SynesthetiQ

October 11, 2021

23 minutes ago, Nick0678 said:

I don't understand your reply.. so do you know a BETTERr way than condoms to protect against HIV and STD's in general while having sex or not ?

If you do feel free to post a link saying "This pill will protect you from HIV, forget condoms" otherwise you are just avoiding the question because you have no mature answer.

HI Nick,

While your sense of responsibility and commitment to condom use is really laudable, sadly many men don't share that responsibility.

Condom use is really problematic across society (probably shouldn't be, but it is) and largely (sadly, speaking as a man) the problem lies squarely with men. If for no other reason than the "receiving partners" are the ones disproportionately most at risk from the consequences of unprotected sex and thus we men tend to shirk our share of the responsibility.

I do therefore agree with Finite that there are many initiatives under way which seek to either educate men specifically, empower women more, and/or find other interventions.

For a really interesting read on this have a look at https://www.bustle.com/wellness/why-dont-guys-like-condoms-like-unprotected-sex

Also in terms of your request for alternative interventions against HIV, have a look at https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep.html

October 11, 2021

Just now, Finite said:

I would gander there's a lot of socks in some bins.

I think you're giving the male population of SL too much credit.

I'm thinking the test is a little bit like how you test if pasta is cooked - if you throw it at the wall and it sticks, then probably worth a quick rinse.

October 11, 2021

57 minutes ago, Nick0678 said:

Oh they do? I am a bit old fashioned and only know of condoms.

I would definitely like to know those new methods that could offer protection against HIV, syphilis etc during sex.

Is it a new lube or pill or something like that? Can you please inform me about it?

If everyone just stuck to SL sex, the only responsibility the man would have is to occasionally wash the sock.

October 11, 2021

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

[Reposted with minor changes because the original was "hidden" by the forum software]

I am pretty agnostic on this suggestion, although I probably lean towards the response given by most here -- that it's unnecessary and unlikely to really accomplish what it is supposed to. And also that it would unfairly disadvantage some.

Social engineering gets a bad name sometimes, and it can, of course, manifest itself in negative ways. But most of our RL laws are, in fact, social engineering: there are laws against violent or fraudulent behaviours because "we" have determined that these are behaviours we want to discourage. And when we have conversations about sentences and punishments, as for instance, capital punishment, the argument is usually less about ethics than it is about what makes the most effective deterrent for those behaviours.

And social engineering is not exactly new, either in the digital realm generally, or SL in particular. Most social media programs, MMOs, etc., incorporate social engineering in the foundational base code, I think. Facebook, Twitter, online multiplayer games -- they are all designed to encourage certain kinds of engagement, and particular kinds of community, and discourage others. And, as the recent revelations about FB's algorithms make clear (as if we didn't already know), it's mostly about the money. What kinds of social engineering will generate the most revenue?

SL is no different in that regard. I don't think LL has probably ever introduced a new affordance, rule, or constraint for ethical or moral reasons. It's always about money, and the continued viability of the platform. When certain kinds of activity were banned about 15 years ago, it wasn't because LL had suddenly determined that they were causing social harm: it was because there were serious threats of legal action, as well as a lot of bad publicity. When LL introduced a new rating system, when it closed down SL "banks" (i.e., ponzi schemes), when it banned gambling, and, now, when it got rid of gachas, it was always about external forces at work. I'm sure that there are many in LL who agree with these changes -- but it took governments who didn't necessarily have SL itself in their sights to trigger them.

So, LL isn't going to institute enforced down time merely because it is worried about its customers. If something like this is ever instituted, it will be because some government somewhere has decided that it would be a good thing.

Thanks for this Scylla, for what it's worth I agree with you completely (currently more a poisoned chalice than anything - sorry 🙂)

The only thing I'd say additionally is that, from a business environment analysis, the scope of external stakeholders affecting SL policy will also include:

Sales prospects (prospective new channels, business partners, consumer groups/demographics)
Investors

From my perspective these are critical to any promising future for SL; one which doesn't see it relegated (as some commentators predict) into simply being a virtual sex and kink platform.

