Prokofy Neva

That's interesting that Lindens and Moles "are almost always in attendance". I figure that can't last. I literally have gone for years on the Legacy Mainland never seeing a Linden, except for very rarely, if one TPs in to solve some complicated technical issue. Seems to me it's Ma and Pa, sitting on the porch with their shotguns and jugs of moonshine, crying "Revenooers!" if a Linden trespasses...

These are all very well formulated thoughts and questions. I've revisited them over the years. Mostly, I'm a solitary SL player -- which, BTW, I see others are, and I even have friends who are the same way, who prefer to just fly around and explore on their own, and occasionally chat, or drop in or give a gift. And I like it that way. High casual, but far less drama. I chat with my customers, to some extent, but basically I leave them alone as I'm sure they'd prefer that. Every once in a blue moon, I get the wish to go to some bar or club or event or something to see what's up, what are people saying, wearing, etc. So yesterday I happened to get Coco's scary rabbit add-ons which are must-have cool SL things I had seen other people with, and not realized at first it was something I could get, too. So I wanted to show them off! A lot of SL is show-and-tell. First, I went to the much-ballyhooed Bellissaria, thinking, "this is the cool place now where real cool kids go who are humans, not bots!" I went to a green dot pile-up, but I could only see a guy on a boat, and I guess the rest were in the sky, so I didn't want to intrude up there. BTW you have to look at the mini-map, as you may know, to see actual locations of green dots, as the world map is distorted and can be misleading. A few other green dot piles were on no-access or in the sky. So next I went to what I call Legacy Mainland. I saw 45 green dots filling up the sim of Ufeus entirely. So I went to the adjacent sim to see, hey, what's this! It wasn't one of those crowded events like kustom9, it was a place with a name like Kiwi Sanctuary. But they must have "avatars can see me" unchecked, because I simply couldn't see anybody in the ground or sky, there was nothing on the events list, so I withdrew. Next, the infohubs. These can be terrible, with the griefing and spamming wall-sitters, but not always. But usually, they just have bots, like this, some of whom are clearly NPCs on themed sims and others might be AFK or dumped from a re-setting sim but whatever, they aren't "there". The few infohubs I tend to, where I own the land nearby or the old legacy resident-developed infohub I have, can have real newbies on it and I talk to them, but yesterday it was all bots. I looked at a few more green-dot pile-ups, but one was in a gatcha re-sale store which had bots for "traffic," and another seemed all AFK or maybe Tiny Empires or something. None of the "events" on the list seemed compelling to me, and were thinly disguised ads for clubs. I had limited time for all this because I had to go to a job, so I gave up. And that's what happens. It takes some effort to find the events or groups that interest you and then begin to socialize. People do it all the time, it's possible. I suppose it takes time, or a low threshold of acceptability. Now to answer your questions: 1. No, because I think the Lindens cannot make the society and there has to be civil society separate from the "government" or it isn't viable. I also think they do not have the time, talent, or treasure to do this, let alone the wish. 2. They already built a bunch of hangouts all over the place, the infohubs, the various Portals with their games (which I don't like, but some do), the premium places like the jungle, the mainland places built by Moles like that carnival game, or whatever. Tons of them. They can't justify more. So residents need to build them. 3. There was a bowling ally near my rentals for years, not sure it's still there, I would advertise is it my "Area Attraction" notecards, but I never saw a soul there. I have restaurants in my land preserve that people actually go to, interact, pick up content, even leave tips. But I find that things like archery or bowling alleys don't attract people, they're hard to do. But who's to stop any resident from doing this? 4. In an authoritarian country such as we live in, where there are no free elections, no free press, and no justice for the simple reason that it's a company town owned by a corporation where we only rent, there is nothing except the "us" and "them" mentality that can exist, and the space cannot and should not be bridged. Residents should make their own societies to the extent they are able and willing. 5. History repeats itself! There used to be regular Town Halls run by the Lindens all the time, when the world was smaller. The sims got so crowded, that they had these retro looking radios they handed out known as "repeaters" that basically broadcast the townhall to other sims -- an interesting technology which they let lapse when they stopped the *inworld* Town Halls, as they got to be too hard to manage, griefed too much, and too time-and-resource consuming to be justified by busy Lindens. (They still occasionally have a chat show at Designing Worlds or something called a "town hall" but that's not the same genre.) Groups that I'm in have their own town halls, and that's how it should be done. 6. There is already Land Forums>Linden Homes and that's plenty.

