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Prokofy Neva

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Everything posted by Prokofy Neva

  1. Not "Ravenglass" FYI because I haven't raised my prices, except if I also raised prim allocations in a few places. If anything, due to COVID, I've lowered my prices in some places. The Lindens doubled the cashout fee, which really bites into profits, but I didn't raise my prices then -- I just became more activist in getting people to pay, added a "grace period" mode for the rental box and made it clear they would be returned if not paid after that period expired. I can't run a charity if LL doesn't. I can't believe there is a practice of raising in *thousand Linden increments*. That is just plain crazy. No one does that. I've never heard of it. It isn't justified. So leave ASAP. PS I allow refunds on any of my rentals at any time, for a small fee of about 20% of one week's rent. Many island owners lock you in for a least a month. Mainland tends not to do that, but look around. No one should pay those prices or increases in this market with a zillion choices.
  2. Most people attempting what you are planning have to put the club or events space on its own separate sim in a cluster of sims. You simply cannot combine clubs with residential rentals because the clubs, even if they only meet at certain hours, or the events, fill up the sim and then people renting homes can't get home to their home they are paying for. People coming to clubs and events generally aren't paying for anything except maybe dropping a dime in a tip jar. So take care of the residential people first, they pay your tier. I stopped renting to clubs 14 years ago as they are nothing but trouble, up and down. A club on a sim ruins its use often. I have suffered through this many times to the point where I simply won't buy any land where there is anything like a club, and will move out and sell the land rather than stay where there is one. But I wait 30-60 days, as most clubs fail in that time. Many landlords make the mistake that they need to provide clubs, events, parks for their tenants. They don't. The tenants don't need or want this. They make their own lives. Unless you have a theme or RP or category like "furries" or "LGBT", don't expect the club to be relevant. Focus on residential first, add the others later. Don't expect that stores will pay for your club. They won't. Shoppers won't come to a laggy sim and store owners may not rent from you for that reason. Stalls with vendors are a different story if you think people will buy as they are going to the club as distinct from coming into the sim from outside not for the club, but the store. You can't go wrong by putting in the club last in my view. But most people planning these things really love the idea of a club. So do that if your heart is in it, you have a group of people who want to be there, but then expect to pay the tier yourself.
  3. I don't have any bots at all nor would I need them as they are a needless expense gathering information that seems useless unless you are a large corporation with the resources to gather and manipulate it and make use of it. I don't see the point. I do know land barons have bots to watch the market and various other entities gather information for God knows what purpose, and make use of 16m microparcels sometimes to place scripted devices or to run the bots. I wish that all bots had to designate themselves as such not just to the Lindens, who require them to be registered in the premium account, but to the whole world, with some kind of visible marking, a color tag to their name -- something. So that they could be banned globally. The Lindens probably find that bots are useful to their largest customers so they don't move against them.
  4. If the Lindens wanted to, they could do this, since all things are numbers anyway. This is how they let another group have the same name "Free Tibet," even though I had taken that name 15 years ago, because they felt I was somehow "not entitled" or they didn't like me, or whatever. And they could do this because it's a system with numbers that resolve to names. So they just made different numbers.
  5. I turn off the ability to see friends online -- period. Because most aren't real friends, and even those who are, need not be telegraphing to me their re-logs every 30 minutes as SL is laggy. Off it goes. I remember when FlipperPA wanted the Lindens to "do something" about the problem of people who had your card, who you wanted to keep your card, but who you didn't want to see you log on because they'd pepper you with IMs when you logged on. I used to think, why be friends with people to whom you can't say no? Or who do that to you? Who can't wait for you to have the world rez and collect your notices before they hammer on you with an IM? But he got his way on this as in other things and the Lindens instituted the ability to hide your status online. To be able to log on, yet not be seen as doing so. Of course, the enterprising look in groups you have in common to see if it shows "online" or a date. But that's one way to deter the over-eager. I never turn off my online status unless I know I'm going to be in the hospital. How can you be in business and do that? But I also just don't answer some people who hammer on me. or I go AFK, do not turn on the "Do Not Disturb" sign because I find in fact *that* is when messages caps and don't get received -- and why not just let them collect? If people find that annoying, understood, but since when am I required to answer you when you are thrusting things at me, i.e. as distinct from a customer needed something done. I'm not. I've found some people use this set of annoying techniques to goad you into response, or perhaps as some form of flirting -- but it's totally ineffective. You don't answer their friendship card sent while you were offline; you don't answer their IM. So they IM again and say "Did you miss me? I guess you know I like the strong and silent type". I feel sorry for people who use this method as I can't imagine it ever works. Or they create a drama, like "So, you're not talking to me. You came and went from the sim, I saw you on my radar, yet you didn't say 'hi'." Well, I don't pay attention even to the radar I have when it is on nor do I feel the need to say 'hi' to everyone I know on a sim when I go to that sim. So sometimes they escalate: "So I've concluded that you must hate me". Or "Aha, you must be an alt of John's. John would do this. Hi, John". Etc. If you are like this in RL, I can understand why you don't have friends there.