Maybe I'm just misreading the writing on the wall, but isn't it the case that:

the current pool of residents (measured by concurrency and/or DAUs) and associated economic activity is contracting and has been for a long time (despite a much misinterpreted COVID bump)?
Genuine new signups that stay longer than 5 minutes are also stagnant, indicating that the current offering isn't attractive and that current marketing and onboarding isn't working?

Any attempt at a PESTLE (ish) analysis for SL now versus 2 years ago (pre acquisition and and pre COVID) suggests the need for a change - which I'm sure the new owners are only too aware of..

That's just me though and, as revealed by my ignorance of the brand names within the SL sex industry 🙂, what do I know?

Genuinely though I do have a lot of love for SL - admittedly more so from my first incarnation (back in 2005-2007) - but that might be more to do with where I am now vs then.

Really I'm just open for a debate, for which I agree I sometimes err too much on the side of obnoxious "Devil's Advocate"!

Anyway, that's my last post on this subject (everyone will pleased to know) because I know I've hammered it ad nauseum.🤐

October 10, 2021

Lessons for us all I think (me included).

I admit I'm guilty more than most of the whole "Come writers and critics, Who prophesize with your pen" thing, but the future interests me and I enjoy taking a punt at guessing what's around the corner.

We'll all see what's coming soon enough 😀

October 9, 2021

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

That still doesn't explain how limiting what people can do will be increase the profitability. You're talking about implementing policies that could, in effect, close down a lot of the adult business. People who own land for adult clubs, stores. People who buy those items to use in their homes. But honestly, if you made poo emoji avatars, I certainly wouldn't be logging in to spend money dressing it up (in what, I have no clue) nor would I bother keeping my premium account or my land.

Limiting access is an entire other can of worms. How long would land owners keep their land if they were unable to access it whenever they chose? The land rental.companies who spend 100s of thousands? Or do they get special treatment?

Btw, the 'sorry and all that 😃, at the end does not make up for using the aging cows analogy. Just sayin'. 🙄

First off I'm sorry for the various analogies.

To be fair the "aging cows" thing was more a reference to the fact that I think the current population and business model is seen as a cash cow asset to be sweated with the minimum investment, rather than an insinuation residents are seen as individuals displaying any sort of bovine traits.

In this context then, yeah of course, if you have a pool of residents only 40% of whom are premium and/or own land, it's always easier to sweeten the deal and try to convert the remaining 60% to fee paying customers. That's not even a strategy, that's just tactical, It's cheap and easy and doesn't hurt you too much if it fails.

By all means take some petty cash from the pot (because I'm sorry, but relatively that's all it cost) and plop out a new set of Linden Homes or whatever. Again, sorry for the analogy in advance, but it's like waving a shiny cheap trinket in front of a baby to distract her while you change her diaper.

The trouble is that pot of prospects is finite and seems to be contracting.

Personally (for what its worth) my reading of the situation is that the new owners aren't here just to sweat the assets for the next 10 years and then call it a day - which ironically feels like the preferred option for many in these forums.

Given the rapidly evolving ecosystem for businesses like SL, there are incredible opportunities in the short term to leverage SL into something great - something that makes the current revenue streams look pretty small.

In order to take advantage of these opportunities however, a lot will have to change including how SL is perceived as a brand and the values it communicates to the wider world.

Which means modifying some policies and accepted behaviours, particularly for people flagged as potentially vulnerable, whether by age or observed behaviour or whatever other metric LL wants to use.

I do admit one of many flies in my ointment, is that in my mind's eye I have a halcyon view of what SL might evolve into - and truly I don't expect anyone here to share that view.

I mean if you really wanted to, SL could stay as it is give or take and be a self supporting backwater for 10 years, and that might be fine.

Another way might be to forget porn and gambling controls and any other behavioural interventions, SL could be the virtual pornhub of 2025 - a good living to be made in that.

