Porky Gorky

I reads lots and you can find the most popular easily through google. If I had to give you a blog recommendation of the week it would be Ciaran Laval's I've started reading this one more recently. It's entertaining and informative and generally covers the topics that interest me.

Athena Bedrosian wrote: Sixteen thousand (16,000) people sign up on SL a day. Wow is that number verified as being true? Is that new users or does it include alts?

Rene Erlanger wrote: The point is that there are a few that flout the LL TOS and the more serious cases like "Wonderland" ought to be reported to the local Police, but one should not tar the entire Children community with the same brush......that part is very narrow minded imo. I guess this comment was partially directed at me so I shall address it. You are right, it is narrow minded. In a fair world everyone should be given the benefit of the doubt, innocent until proven guilty and all that. However it is generally not a fair world, it's not even a real world. It's a virtual world in which I choose to spend my recreational time. The social conventions that exist in real life are less applicable here. So I can easily label all child avatars as suspicious and get away with it because it has no direct impact on me or my experience here. The point I am trying to make is, I think because we are operating in a virtual world we can get away with having more extreme view points compared to in RL because it has little to no consequence in the grand scheme of things here.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: Porky Gorky wrote: The world is full of sick bastards who either abuse and hurt children or fantasize about such things. SL is an ideal environment for these perverts to role play their sick urges and desires. This has happened in the past as reported in the media. I've also seen it with my own eyes. Meh. The world is full of people paranoid that it is full of such people, but has very few such actual people. Having worked in the criminal justice system I've met a few of the real ones - they aren't who you think, and they're not that common. One of the rarer forms of criminality. It makes for very easy paranoia though. Life is rarely like Law and Order:SVU where you can cart one of these out every week at 9pm CST Wednesday... Most folks will never encounter one in their whole lives - knowingly or not. But anyone from any inner city like where I grew up can easily recall real murderers, thieves, pimps, and dealers. Having worked within the prison service and the criminal prosecution service in the uk for 12 years I guess I do not have the average perspective. I was surrounded by hundreds of sex offenders day in day out and a good percentage of them were child sex offenders, I am not paranoid in the slightest, I have just had allot more exposure to these sorts of criminals and cases than most people. Having worked in the criminal justice system yourself I am surprised you remain so sheltered from the truth. Child sex offenders are common place within our society. There has been an alarming increase over the last few years in the amount of reported cases and the quantity of convictions. As I quoted in my previous post, "the NSPCC suggested one in 20 secondary school children had been sexually assaulted." So no, sexual abuse against children is not "rare" as you put it, at least not in the UK and I expect the same holds true for the US too.

Don Mill wrote: Dear Porky Gorky: I would very much welcome the links/references that support your varied asumptions in your post. I am assuming that all your condescending statements are actually grounded on proven fact, right? Meanwhile, please understand that no one owes you any kind of explanation or justification for their actions. So whether you trust those that roleplay child avatars or not is of no consequence to over 99.99% of the human population (you can include undiscovered alien species too, I am pretty sure they do not care much about you either). Live and let live... or in your case, hide... please I don't think I made any assumptions that require sourcing, however if you need sources I shall provide them. My first source is my own personal experience. I spent 8 years working in the prison service and another 4 years working for the CPS. I've spent thousands of hours surrounded by sex offenders, specifically offenders who rape, sexually assault and abuse children. I've also reviewed hundreds of cases of child abuse during my time at the CPS. So when I say the world is full of sick bastards who abuse children, my statement is mainly based on personal experience. Thousands of people are convicted of sex offenses against children each year in the UK. It's a grossy unreported crime and there are many instances where the perpetrators are not convicted and cases never see the light of day. The same holds true for many countries around the world Here is a link to a BBC article Convictions for sex offences on children up 60% in six years WIthin the article it states "last year police in England and Wales were notified of more than 23,000 offences and that recent research by the NSPCC suggested one in 20 secondary school children had been sexually assaulted." So the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children suggests that 1 in 20 secondary (high) school children have been sexually assaulted in the UK. I don't need to elaborate on that, the world is full of sick bastards, as I said, so I will move on to SL. Drawing from personal experience again, I have seen 2 instances first hand of SL users role-playing a sexual assault on a minor during my 7 + years here. The first instance took place in 2006. I was basically spying on my neighbours as I had noticed child avatars hanging around and I wanted to know what they were up to. One day I swung my cam through the walls of their house and into the bedroom. I witnessed 2 male avatars roleplaying sexual acts with a 3rd avatar that looked like a girl aged about 6. I took lots of snapshots of the scene including Av names, then I contact live help and reported them immediately. A Linden arrived on the scene straight away, I sent them the pics, they cammed inside the house and 5 minuteslater I had no neighbours. The 2nd instance happened in 2008. I was working on a custom sim at the time for a customer. The sim was closed to the general public but I had access as I was obviously building it. So I arrive unexpectedly at the sim one day to do some work and noticed there were 2 other people showing up on my mini map. One was my customer,the sim owner, so I flew towards them to say hello and arrived to find the sickest thing I have ever seen in SL. I won't describe it here but will summarise it as 2 people roleplaying the abuse of a child. So that's my first hand experience. Im guessing by your post that you are not aware of the child abuse scandals that have taken place in SL in the past which is why you are asking for links and points of reference. If you are interested in this subject then you should should search for credible sources on the internet yourself. There are many and the issue has been well documented I shall provide a link to one article to back up my earlier post as you seem to think my comments were just condescending without any basis in fact. Paedophiles Target Virtual World So this is the "Wonderland" scandal. It was reported by numerous mainstream media outlets in 2007 and went a long way in cementing SL's reputation as being a haven for sexual deviants, a reputation that still exists today to some extent in the eyes of the general public. As I said there are plenty of other stories out there. Go and research the subject yourself if you would like to become more informed. So that is why I find all child Av's suspicious, I am not just being inflammatory for the sake of it, There have been many documented instances where child av's have been used in the simulation and roleplay of child abuse in SL. So when a ADULT user makes a conscious decision to play a child av within an environment where child av's have been used inappropriately many times in the past, then I am going to question their motivates. As I said in my previous post, child avatar users need to justify their choice of avatar to me if they have any hope of gaining my trust and friendship.

