AnthonyJoanne

I wrote an absolute wall of text ... and decided to reduce it: When I first arrived in SL (a few years before this avatar was created) I was blown away by the potential. During the years that followed I watched that potential flower. I shall illustrate with a single example: Once, if you wanted a pair of black patent shoes ... the only way to make them look shiny was to bake a fake-reflection into the texture. And to be honest it never looked that good. Actually if I'm being really honest ... it looked AWFUL from the wrong angle. But then we got ... materials! And you could actually make your shoes shiny! There were (still are) limitations to it ... but it was a vast improvement. Recently I saw an advert for pair of shoes that I thought were something a bit different ... so I went looking for them. Only to find that they are no-mod and use that hideous old-school pseudo-reflection. I was more than a little shocked ... so I did some exploring. A lot of creators are doing that now. I can't imagine why ... it still looks terrible, in my opinion. People are buying them though ... and if they like them, fair enough. In truth, it seems to me that SL achieved as much of it's potential as it was going to and is now backsliding in some ways. Experiences are mostly a dead mechanism. Animesh never did fulfill it's promise, sadly. Some people did really impressive things with EEP ... but most haven't bothered. "Back in the day" the potential was yet to be explored ... now it has been, and in some ways, it's been wasted. At least that's how I see it.

This is where ... the conversation turns surreal if we're not careful :D It also may offend some people who don't pay attention to what I'm saying. Before anyone react I implore them to read what I've said closely, and ALL of what I've said. The thing is, in terms of SL ... LL represent something that didn't exist in the cultural and societal matrix of the period which coined the term Intelligentsia. LL is, in the narrow and specific perspective of SL, God. Specifically LL represents a living and responsive God that you can literally point at. Had Nietzche said "God is dead" in SL someone could have taken him to a LL meeting and said "No - he's right over there". If not God, least one of his angels would be at the meeting. :D NOTE: Anyone who believes in God may, at this point, say that I'm being blasphemous. Not the case. I'm saying two things: 1. In terms of SL, LL fills the role of God. LL creates. LL sets the rules. LL punishes. LL literally keeps the world running. 2. LL's existence is not subject to debate or faith ... we have regular, ongoing, concrete evidence that LL exists. If you believe that God exists, and it's verifiable, then I envy you your faith. But let us remember that for a long time now there have been people who have not believed in God and see no evidence to support the existence of God. I am not saying that God does not exist ... I am saying that there is NO way to argue that LL does not exist. And that's all I'm saying. To my mind, and I fully acknowledge that this is purely my own perception, an Intelligentsia needs to address issues which might best be described as 'profound'. Meaning of life stuff. Issues with major ethical implications. That sort of thing. And Intelligentsia may also concern themselves with more trivial issues, but while we HAVE profound issues extent IN Second Life ... they are RL issues which have come in 'from outside' so to speak. About the only profound issue that comes to mind that truly belongs to SL is "Do LL overstep because they are biased?" Even THAT particular issue requires consideration of SL and RL. Now that's an interesting question and one which is fit for an Intelligentsia: Are we in the hands of a just God? Or is God a committee of fools? But the reality is that LL is NOT God ... for all that they fill the role in terms of SL. So how profound is the question really? Creating Miepon and Nextup in response to market forces and the demand of the customers doesn't really strike me as something that qualifies as an act of the Intelligentsia. Mind you ... this conversation might qualify

Ah - but are we talking about in-world scripters ... or developers of an external program? Let's note that the devs of FS may well have influence in some regards, but that doesn't make them an in-world intelligentsia. So we've exposed an interesting difference to RL ... SL can have influence which is both internal and external. External influence would be the development of SL (eg the addition of Bento), or changing the rules (i.e. TOS etc). Clearly LL has a pretty healthy lock on that. Additionally the devs of FS can exert a similar influence (to a lessor degree) with what they do with FS. The same applies to the devs of the other TPVs. Now some of those external changes (especially TOS) would have a major knock-on effect in-world. We saw that when LL eliminated gacha. I never got into gacha, but I could see that a LOT of people were impacted in a big way by that ... and not just the shop owners who had to replace their gacha machines ... but people who were really (really really really) into gacha who were going to miss it. But in-world scripters? To a certain extent ... logically it follows that the creation and scripting of the replacement for gacha had an in-world impact. BUT ... Did it have the kind of impact (i.e. influence) that is required of an Intelligentsia? I'll admit to not being in touch with those aspects of SL ... Breedables have never held any interest, and Vehicles and Weapons strike me as trying to get SL to do things that it's poorly suited to do. As to dispensers, sitters (ie adult furniture) and the like ... I wasn't aware that there had been any serious upgrades to those in a while. Even if there were a lot of really significant upgrades ... a sitter is still a sitter. The most profound change that I can think of in terms of sitters was the move from requiring poseballs to not requiring them. And that was quite a while ago. And even that didn't necessarily count as the kind of impact we need to look for in terms of an Intelligentsia. And so we've arrived at the same point, via two different conversational forks: I've always viewed the influence of an Intelligentsia as the ability to sway the attitudes of society (to a certain extent, as a whole). That would require a person or group to be respected by the majority of the society. That no longer applies. The past five years have done an amazing job of exposing the feet of clay of just about everyone who was respected.

