Prokofy Neva

Before I learn Blender, which I'm likely not going to be good at, I'm personally waiting for something like a global pandemic where I'm forced to stay at home and never -- oh.

For versimilitude, you'll need a Socialist Gun Club (anti-fa) commandos bearing arms in a no-gun zone (which would be most sandboxes) and you'd need to shoot people in safe areas and not let the police (Lindens) into the area. So -- I'll pass.

I wonder if you can tie this to Viewer 1 and its demise. The search was much better for Viewer 1. I must have been the last avatar clinging to Viewer 1 when they deprecated it. I agree with you that many more things are complicated now. I try all kinds of ways of explaining things to new people and I have various notecards and tutorial areas such as the infohub in Ross called Memory Bazaar, but it's just never enough. It's an enormous amount of lore that you "just have to know". I don't know the way out from this thicket but one thing I do is just rarely buy clothes or avatars, I never add an "AO," and that way I keep my sanity.

California is a completely different country than the rest of the United States. I recently bought a microwave oven. Scientists have proven for decades that microwaves do not cause damage to your health unless you do something stupid like put metal in it. But a big label on it said "For residents of California only" and proceeded to provide a warning that microwaves may be damaging to your health. Hilarious!

There are wildly different reading lists and suggested behaviours and thought patterns depending on different people's ideologies so I prefer to keep it less theoretical, on the Internet with anonymous strangers, and stay in real life, where there are many things that can be done to remedy the mass crime against humanity which was slavery in the United States, and to ensure that Black Lives Matter. Meanwhile, all the "woke" activity of especially white leftists begins to be counter-productive and to incite backlash needlessly, and I'm reminded of a very good essay on this topic by Vaclav Havel, the Power of the Powerless, which along the way makes a good point about imposing slogans on people.

There is a site inworld called Rental Central which you can go to and see a wide variety of rental companies. A rental agency can rent a kiosk there and place signs. I personally do not bother with that "Land for Rent" list because it's incredibly stupid and clunky. You have to keep filling out the form carefully and keep refreshing it as it keeps losing what you put in, and you keep getting "island" first and have to deliberately put in "mainland" again. If you have marked any parcel as "rental" it will show up there, even some empty space with only a tree that is part of a rental community. This causes people to land in the water and ask me if the land is for rent. Instead, I put a sampling of 100 rental properties in search/places which is a much cleaner, easier to use, and easier to maintain list for both me and for customers. They just search for "Ravenglass Rentals" and possibly another word like "$100" or "waterfront" and find the list and teleport to them. "Land for Rent" is just a confusing chore and I don't understand why it is there or if people really use it.

You can deed an item to the group and then anyone can use that deeded item. People don't do this much because it's vulnerable to theft or griefing by moving around if you have an open group. And the permissions can still get messed up in this process. But that is the thing to do if you want to have "everybody" in a category you can still restrict by membership have access to an item. I'm glad you're not in charge of RL. The things that parents leave their children -- books, trinkets, diaries, etc. -- are not going to be appreciated by a library as much as those children. The library won't take a lot of what seems like junk. Leave people to do what they wish with their private property and their families. What, the state has to intrude and confiscate their belongings and put them in the museum for "the people" or the trash heap of history?

Bad cases make bad law. The Lindens in fact have a procedure that if you leave your SL assets in a will to someone, they will honour that. But you have to go to the trouble to spell this out and get a valid will made. It's something more than the Facebook Legacy program. A person who has bought no-transfer items can elect to leave their account and its content to a friend, rather than intrude on copyright for everyone because of the sadness of some, and make them copyable to anyone. So that means yes, you would have to log on that dead friend's avatar, which you might not wish to "wear," but you could rez out their content. In RL, certain things cannot be passed on because they become eroded or destroyed, like a land parcel worn away by the sea or a house that can no longer be repaired. Nothing is forever. There are certain things made in the historical past that I cannot readily buy, like a stereopticon. This is the nature of the human experience, and it is replicated in virtuality. I have all kinds of things in SL that are on my land, particularly builds I commissioned and paid for, which the builder never bothered to turn over to me, although he gave me the textures full perm, and he left SL. And while I have been in touch with him, he doesn't want to bother to fix this. So the buildings suffer from prim drift and if they are returned by accident I am SOL. But such is life. New buildings could go up. One thing to do is to deed land and content to the group so that anyone can use it. But then this leaves it vulnerable to griefing, so it has to be done carefully. Copyright and permissions are the heart of SL. They are what made it work when so many other virtual worlds and games and platforms died. So it is worth preserving and using the same methods of RL in SL, such as making wills. Inventory loss is a harsh reality of SL. I have lost 15,000 items in a go, never to return, including many gatcha rares, and I recently found that inexplicitly, this lovely ice coach called "En L'hiver" made by Margot Abattoir is missing from inventory. I used to put it out every winter. So I mourned its passing because she is gone from SL. And far more importantly, I mourn the passing of SL friends who died in RL, who were more important than any one item of clothing or furniture. This is life. Nothing in excess. There has to be a balance. Many things are sad; that doesn't mean you destroy people's livelihoods.