To be fair we've already imported the whole lovesense thing I believe into our sex clubs so we're not against opening up a bit to the brave new world! A hard NO to "pixie dust" NFTs and the Blockchain, but by all means let's get some of that LoveSense action on board 😀

It all depends on your personal vision for the future of SL and how we might get there.

October 9, 2021

15 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

And how exactly would that make it seem more safe or palatable? The more restrictive they make it, the less people will log in. The less people who log in, the less revenue LL will see. Why would anyone purchase land if LL were to restrict how often you could use it? If anything, it would make SL seem less attractive to potential investors.

I think the point I'm making Rowan is that nobody really cares what the current pool of aging (both in terms of SL and RL) residents think - least of all the new owners, nor any prospective investors.

You guys are a given, you're the aging cow the farmer keeps on for its dwindling milk production, right up until it costs more to keep you than he would make by sending you off to the local abattoir.

Mostly you're prime examples of the sunk cost fallacy, LL could institute a new technology tomorrow which relegated avatars to decorated poo emoji and you wouldn't leave.

I keep hearing people on these forums shout "PERSUADE US - SELL IT TO US" - trust me, nobody's selling to you.

I know it sounds really harsh and I apologise for that, but I just want to really clearly articulate some things.

LL was "acquired" by Randy and Brad. I'm just going to ask what people here think the motivations where for that. Why did LL decide it was time to sell out, why did Randy and Brad think SL was a worthy of their cash?
Whatever the reason, R & B will be looking at two things (not rocket science by the way):
1. ROI (Return on Investment) - if they decide to keep SL and develop it, they'll be expecting a decent ROI over the medium to long term. I can guarantee that if SL stays as it is with no major changes to platform and target demographic and adhere to merely satisficing the current aging pool of residents - they ain't going to get anywhere near that ROI.
2. A forecast profitable Exit. Nobody, and I mean nobody looks at an acquisition like this without considering when and how they might exit, which at the end of the day means answering the question "Who in hell will buy this thing off of us when we're done?".

Whatever people here think, all the gradual incremental changes in technology and online behaviour we've seen over the past decade are now reaching critical mass and I think most commentators and the investors who listen to them agree that the next 5 years isn't going to look anything like the past 15. (just to reiterate - you guys can agree with the forecasts or not - nobody actually cares).

To cut the chase, and I'm as sad about it as you, the fact is "What it looks like", is much more important than "What it is".

So for SL:

Less latitude when it comes to accepted behaviour and acceptance of "kinks".
More sensitivity as to what transactions are accepted through Tilia. Nobody wants even a whisper of Tilia being a glorified laundering mechanism for virtual prostitution or gambling (just two examples).
More necessity to be perceived as a Good and Responsible actor in today's zeitgeist. So implementing policies which "appear" to manage levels of addiction and general emotional wellbeing - including the expulsion in the event of any hint of sexism, misogyny, or illegal sexual behaviour - notice I emphasise the word "hint".

That's it really. I completely understand nobody on these forums agree with this and I'm completely open to the resulting ridicule - sorry and all that 😀

October 8, 2021

2 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Well, good heavens. What have you been doing for two months!? Go get some freebies and take off that system avie, at least!

And make some friends. Or even Friends. SL is about five hundred more times more fun as a shared experience.

I know I should Lindal, I'm just a bit contrary that's all 😀

It is getting to the point that I can feel the ambient level of paranoia escalate by 90% in any room I enter.

Seems most SL residents have at least one skeleton in the cupboard they'd rather not see again in alt form 😀

October 8, 2021

3 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Hi, @SynesthetiQ. Assuming that you're not just pulling our collective leg, if you right click someone and choose Add > As Friend from the context menu, they are sent a friendship offer from you. (There's also an Add button in people's Profiles, so you don't actually have to be near them physically.) If the person accepts your offer, each of you appears on the other's Friends List. By default, your Friends get a notification when you come on line, although this can be turned off. You can also allow your Friends to modify your objects and to see where you are on the Map, although these are turned off by default.

