Chroma Starlight

Just be careful that you don't violate the TOS by quoting someone's inworld speech to you without their consent. Such quotes are easily taken out of context, regardless of this particular circumstance. I think that's why the rule exists. I can tell you that when it's broken it can create such 'great' wrongful harm. In virtual and material communities alike, the meaning of speech isn't always literal and its purpose isn't always direct and obvious. Also, sometimes people just say things they don't actually mean in what they reasonably expect to be a safe context such as a virtual and/or role-playing environment online. These principles have such primacy that I kind of feel sordid looking at this screencap; I really dislike what they said to you, but I'm not sure it's "actionable" in this fashion and if I didn't take your word on it, I might be wondering more generally what else is going on here in cases resembling these. It's just... a bit fraught, though it's illustrative how tricky this can get, fast.

Well, everyone knows the people who say "All Lives matter" in this context tend to actually be saying (in crypto- dog-whistle speech) that "(Only) All (White) Lives Matter." They just have to get out ahead of the idea that any nonwhite minority group can actually hold human rights equal to their "master race" and the powers granted by their presumably cultic genocidal mad male God. Even better if in doing all this they can simultaneously denigrate this concept with words woven to appear almost as though they're supporting absolute human equality even as they nevertheless actually undermine it. Oh, does someone think they're a funny and clever supremacist? You've been called out. Anyway, it's all beneath SecondLife and our superior (*rim-shots*) funky progressive cosmopolitan community of people who are sick and tired of these anachronistic pathologies from the past rising from their graves like zombie meme hordes.

Those are all really great points I hadn't considered. You're illustrating the point that there are lots of playstyles that may be tied up in truly disposable free accounts. I'm not sure what the answer there is, I guess it would have to be weighed against the larger social impacts for some balance. I just suppose that in light of how things have developed over the years, it may be time to reconsider what that balance is, but absolutely nobody should be stopping you or anyone from doing their thing in good faith. A big point here is that a remedy should not create more problems than it solves, nor should it create urgent problems where none before existed.

Just follow-up thoughts: I believe that the real problem is 'free accounts' per se, just that there's no value attached to the accounts. What if the account were free but required a security deposit in cash or cryptocurrency, or even just a one-time registration fee? Would cryptocurrency preserve the anonymity I assume that they wanted to integrate into this system? The deposit could still force such users to have some form of "skin in the game" and encourage the avoidance of the worst bad behaviors, especially established people in-world using a barrage of accounts hot off the presses or banked like ammunition to achieve social effect on-grid. All that would become less easily scalable on account of the expense. Of course, it's too late now in a sense. Social empires here have been built on falseness, as though participating in SecondLife somehow excused people from the demands of higher social consciousness. I don't think that's what SecondLife was supposed to be about; we weren't building a more perfect virtual Lord of the Flies world here, nor a better exploitative capitalistic dystopia, yet those people have been permitted to run roughshod over others' experiences here in a systemically greenlit fashion that has disempowered SecondLife's most enthusiastic good faith users. Such will-to-power movers and shakers here on SecondLife have pressed the advantage socially in a most inequitable and judicially non-credible fashion. Ask me how I know. Alternately, why doesn't SecondLife have a wuffie/reputation system? Why can't people publicly express social esteem for others in a manner that is standardized, consistent, and at-a-glance like an attribute on a being in the AD&D monster manual? :3 Where's our crowdsourced SecondLife reputation system? If someone lies about me, I should be able to defend myself against their lies. If someone crowdsources harassment of me, I should be able to defend myself against their dark machinations. I can't even AR them, nothing happens. There's no one problem here, and free accounts aren't that big of a deal when considered in isolation, but they are a part of the feedstock of these greater problems, hindsight being what it is. These accounts were used by some sordid operators to consolidate such evil power socially on SecondLife, I am now convinced. They built a protection racket. They "keep us safe" and they've been given more power than justices of the law in FirstLife, and yet no supervision and no ethical standards applied.

Kind of like how some states don't let you change your birth certificate. c_c Well, I'm sure it's not quite like that because I believe the sterling character of LL wouldn't harbor such regressive sentiment, but it does seem as though it is a bit unfortunate. It's as though it has not occurred to anyone that there may in fact be an identity-based need for account name changes on SecondLife. I think the assumption must be that because I "could" just walk away from a fourteen-year-old account and start over with a new one, this is all just fine, but that seems a bit unrealistic too. My name is actually Chroma Key, and this preposterous system denies me endlessly. Just look at it.

While I'm sympathetic to what sounds like a frustrating experience, at five years old, my i7-3820 system is no spring chicken, and newer GPUs like the GTX1070 can lap my GTX970 (and hell, it ran satisfactorily on the GTX460 I pulled when I upgraded). My ADSL2 connection has a latency seizure whenever there are more than a few packets on the wire, which is about 6mbps down total. Despite all this, I find that most content on SL loads quite quickly, and I'm satisfied with the frame rate. None of this is intended to invalidate what you're reporting, but rather to give you some hope that there can perhaps be a remedy to the problem that you're experiencing.