No, the permissions shouldn't be changed. Put the shoes in a folder, it's not that hard, just as easy to search for as a name. If you need to clothe your alts, pay for their copies and support those creators. There is no way to make something "copyable only for me" and have it stick without disrupting copyright and creating huge coding headaches for Lindens. It's not like most creators earn a RL living from their hard work. Don't begrudge them the extra US $1.00 or $5.00 or $10.00 which is all we are talking about here for outfits and mesh bodies.

I love all their outfits. They are all so individualized and cool. I wish you could convey that same sense of vibrant, authentic outfits on the Marketplace pages. The models there are so insipid.

I think the Lindens did a great job with this. They gave $10,000 to three groups and that is commensurate with their profits -- they put to shame other Silicon Valley businesses with far more profits who have neither said or done anything about BLM. The suggested three groups are ACLU, NAACP, and SLPLC. Of the three, I'd go with NAACP as the longest-living civil rights organization still standing with the most credible record. I used to support the ACLU -- not after their atrocious apologia for Snowden which was way beyond their mandate. As for SLPLC, generally they do important work documenting hate groups. But it's ideologically tilted toward the left, and they slam some groups that are within the free speech norm and do not incite imminent violence -- which should be their definition. They leave out some leftist hate groups. They will have excellent documentation of things like Steven Miller's emails and the links in them and what that context is, but then they dismiss anti-fa as a nothing. They've also have leadership turmoils in recent years. But all three of these groups are chartered, they have high ranking from charity monitors, they are transparent, they are established, and so safer than something made yesterday which may not be as accountable. They also provided links for petitions and such, and that's ok, although I personally don't want to give to large, amorphous bail funds run by Moveon or some other leftist group which will end up springing some violent types like the two lefty lawyers, graduates of prestigious universities, who threw the Molotov cocktails into the police cars in NYC. I personally would rather give to legal defense funds as the more urgent need given massive numbers of cases, many of whom have been arrested for nothing, or for minor offenses. The bail system is broken thoroughly, to be sure, but it's just my choice to focus on defense rather than bail. I think a lot of SL merchants and stores have stepped up to respond to this urgent new movement. To be sure, when you donate through SL, you are passing funds through a sieve several times, losing value on the way with fees, and it's better just to donate directly on the Internet. But not everyone can do that or is moved to do that and putting $100 or $500 in a tip jar is easier, so why not? If they get content for that, it's a motivation.

This suggests to me that they either have some inside knowledge of some Linden policy about to come, or more likely, they read the recent notices that Linden isn't going to add to their stock and has a shortage of regions, and they think this is the smart thing to do. Just looking at my piece of it, which is mainly Mainland, demand is definitely higher due to the pandemic, there are more big spenders due to people who still have jobs being able to spend time online, and there are even RL groups such as churches or non-profits who want to rent virtual space now. Linden Homes seems to be dropping off just because people chafe at the lag and the prim limits. This situation will not last as some cities are opening up again and getting people back to work, unemployment is running out for people, and there are further losses from mass disorders. The Linden is at an all-time high at 246 today. Again, this won't last. The Lindens may hold their stock down to lower levels in fact to drive up prices as they know it won't last, either.

Well it's too bad you don't have a refund button. But island agencies tend not to have refunds or they would have to deal with the same thin margins we do on Mainland. I'm just not getting the reasoning of this fellow charging $1000 hikes and emptying out his stock obviously. Does he know something we don't know? He thinks he's going to get a surge of deep-pocketed renters? Maybe RL businesses? Seems crazy.