But how much influence do they exert on the 'world' as a whole? I script quite a lot in-world. So I am very aware of the changes made to scripting over the past decade. I submit that if the scripters had significant influence then we would have seen a LOT of improvement in the ability to script ... which we have not seen. I'm not saying things haven't improved, but not enough to count scripters as a major influence. And while you're entirely correct that scripts are one of the few things in SL which are pretty much impossible to do IP theft on ... I have yet to find a single script that I couldn't reverse engineer. A quick trip over to OpenSim will show you a vast amount of reverse engineered scripting which achieves exactly the same result there as does the original in SL ... without a single line of code having been stolen. Setting that aside ... how many residents of SL are even aware if Fred Nurk suddenly releases a Widget that is far superior to any Widget ever seen in SL? Among the most influential people in SL are the creators of mesh bodies and the fashions for them. Certainly I would suggest that they drive a very high percentage of the market on the MP, if not the absolute majority. (I honestly don't know ... I really don't bother to track that stuff). But even then ... how pervasive is that influence? There's a list, I believe populated by @Lucia Nightfire, of the most popular mesh bodies in SL. I don't question her methodology or her results ... but I note that I am aware of a LOT of people who STILL don't wear mesh bodies for a number of reasons. For those people the popularity of given mesh bodies, and whether or not creators are making clothing for those bodies, is entirely irrelevant. Whereas for others the data gathered by Lucia is really important and can influence business decisions. It's why I suggest that we cannot include 'influence' in the definition. And of course, what passes for people with influence these days ... I'm sorry, but when people actually care what a sports ball player (who is no better informed than any other member of the public) thinks about complex geopolitical issues ... then it's time to discard influence as a metric.

Perhaps. I personally think it was a collective series of complaints over many years, and then the concept that they could charge for the last name that did it. I really doubt it was a single person, or small group, who pushed the idea out of the blue and convinced LL to make the change. Of course I could be wrong ... I often am.

Interesting. Here are three definitions (excluding wikipedia, which is mandatory given it's nature): Merriam-Webster: Brittanica: Free Dictionary: A general 'theme' to the definitions is that the Intelligentsia are (a) elite and (b) influential. The problem is that the standards by which one might be considered 'elite' are no longer particularly valuable these days. I wrote a few paragraphs to substantiate that, but it was boring. Suffice to say that I suggest that there are NO metrics which can be applied to define 'elite' which have not been devalued and distorted. So nobody is 'elite' by any rational definition. Now on to being influential. I submit that LL do what they do based on business decisions. Those business decisions may be based on influences OUTSIDE of SL ... i.e. pressure from the legal system, or the social matrix, etc ... but they are based on the premise that making that decision is going to be best for the business. Of course we've seen ample evidence that many businesses have, for the past few years, been getting that hysterically wrong ... but that's neither here nor there. No - my point is if one is a part of the Intelligentsia then by definition one must be able to sway the direction of the society. And that's not just happening in SL. Firstly: SL is not a society. It's a 'location' with a wide diversity of groups ... many of which have little or no interaction whatsoever with each other. And who are, to a very great extent, not influenced by each other. So if one is very influential in (just an example) the loose group created by the Bloodlines system ... that person may well have no influence whatsoever in the loose group created by the (another example) interest in being a Furry. Secondly: The most 'influential' group with regards SL is LL ... and we've already seen that they are constrained by RL business factors. What influential people in-world may want or not want is going to be a looooong way behind that. Just to illustrate, I can't imagine that ANYONE wants LL to charge more for $L ... but if LL feel it's in their best interests then they'll do so to preserve the business. So I submit that by the generally accepted definition of 'Intellgentsia' ... no, we don't have one. However ... if we turn to @Prokofy Neva and his original post: I suggest that we DO have people who might qualify as 'Intelligentsia' ... however they have little or no influence. Whether this means that an Intelligentsia is a thing of the past, we'll have to wait and see.