Try to stem the flow of people whose purpose in coming to SecondLIfe is to tear down others. Even though they are stopped, it has enabled the rise of this ugly structure within the community: "protection" provided by "police lords" who claim to Linden Lab they represent and protect the communities that they seem in actuality to oppress and enslave. What kind of grid are you running when people can get chased from a mainland community for opposing Trumpism specifically or fascism generally? This is what you have enabled by permitting anyone to walk in and act as if they own the place without even so much as investing a penny. It's enabled an ecosystem of literal wrongful social oppression, sordid lies, gaslighting. I'd be more than willing to bet that these police lords 'protect' with their hard-right fists even as they extend their sinister hand to likely hire or possibly antagonize and provoke the 'griefers' they're 'defending' us against, like subcontracting to DAESH or something (we all know that's what's going on there, BTW). All this just to remind everyone why "Police Lords" should have power over society and stand between invested SL users who own property and adjudication from Linden Lab where conflicts arise. Oh, you want me to get in the griefer queue and appeal to the stone? How worthless is that? How worthless is Linden Lab community governance? It seems like hot air and wishful thinking from where I stand. Go ahead, ask me why I would say so. I'm begging for anyone to ask who it is that disingenuously screwed me so hard and how they had to lie and bend objective reality and bear false witness against me to get their way, but now it seems they've got it and they've had it for some time, and yet they are completely exposed by it. And they're operating still with some sense of free license and perhaps even Linden Labs' nods and winks. You know, it's corrupted everything, and given Trumpism and illiberalism a fifth-column foothold and strength, established well within SecondLife, and right under Linden Labs' noses, passed off by some of the 'trustworthy' ones who assure you they're 'credible' while insisting I'm 'not,' despite many evident things to which I'd happily point. I think ultimately what SecondLife needs most of all right now is actual credible adjudication within Community Governance, and maybe also something like a victim services department. Stopping the pain that is a burner account on SL might be a good call to make because not only are people abusing the accounts, but they're abusing the power they've consolidated around 'protection,' and it's the biggest turd in the punchbowl I could imagine. Why has Linden Lab allowed it?

Well, in fairness, in my OP I did actually go out of my way to say " not just an artful edifice, but a body of faith, belief, and practice ... " and so I hoped it was clear I'm not so concerned about virtual bricks and mortar, but rather have this curiousity, or maybe that's a longing, for this sense of a living individual and shared community spirit. That said, thanks for the suggestion, it sounds like a cool build and the architecture in that snapshot does seems neat and inspirational. :-)

*snorts* oh gawd, Rolig whyyyy XD *giggles* after all this time, this thread has sprouted unexpected shoots

What's funny is the less hard I search for it, the more it seems to pop out at me from the margins. :) Hey, people are awesome, and SL is about exploring and uniting humanity's potential. I was feeling a bit angst-ridden the week I posted this originally. I will say, it's hard to meet people on SL, it's become very large, and yet social mobility seems harder than ever, perhaps because of this "needle in the haystack" quality that life there has taken on with all the private estate islands. I think at this point, SL is a very strange but beloved beast and creates a commercial social space most like Internet community social spaces such as MUSHes and MUCKs, and that's a special space.

I would say that everyone who values SecondLife should get themselves at least one premium account because it's a committed way of financially supporting the service.

Especially now that first life is enduring a small dark age-like winter that seems propagated by ideologically paternalistic cultish regressive forces, there is this sense of SecondLife being one obvious kind of safe harbor and place for communities to organize. What I've been turning over in my mind seems so very obvious that one might expect it's impossible that it hasn't been arrived at by others over and over again already, and yet all of my limited attempts on occasion to identify and connect with any such community on SecondLife seem to have been fruitless so far, with a caveat or two that I will leave set aside. Has anyone founded a temple to a classic or ancient Goddess and elevated their values in spiritual and philosophically earnest terms, e.g.: not just an artful ediface, but a body of faith, belief, and practice? This could be either an authentic attempt to bring ancient practice forward, or a modern syncretic recreation, but I'm just curious what's out there. I don't see any forums here for spirituality, though that may be (given my specific interest) for the best, since so many incumbent religious systems seem hell-bent on ideologically undermining spiritual gender equity like it's 380AD. I realize that most of SecondLife is arguably like a secular cult of Artemis et al, and I'm quite curious if anyone's taken a logical next step to build and give the 21st century the kind of non-paternalistic ethos that it so clearly needs for its own spiritual and material salvation.

Mainland Community Governance had so much potential for good, but what was actually implemented was an insincere Lord of the Flies kakocracy, or "government by the worst of the people." Attempts at reason, testimony of truth, good-faith intent, a sense of fairness in justice-- swept aside. Petty bullying, parochial arrogance, demagoguery. They denied all reasoned appeals and attempts to initiate any process that might confirm that SecondLife mainland communities are not illiberal spaces. It bugs me, and the entire thing was degrading.

Well, I'm looking forward to in-world Mesh editing, until then, it's sorta less useful to me.