We actually have few big box stores in New York City, especially Manhattan. They aren't given permits to build and there's no space for them. There are still a lot of little and medium stores. In my neighbourhood, I have seen small cafes, hardware stores, book stores, video stores, gift shops, stationery stores destroyed BY THE INTERNET and by higher rents. Not by big chains. First *the Internet* destroyed them; then the rent was too damn high. Today, I live in a hollowed out, once thriving area of three giant government subsidized housing projects with virtually no stores, many stores vacated because they can't pay the rent, but not rented yet, and owners waiting to drive up prices further; large apartment buildings that built on the ashes of small stores, a temple, a school -- and aren't even 30% full because no one can afford those luxury apartments; and more 7/11s and Taco Bells per city block than anyone could possibly use them -- and they sit empty, much of the time, their owners able to write off losses and wait for the area to gentrify, I guess. Where are all the people in these giant housing complexes going to go? Well, one place they will go when there is enough incitement and opportunity by mass marches is to loot and trash the few stores -- and chains, like Verizon -- that remain. So yes, any little mom and pop stores still owned by established Koreans, aging Holocaust survivors, and new Indian immigrants who managed to survive first the rent hikes, then the pandemic, have remained to see their businesses looted and trashed during recent demonstrations. Here's a video made by one of my children's classmates of the Best Buy. Best Buy will survive, but now the jobs are gone from that particular store (my daughter's boyfriend worked there), and in general Best Buy has cut back during the pandemic and laid off people. All the stores by Fordham in the Bronx are trashed. How will they be rebuilt? Small business loans were already spent coping with the pandemic. Now what? They won't be rebuilt, and in their place will be a giant K-mart or if they are in Chapter 11, a Wal-mart. AOC couldn't see her way clear to allowing Amazon to come in and provide jobs, she kept falsely claiming that apartment complexes were going to push out existing residents when the already-existing co-op owners already were selling to Amazon without displacement. It's not like there were more executives than the locals who were going to be hired. So easy to say "oh, big box stores" which I don't particularly like either, but they are cheaper than ordering from Amazon. But now it's not big box stores causing the havoc.

We have some box stores in NYC but mainly a lot of smaller stores because they simply can't fit here or get permits here. In some cases Ace Hardware drives out little independent hardwares; in some cases Ace fails as people won't go away from the independents. It's a mixed bag and your blanket statements as usual doesn't apply to reality. Most of those harmed are small businesses, many minority owned.

That's entirely not true, and you have only to go on twitter and watch all the videos and read the statements to grasp this. It means NO ARMED POLICE. It means funding "civil services" in vague ways and not just removing excessive militarization from police, it means NO ARMED POLICE. Rolling Stone whitewashes this. There are plenty of reform groups all over with many good ideas for how to reform people -- taking all the funding away from armed, uniformed police maintaining law and order is not a solution, it's a recipe for disaster and that is indeed what they are calling for.

This is an absurd way to look at it. On Kristallnacht, Nazi thugs roamed through Jewish neighbourhoods, breaking store windows, throwing Torahs out of synagogues into the mud, beating and killing people. This was the start of the Holocaust. Had German society been able to halt that pogrom at that stage, history may have turned out different. But it didn't. The rest is history. To claim that breaking store windows, stealing, and beating people is somehow a form of civil disobedience on the way to a greater glory of social justice is absurd. Authoritarian societies can decide that it's "the law" to kill Jews or censor newspapers, and those challenging those measures for the greater cause of social justice then can be understood and supported. But no society cleanses the breaking of store windows and torching of businesses as some kind of necessary stage along the way to a better world. That is, when they do, they get fascism in Portugal or communism in Cuba or Russia. Then everybody has to work 50 years to undo that. The Boston Tea Partiers, then Mildred and Richard Loving didn't go beating up people and torching businesses to make their point. There is a concept of *just* law that often proves elusive to socialists. I guess it's pretty hopeless to get this across.