  6. I was expecting something different from this original post and the discussion so far, but I've come to see that I really prefer playing SL "solitaire," so to speak. Working on my own projects, flying around and exploring on my own, attending the occasional event and just watching and not wooting or gesturing and so on. I value my long-time SL actual friends, one of whom I knew in TSO and met in RL and have kept up with. We have mutual life experiences, views, thoughts etc in common so friendship is natural. I have some SL friends that I have known for 15 years, but I have no idea who they are in RL, and even their SL is something of a mystery, but we chat about certain issues we have in common, the current state of SL in the meta sense, the land business, the market, the LindEx, etc. Some tenants are friends simply because they've been there so long, or we might have a few things in common in terms of interest in exploration or the arts. I was fortunate to make a new friend in SL this year who shared both my interests in SL mainland issues and certain RL issues of foreign affairs etc. Sometimes you just hit it off with a person, despite very different ages, countries, experiences -- SL makes that possible. But other times all those factors that used to be called A/L/S in AOL chat rooms just divide you and become exasperating if they are disguised. Sometimes anonymity or to be more precise, pseudonymity make for better friendship or merely casual friendly interactions; sometimes they don't. Often people force-friend me as tenants -- without any basis, they send me a card or ask to friend merely because they wish to be able to see if I am online or not, because they fear they won't give service. I sometimes ignore or turn these down and explain they don't need to do this because messages actually don't cap when you: o tie your account to an email account and read it regularly o right click on anything and "block" it when you log on, which forces messages not showing to flood in. Why this happens is a mystery but THAT is happens and is a great trick to deal with "capped messages" is definitely the case. Sometimes I just let the "friendship" go through as it is more trouble to stop it than keep it, but then I open myself up to abuse. I get repeated "force ports" of people sending me a TP to their DJ party, birthday, new club, art show, whatever, and not just sending it as they have to a mass group, but badgering you go come. I get constant sales ads to buy their stuff. I get put in stupid group chats. I don't want any of these things and cut the cards of anyone who does this to me. If they keep doing it -- because they can do so by pasting the card -- I tell them that even though they are a tenant, I will block them. Usually they stop then. So the devaluation of friendship through the card system enabling abuse and spam is one problem. But also the ability of people to understand boundaries and read social cues, either because they are on the autism spectrum, or because the nature of SL makes it hard. So someone might be interested in one of my land preserve lots. They chat with me about this or that, and ask me to come sailing. I go sailing once -- but I don't like sailing. That's because you can't stop generally, as the distances are long and it can be laggy; and if you try to pan out and view something on shore, you fall out of your boat. I just don't like it. I occasionally go boating which is different than sailing; it can be better when someone takes you as you don't have to stop to look at the map or navigate. But I just don't like it. Even so, this person IM'd me daily for weeks to try to get me to go sailing. Finally they got the idea and stopped. But there were also calls to come and see this neat thing, come and see my house, etc. Sometimes it feels like a big game of Animal Crossing. When there really is mutual interest and a give and take and not hammering on someone either time you see they log on because you have their card, you don't mind seeing their new thing. But if they aren't a friend, it is annoying. I have one friend and tenant who has sent me gifts for years. This person has a sense of what a good gift is. I send them gifts. But other people send me gifts that they made and it's annoying. Merchants in the lesser-skilled category do a lot of this, to the point that I leave their groups. I myself am guilty of sending people something I just made in an ecstasy of creatorship. Most of the time they are underwhelmed as I am an amateur and they don't need or want the thing I sent. So I try to stop myself in time before doing that because it's stupid. In general, gift-giving is degenerated and diluted in SL because of the overwhelming presence of freebies and dollarbies and gifts at events. As they used to say in the news room on a slow news day, "It's always the anniversary of something" (Google's Doodles make heavy use of that concept). So it's the fifth anniversary of the event itself, which isn't anything remarkable -- time for free gifts. It's Christmas or Easter or who knows, Yuri's Night, and everybody has to make and give a gift. You notice certain high-end merchants never provide those gifts. It's beneath them. They need to get paid. And I'm actually glad that they don't make a balloon, a picture frame, a birdcage, a chair with a birdcage and a candle in it, a picture of a chair with a birdcage and a candle in it, or some other dumb thing, just to feel like they ticked off the box. Events often involve these parties where everyone is supposed to come and set their avatar to dancing in a laggy sim with 50 or 100 others, and try to make conversation, which is disjointed due to lag, either in the group with chat lag or in the room with lag there. The chat is usually mindless. Occasionally people are prompted by something as bad as COVID or police brutality to speak their minds, but then there is such a mixture of levels of education, awareness, political affiliation that it is impossible. That is, SL is supposed to make this possible, but it doesn't. I used to hold several discussion groups. I found these were ways to really make friends and have good talks with people. But they were constantly griefed by people who understand that they get maximum mileage of attention and annoyance by griefing events, and whose ideology basically proclaims that no one can use the Internet for anything serious, especially related to commerce. I may start up these groups again if I am stuck at home for longer or don't have enough to do but that hasn't been the case for years. It's hard for me to show up at an event on schedule when I have RL jobs, etc. SL has to be asynchronous or fortuitous. When there has to be a schedule of obligations it really becomes tedious for me. As in RL, many of my SL friends either died in RL or left SL completely. If someone wrote on the forums that they wanted to make friends, I wouldn't write to them out of the blue with a cold call unless there was some existing point of mutual interest, a group, a build, an event, something. If they said "hi" to my "hi" and blew me off, I'd get it quick and not harass them. Sometimes you IM a person full of hope that they will be on the same wavelength; they aren't. Or sometimes, maybe 10 years go by, you have a casual relationship with them, but in time you realize the issue is a language barrier. Or a different time zone. The Lindens tried to improve things by putting this feature of interests you can check off or put in like key words on Wordpress. Does anyone look at them? I never do. As your mother likely taught you, as mine did, to make a friend, you have to be a friend. Being a friend means knowing when you have to withdraw.