There's a function that almost no one uses these days called "Give Card". If you give someone a Calling Card, you go in their Contacts list but not their Friends list, and you don't have the Friends abilities to see online status, location, etc.

Most SL residents consider it rude to send a Friends offer without at least chatting with a person for a while first, and then asking them if it's OK.

Threads like this one arise from time to time because most of us understand that there's a big difference between Friends on a list and actual friends.

Sorry Lindal, sadly that was just my poor attempt at humour 😀

My avatar and profile is as described though, so you can imagine unsolicited friend requests are in pretty short supply (not unknown though) 😀

October 8, 2021

I'm 2 months old, I have an empty profile, and I'm wandering around in a system avatar.

This friends thing you speak of, what exactly is that?

October 8, 2021

1 minute ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

Highly unlikely.

Oh ok then, I'm glad that's all sorted out 😀

October 8, 2021

40 minutes ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

According to whom? I'm an adult. If I want to spend 24/7 on the computer why would I want a social media gaming site to limit my use on their platform? I play a game here in SL that you level up according to how much time you are logged in with the HUD on. I stayed log in all the time just for that reason, even when I am sleeping or doing other RL things.

If this were a platform where children under the age of 18 played then I could see some merit to it but since it is played by adults we don't need Big Brother dictating how to spend our time.

I understand that there are a few people on these forums that firmly believe history is destiny.

The logic (if it can be called that) goes that SL has "survived" in its current state for over a decade - despite all previous harbingers of doom and gloom. As a result its obviously safe to extrapolate and spin that history into a future of many more years of support for a stagnant economy, anachronistic culture, and dwindling user base. Nobody is forecast to make any real ROI, but that's ok because look how realistic my boobs are.

The truth is there are lots of genuinely new legal, societal, technological changes and pressures which are beginning to impact SL and the rest of the online world. Given current research shows that Americans spend (on average) around 30% of their time online, the idea that we as individuals and our associated behaviours won't also come under scrutiny and legislation is pretty silly.

In the beginning of course it won't be legislation which reflects and attempts to mitigate these pressures (however there are already quite well funded lobbying groups attempting to do just that).

It'll actually be commercial online businesses across social media, gaming and yes virtual worlds pushing the changes. All of whom need new investors and customers with deep pockets, and consequentially need to be seen as responsible actors and display an adherence to the same set of brand values as this target demographic.

Much talk on these forums has been around the future of SL - what the new hires mean - what the new owners are thinking when they institute changes to ToS.

If you think their strategy is to invest good money after bad in developing clever, commercially and technically savvy ways to keep SL as it is and keep the current slowly decreasing user base happy, then sadly I think there's a lot of disappointment coming your way. Nobody hired the new VP of engineering for his ability to manage a jira backlog of low priority BAU concerns and gripes.

I suspect the new owners of SL will gradually institute tighter controls over user behaviour and attitudes, not really because they care about your potential addictive tendencies or ensuring your civil liberties as a self determining adult.

It will all be done purely to ensure that SL is seen as a safe and socially palatable haven for investors to place their money and expect a good ROI in the forecast context of the next 5 to 10 years.

So is it likely that SL will institute some sort of access control to minimise the potential for addictive behaviour?

In the short term probably not - however in the medium term maybe.

Either way, the deciding factors really won't include whether or not a few of the current residents lose out on some fishing time or feel their imagined civil liberties to be infringed.

October 7, 2021

Sorry people, just ignore.

In the end turned out I hadn't cleared the cache properly after all.

When I did, normal service was resumed 😀

October 7, 2021

On 10/1/2021 at 7:44 PM, animats said:

A must-read for LL management: So you want to compete with Roblox.

This is the best article in some time on the business problems SL faces. Some excepts:

Minimum Requirements to not Fail Right Away

You should consider the following as mere table stakes:

High quality multiplayer support for user creations out of the box. (SL has that.)

High performance servers with excellent reliability. (SL needs more server side performance.)

Powerful, user friendly, and joyful creation tools. (Hmm.)