I see lots of ranting about these Linden homes, but not the suggestion that they create a sign-up sheet. If you see it, let's have the link. Thanks in advance!

Not with this point, that I've seen.

I was amused to see a fellow make a video about waiting endlessly for his Bellissaria home: Then I saw somebody made houses in what is called "Bellissaria Waiting Room," so I guess you can sit in your non-Linden houseboat and gaze wistfully across the sea. I actually snagged a lot somebody let go for a low price across from Bellissaria, which I named "Sailing to Bellissaria" but you can't actually do that without a lot of portage because of the "Linden Dead Sea". I have a filling the Lindens will never fill in these areas with "void sims" to enable sailing, as they haven't on the shores of Alston and Furness and so on, so you hit a wall as you do on a private island. I added a skeleton refreshing his page endlessly in my Halloween installation: So this brings me to the question: WHY ISN'T THERE A SIGN-UP SHEET? Why force people to endlessly refresh pages and trample each other trying to get these houses??? It's insane. It wastes energy and resources. Why not just create a system where you file a ticket? First come, first served. Lindens and Moles work their way through these lists. There *is* a precedent for this, which was the move to Zindra. If you wanted to exchange Mainland mature for Zindra, you put in a ticket with a list of the SLURLS of several lots of your CHOICE. You weren't randomly assigned because it had to be the equivalent in square meters, more or less. There really isn't any reason for this that I can tell. A separate category could be created in the ticket system -- or not. That way people don't sit and endlessly refresh or speculate. They just get in line. The line moves slowly, but it moves. I'm happy not to pursue them and leave them for others, as I don't have patience to refresh pages or wait months for something I can't rent out to cover costs (it's not allowed). But it seems crazy not to have a fair and more efficient system like this.

Yes, I have exactly the same thing wherever I go, too white, strange skies like there's going to be a tornado, etc. I wasn't sure if it was global, or because I turned "Advanced Lighting" off because if anything, that makes scenes look blurry. Then I turned "Atmospheric Shaders" off because of lag. But it seems unrelated to those settings. Sometimes it has a beautiful but eerie effect, whatever is wrong with the sky now.

It's ridiculous to think that just because you put up some flowers or decorative ivy on a wall you've somehow disguised the essential WAREHOUSE nature of a WAREHOUSE. It's a sea of concrete and steel. Wrapping flowers around the edge can't change it. The Lindens long ago decided not to pursue zoning, because it's too much work for them and too much a curb on creativity. And that's how it should be, at root. I do think they could make their special projects like Nautilus have some zoning like "no builds over two stories" or "no builds smack on the property line" to mitigate the disasters. Even that's too much policing for them. But if they responded only to ARs instead of proactively looking for violations -- the way they do on the Marketplace and with adult content -- it might work. But generally, the propensity of SL residents like yourself to use the AR system merely as a weapon in a political fight for people who don't like your ideas means that any avenue that the Lindens created for "zoning" is an avenue for misuse of the AR system.

I think it's great that you developed this game that has kept people involved with the Mainland. I can only report what I see EVERYWHERE with my own eyes in what I think is a fairly large slice of SL. You keep saying that X percent of the sites are different, but they are different by degrees that still don't mitigate against the whole concept of "warehouse" which by its nature, cannot be an aesthetic park or beach. Clearly, you are very attached to this and spent a lot of effort on it, but it's simply not persuasive to keep telling someone like me who sees a LOT of the Mainland that they have "erroneous information" when I see what is in front of my eyes. It's like this horrendous plague of driverless vehicles. I literally see hundreds of stupid green flying buses a day that in any other context would be considered spam and griefing. But because Lindens love the idea of load tests and sim seam tests they don't have to do and pay staff to track, and because there was that one time that a forums queen went on one of these vehicles in 2010 and thought it was delightful, those of us who actually live and work on the Mainland have to suffer this blight. Try to hear it. The map is a shared space, and GTFO is a tragedy of the commons. It's hardly the worst -- the big hearts and those GIGANTIC domes are far worse a problem, but it's annoying. The logo isn't "very small" on the map because it covers the whole parcel. Lots of people do that and I find it tacky and annoying. It's everywhere. It's also your right. Since it is so hard to find entry into the economy, it's a shame that it doesn't have cash really, although I realize that has all kinds of pitfalls. Maybe it could be like Bing, make users who want to play "Rewards" spent ridiculously long amounts of time searching for stuff or filling out quizzes in order to earn a US $5 value Amazon card. You could give them gatchas once a week. Your notion that the WAREHOUSES are built better in Nautilus or the Fruit Islands (those are islands, not Mainland) -- again -- doesn't mitigate the fact that they are WAREHOUSES. Because, you know, it's GTFO, hello! And you haven't supplied any pictures, and I gave you 5 in 5 minutes. Um, I don't "disrespect" their right to do WTF they want on their land, that sacred FU hedonism of Mainland creed which is responsible for its greatest ills. I have even rented to customers who put the damn things on my lot, and since technically they didn't violate my rules, I tolerated it, although I don't think my neighbours with pretty seaside cottages were very happy. But you have a problem here even if only 30% are ugly because of your free-will values. That's a high percent. The end. You're welcome to have whatever last word you need to have, everyone else knows what their eyes see.

