Virtual Secrets

[PekeNL]

So. We (mostly) know it's a thing, but I never really found the opinion of SL'ers on it beside a few people I know that feed on drama. I notice browsing it a lot of it is mangled private drama that, unless you know the people, offers no sharp exhale (Cheating posts main contender). Not to mention a lot of posts seen to be made in MS paint with the worst color/font combination someone can come up with. 

What's your opinion?

[Prokofy Neva]

After being directed to it once or twice, I never went back because it was utterly obscure personal drama without any connection to any more generic issues, which at least you can find on these forums now and then. I suppose there's a use for it.

It's too bad the Alphaville Herald went under.

[PekeNL]

6 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

After being directed to it once or twice, I never went back because it was utterly obscure personal drama without any connection to any more generic issues, which at least you can find on these forums now and then. I suppose there's a use for it.

It's too bad the Alphaville Herald went under.

I often leave confused as hell. For a drama-driven site their content filtering policy is terrible. Sometimes there's quality, but sometimes it's almost unreadable.

[LittleMe Jewell]

I've wandered over a time or two, due to posts here in the forums alluding to stuff, but it's just too much drama for me.  Maybe if I was much, much younger.

[Rowan Amore]

I only go there when someone tells me I've been mentioned.  Last time, I believe, they mentioned me and 1/2 the regular posters on the forums who are apparently my alts.  😂

[kali Wylder]

Rather petty and not very interesting.  Now sure who those people are or why they are so nasty but I'm just as glad I don't know them.

[Amina Sopwith]

I can't form an opinion. It's absolutely unreadable. I literally can't parse the text on it. Can only assume they're all beaming in from some very secure location that garbles all the output until you need a Turing machine to make any sense of it.

[kali Wylder]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I only go there when someone tells me I've been mentioned.  Last time, I believe, they mentioned me and 1/2 the regular posters on the forums who are apparently my alts.  😂

That was the last time I went over there Rowan. I never did see the post about you but I saw it mentioned here in the GD.  I'd known about the site before, years ago, had checked it out and wasn't impressed. 

[Seicher Rae]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I only go there when someone tells me I've been mentioned.  Last time, I believe, they mentioned me and 1/2 the regular posters on the forums who are apparently my alts.  😂

You made me go look. Ohhhh, that place. I've been there before and it was just as mind-numbingly stupid then as now. And how do you even search for you being mentioned? I played with the search and it just brings up these random posts with those lame images. I doubt a Turing machine would make sense of it, and like Kali said, as far as I know I don't know the people and yay.

[Rowan Amore]

Just now, Seicher Rae said:

You made me go look. Ohhhh, that place. I've been there before and it was just as mind-numbingly stupid then as now. And how do you even search for you being mentioned? I played with the search and it just brings up these random posts with those lame images. I doubt a Turing machine would make sense of it, and like Kali said, as far as I know I don't know the people and yay.

I assumed at the time, it was a poster here in the forums who disliked me (shocking, I know!) and who butted heads with quite a few people considering the times their threads were locked.  And I mean A LOT of their threads.  Good times!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

59 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It's too bad the Alphaville Herald went under.

You can't be serious.

What do you miss most? The Post 6 Girl? Or the regular news updates on the exciting trials and misfortunes of Tizzers?

Give me a break.

[Ceka Cianci]

I can't say I remember ever hearing of this place..Sure sounds like I want to avoid though..

[Luna Bliss]

It's the Flying Monkeys on crack.

[Eddy Vortex]

They're weird. And not in an endearing kind of eccentric way.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I can't say I remember ever hearing of this place..Sure sounds like I want to avoid though..

Just typing its name will make you dumber. Stay away.

[Ceka Cianci]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Just typing its name will make you dumber. Stay away.

I had my fair share of drama working the clubs when I was younger in SL.. Just the silliness of it all when looking back, gives me cringe.

Then to realize that we were all adults and no kids involved, Just older people.. So I learned, You are never too old to be so childish.

The Cringe just reading back on the notecards I was sent from back then.. It just made me delete every note card in my inventory..

Some people live for those things though, I think.

[Amina Sopwith]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

You can't be serious.

What do you miss most? The Post 6 Girl? Or the regular news updates on the exciting trials and misfortunes of Tizzers?

Give me a break.

I've never heard of this. Tell me more.

 

ETA: I've done some Googling about the Herald and Tizzers and what I'm finding is only confusing me further. Post 6 looks like a pisstake, I mean rip off, of Page 3? Didn't expect a British reference. Spherical fixed boobs that point north at all times definitely look just like Page 3.

Edited August 14, 2022 by Amina Sopwith

[Sid Nagy]

So what is this all about?
Am I missing something?

Edited August 14, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Rat Luv]

2 hours ago, PekeNL said:

What's your opinion?