  7. So this is a bug, that I recall from the much earlier days (2006) and then 2010, and later. Google it and you will find it on the old forums. Maybe it's in the JIRA, I don't know, the view of the JIRA is blocked for me. Yes, it is a bug because it is not "just me" or somehow not checking things off. When you go to a busy event and you uncheck the appearance of avatars in the advanced menu for "render types", and then forget to check that again later, it will seem as if everything you sit on or edit disappears, because those things adopt the state of your "disappeared" avatar in that advanced mode. But that's not the issue here. Avatars are checked off. "Show selection lines" is checked off. This started with the new patch just now. So I hope the Lindens will fix it. UPDATE: Oh! "Hide Selected" is checked off. Duh! Now how does that happen? Because merchants increasingly complexify packages and make you do "add" and then "click" to go into inventory -- but then it goes into inventory in its own folder, and you can't sort it from the box. So even though some of them bounce when you attempt this, I rez these annoyances out in order to pull their contents directly into a sorted folder. But because they are HUDs or meant as "adds" they are often clear on 3 sides and you lose them. That forces you to constantly check and uncheck "highlight transparent". I don't know if that is how "hide select" accidentally got checked off but I wouldn't deliberately check that. BTW it seems impossible to delete posts on the forums.
  8. I appreciate that you took the time to explain this and I will save it to study later but the bottom line is this: I do not want to have "layers", "appliers," etc. etc. I do not view the avatar's appearance and clothing as like the layer method of the Old Masters' paintings. I view it as on/off, the end. It took way too long to buy feet so that I could fit my various 30L or gatcha shoes (talk about stupid, retro-fitting expensive things to cheap things) and to get the "socks" to apply. That pretty much finished me off on "layers" and "appliers". I do not want to be a wedding cake.
  9. I am not getting a head. I am not the Headless Horseman.
  10. I don't care about the head and didn't get the head. I didn't realize they don't sell them on the MP, guess they want to lure you in the store to get demos and buy stuff more. I just got the body, put it on, put the gatcha dress on that said it matched that body. Didn't seem to need more than that. Don't think I'm missing anything. Just click hit or miss on things like shade of skin. I mean, who has time for this? Not me. There's already the skin and shape of the Linden avatar, not sure if that "remains" but it seems ok. Of course my standards may be low. I don't care about the hair -- I have the Library hair, shoes etc. Manicure, no, not going there, too much. As Dolores Claiborne put it, "I ain't doing no beauty contests today".
