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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    How really wonderful to see you posting here!! Yay you! And a lovely pic, too! Yes, please: more!
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    I like this pic enough that I'm double-posting it: a slightly censored black and white version here, and an uncensored colour one in the Adult section. Again, not sure which I prefer: B&W or colour (although I certainly prefer uncensored).
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    Arguably, almost every algorithm applied to social media has historically been a form of social engineering. Frighteningly, it often seems to work. /me drools slightly
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    See, this is what I mean. Generosity! Bountiful goodness! You can almost see the Milk of Human Kindness gushing from her every pore! My adorable nature isn't an excuse, dahling. It's a stratagem. And it works! /me smiles adorably
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    I know you're (sort of?) joking, but this in a way is my point. I don't want people talking to me on the expectation that they will be rewarded for doing so. I would like them to talk to me because they want to talk to me. I do understand the.point of "rewards," but these can also, unless one is careful, drain the value of "X" activity by ensuring that it's not the value of that activity itself that is the motivation for undertaking it. It becomes instead a mechanical exercise undertaken to achieve another purpose altogether.
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    I'm not sure how I feel about "rewards" -- there's something a bit . . . I'm not sure, mercenary? Patronizing? Hierarchical about it? On the other hand, unmerited largesse from people who are just being generous for no reason at all can make your day. I remember being given L$200 by someone I met entirely randomly in my first week or so here. It was totally gratuitous and it helped sell me on the platform. On more than a couple of occasions, I've been whining to Maddy about not being able to choose which colour dress or whatever to get, and she'll just throw me L$1000 or so with instructions to just buy the God damned fatpack already and shut up about it. (I have this down to a fine art now, of course.) Sometimes I'll happen across a nice garment that I think will look lovely on one of my fashion-challenged men friends, and I'll just buy it for him. (We go dancing weekly so, yes, I have an ulterior motive.) Rhonda used to just occasionally buy things for random people. She once bought me a lovely top I'd commented on in the picture threads. I far prefer random acts of kindness over programmed ones.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    It occurs to me that, for someone who doesn't think we should be talking about the rules of the forum . . . you seem to expend a lot of time and effort talking about the rules of the forum?
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    That was a thread that should have been shut down by the mods loooooong before it eventually was. As I recall it -- it's part of the GD from that era that has disappeared -- it went reasonably well for the first four or so pages, with people discussing the reasons for the belligerence here. And then it swung wildly out of control. I vaguely remember backing away, poking my head in again about page 25 or so to make an angry "This is why we can't have nice things" post, and then just heading straight for the bomb shelter. I doubt it would have gone as far as 4 pages on this forum now.
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    "Why So Acrimonious?" Ironically, the OP was about engaging with each other in a civil manner. Hah.
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    I guess that's subject to interpretation. Virtual Secrets (and other external blogs and sources like The Herald, JuicyBomb, Inara's blog, etc., are all themselves explicitly "about" Second Life, so talking about them is talking about SL in a sense. They do "relate directly to Second Life/Linden Lab," to quote the mantra, even if they are not PART of SL. Too restrictive interpretation of what constitutes "relevant" to SL could lead to us being unable to talk about SL's place within the Metaverse, other platforms and/or games that have relevant lessons to teach us, external tools such as Blender or Photoshop, etc.
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    Trust me, I've seen it. It's sort of greyish pink, squishy, and gross. Ick.
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, to begin with, I wasn't at all sure that she was RPing. I think it entirely possible that this is how she actually was/is. And that is the source, mostly, of my regret: she's someone whom I'd like to talk to about her presentation of female sexuality, but mocking her as I did was not kind. Her response in the comments was not at all aggressive or defensive. I think she was probably quite genuine. And I need to be better at not assuming that that kind of presentation is RP in SL, and just be generally nicer. I am trying. I have fewer issues with my response if she was RPing. It's another curious example of how it's sort of open season on women in SL. Were I to represent as, say, a black woman and RP it according to every cliche in the book, people would rightly view it as offensive and quiet possibly AR it. And LL would be quite likely to take action: the one instance I've witnessed of a Linden from the governance team swooping in and actually booting an avatar in front of my eyes was just such a case. On the other hand, one can represent a woman in pretty much any offensively stereotypical manner one wants, including (not infrequently in some sims) playing her as "deserving" of r*pe or actually "wanting it" . . . and that's just fine so far as most people, and LL, is concerned. I am of the quaint opinion that if one is representing something or someone one is not, be it a different ethnicity, gender, biological sex, sexual orientation, or whatever, that one should do it respectfully, and not reinforce ugly and sometimes dangerous cultural stereotypes. Oh well. "Your world, your imagination" . . . But I do wonder about the dark and ugly mess that is sometimes evidently people's "imagination."