Good big hair. Well rigged pencil skirts that don't require that I alpha my body to avoid clipping. I search at least once a week for the newest items hoping to find someone has released something I can add to my collection of the above.

Sorry - but dog-whistles is a misnomer for "I claim this is an attack but can't prove or justify it". Back to the bit bucket with you.

That's not a political post about RL. Not in the least bit. It's evidence that there are people who are manipulating social media to amplify their voices. I don't claim that it's only one side or the other that's doing it. My entire point in this thread is that this is not a time when a company can create a laissez faire metaverse without pressure groups (again, on either side of the aisle) demanding that it be strictly regulated. And my contention is that creators will be unlikely to find inspiration in an environment where small but very vocal groups can have an impact on their creations. Not political.

Would it that that was so. Unfortunately we've seen ample evidence that it's not. Let us not forget that Twitter, for example, were actually banning people for quoting the CDC report that people who had been vaccinated against COVID could spread the disease. While permitting blatant botnets posting demands for people to be censored. I referenced this in my currently hidden post ... on the 19th of November 2020 over 300 accounts posted the exact same identical tweet: Nobody can pretend that twitters mechanisms did NOT pick up that 300 identical tweets were made in a short time frame. Not as retweets or quote tweets or whatever they are (I don't actually have a twitter account, never have done) but as 'original' tweets. And I'm sure I don't need to point out that Twitter is in some pretty serious trouble now. Clearly there are factors at play which care not the least for market forces and are more than willing to act against the bottom line.

Well - we do see high heels for the male avatars in SL ... but I suspect that they don't sell all that well. That having been said, who would have thought those thigh tourniquet things would have taken off the way they have? I wonder if there's actually a market for someone to make a foot akin to the slink high heel foot, but which works on male mesh avatars? You may well have stumbled upon an untapped niche there, Persephone, that someone with mesh and rigging skills could exploit. :)

I responded ... it's quite a detailed and comprehensive response which should reassure you that I'm not paranoid, and which details exactly how that stuff is happening as we speak. Unfortunately the forum has hidden the post saying that it needs to be approved by a moderator. I've reported the post asking that it be unhidden ... but whether or not it will be made available is not up to me. Given that I spent a couple of hours on the post ... digging out details and listing steps to debunk claims in detail so as to provide you with serious evidence, and providing a screenshot of twitterbots in action ... I'm not really inclined to try to figure out what it was that the software decided was problematic. Suffice to say that I proved my assertions to my satisfaction, and as a person with many years in academia, I have high standards in substantiating claims. :) So while I appreciate your concern ... it is misplaced and you might want to look more closely at just how realistic are the claims that have you scared.