  11. Well, that wasn't my point. The learning curve is bad, but it can be flattened, to use the modern phrase, and it can be flattened within half an hour and with less than US $10. So that isn't really so insurmountable and I don't think it's the chief reason for retention failure. On my other point, well, look at this compare and contrast, I rest my case. https://twitter.com/Prokofy/status/1266183276781359110/photo/1
  12. So, I'm mindful of many threads on this subject of how hard this is, and there is an ardent belief that this prevents adoption by newbies of SL. Here's a good one but there are lots. I change my avatar maybe once every 10 years or something and my outfits maybe once a quarter so I'm not a reliable source on this, in a way, but because I persist with a system avatar although I have store-bought shapes, skins, eyes and even ventured out to feet recently, maybe I'm a good subject to test this theory. I don't like clothes shopping in RL or SL and hate dressing up and want to focus on the world -- plants, buildings, furniture, etc. I just glaze over on all the fashion/mesh body/ etc offerings and discussions. I find this topic quickly becomes not "dressing" but "selecting from an enormous overwhelming stock of body parts" and then I really lose interest. I can't help thinking that eventually, this will stop and narrow down or become easily. Currently those making these "body parts" have a captive audience fearful of being uncool or left out and confused enough to buy lots of things to stay current -- and the merchants like it that way, and who can blame them. If they can be part of the culture that says, "You MUST have X or Y or Z body part, look, tint, shade, applier" etc, of course they will, and that's understandable. But some day it won't be like this. And even while it is like this now, you can bypass it. I find that even without a mesh body, if I get a gatcha for $50 or a 30L salebie that is a shirt or something, if it says one of those main mesh body makers, I can still jam it on my old body much of the time, especially if I pull out an alpha t-shirt or alpha pants out of the Linden library. To be sure, there will be glitches and sometimes I have to get a little creative with belts or scarves as I might look like I have no neck or chest but still, $50 is all I want to spend, and 5 minutes, so... Recently with the pandemic I thought once again -- and likely in vain, but hope never dies -- that maybe my co-workers or friends might like to come and have a meeting or event in SL, and for that I need my female alt, who actually has my RL last name by accident, as it was once available, and I could get it free without the $40. So that alt I had in the same suit for probably 10 years but I thought it might be worth putting the Library avatars on her. So I took the old one in the grey hair, pearls and gown to start with, but who wants to look like they're in a ball room? So I tried to weld in some of the other "Marias" or whatever their names were, and I ended up with something not bad but in a summer strapless dress that seemed kind of skimpy for business. So I thought, take a jacket off one of the others or even a male jacket. Turns out you *cannot* drag the male avatar outfits on to the female system avatar. Maybe I'm missing something. So now I had a problem: I actually had to shop. Ugh. So fortunately through "gift" I could send some 30L and gatcha $50 items -- dresses, tunics, pants, dragonfly wings, etc. to my alt and thought well, great, she can just jam them on, maybe use an alpha from the library.The expense far is now perhaps $500 in Lindens which is US $1.87 so far, so honestly, the complaint about huge costs isn't valid. The problem is that it is much harder to jam those company-specific items on to the system body on a female than a male. For some reason even expanding the mesh dress while off of you doesn't help when you put it back on. So now I had to go shopping again -- for a mesh body, something that really goes against my religion, as I am not a cannabalist and don't like to have to keep folders of body parts that I mix and match. So first I try to look on the MP. This is IMPOSSIBLE. Go do it. You cannot find "mesh body" with the various company names to save your life. The results turn up adaptions of those things -- shapes, add-ons like scars, vampires, all kinds of "popular" things and even using closed quotes and Boolean, I simply could not pull up a screen that had X Mesh Body on it. The categories aren't helpful as they do not contain "mesh body," but only "Avatar Accessories" (not there), Full Avatars (not in the first dozen pages of search results), etc. Here I'm beginning to think, oh, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is too hard like they say, even though so far, I had spend only about 20 minutes and US $1.87. So now I really had to shop -- and go to a store. I picked a popular one at random that seemed more or like the Library avatar I already had (those library avatars do not appear to be any of these popular brands). I landed at the store --the "mesh body" was a few steps away from the entrance, it had a demo, it had miles of explanations that I could safely ignore, it cost $1250 which is US $4.68 -- a bit high but not $5000, after all. So now I've spent US $6.55 on this venture, which is likely in vain because no one I know will come in SL at the moment and prefer the hideosity of Zoom. Still... Bottom line -- not exactly some huge expense. That body then could accept the gatchas perfectly fine, maybe not in the highest of fashion but good enough. Shoes out of the Library seem fine; hair too. Glasses were a little nerdy -- I put those one from another of the avatars, but I could likely shell out say $299 or $599 in Lindens and get the most fashionable eyeware and I'd still be under US $10. As someone said in one of these forums, if you won't work an extra hour, or have one less latte on your break, and spend $5 or $10 US on your avatar, especially if you aren't premium, then why are you here? You are too poor to be on the Internet. Feed your family first. But nobody who complains of this cost is really from any third-world country and most have jobs including high-paying ones in IT or design. So let's not be children here. Take $5 or $10 and dress your damn avatar. And I personally am done now, unless my main gifts my alt with a $50 gatcha next year or something lol. I think what the problem is, it's more psychological. People may not be able to bear the amount of education, trial and error, and shopping you have to do to get the skin shade or lipstick shade. I do not care about those things and I don't think anyone looking at me will care. If some seasoned oldbie eyes me in a meeting and says, hmmm, her neck shade is off compared to her head, I won't care. But people do. Even so, I don't think this is the horror envisioned. I'm really done shopping for a good log time, however, because of how the search is too hard, the choices too overwhelming. The good news is that at last, the Library avatars are tolerable and even fine, and with just a little more purchases, you can make use of the cheap stuff out there (not the freebies, generally hideous, but the gatchas). I do have to say that I finally figured out who that old grey-haired Library male avatar in the tux wearing the rose reminds me of. I have that outfit on my permless test alt. And it's Jeffrey Epstein. And I begin to reflect on how that may not be an accident. In any event, that avatar now has to become "Male Rocker" in a jiffy because I cannot wear that Jeffrey look, no way.