The Cloud Cost Trap

Why doing everything on AWS costs too much and hurts you competitively.

Tools are Hard

It is not easy to make good tools. And not just for the normal software engineering reasons – ie, you'll inevitably become too familiar with them and become unable to see their flaws, you'll forget to dogfood them and build them around speculative users rather than actual things creators want, etc. No, tools are hard because they take time. Not just time to build, refine, debug, and test, but time for creators to learn, adopt, and build them into their lives and workflow. This is much harder than a typical user acquisition problem for a simple game or CRUD app, it's more like inventing a new instrument and expecting musicians to start writing and recording music for it.

The Real Problems

The big three problems you're facing are:

Chicken-or-the-egg deadlocks

Platform dynamics

Ownership and trust

Chicken-or-the-egg deadlocks

You need players

Players won't show up without content, so you need creators

Creators won't show up until you have players

Content creators value audience size above nearly everything else, closely tied with fat stacks of cash money. It doesn't matter how easy it is for creators on your platform to make mind-blowing experiences if you don't also have an audience eagerly waiting to play them. (SL's flat user count is not good enough.)

Platform dynamics

For the purpose of this article I use "platform" to mean a digital ecosystem whose owner gets other people ("creators") to build stuff for players to enjoy, and the owner makes money off of this activity somehow. (SL is in reasonably good shape on this front.)

Ownership and Trust

Platforms tend to follow a certain kind of life cycle, and there's no better primer than Dan Cook's Game of Platform Power. In it he outlines how platforms transition through "Growth" and "Engage" phases where they are friendly and generous to the creators who produce value on their ecosystems, before maturing into the "Extract" phase where they leverage their size and power to lock-in users and capture as much creator-produced value for themselves as possible. Once upon a time, platforms said things like "Don't be Evil" and "users will never be required to use a Facebook account to use an Oculus" and we've seen what that's worth. (We see SL slowly moving into the "Extract" phase. SL isn't a giant monopoly and can't get away with that.)

Good Luck, You'll Need It

Look, I know this all sounds a bit crazy, but you're the one who decided to compete with Roblox. I'm just here to make you fully aware of the magnitude of the problem, coming up with an exact business model that threads that needle and adapts it to your specific situation is your job. The entire venture is crazy to start with, and my point is simply that the riskiest thing to do is play it safe.

If you do something wild and ambitious and off the wall you might still fail but at least you'll have stood a chance. Even better, you'll greatly increase the odds you'll discover a weird new opportunity along the way and pivot away from "competing" with Roblox, accomplishing something much better instead. (SL is already past that point. This is a huge edge.)

Now, all this is encouraging. The take-away from this is that nobody is positioned better than Second Life to compete against Roblox and build the Metaverse. It's going to be all uphill for new startups. Despite that, SL is blowing its opportunity.

They've called out SL's three big problems:

Too hard.

Too slow.

Not enough users.

Read the article in full if you have any interest in the business aspects of all this.

HI animats,

First off, thanks for all your really well informed posts on this subject. It's something that's really close to my heart both here and as part of my RL day job, and I always walk away from your posts having learned something 😀

The only difference in perspective I have with this excerpt is the reliance on in-house platform specific tools and IP protection mechanisms.

In my view it's only a matter of time before we have open interoperability standards across the industry which will allow creators to create, distribute and profit from their work seamlessly across multiple platforms (nothing new really for SL creators to do their work external to SL as it is)

It'll also help consumers because they won't have to support multiple discrete presences across multiple platforms, as an example a single shirt or outfit will be bought once and then duplicated seamlessly and at zero cost across multiple platforms.

There are certain interoperability standards and asset classes emerging as we speak, I won't mention them here though because I don't want to be called out (maybe completely fairly ) for indulging too much in some sort of buzzword hyperbole.

I can see however that this sort of approach and potential tools have been discussed extensively in this thread already - so I'm probably not saying anything new. 😀

Anyway, this sort of approach is nothing new obviously in any sort of engineering or creative process. My RL product backlog would be going nowhere fast if the team didn't spend most their time on Stackoverflow and leveraging third party APIs.

