Scylla Rhiadra

There's obviously a lot of poetry on the web, so you can pick and choose. But if you're looking for one good source for a lot of really wonderful verse, I highly recommend the Poetry Foundation. It has a really diverse range of verse, old and new, and often with introductions, info about the authors, and so forth. AND it's fully licensed: poets receive actual money for the publication of their work there, which is . . . unusual. I've spent many evenings just wandering the site and exploring new poets.

I can make the first part of this, I think. I do want to emphasize something with which I think most if not all people here will agree -- and I'm sorry if it makes me sound complacent, or brown-nosing or something equally icky. Dyna and Quartz have gone out of their way to ease this transition, and to make it more transparent than it might well have been. They're enforcing the rules, which is their job, but they are talking to us about them and clarifying their approach publicly. That's utterly unlike any sort of moderation we've ever had before on this forum, and I very much appreciate it. I think it really important -- well, for me anyway -- that we distinguish between the "policy decisions" that have been made about the forum, and the way in which the mods here have handled and implemented it. Like us, they're dealing with a new and difficult situation, and I think they are managing it exceptionally well.

Alan Brownjohn. One of the things I love about poetry is the way it can concentrate and crystalize a feeling and a moment. It's like it takes an emotional response to an often tiny, insignificant utterance or event, and pack it into a little word-bomb that can totally overwhelm you. That's a good one. Thanks for sharing, Marigold!

0 ETA: No. Wrong. I have one. I'd forgotten. And that one isn't an egregious person -- I just don't want to talk to him in-world.

See my response to Love above: the "discrimination" bit was a confusion on my part. I think that the OP is asking this in a rather rhetorical way -- and, again, I don't think anyone here (unless I've missed it, which is possible, as I seem a bit fuzzy-brained at the moment) has responded in the affirmative. But I take your point: you're responding to a hypothetical question with an answer that examines the principle proposed.

You're right. My screw-up. I'm confusing two frankly rather similar threads. (I suspect Persephone got the idea for this one from the other, in fact.)

I'm not sure I'm entirely clear on your objections, as my proposal wouldn't in any way endanger the sharing of such images. At worst, it would mean that the parcel or region in which they were shared would carry an "extreme violence" rating. And in the instance that you particularly mention I don't think that would be warranted. There's always going to be some subjectivity and fuzziness in any kind of rating system: that's certainly true of the current rating system. This last weekend, I stood in a store in an "M" rated region, looking for a sale item, and noticed a couple "testing out" the adult animations on a chair they, I presume, were interested in purchasing. Nobody, including myself, seemed particularly disturbed by it, but it was, technically, a breach of the ToS. The current system has some fuzziness and exceptions built in. Nudity is permitted in M regions, for instance, as is sex out of the public eye. You can't post porn in a Moderate region either -- but the ToS makes (if I remember correctly) an exception for works of "artistic merit" (however you want to define that). So, no, you can't post pics ripped from some gonzo porn site online. But you can post photos or paintings or drawings that include nudity, and even some mild sexuality, if they are in some discernible sense "artistic." I don't see why a similar principle couldn't apply to violence. Caravaggio's painting of the Judith and Holofernes is intensely violent and awful -- but I think it qualifies as "art," and I'd exempt it from the "extreme violence" rating for the same reasons I'd exempt Boucher's "La Toilette intime (Une Femme qui pisse)" from having to be in an Adult region. The point of such a rating isn't to hide stuff away or prevent it from being shared: it's purely informational. It would do nothing more than tell potential visitors that, if they visit this place, they are likely to run across depictions of extreme violence. It doesn't need its own continent, a la Zindra. And, in practice, it would almost certainly mostly be applied to particular RP areas. I don't think it would be very difficult to manage, to be honest.

Maybe I've missed it -- but has anyone in this thread actually argued that SL should be "cleaned up"???? I.e., that it should have content removed or existing behaviours banned and restricted? Even the OP, as I understand it, was just asking for an end to "discrimination" against certain kinds of avatars -- not the banning of anything. I think a few people here are tackling a strawman of their own making, perhaps?

Thanks, Chuck! 😏

Cool pic. I like the lighting and the crispness! And, of course, the balloon. Cuz everyone likes a balloon.