  13. Oh, totally. Yesterday I clicked on one of the Lindens' lovely picks in Destinations with something about books and flowers and dreams, and I thought great! But they were rolling, rolling restarts and so they bumped me to the Horizons Safe Hub, God knows why, as I have no interest in either of these places or topics. And the next person to step on my head was one of those big black bucks with a -- well, never mind, this is a family newspaper. And I was 100% certain that guy was a white as Wonder Bread.
  14. Well, if we're on Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, let's recall that the court upheld the right to have an association that defines beliefs and to expel members who don't comply with those beliefs as part of the First Amendment, so that if the Boy Scouts expel a gay scoutmaster, in their belief (mistaken though it may be) that gay scoutmasters may be a threat to children, then they get to do that. And the gay scouts can make their own group and articulate their beliefs, that's what freedom of speech and freedom of association are all about. Unless you can find incitement to imminent violence or incitement to actual discrimination in employment, it's going to be hard to overturn this because the gay scoutmaster doesn't have to seek a job at the Scouts (or a Catholic school) but can go to some other place with more enlightened views. Like PS the wedding cake purchasers. But the reality of the era is such that even so, the Boy Scouts were hounded to death over this. Parents boycotted them; LGBT leaders denounced them; companies decided not to sponsor the Scouts. And in the end, the Boy Scouts did the right thing and changed their charter. This is still debated, of course, and maybe the damage is irrevocable. The point is that the law does not always decide such things. Social media does, for good or bad.
  15. 1) Yes, by all means abuse report them, it's against the TOS. It's wrong, morally, and in some jurisdictions even legally. And SL is a jurisdiction where it is likely in violation of the TOS. The Lindens don't always enforce every instance they find so good luck. 2) If you start with the premise that you should delete all content over a person's views (or, as is often done, block sales to people whose views you dislike), you will really not have a market made up of anything but those most vetted RenFaire style guild masters. And I'm not for that. I find Gor reprehensible as an ideology, and will debate it forever, but I feel the marketplace is one area where you can mitigate bad ideologies and also bridge irreconcilable differences. I'm happy to buy some Gor chore or medicine if it fits in my build about a physician because nobody else is bothering, really. Most of 30L Saturday sales are taken up with Goreans or those willing to cater to Goreans. I will look at a bed, say, from a given artist, and if it contains chains and whips, I won't buy it because personally I abhor BDSM and while I am happy to provide adult beds to my rental customers even though they are not of interest to me personally in SL, I don't see why I need to promulgate an ideology containing violence to women, often wrapped up in a fake notion of consent that is belied by the number of sub recover groups and zones there are. But if that customer wants their BDSM or vampire bite or whatever (human cow!) item, that's their call, they get to do what they want in the privacy of their own home and it's not my business nor LL's unless it violates the TOS. Am I going to ban a child avatar on the basis of that status? In some areas I put "no child avatars" for very good reason because long experience has taught me of the havoc they cause and more importantly, most of the customers don't want them there. Am I going to ban them from any area where I don't have that rule? No, not unless I find they put an adult bed in their rental and belong to a "Daddy" group. Then out they go, with an AR to boot. It really comes down to your own personal ethics. But just as we don't delete the poems of Ezra Pound or the symphonies of Wagner despite their aid and comfort to the Nazis, so I don't think we should delete a thing made by your player or a Gorean or what have you. Hopefully art can transcend their beliefs. You might not want to buy from them again. Some merchant event might want to expel them as most of those events have rules about not propagating hate. But it's not always easy to make a call between generally bad beliefs and how much they are acted on or harm others.
  16. I wrote of my lack of interest in debating Luna Bliss because of a long history of debating fruitlessly with her. It's not about somehow not being able to take in "some other point of view". But part of the freedom of debate that we supposedly cherish is that I get to not have her point of view -- or yours. Because I find them flawed, sad, and even destructive. And that's ok. Not everyone in the wiccan thing is a follower of Crowley or a slavish indoctrinator etc. People do their own thing. But this silly "An it harm none" in its faux olde language written in fact by people who didn't speak even in 1904 in this "ye olde" language is indicative -- it's fake, it's meant to pretend to hark back to the ancients but it doesn't. And PS your friend Alistair had only half of this creed to start with -- "Do what you will". Free Will is decidedly NOT part of the canon of the world's many religions and you have only to look at the belief in "karma" and "reincarnation" which is WILDLY popular and widespread to grasp that basic truth. But again, it's hopeless to try to parse these things with people already firmly convinced that "An ye harm none" is some kind of wondrous thing. It's not. I'm here to explain that and will go on explaining it, preferably on my blog, to those still making up their minds and willing to hear different things. In fact the Crowlians don't invoke any special relationship with Nature to justify their view but would rather badger others about their supposed repressed and oppressive views. It gets old. We don't all have pagan ancestors as some people have no idea what paganism is and have little understanding of religions at all. A person in another thread conceded they had never heard of the Hand of Fatima or the Eye of Horus as the background to the Second Life logo, for example. That is, you can posit that sure, this or that culture in the main formally has "pagan ancestors" like the figure of Bridget in Ireland but it's another thing whether the humans of today have any education in these beliefs. "An ye harm none" -- dress it up as ye will in Nature loving or even just appreciation and pretend that's the motivation for it, and not hedonism and selfishness -- has done an awful lot of harm, and PS doesn't even stand up to scientific scrutiny, for those inclined to invoke Science rather than Nature. In the context of Second Life, "An ye harm none" has done more to destroy relationships and people's psyches than not, and there are few practitioners of it that actually prove it has any value. The good that they did and were and are sprang from other sources.