That's a fair enough question. I'll answer it for you. Let's take one issue: Are you concerned that the metaverse is facilitating rape and sexual violence? Most of the claims are based on a report released by SumOfUs. The title of the report was Metaverse: another cesspool of toxic content. That's a pretty emotive title for a report masking itself as research. SO let's consider the source. From Wikipedia: SumOfUs is a global non-profit advocacy organization. That seems fair enough ... until you notice that there's organisation with the same name which is (in their own words) the leading producers of socially conscious seminars in North America. But the two organisations so named are entirely separate ... financially. Even though the work of the 'non profit' directly and indisputably emphasises the need to hire the profit organisation. I'm sure it's just a coincidence /s But regardless of the source, let's consider their methodology. The report is loaded down with references. That makes it look very professional and well researched ... unfortunately many of them are literally worthless. For example SumOfUs quotes a report by CNN which details toxic activity in Meta. The only problem is that if you drill down (I took the time to do so) the 'reports' by organisations such as the Center for Countering Digital Hate make claims like "Our researchers found that users, including minors, are exposed to abusive behaviour every seven minutes." but offer ZERO proof or backing for these claims. They offer no evidence whatsoever to prove ANYTHING. That makes their claims worthless. Which means that CNN ... the most trusted name in news according to them, reported that the metaverse is a haven for toxic behavior without evidence ... and SumOfUs used that as evidence. Notice the problem there? I'll spell it out. A claim by an organisation with zero evidence is then used by a 'reputable source', and is then used to substantiate another report. Speaking of drilling down: To follow the chain of the above reference I had to Go to the CNN article Then follow to an article on a webpage called counterhate Then follow that to the the twitter account of the Center for Countering Digital Hate ... not a specific tweet mind you, but just the account So I had to look up the Center for Countering Digital Hate and go to their web page and then scroll through their site to find the report ... Only to discover that it's NOT a report ... it's literally SIXTEEN lines of text and two of those lines are a quote from Zuckerberg. It's not surprising that the 'report' was hidden, given that it was an unsubstantiated claim which offered no evidence. Even more bizarre is that the counterhate website I was directed to from the CNN article is the SAME organistation as the Center for Countering Digital Hate ... but they didn't link directly to the 'report' ... instead they obfuscated by linking to their twitter account and only through manual effort could someone actually find the report. Because a report which offers no evidence is, I'm sure you will agree, is without any value. Back to the SumOfUs report: "About an hour into using the platform, a SumOfUs researcher was lead into a private room at a party where she was raped by a user ..." And the evidence of this is a 28 second clip with no context, and no explanation why the researcher didn't just press the OFF button. No explanation why we didn't see any of the events leading up to this 'rape'. No evidence to support the claim that the 'researcher' was pressured to disabling the safety mechanisms. Let's be entirely a completely clear about this: That claim is worthless. It is unsubstantiated. It is made by an organisation which has a clear vested interest in finding evidence of sexual violence in the metaverse, and the supporting 'evidence' was frankly ridiculous. Yet as a result of this claim ... a single search on google found articles on the web from: independent.co.uk, businessinsider.com, vice.com, refinery.com, nypost.com, wionews.com, cnet.com, dailymail.co.uk, usatoday.com, coindesk.com, vogue.co.uk, indiatimes.com, metro.co.uk, news.com.au, cnbctv18.com, fastcompany.com, albawaba.com, screenshot-media.com, timesnownews.com, thedailybeast.com, latestly.com, techstory.in, dailystar.co.uk, news18.com, dailypioneer.com, techgig.com, theguardian.com, yahoo.com, sbs.com.au, thestar.com.my, digitnews.in, torontosun.com, nationalpost.com, insidehook.com, lexology.com, morningbrew.com, newshub.co.nz, groundreport.in, stealthoptional.com, theidependent.sg, lemonde.fr, gizmodo.com, bbc.com, mixedmartialarts.com, madamnoire.com, mirror.co.uk, economictimes.com, thesource.com, indiatoday.in, techxplore.com, rt.com, hourstv.com, newsleaflets.com, nzherald.co.nz, newsrebeat.com, michigansportszone.com, hardware.com.sg, dailydot.com, zipe-education.com, kqeducationgroup.com, chicagotoday.news, metaversezeus.com, nixolympia.com, himalsanchar.com, leofinance.io, medium.com, california18.com, nationaltribune.com.au, spamchronicals.com, sfist.com, indialegallive.com, sportsgaming.win, thesun.co.uk, tatvabodhini.com, newhemitech.com, zee5.com, currency.com, unherd.com, onindia.com, euronews.com, prindleinstitute.com, naeww.com, unlad.com, izzso.com, breadnews.com, newsweek.com, hindustantimes.com, valuewalk.com, newlanes.com, ycombinator.com, newsbeezer.com, zeehindustanlive.com, lifestyle.ng, cybernews.com, urbanspotlite.com, nepwave.com, thejerseytomatopress.com, theconversation.com, newser.com, wired.com, balleralert.com, othernews.pk, lipstickalley.com, kiddaan.com, eurweb.com, ladbible.com, nairaland.com, studyiq.com, longhaircareforum.com, immersivelearning.news, newsfounded.com, dnindia.com, flipboard.com, latestfinance.news, legaldesire.com, glamormagazine.co.uk, thenextadvisor.com, hayti.com, offtopic.com, recentlyheard.com, parisbeacon.com, mondialnews.com, freepressjournal.in, livemint.com, virtualrealitytimes.com, monash.edu (A UNIVERSITY) ... and there are countless more pages of hits. So one 'report' by an 'organisation' which might be no more than a handful of people, which has made a demonstrably unsubstantiated claim that one of their 'researchers' was raped in the metaverse has spawned countless articles about the subject. The overwhelming majority of those articles cite the SumOfUs report as if it were on the same level as the research carried out at CERN when they were seeking the Higgs Boson. Based on unsubtatiated claims, and a 28 second clip with zero context. Now consider that people all over the planet have been told, by organisations that are supposed to be reputable sources, that the metaverse is a hotbed of sexual violence, racist activity, etc. Based on claims by faceless people with no evidence to support those claims. Starting to wonder if perhaps your concerns about being raped in the metaverse might not be so realistic yet? And to point out just how rife social media is to such manipulation. On the 19th of November 2020 there was a coordinated campaign of over 300 tweets ... all of which said EXACTLY the same thing ... a call for censorship: That's a pretty good example of someone using the system to amplify their voice, would you not agree? Now go to your search engine of choice and search for "high heels male gaze objectification of women" I did and found articles from: fastcompany.com, thewomens.network, utexas.edu (a UNIVERSITY), bengalspurr.com, bodypositivealliance.org, westmont.edu (A COLLEGE), hercampus.com, atlantis-press.com, dailymail.co.uk, lizfelifestyle.com, thesoutherneronline.com, pyschologytoday.com, feminismindia.com, sayitloudspace.com, verywellmind.com, anewseducation.com, oxfordfeministssociety.uk, wiley.com, nih.gov, sciencedirect.com ... I won't continue as there are, again, countless hits on the topic. And remember that Meta is a huge organisation compared to LL ... Meta are able to withstand pressure that would cause LL to buckle and fold in seconds. That's how activists can pressure a company ... without any real evidence to back up their claims, and without the actual numbers that they claim to represent. So while I appreciate your concern - I am quite sure that I'm not paranoid. :)