Such an unhealthy habit. It's entirely drained all the colour from my face.

Recursive poetry! Verse 51 from Whitman's Song of Self The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab. Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

OMG. It all makes sense now. Even the Articulated Breasts!! Dahling, the breast deformer? It was all in the name of Aht.

Wait. What do you mean? Have I at last become internet-famous for my best feature(s)?

Wow. Prehensile breasts.

Thanks Ceka! I hope so! In the meantime, I'm going make everyone here profoundly bored with black and white high contrast shadowy portraits. Gotta say, I'm loving your pics, btw. I'm so glad you're posting pics again!

We continue to work on our black and white portraiture. I'm not sure I don't prefer the colour version of this one, but I've been assured by people whom I mostly trust that the B&W is actually better.

Totally. And that's fine with LL, I think, whatever the qualms that I'm certain many individuals within the organization feel about it personally. LL is also looking for "plausible deniability." And they want the nastiest stuff safely out of the casual view of the public -- which is, not coincidentally, what the people running these regions and groups also want. As I think I've noted before, I can't think of a single instance when LL enacted a restriction on a kind of behaviour -- inappropriate behaviour with minors, gambling, gachas, "banks," etc. -- proactively and of their own volition. It has always happened because of external forces, regulations, laws, and bad PR. Some of that is, as I think Coffee said above, about "money." But LL was also founded on a Silicon Valley libertarian ethos. It'll be interesting to see how that slowly changes under new management. As I think it's going to, in at least some ways.

I think I agree with almost all of this, Lindal. The problem with "banning" stuff is that it simply drives it underground, or leads to it being disguised behind code words or in other guises that provide "plausible deniability": "All of the half-naked nubile schoolgirls in this high school RP are over 18! Really! They are just very slow learners, and had to retake a few years . . ."

Barbarian. (Again.)

Yep. This is why I said that the language used in the CS and ToS about discrimination is, frankly, a bit of a joke. On the plus side, it makes it very easy, usually, to avoid tripping over the trash.

I think this is, as many have said above, a serious problem with SL: the learning curve is very high, relative to other kinds of somewhat similar platforms. LL is working (we think and hope) to alleviate that problem a bit, but a central stumbling block is that almost all of the content is produced by users. For what it's worth, if you can persevere a bit, I think you'll find the rewards outweigh the initial pain. The things that make SL more difficult to grasp are also what make it more powerful than other platforms. Nearly infinite possibilities for avatar customization, for instance. And an incredibly diversity of experience and things to do, ranging from taking in digital art, hanging out in coffee shops, dancing and listening to live music, or role playing any number of different kinds of stories. There IS help out there for new residents. You might try Caledon-Oxbridge, for instance, which usually has real people on hand to help out, and lots of automated tutorials as well. Here's the SLURL: click on this here while you've got the SL viewer open, and it will open the Landmark that lets you teleport there. https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Caledon Oxbridge/92/198/28

I have friends who spend a lot of their time buying and playing with new mesh heads and skins -- for them, it's no different than buying new hair (which is what I do -- a LOT). And the results are, for me, usually pretty discernibly "different" from their former looks -- but not entirely so. There's always a family resemblance, and one of their questions is frequently "Do I still look like me?" The answer is generally . . . yes. With some qualifications. They've tried to seduce me into the game (yes, I'm looking at you @Saskia Rieko and @Eva Knoller), but I've resisted. I'm not sure if it means that I am more or less "sensitive" to sometimes subtle differences (and they are often quite subtle), but changing a skin or mesh head, to me, has a pretty dramatic effect on my look. And I like my look, a lot. I spent a great deal of time fine-tuning it, over the course of a year or more. So I'll keep on using my increasingly out-of-date mesh head (Genus Classic) and the skin I finally settled on for it for as long as I can. If Genus ever updates to a higher definition skin mapping (like LeLutka), I'd still likely resist the change, because it would almost certainly entail buying a new skin. But I think I'm the exception. Most people, I think, do come to identify with their look, but most are probably not as fierce about it as I am.

Well, honestly, I've tried reasoning with them when they came knocking at the door. They don't seem to be susceptible.

Only if the claws are trimmed waaaaaaaay back. I am a very delicate flower, ya know.