In my short time in SL I can see that it definitely has some great USPs which could make it a great success in the coming few years. My view is that it should "stick to the knitting" as we used to say back in the day, which isn't building content creation tools or IP protection standards from scratch.

I genuinely feel SL has a really bright future if it offloads the responsibility for building tools and ownership/trust mechanisms (things which we're not great at any more) but concentrated on the platform dynamics (things which SL is still great at) by virtue of being being a leader in openness to interoperability standards (embryonic as they are).

Anyway, in a bit of a rush, so sorry but probably haven't articulated very clearly.

Thanks again.

October 6, 2021

On 10/3/2021 at 12:53 AM, Istelathis said:

A little off topic, but something I have been wondering about for the past few years. With the advances in artificial wombs, and how soon it may likely be that pregnancy is no longer necessary - I wonder what sort of ramifications this will have in the near future. Will it soon be a requirement to transfer the fetus to such a womb, and will both parties involved be required to pay for the expenses until it grew to be 18 years old. It further introduces even more questions, such as how all of these children will be taken care of if such mandates were made, I wonder if there would be enough foster parents to take care of them all.

This doesn't feel "off topic" to me at all.

From and including Roe v Wade onwards, there has been no (as far as I know) absolute right to unregulated abortion.

There is always the consideration and protection of "potential life" which generally becomes compelling (in legal terms anyway) when the fetus achieves "viability" - usually defined as the point where the fetus is potentially able to live outside the mother's womb albeit with artificial support.

It's the question of viability and its complexity and dependence on context - including access to medical technology (as accepted by Roe v Wade as far back as 1973) which is often used as a key challenge to existing abortion laws at any specific stage in a pregnancy.

It's therefore the case then that as technology and medicine marches on, the time period for a fetus to become viable will reduce.

Currently I believe that modern practitioners still hold that 24 weeks is when a fetus potentially becomes viable, and at that point access to abortion becomes a much more difficult conversation. Even given that endangerment to the mother's physical and mental health is an overriding consideration.

All I'm really saying then is that this sort of challenge to a woman's right to choose is likely to become much more frequent as medical science (including perhaps availability of artificial wombs) pushes back the timeline for viability.

Once a pregnancy moves into a phase where there is a relatively high potential for viability of the fetus, then we move into an ethical and moral discussion of relative human rights.

October 5, 2021

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well, bearing in mind that the original post for women was intended as a sort of joke in the first instance anyway . . .

I think both threads could usefully die. I don't really see the point of threads for pictures that are specifically targeted at one gender or the other. And it's kinda heteronormative, no? I'm not allowed to be attracted to a photo of a woman in the other thread, because they are only for men to admire?

Be as sexy and provocative as you want (or as the mods will permit)! And people will respond as they will. I don't see any need for threads that are literally soliciting wolf whistles.

To be honest when I first arrived in these forums I did raise an eyebrow when I saw the women's thread.

But then just thought I was missing something - being new and all that.

I'm not sure if it's related to the general demographic of the forums (I'm in the same demographic by the way), but I know that most of my RL friends and colleagues would see it as pretty crass (at best).

There are no doubt lot's of reasons why I'm missing the whole zeitgeist on this, and I definitely don't want to come across as a spoilsport; I'm genuinely open to being educated on this.

is there a fine line between artistic expression (erotic or not) and simple (anachronistic) titillation?

That's a genuine question from a philistine of the first order 😀

October 5, 2021

17 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

Either way, the rest of the guys should basically just give up at this point. The dadbod has been dropped. You cant win.

You've obviously not seen the size of my digit ratio, it's quite small.

October 5, 2021

18 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

https://www.webmd.com/men/news/20110705/study-*****-size-linked-to-length-of-fingers

Not saying I believe the study but it was a study...for some reason. I'm sure you can guess what word was censored.

Fist?

Or is that a whole different conversation?