Don't blame me if it's over your head.

It won't work. I hate to be negative, but it just has zero chance of working for the same reason that Meta is never going to create a fully realised Metaverse. At this time in the world, there are far too many constraints being enforced by a small minority who have artificially amplified their voices through the use of bots/sockpuppets and a rampantly biased legacy media who are willing to lie and expect no repercussions. Remember that we've already SEEN activists go to Meta, disable all the safety mechanisms, and deliberately PURSUE sexual harassment so they could then claim to have been raped. This from a 'researcher' for an organisation with a deeply vested interest in pushing a very specific narrative. In other words, not a reliable source by ANY metric. The result has been countless clickbait articles loudly proclaiming that the metaverse is a hotbed of sexual violence. I'll offer you an example to illustrate: Second Life has succeeded to the extent that it has through user created content. If you were restricted to the stuff that LL provides, everyone would look the same, dress the same, and move the same. Variety is expensive ... LL has neither the resources nor the creativity in-house to provide the diverse range of goods available in world. It has taken many many years for motivated individuals to create all the stuff we have available to us. Now consider this new Whatever Life. LL would create the infrastructure (ie the land, the base avatars, the mechanisms to 'do things' like walking, the scripting engine, and the mechanisms for building/importing stuff, etc) and that's about it. They would then want the users to create the content. But remember that we're talking about creating content NOW ... in a social matrix where the twitter mob WILL descend on you like rabid ferrets for any perceived infraction. So picture, if you will, someone deciding to introduce something innocuous into Whatever Life. Let's say high heels, which are a pretty good seller in SL. Now imagine a small bunch of 'activists' deciding that LL are facilitating the exploitation of women by encouraging them to put their bodies on display for the male gaze by wearing high heels which are clearly dangerously unhealthy and are meant only to objectify women ... endless ad-nauseum. If you can't find a suitable screed saying exactly that on the internet you aren't looking. Said small bunch of activists will then use their twitter bots to repost the same tweet over and over (word for word the same, mind you ... they don't even TRY to mask it) and get articles published on the web and scream like demented banshees. It doesn't MATTER if women WANT to buy and wear high heels because THEY like them ... such 'activists' will trot out their 'internalised misogyny' and their 'patriarchal oppression' and deny those women any agency for daring to disagree. Same way that so-called 'anti-racists' will attack any black person for daring to disagree ... and trot out such lovely terms as <censored> and <deleted>. If you can't find exactly that on the internet, you aren't looking. The very fact that I have to censor myself rather than quote those terms which you can find on plenty of tweets is indicative that the terms themselves are racist. Now remember that LL is not an organisation with anything like the fortitude to tell those people to sod off. How motivated is a creator going to be if suddenly they are being harassed by 'activists' and are getting zero support from LL? Not going to work. Not in this current social matrix.