I had to look this up, then realised I've looked it up after reading about it here before...😣

I think most of them need to go on a design subreddit and get advice on making memes 🙂

It reminds me of when you'd be in a club group chat and someone new would suddenly say "(name of regular) is a pervert!" or accuse them of something, and then the person under attack would sometimes get upset or defensive, or think it was going to get them ejected or ruin their reputation. But really, everyone was thinking "Oh, it's another drive-by troll with nothing better to do...what a plonker" 🥱

[Jordyn McGregor]

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

I only go there when someone tells me I've been mentioned.  Last time, I believe, they mentioned me and 1/2 the regular posters on the forums who are apparently my alts.  😂

I'm still offended that I didn't make that list.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, PekeNL said:

So. We (mostly) know it's a thing, but I never really found the opinion of SL'ers on it beside a few people I know that feed on drama. I notice browsing it a lot of it is mangled private drama that, unless you know the people, offers no sharp exhale (Cheating posts main contender). Not to mention a lot of posts seen to be made in MS paint with the worst color/font combination someone can come up with. 

What's your opinion?

Don't sniff permanent markers in the first place, and you won't have a problem with a sharp exhale?

Edited August 14, 2022 by Love Zhaoying
Sharp, sharpie, tomato toemahto

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Jordan Whitt said:

I'm still offended that I didn't make that list.

It sounds like finding your name written on a bathroom stall with Sharpie.  Would not recommend. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Amina Sopwith said:

I've never heard of this. Tell me more.

 

ETA: I've done some Googling about the Herald and Tizzers and what I'm finding is only confusing me further. Post 6 looks like a pisstake, I mean rip off, of Page 3? Didn't expect a British reference. Spherical fixed boobs that point north at all times definitely look just like Page 3.

Where to start?

In a nutshell, The Alphaville Herald was a virtual "newspaper" started in about 2003 to "report" on the culture of the Sims Online by Urizenus Sklar, a relatively well known real life American academic whom I won't identify here, but he's easy to look up. When Sklar was banned from the Sims Online, he moved his operation over to Second Life, and it became, at least for a while, "The Second Life Herald."

The newspaper was a muck-raking bucket of bat droppings that occasionally had serious news to report, but that mostly made its name by dealing in the currency of gossip and scandal, frequently half made-up. Among its more regular features was the Post 6 Girl (or, just occasionally, Boy) which, as you surmise, was modeled on British Page 3 girls.

Aside from being semi-literate and over-the-top sensationalist much of the time, the Herald was also an "academic project," which is actually where my real objections to it come in: it deliberately stirred things up so that Sklar could write about them as part of his work on "online culture." Sklar and his paper associated and sometimes worked closely with in-world trolls and griefers, including Woodbury University, one of the worst griefer groups in SL history (and banned from the platform at least twice that I can recall). Tizzers Foxchase was part of that, and was also someone repeatedly banned.

Sklar and his Herald were, in my opinion, part of one of the most shamefully unethical interventions of academia into virtual worlds ever. In contrast to Tom Boellstorff, whose engagement with SL was at one and the same time immersive and respectful (and non-interventionist), Sklar mocked SL, and was deliberately provocative and destructive in his approach to it: he saw SL as his personal test subject to be prodded, electrified, kicked, and vivisected so that he could write about it. (And he did, eventually, co-author a book on the subject of the Herald). He was an awful man, and a crappy and unethical academic who should have been kicked from here to kingdom come by his university's REB.

I am happy to say that Sklar is no longer employed by a university. But that's another and even more shameful story that I probably shouldn't go into here.

Edited August 14, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra
GRAMMAR!!

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

muck-raking bucket of bat droppings

 

9 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

prodded, electrified, kicked, and vivisected 

I swear, these are almost direct quotes from Red Meat taglines! Are you a fan too?

 

[Seicher Rae]

9 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Where to start?

In a nutshell, The Alphaville Herald was a virtual "newspaper" started in about 2003 to "report" on the culture of the Sims Online by Urizenus Sklar, a relatively well known real life American academic whom I won't identify here, but he's easy to look up. When Sklar was banned from the Sims Online, he moved his operation over to Second Life, and it became, at least for a while, "The Second Life Herald."

The newspaper was a muck-raking bucket of bat droppings that occasionally had serious news to report, but that mostly made its name by dealing in the currency of gossip and scandal, frequently half made-up. Among its more regular features was the Post 6 Girl (or, just occasionally, Boy) which, as you surmise, was modeled on British Page 3 girls.

Aside from being semi-literate and over-the-top sensationalist much of the time, the Herald was also an "academic project," which is actually where my real objections to it come in: it deliberately stirred things up so that Sklar could write about them as part of his work on "online culture." Sklar and his paper associated and sometimes worked closely with in-world trolls and griefers, including Woodbury University, one of the worst griefer groups in SL history (and banned from the platform at least twice that I can recall). Tizzers Foxchase was part of that, and was also someone repeatedly banned.

Sklar and his Herald were, in my opinion, part of the one of the most shamefully unethical interventions of academia into virtual worlds ever. In contrast to Tom Boellstorff, whose engagement with SL was at one and the same time immersive and respectful (and non-interventionist), Sklar mocked SL, and was deliberately provocative and destructive in his approach to it: he saw SL as his personal test subject to be prodded, electrified, kicked, and vivisected so that he could write about it. (And he did, eventually, co-author a book on the subject of the Herald). He was an awful man, and a crappy and unethical academic who should have been kicked from here to kingdom come by his university's REB.

I am happy to say that Sklar is no longer employed by a university. But that's another and even more shameful story that I probably shouldn't go into here.

Don't hold back, dahhling. Tell us what you really think!