Everyday some student pops up in the forums asking us to give up our time for free to answer their questions about the SL platform or to find out how we make money or to gain insight into our private virtual lives. On the other hand during the past week we have Linden Labs poking us with a stick, messing about with our TPV viewer choices, our inventory management structure and proposing to inflict pointless privacy policy on us that will break multiple types of content in SL. Does anyone else feel like we are just here to be experimented upon and probed for our knowledge?

Do stipends still get paid on a Tuesday? Maybe a % of people run out of L$ over the weekend and wait till Tuesday to resume shopping. Or Monday can be a busier work day for allot of people as they catch up from the weekend or try to start the week running, so they spend less time on the MP shopping for animations and more time doing the work they are paid to do. I hate days like that.

Grr... now i want cake.

MP is the problem. MB's are still in operation. It can take a while sometimes after synching the MB for the items to show up in the MP inventory. Sometimes for me it's instant, sometimes I have to wait hours.

Ziggy21 Slade wrote: The last week has been pretty dreadful for me, but prior to that things were fine, I put it down to monthly pay packets, especially at this time of year when everyone is skint February is always a stitch up too if a person is paid by the hour due to it being a shorter month. Personally, sales have been ok for me this month with a dip around valentines which happens every year as I don't do seasonal or holiday content and I assume my customer are off spending their L$ on novelty valentines crap in one of those silly shops that looks like a cake or something. :smileyvery-happy:

The world is full of sick bastards who either abuse and hurt children or fantasize about such things. SL is an ideal environment for these perverts to role play their sick urges and desires. This has happened in the past as reported in the media. I've also seen it with my own eyes. I am not saying that this is your motivation for being a child Av. However, based on what I have seen in SL in the past, I view every child avatar with suspicion. It's up to the user of that child avatar to convince me that their intentions are harmless and to explain their motivation for being a child AV before I even remotely trust them. Yes, I know it's prejudice and I know it's unfair. It's just the way it is from my perspective. As the majority of SL users have no desire to re-live their childhood or express their inner child, then that puts child av's in a very small minority. Unfortunately it's a very small minority shared by actual Pedophiles or people with Pedophilic tendencies. You are never going to escape this association in some peoples eyes, as long as you remain a child Av in SL. This is just the way it is and nothing anybody says in this thread is going to change that. I would assume that the only people who can role play a child av long term in SL are those that can easily shrug off criticism, ignore discrimination and laugh in the face of bigotry. If you are not able to ignore adversity then you are going to be fighting an uphill battle.

I've certainly seen my transaction page bork up before. Most commonly, not updating immediately also payments missing and payments displayed in the wrong order. Normally these sort of errors are fixed the next day when I check the transactions. Not experienced your issue before though. Is there any discrepancy between your inworld L$ balance and the website L$ balance?

That would be the new cleavage tax LL have rolled out :matte-motes-big-grin-evil: Seriously though that is both weird and worrying. Have you tried buying the item multiple times yourself and with alts? Is it always showing as L$45 in your transaction history?

What just happened here? It looked like a customer asked a question in General DIscussion and a Linden just answered it......and it was on a Sunday to boot. That's just going to weird me out for the rest of the day.

Qwalyphi Korpov wrote: Porky Gorky said: "Based on the amount of sims that went offline during Q4, I speculate that there will not be any more public economic reports." leliel Mirihi had this speculation about Porky Gorky's speculation: "A minor dip compared to the number of sims that were lost in 4Q08 and 1Q09. LL is always late releasing the reports and each time people come up with some wild speculation as to why. I think it's just because LL is slow." My speculation may have been pulled straight out of my arse without any research as leliel Mirihi was so kind to point out. But everyday we go without seeing the Q4 report, my speculation becomes more feasable. I still don't think we are going to get a Q4 report. If I am wrong I shall eat my hat / face bag.