There's an inherent problem with the very concept of 'clean up'. In SL (as in RL) there is far too much rush to judgment without considering context. I'll offer an example: Avatar Height. It is quite understandable that pedophilia is not permitted on SL. And it's also understandable that anyone encountering it would be justified in reporting it. And it's entirely understandable that no sim owner wants people spreading rumor that his/her sim is a haven for such behavior. However ... people rush to judgment based on avatar height. Obviously this doesn't allow for quite short avatars or for those who fall under the umbrella term of 'midget'. It may come as a surprise to some, but there are people who find very small adults sexually exciting. It's a fetish I don't personally share, but it falls under my rule of "consensual activity between people who are fit to consent" so I have no problem with it. There is a small (no pun intended) but definite presence of people with that fetish in SL. I've met them. I've talked to them about their particular kink. And I know for a fact that they have to explore their kink very discretely or people WILL assume that it's pedophilia and WILL start complaining and WILL spread unfounded incorrect rumor and WILL refuse to even consider that they may be wrong. Because people failed to consider context. They made automatic assumptions, and to protect themselves other people were forced to make the same assumption. Should the automatic assumption that a small avatar is a child result in people who are ACTUALLY suffering from dwarfism (for example) being unable to recreate their RL form in SL? I, personally, view SL as a way to look different to my RL appearance (for example, I can no longer wear 6 inch heels in RL due to balance issues 😞) but I can understand that some people want to recreate their RL appearance and as such should not be prevented doing so by people who rushed to judgment. And should someone like that then be unable to go out in public ... perhaps dancing with their partner at an adult sim? And there's another problem: A year or two ago I happened on a thread here where someone had gone to a particular sim and then had logged an AR and come to the forum to froth at the mouth. That person had gone to a sim which clearly spelled out, in it's name, that a certain activity was going on there. On arrival that person had been offered a notecard which again clearly spelled out that a certain activity was going on there. To actually enter the sim-proper that person had to pass a sign which clearly spelled out what was going on there. Yet that person then got offended, after all those warnings, and claimed to have been traumatised. The point? There are ALWAYS going to be people who WANT to complain and will go out of their way to be offended/traumatised/etc so that they can then demand that what they find offensive is removed. So the problem is this: Clean up by all means, but exactly who is going to decide what is and what isn't removed? The person who rushes to judgment and refuses to consider context? The perpetual victim?

SL lets us be larger than life. Back in the old days, when all we had was the system avatar, about the only option for being larger than life was height. You couldn't make your breasts enormous because they turned blocky. Same with your behind. If you wanted to be big without ending up with a distorted body part ... height was your best bet. Then we got add on body parts. Prim beasts, then mesh ones. Depending on what brand and model you bought, you could have everything from 'itty bitty *****' to 'weather balloons'. People tended not to adjust their height at that point, because they could make their larger than life body part the size to fit the tall avatar. Now, however, people tend to be wearing mesh bodies. And with all due respect to those body makers ... every mesh body on the market has it's limitations ... you can only make your <insert body part> so large. So if you want to have the emphasis on that body part one way to make it larger in proportion to the rest of your body is to go with a shorter avatar. That's why I think we're seeing some people getting shorter. It's just a theory though.

Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Evil corpos doing bad stuff IN REALITY: Johnson and Johnson selling asbestos contaminated baby powder for years Pfizer to Pay $2.3 Billion for Fraudulent Marketing Improve our lives? Tell that to the people who were addicted to opioids which were being aggressively pushed by Corporations: 4 drug companies agree to pay $26 billion to resolve opioid lawsuits But perhaps you prefer something specifically about Facebook as it was that the time: Facebook will pay an unprecedented $5 billion penalty over privacy breaches I'll quote a bit of it for you: Is that sufficient evidence that corporations can, and do, take actions which are more than sufficient grounds for people to have a justifiably negative opinion of them? I can, if you wish, provide you with MANY more examples.

I think I can best address this with a quote from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: I would NOT get any technology implanted if I could possibly avoid it.