  17. Of course you don't agree with my assessment because it's your belief system. But I don't think you should get to proselytize these beliefs without debate in the forums so I provide a counterweight. They aren't "the truth" and the interpretation is entirely subjective on your part and others. Crowley is the sort of vile creature who would be the subject of a massive #MeToo campaign in our day and age so I don't feel I need to do any genuflecting here. The "connection to Nature" is very hazy stuff and nothing clear and concise like the 10 Commandments, like them or not. Who gets to decide what Nature is? I wouldn't want that to be you or anybody. This subjective context of "nature" can be understood in so many ways that again, it gives anyone an excuse to say "if it feels good, do it," based entirely on hedonism, not self-restraint or self-sacrifice for the good of others or the community. You're welcome to denounce the 10 Commandments as "not really from God" although for centuries millions of people in multiple religions have believed and acted otherwise, unlike the very new neo-pagans of today who would like to overturn human experience. Regardless of whether there are grounds to believe that God really gave the commandments, they stand on their own. "Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbour". If the Karen in Central Park had a little better upbringing and a little more religious and spiritual upbringing, I might add, she might have thought twice of calling 911 and lying hysterically about what her neighbour was doing. If you think "Thou shalt not covet they neighbour's wife" is archaic or patriarchal or blah blah, that's fine, but in general, there's less heartbreak all along when you don't desire another person's partner. These are values that have stood the test of time. If you think "taking the name of the Lord in vain" is utterly old-fashioned and pointless and stupid, that's fine, but it's a higher notion perhaps beyond your ken about the system of values above humans. I could hug a tree all day and not be any closer to knowing what "true love" is, nor would you if you are honest. I'm really not interested in debating you and your views as they are known, you're always going to disagree, you are not persuaded otherwise and it's not worth my time. I put down a marker for those exploring, thinking, willing to consider that they ought not to base their young and vulnerable lives on the notions of this creepy Brit of the last century.
  18. The forums abound with them. If you're having trouble noticing them after two weeks I'll point them out. "Mean" is in the eye of the beholder. Recently a Dinkie fellow asked me if now that I, too, had a Dinkie avatar, was I going to stop being "mean". You wonder when someone asks something like this, which is like the proverbial "When did you stop beating your wife?" if they actually think you will prostrate yourself at their feet in contrition and say "Oh, sowwwy I was so mean!". But that's ridiculous on the face of it. And my answer is and always will be, "I am not going to change anything about what I do, and your notion of 'mean' is entirely skewed, so if being a Dinkie means conforming to your sectarian notions of right and wrong, I guess I'll have to be a rebel Dinkie then". This fellow thought I was "mean" because I criticized the large, view-blocking and sometimes unsightly builds of the game GTFO which is ubiquitous on the mainland. There was a claque of fanboyz and fangirlz flogging the GTFO line who couldn't bear anyone saying anything the slightest critical about their revenue-generating business and game, even if it was first qualified by saying it was a great thing to give people "something to do," and encouraged building skills and planning, and I even rent land to people playing this game. There was endless crazy debate about this topic as there always is on the forums because of the few commandeering it with bad-faith notions and bullying, but I push back, and so should you. I was only proven right in my judgements when I caught yet another one of these characters in the act of cutting up and selling ad farms. Sigh. If "mean" is expressing a legitimate opinion (legitimate meaning you get to have it, even if someone else disagrees), and opinion that is in fact fact-based and shared by others, on and off the forums, then so be it, I'm happy to be mean until the cows come home. SL tends to have a horrid little elitist yet crass and anti-intellectual society running things at times and you need to oppose this to keep the space of freedom open, such as it is in an authoritarian virtual world run by a company, which isn't a democracy with free press and independent judiciary and the rule of law.