SInce this commission discount started I have been giving a 5% refund on every marketplace sale across the board on all the accounts/brands I run. It doesn't cost me very much in the grand scheme of things and has lead to some really positive interaction with customers. I send them the 5% refund then just a short IM saying "Hi, thanks for purchasing an item from [insert store name] on the Marketplace. it's zero commission for merchants this weekend, so I just thought I would pass this saving on to you! Thanks for your business and have a nice day". I reckon 75% of the people I contacted replied and engaged me in conversation either to say thanks or because they didn't understand my message fully, or to grumble about the MP in general. Whatever the reason it has been a perfect excuse to engage with customers and to dabble in a bit of self promotion and the occasional sneaky sales pitch. It's all lead to allot of return business already today. You guys should give it a try.

Well thanks to your sig I now have Alice in Chains in my head. I definitely came off better I think :smileyhappy:

Glad you are enjoying yourself. I've have been enjoying myself too allot more lately. SL for me is generally a part time job so I normally just stay on my land building and what not. The last few months though I have started exploring the grid again for the first time in maybe 4 or 5 years. This started out with me trying to see what people were building in Mesh and this developed into me just visiting random sims I think look cool and seeking out things I've had limited exposure to in SL like combat sims, interactive and gaming experiences as well as furry wrestling and live performers,I've been here since Dec 04 and only just saw my first live performance, it was great! It's so easy to get tunnel vision here and just focus in on an area that interests you ignoring everything around you. I've found it quite inspirational traveling the grid again like I did in my early days. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.

Awww so sad. Reminds me of a woman I once knew from Rochdale England called Lisa. She was looking for someone too. One day she said to me "Been around the world and I, I, I I can't find my baby" I told her to check down the back of the couch and behind the fridge as that is where lost things always turn up. She said to me "I don't know where, I don't know why, Why he's gone away, And I don't know where he can be, my baby, But I'm gonna find him." So I said to her, you should have micro chipped him you could have tracked him with GPS. She said "good point Porky". I said "I know" So the lesson here is. put tracking chips in your loved ones, they will be allot easier to find when they wander off.

Of course. I was Joking :smileyhappy:

I can live with having a received folder as long my lost and found is kept separate. I get allot of items going into my lost and found for various reason and 99% is stuff I never need to look at.

I always thought it would be a cool idea to create a mall for the regulars who post on the Merchants forum. Not talking about getting a private sim or anything, just doing it on the mainland. Everyone who wanted to be involved could buy one 512 sqm or 1024 sqm plot next to each other, or maybe along a road, then we could all work as a group to build the mall together and customise our own shops. It would be a real mish mash of styles but I think it would look great. There would be no overall estate management , everyone would just look after their own bit and then work as a cooperative to solve problems etc. It would be interesting. Probably bad timing now, it would have worked allot better in the past, however I think we have enough experience between us to market and promote the mall successfully and generate some decent traffic.

I had over 30 satellite stores at the start of 2009. Through 2009/10 they started generating less and less sales and traffic to my main store. The malls and clubs and attractions I used to rent from were drawing less traffic overall and were closing at an alarming rate I blamed it on the disastrous GSA search engine at the time but probably multiple factors were involved many of which are still relevant today. I don't have any satellite stores now. In my experience, if you want to expand in-world from your your main store, then affiliate vendors are allot more effective in SL today as well as cross promoting with busy stores that sell products that compliment your designs and vice versa.

I am with Virgin, I stay logged into SL most days with multiple accounts and am OCD about monitoring my upload and download speeds. As a result of this I can tell you that Virgin Media have not started throttling bandwidth for connections to SL at least not in my area and normally their policies are rolled out nationwide so you should be the same. If you are on a low connection speed like 2MB and stream allot of media or just use a lot of bandwidth you may be being penalised under Virgins Traffic Management Policy, this is not just designed to throttle P2P users and filesharers but anyone that uses more than their fair share of bandwidth during office hours and peak hours. Here is a more info on the Traffic Policy as well as a useful chart that basically tells you the optimal hours for downloading large files. I've found if you start downloading about 11pm and switch off at 7am you retain your speed and don't get penalized at all. You can get away with downloading hundreds of GB's overnight, they don;t seem to care. All legitimate and above board files of course. If you are on at least a 10MB connection you should be able to stay in SL all day, and browse the net and stream some vid files without being penalised for over usage. You should phone up and complain if you can't. ETA I did have allot of problems will SL slowing down last weekend, but I am 99% sure that was a server side issue as my connection was perfect when tested in other multiple experiments. That problem seems to have been fixed since Monday.

What items do you want to create?