October 5, 2021

I'm not a great shopper to be honest - after getting on for 2 months, I'm still running around in the free "Johnny Mesh" avatar I got when I joined up, so definitely take my perspective with a pinch of salt 😀

My understanding though is that this new NextUp thingy works a bit like this - please tell me if I'm wrong:

Random thing is shown and available on "stage" for purchase - You know what you're paying and what you're getting.
But, behind the "curtain" waiting to come on, might be something more lovely - more rare; the thing you've been wanting your whole life long!
The only way you can get the current thing off the stage and get to look at the next thing, is by buying the current thing.
You might not normally dream of spending money on this current thing - but now your money also buys you the chance to see if what's behind the curtain is the thing you really want.

If this is correct, then I do agree with the OP that this is just gaming the "new" system.
If it's not correct, just ignore me and go about your business 😀

Some people will spend money they don't have for something they don't really want just to see what's behind the curtain.

Feels a little bit like gambling to me.

As for the ethics, morality or not of the whole thing, that's not really for me to say.

However for people who err on the "if you don't want it, don't buy it" side of the argument, I'd say it doesn't feel quite as clear cut as that (to me at any rate).

The question of addiction (in this case to gambling) vs personal responsibility is generally considered pretty nuanced, so probably worth a bit of sensitive discussion either way.

October 5, 2021

On 10/2/2021 at 11:33 PM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Really beautiful and evocative.

October 5, 2021

I think there's also the risk of people using Google's reverse image search to find your RL identity or your other social media accounts (if you use the same photo obviously).

If I definitely wanted to keep SL and RL separate, the safest course of action is probably not to post an RL picture - particularly not one I might have posted elsewhere.

September 30, 2021

2 hours ago, Orwar said:

Except he was the person who started the entire thing the other day by whinging about it in 'How does your avatar look today?'. Don't tell people they're mistaken if you don't keep up with what's going on.

And oopsie, is John Goodman holding a cigarette, in an award-winning cult classic seen by millions around the globe?!

while I really don't have any skin in this particular game, it's probably no bad thing to point out that the "award winning cult classic" you use to support your case (whatever that may actually be) was released in 1998.

Even if we overlook the obvious argumentum ad populum fallacy of your logic (I know you like a bit of Latin) it might still be better if you could dig out something more relevant than an excellent movie getting on for a quarter of a century old.

I know you understand that this slip up would normally provide me the opportunity to indulge in the same level of Reductio ad Absurdum reasoning as you revelled in earlier so I won't spell it out for you, and I definitely won't indulge in the "overt sarcasm" you apparently pride yourself in - I sort of adhere to the old "sarcasm as the lowest form of wit" perspective.

Now apparently this sort of post would leave me open to allegations of rampant pomposity, but I feel pretty safe in this case because.. well to be frank, if you called someone pompous the irony would be palpable.

September 30, 2021

1 minute ago, Rowan Amore said:

"I never inhaled" ~Bill Clinton

I'd have attributed that to Monica, the proof was on her dress apparently 😀

September 30, 2021

4 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Just swirl it around your mouth and don't inhale. You'll be fine 😀

September 30, 2021

I've no idea why this subject is causing so much contention.

At the end of the day, it's well accepted that there are many Socio-Cultural influences on behaviour, and there's no doubt that marketing and social media firms have made a good living for decades by subtly (and not so subtly) leveraging those influences.

Is product placement (branded or otherwise) within digital imagery a tried and tested influencing mechanism? The answer is of course YES!

The degree of influence is contingent on lots of different things, including factors such as:

Is the "influencer" perceived as worthy of emulation?
What is the volume and relative suggestibility of the target audience?

Self delusion aside, I think we can agree that any "influence" coming from these forums is localised to a tiny demographic which has already made its behavioural bed and been lying in it for quite a few years 😀

Do what you want to do, nobody outside these forums cares - and that's a good thing!

Forums

Blogs

Knowledge Base

Posts posted by SynesthetiQ

Linden Lab

Tilia

Second Life

Connect With Us

Partner With Us