  19. It's useful to compare and contrast "An Ye Harm None, Do What You Will," which I think pretty much starts in the modern era with Alistair Crowley (1904) and isn't any kind of ancient thing but someone will know -- with the surely more ancient idea of "Do until others as you would have them do unto you". I would submit that "An Ye Harm None" is basically quite a pernicious creed. Essentially, it leaves it to the individual to conceive of what is "harm" to another in a subjective way. There is no 10 commandments or any kind of restraint to suggest what harm in fact *is*. So it's basically a creed of hedonism and "Anything Goes" and like Dostoyevsky's "Without God, All is permitted," which I also translate as "Without God, anything goes". So I personally don't think it's the lovely thing many others do and it's important to debate it. That's what freedom of religion or belief (which includes freedom *not* to believe) is all about. When you get to decide what harm is, and let yourself off the hook accordingly, the results can be harmful. Why do you get to do "what ye will" when it might actually be harmful to another and even to yourself? Who says? Why is this a good thing? By contrast the Christian creed of "Do until others what you would have them do unto you" conceives of a world of real reciprocity, where you don't just imagine what a harm might be and give yourself an excuse that maybe, oh, calling 911 on a black man in Central Park who was out bird-watching and who happened to tell you to leash your dog is "not harm" -- when it fact it was, and ultimately proved harmful to that person to have done that. You don't imagine "harm" in a vacuum as it applies to another whom you ultimately don't care about; you imagine it as what could be done to you and then it becomes more real and practical -- and frankly, more of a deterrent. "Do until others..." means that you actually have to envision how that thing you are doing will feel on your own skin, and how it will rebound. You wouldn't like it if someone dropped a dime on the cops on you for nothing, yet you did it to another person... So I just prefer it as an idea for community rather than Alistair's heedless hedonism, which I find reprehensible.
  20. I'm not an expert on this topic and I'm a Catholic, so it's not my belief system, but I put out areas with this theme for tenants and visitors in the land preserve and I follow some of the things like "Belane" and "Imbolc" which are interesting and which evolved into modern-day religious feast days. I recall there used to be several covens that had stores and communities and such that are gone now. But there some left which I have included in my list of Sacred Places in SL. Here are some places which I have included and when I have gone to look at books in the library, etc. the people seemed friendly: Wiccan Library http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/witchfest/84/143/707 http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/witchfest/86/112/701 Wiccan Info There's a beautiful sim called Witch Wood whose owner Cerdwin Flanagan sadly just died in Second Life, it likely won't be open for long but perhaps you will make a connection there. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/witchfest/86/112/701 I imagine as with everything else in SL, there are likely warring factions of witches, weekend witches that hard-core witches don't like, etc. etc. but as in RL you will have to find your way.
  21. Most but not all people in SL are not religious, i.e. they do not participate regularly in organized religion. But there are more religious believers than this secularized society imagines, and many people who yearn for some spiritual aspect to their lives in some form. It might be an old-fashioned religion that ends up attracting them or they might search among pagan, wiccan, etc. belief systems some of which are actually ancient and others of which are "neo" in ways that are worse than organized religions "of the book". This I can see from the enormous number of people who visit the sacred places I maintain, and all the others, which I cover with a regularly updated server. Some of these places have lasted as long as Second Life because people like to go to them. Others die, because they can't pay the tier or even the RL person dies, but others are born in their place. There is more religion in SL than the forums regs and the secularist geeks are prepared to admit. Twenty percent of Americans are Catholic, and that includes me. That's a lot of religious people who went to Catholic school, even if today, this cohort is down from 25% and many no longer go to Catholic church or espouse the beliefs and practices of the religion with which they continue to identify. There are a fair number of Muslims in SL which you can find not only by seeing various Islamic sites in SL, and even a "Ramadan 50% off Sale" but by seeing that every day, there are multiple visitors to a mosque which I maintain in Ross as part of a sim with a Moroccan theme. Same for the Tibetan monastery and the Catholic and Protestant churches. So when a top SL designer, around Easter time, makes a wearable item which is the Crown of Thorns in the form of french fries, I think this is blasphemous -- and PS just stupid and in poor taste. I wonder how many people bought it. When another designer makes a gatcha item called "Holy Toasties" depicting toast with the image of Jesus, I think it's funny, because that's an artifact of other people's religion. The tolerance for humour usually ends at the door of your own religion, I suppose. Recently I had to make an item for a game tied to an event and the permissions system was so frustrating and crazy-making that we dropped an item that I was going to supply from an ancient religion (which by now would be seen as cultural, not religious) and I substituted a poster I put in a run-down cafe build in the mountains, "In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash". Then it occurred to me that there might be some born-agains who would be offended, or -- more likely -- some literalists who thought this was a religious sign that violated the event's rules against religious and political propaganda (which many events, including the SL Birthday, have as a restriction).