I could say a lot about anti-fa from my years of working on the war in Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia -- and the anti-fa from Europe and Russia taking the side of the Kremlin, and often lying about their true nature. But Trump is completely loony on this idea that he can get anti-fa designated as terrorists. And that's not because they are a "loose network" -- they are only partly that, but they have very organized, trained, ideological cadres who steal credit cards and all the rest and whose nature is well known to the FBI who has indeed tracked them and arrested them and declared them a domestic terrorism concern -- but not the primary one, which is from white supremacists. There isn't a procedure to do this designation at a federal level as he imagines -- it only exists for *foreign* terrorist groups, and there it is a contentious political process where all the branches of government are involved, and even hobbled as they are under Trump, you wouldn't get a *foreign* designation out of anti-fa for this. Could you get an executive order mandating the FBI to pursue them more hotly? I'm not a lawyer but I think not. I think the whole thing will collapse. But meanwhile along the way to arguiing stupidly against this without even the most basic facts, too many liberals have sanitized anti-fa, pretending they are not organized, violent anarchists. Just watch Portland videos2 on YouTube and the NBC interview of masked anti-fa -- masked, before COVID. They themselves do not hide their violent ideas and methods. Not every act of looting and smashing comes from anti-fa; it's a mixture of right, left, and clueless kids. Children of 10 and 12, even.

There it is, the socialist ethos in a nutshell. Death to capitalism and big box stores; well, we'll let a few little cooperatives survive to get people fed since state distribution is so poor. Except, the poor people buy their cheaper clothes at Target.

It's not that the socialist cause "deserves better"; it's that it attracts violent criminals because it is itself an ideology of crime. I'm generally in favour of the protests by BLM and others which are largely peaceful, and which highlight real issues of horrifying proportions. But I'm not for anti-fa which is a form of Bolshevism with the same kind of history and tactics; see the Soviet infiltration of the anti-fa of the 1930s. The energy that people expend in justifying this violent group and claiming's a loose network, or it means well is the same kind of energy they put into white-washing the Soviets or for that matter the Woodbury griefers, and for the same ideological reasons. But the protesters are mainly BLM and related groups which has had 4 years to organize since the police murders of the Obama Administration; they will decide how it goes, not anti-fa or white supremacists who may be over-represented at central bookings, but do not make up the face of the crowds, which is black not white. Let's not get bogged down in the BLM charter of 2016 which was ridiculous and they themselves then suppressed it. At this point, I invite you just to look at this video. It shows the most liberal mayor in America from the Democratic and Farm Parties who has just eliminated the chokehold as a police method and has done many other things in Minneopolis, where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who put a knee to his neck. Demonstrators march to the mayor's home and call him out. Unlike our own NYC socialist mayor who would hide inside, he does come out, wearing a mask due to COVID. They ask him whether he supports defunding of police, the latest dramatic call of the BLM marches. He said no, he can't do that. Which is eminently reasonable. For one, you'd lose a lot of jobs for people of colour -- not to mention the mayhem that would result with no police. What's the plan, Cuban-style neighbourhood patrols? Soviet-style druzhinniki? I can't imagine. But they ran him out of the meeting with boos and cries of "Shame, Shame". So you see where it is headed, not to a good place. Frankly, I'd rather have Mayor Frey and whatever improved police and city council he can muster. Some of the BLM demands for greater transparency, greater inclusiveness, more funding of communities make sense and I'd vote for them. But not abolition of the police. That's extreme, like "Medicare for All". The extremism we always get from the Squad and the rest. This brings us not better worlds, but Trump, and locally, more people like the mayor of Portland texting with the Proud Boys or whatever the supremacists are. A colleague of mine has been brutally beaten by NYPD during the protests. A friend of my daughter's filmed the most outrageous looting and smashing of the Best Buy store. it's just chaos out there, and COVID to come again.I can't support either police beatings or trashing of stores. As for activity in SL, raising money in SL is a problem because you have to pay fees to get it out. I would steer people to bail funds and such in RL.

Well, my RL landlord is not going to go knock on every door in a complex of 4000 people, and I'm not going to go say hi on every sim with some 2000 customers. I have a newsletter to reach them, as my RL does. They can socialize among themselves, you know? If you mean a small town, population 3000, which I have lived in, yes, going down the street, not only do you say hi, you stop and visit with people on their front porches, and set a spell. But not all of us live in such places now.

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.

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.

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.

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.