When I went to the video I saw that it was nearly an hour, and I really couldn't see myself watching the whole thing. Now I'm 10 minutes in and I can't stop ... it's like watching a train wreck.

I stopped going to events a few years ago ... I just wasn't finding anything to justify the time spent. Recently I decided to to go to one, mostly just out of curiosity. So I did what I always used to do when going to an event: Turn down particles, reduce Max Avatars, minimise my Draw Distance, and ... I put on my low-impact system avatar. When I arrived it wasn't that busy, which was good, but everyone I could see was high complexity. Some of them were very high ... I run my Max Complexity very high when I'm not at busy locations (I forgot to turn it down before going to the event) and it takes a lot to get jelly-dolled ... yet several of the people attending to the event were immediately subject to the gumby treatment. I'm afraid my inner-troll came forth ... I dragged my Max Complexity down to the absolute minimum so that the attendees would hopefully enjoy being spammed with the notice that they weren't being rezzed. I'm like that sometimes. Queue Meredith Brooks. I'm not sure why people thought the thing to do was go to a potentially crowded environment wearing avatars loaded down with cruft ... but as long as they do, events are going to be sub-optimal no matter what LL does to the region. As an aside - I was far from impressed by what I found there at that event: I did see one pair of boots I quite liked, but when I got closer and had a good look I realised that the creator was actually using the old school bake-the-reflection-into-the-texture approach. And that creator wasn't the only one. Apparently we now have a generation of creators who don't actually understand how to use materials. Yeeesh!

A bit slow in responding, but when I think Goth or similar I think ~Black Arts~ They do have some mesh body stuff, but the majority of their stuff is pre-mesh body. I find the textures of their system outfits to be first class, and they work really well via BOM. At least I think so. YMMV :)

Sorry - but you are entirely wrong. You have merely to go to group search, plug in some relevant terms, and you'll find that female-superiority and black-superiority groups are present in equal or greater numbers to their opposites, and that they have significantly more members. Your mistake, and it's a common one, is to assume that this has ANY bearing on RL racism or sexism. These groups are 99% fetishes, and nothing else. And that is why LL are wise to leave them alone. That was my point. (What those fetishes tell us about society in general is another topic, and it's WAY off topic for this thread. And any conclusions we might draw would be debatable anyway.)

LL are wise to leave that alone. Because if they touch that ... then they are going to have to deal with of the myriad of groups and sims which operated on the principal that 'men are inferior', and 'non-black are inferior'. Both of those, shall we call them 'themes', are by far the most common of the ones which are borderline.

Let's consider secret societies. Years ago I was indulging in some sim-hopping. You know the kind of thing ... plug a random word into the Places search and pick one of the returns and just go there to see what there is to see. One particular hop, I arrived in a sim which had some very edgy role playing going on. I stayed in the welcome area for about 10 minutes reading the comprehensive notecards explaining exactly what was happening in the sim, clarifying a LOT of points about what was going on, and making clear what was NOT going on. The notecards were SO extensive that I found myself intrigued. I went out into the sim and was further intrigued ... it was clearly the result of a LOT of work, and it was all very well done. I was wearing a titler which basically said "I'm just exploring. Please let me know if that's a problem" and was approached by someone who checked very closely to confirm that I had read and understood the notecards and was fully aware that this was role play. I guess I passed as they welcomed me to look around, asking that I not intrude on the active RP that was going on, etc. Now let me be ENTIRELY clear. I have read countless TOS and EULA because, as an IT professional, it's often been my job to keep idiot users from bringing in software that is licensed only for PERSONAL use. So I am quite aware of the rules pertaining to SL. I can state that what was going on in that sim was NOT against the TOS in my opinion. But a few months later that sim was suddenly empty and available for rent ... courtesy of complaints about what was going on there. I had some items from the sim, and was therefore able to get the name of the creator who I reached out to. He was very cautious but admitted that their group had given up trying to have a specific location to indulge in their role play. In that I wasn't part of the group, he wasn't willing to share any more than that and I understood and wished him and his group well. Now for what I have inferred. I know that many of those avatars are still active. Some of them have updated their profiles and have clearly moved on. But many others have NOT changed their profiles in the slightest since that sim was shut down. Clearly they have found something to do, but choose not to show what it is on their profiles. I suspect that they are still doing their RP ... they are just doing it underground so that they can be left in peace to enjoy their fetish(es). Perhaps that counts as a secret society?