  22. No. That's not true. One thing for which God, the Creator, is famous, is not intervening in His creation -- or at least very rarely (in the form of miracles). Some people think free will and such are a good thing and others wish the Lord would intervene more often at their behest in particular to fix things not just like children going hungry or people being bombed in Syria but to make their car dealership in Kenosha successful. The Lindens do not trust the very market they created and the very world they created. Had they not intervened to privilege (and save) their special pals, businesses would open up search, or open up classifieds, or put an ad on Monster.com or Craigs' List and they would have got answers. It's not like there aren't programmers and graphic designers without work all over the place and at this point there are zillions of competent and creative people who have been through SL and had successful businesses and/or beautiful sims. You can go on the Marketplace and find office parks, business machinery replicas, and even giant Soviet stadiums, no doubt, like the ones the Moles found or made and plunked down for a very big client recently until finally the new hire (an old SL hand) put up some nicer, more user-friendly buildings from the actual market. I will never forget once standing in the hallways at a big virtual worlds conference in NYC some 14-15 years ago. One of these superfluous men who populate giant IT businesses came up to Philip Rosedale himself, whom he had been trying to catch, and said, "Let me have my compliance department call your compliance department" or something of the sort. Philip said innocently, "We don't have a compliance department". That is, sometimes belatedly and sometimes not at all, LL in the early days did comply with regulations, sometimes when the credit card companies stood on them and threatened them with cutting off service as I know from talking to some senior Lindens themselves in those days. But "compliance" was something the lawyer or the business manager did because it was a small, boutique lab, not a giant IT company. It was utterly unprepared in size and scope and experience and culture to deal with these giant entities that weren't even as giant as they are today. The way that giant companies dealt with new media is to have their PR people handle them first and advise them. They don't even call them "PR" anymore, but such companies have a variety of other buzz words they are known by, and they use terms like "engagement". So first companies like Crayon came in and studied it and tried some test hipster campaigns and then they sold the big behemoths this odd and clunky virtual world which really had no immediate application or use for them -- because they were terrified of missing out on the latest cool thing the way they missed out on personal computers or social media. The PR firms then had to justify the huge amount of money spent on themselves so it had a run for awhile. IBM, for example, started with 10 islands and I think they had double or triple that at one point but then they withdrew, not before having some of their avatars leave a larger-than-life footprint on the world's society and culture not to mention market. In the interviews of that era, including of me, you see this concern about the outsized effect large corporations will have on this fledgling world, like when they put the Interstate through or Amazon moves to town. But my point about it then as now wasn't that there would be "commercialism" or "capitalism" which I don't oppose like the forums' regs and the internal elite who are anti-capitalist in ideology. What I was concerned about was the effect the giant corporations and monopolists would have on small and medium business and whether they would displace or cripple or kill it so that the society wouldn't be liberal and democratic, to the extent that can be said, but oligarchic and more authoritarian. I personally don't think that SL grows because IBM's marketing people put a graphics artist employee into the view with the help of SL's lapdog press, so to speak. I think it grows because of the opportunities for indigenous artists. Of course, it's not like the boundaries between these two groups are so defined. Some people who were "SL-famous" had jobs in the big corporations all along, or they were kids and then got jobs in Big IT. I always think of that particular griefer who led the Copybot revolution who later landed a programmers' position at Intel, and this may not be the accident one imagines, comrades.
  23. Likely more cultures outside the US understand the Hand of Fatima as a symbol. But yes, it's obscure relatively speaking, and their further gloss about "eye-see-hand-do" goes beyond the hamsa. I don't think it's so much about terrorism, although that's possible -- you have to remember that to move any significant amount of money such as a terrorist or for that matter any large-scale criminal would require -- SL would be a very frustrating device, with all its fees and delays. And large amounts would stick out, and can be stopped simply for being very large. It's more about gambling, I think, and the intention to stay in compliance regarding US laws against online gambling so that the credit card companies don't stop servicing SL. Without the credit card companies' participation, SL would be dead like any online business.
  24. One thing I was looking for was a reflection in the logo of the accentuation in the phrase, which differs among different people. Possibly this might reflect regional linguistic differences or dialects. But I think it reflects perception. I've always said Second LIFE, with the accent on the second word in the phrase. It just seemed how it was "supposed to be". Other people I would run into at RL meet-ups also pronounced it this way. But I discovered that Philip Rosedale and other Lindens said SECOND Life. To make it clear that it's second, but not life, not the main thing. To test this, we'd have to discover what people say in general in California, and on other phrases like "second mortgage" or "second chance". But I this might reflect the difference between the worldists and the platformistas. I see in the logo, the word "Life" is still more bold. There's hope.
  25. We live in a time when the Planters people actually killed off Mr. Peanuts, and even during the Super Bowl -- before they thought better of it. We live in a time when they totally messed with the Land O' Lakes logo under the mistaken belief that it was cultural appropriation of Native Americans, without realizing that the original painter was himself an Indian and designed it from his culture without modification. We live in a time when Mrs. Dash of B&G Foods is now going to become Dash. It's not a good time. It's worse than the time when they tried to do things like take "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and call it "KFC" in the theory that you wouldn't notice it's all fattening, fried, junk food. They're not done yet with all this, and the Lindens have only gotten with the program.
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