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is not the issue, and you know it. If you disagree with what Lindal said, then argue with her points on their own merits -- as, in fact, you just did above. The ad hominem snark, on the other hand, was unnecessary and mean-spirited. Believe it or not, I thought you were better than that.
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    That's pretty uncalled for.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    Library of Congress, dahling. I'm not living in the stone ages. PN 6231.E72.
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    Too late. I read it and got a screenshot. I'd strongly suggest you avoid Virtual Secrets for a week or two . . .
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    I've never appeared in it (that I know of anyway), and the only person I directly know of who has been attacked there is Roman, but I know friends who have friends who've been pilloried there. On that basis, I don't think it's a single social group -- rather a particular kind of group that uses it. I think it's actually pretty popular and gets a lot of hits. Which, yes, is frightening.
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    Lol You labelled your outfit "summer bimbo"? Lol
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    The theory is a good one. The problem is that it would get gamed very quickly.
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    Make Scylla laugh at a really dumb sexist joke. Priceless.
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    Wait, what????
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, good question. I mean they should have known me well enough to understand that I was not going to pose for them. I was certainly eloquent enough on my feelings about Post 6. But it is interesting that Timothy apparently thought that a (public) offering of a spread there (so to speak) would be something I'd consider. It suggests that maybe he either wasn't really getting it, or that he suspected my motives, and thought I was really either just jealous, or craving attention. Either way, he certainly wasn't taking my criticisms seriously. I should say that I made it clear enough, I think, that my objections to Post 6 were not prudish. I'd have been fine with it, including the nudity, had they chosen people with actual accomplishments beyond an ability to max out shape sliders, or who had things to say. I do nudes and semi-nudes myself on Flickr: the issue, as I'm sure I don't need to say to you, wasn't nudity, but rather the context and how it was served up. I should also say that on at least one occasion I got rather mean about one of their models, who really presented herself as the ultimate inflatable and brainless large-breasted boopsie. I don't know if she was really as clueless and empty-headed as she sounded, or if it was role play, but I should have been a great deal more gentle and less satirical than I was. I'm not very proud of how I managed that. Sometimes walking the line between making a point, and scoring points, can be difficult to negotiate, and I've got it wrong on more than one occasion.
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    Full points, I suppose, for tolerance and forbearance, given how you were harassed by these people and their associates. But that's sort of the point I'm making. Yes, the Herald did break some actual news, and sometimes even noteworthy news. Hell, they gave really full coverage of a protest picket I led at a r*pe sim once, and even published in full a statement I made on it afterwards. (I also got an invite from Morpork to pose for Post 6, but that was mainly in the hope that it would shut me up, I think.) But where they didn't have actual news to cover, they either dredged up utter garbage, or they made the news happen by setting their dogs on someone. How many stories did they get out of griefing you? How often did you get dragged into a story merely because hating on you went over well with their readership? Yep, I know all about Ludlow, McCahill, and Wallace. We can cavil about how "independent" they were (were you not alarmed when Wallace was hired by LL? I sure as hell was). But, again, "independent" or not, the Herald was an unethical pseudo-academic experiment in hactivism, with all of SL as its petri dish. Its approach to "news" was actually a rather interesting foreshadowing, I think, of the kinds of strategies employed now in social media to feed disinformation and stoke outrage. And no, pioneering in that is not a "good" or "laudable" thing. God help anyone sifting through the sludge in the Herald for any sign of this "intelligentsia." There's no point in arguing this with you: I'll just direct anyone who is curious to visit the site themselves and make up their own minds about whether or not it constituted "critical thinking" and incisive virtual world journalism. I'm pretty sure they won't make it half way through the cutting-edge article on "The Fattest Guy in SL" before closing the window.
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    Interestingly, Black Dragon's interface has been designed, at least in terms of movement, key shortcuts, and menus, with much of this thinking in mind: I think those used to playing games find it much more intuitive. I don't, so I almost immediately changed the defaults, but there may be something to this.
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    OH OH! I like this idea! I'm going to start a new thread listing people whom we should tag with targets on their backs!
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