So here's just 5 that I quickly went and snapped -- out of the 5, only one is "aesthetic" in terms of being a field of trees and a dark, although the signs are cluttery -- the rest are all concrete bunkers and tanks and such -- good Lord, one even has Communist insignia. So having a diner among them makes it a little more amenable but they're still...warehouses. Because, you know, it's a *freight* game. Click on any GTFO on the map, and you find them like 4 of these pictures, not the 5th. I realize there may be charming little Japanese kaiseki restaurants seating only 12 with fresh fish and roe and persimmons and leeks delivered twice daily on GTFO bicycles, creating gorgeously picturesque scenes, but we know what GTFO is. There's no need to argue about it. It's great you're diversifying it. Diversity happens when there's more than one company/game/product.

No, read what I wrote. I have land on 50 sims. I visit them constantly. Every day I see GTFO on a map of a sim somewhere. I see lots and lots of GTFOs every day. Beyond those 50 sims, i visit others, where I also see GTFO sites. Lots and lots of them. It's safe to say that I have seen dozens if not hundreds of GTFOs spread over 100 plus sims. Because every sim where I have land has a sim next to it. You're just not willing to hear the problem, but I don't want to go out snapshotting right now, I have better things to do. Accept that because you've given your users free will to use even old "outdated" concrete styles, they...do.

It's not that I'm working with outdated information. It's that your beautification message apparently hasn't reached all your users, and I can only repeat what I see on sim after sim after sim, and I'm happy to go out and take screenshots if that would help. I report what I see, not your aspirations. But SL is a big place. On other continents you may be more pretty, and I don't see it as much. I appreciate that you want to flog GTFO, but honestly, marring the map with your logo (needless), using a term that in fact is a swear word (causing brand confusion for sure), not having any way players can actually make cash -- these are all negatives and your effort, while as I said is great for giving people "something to do" is not without its flaws. But it doesn't matter, truly, because SL is a big place, and I have even had tenants with what might even have been some of your more unlovely builds, but everything needs competition in an open society and it wouldn't hurt for others to appear, just as with horses.

Groups are whatever its members make them. The group charter states, if you look inworld: A group devoted to appreciating the Mainland by living, working or visiting the legacy Mainland outside of Linden Homes. Members get a free ad board with "Visit the Mainland" texture created by Jack Linden and a portal script to put in the location of your choice. Gifts will also regularly be provided. Chat is encouraged with recommendations, help, causes. We advocate for Linden policies to encourage Mainland living. A hangout is being developed. I just made Therese co-owner because she has already got land and a house and has an idea for a HUD and so on and anyone else who has locations and wants to put out things can also be an owner. And if we violently disagree about basic things, like whether photo-real trees on your parcel border are the way to go, or whether 3D trees are more aesthetic (to cite one issue) or if we disagree about the aesthetics or utility of GTFO locations, why, someone can take over the group with their faction and then I will just make another one or go back to some of the others I've made over the years like MISSING INVENTORY or WEATHER REPORT (state of the grid and chronic problems in user-friendly terms that stay away from the whole JIRA/Linden office hour madness). As I said, I can't start meetings on this at the moment, nor put a lot of effort into it, but I did get a parcel right across the ocean from Bellissaria where you can *almost* sail to Bellissaria, and I will put out the various servers and things I've done for Mainland appreciation, and anyone is welcome to take it from there. Basically it's just about bringing together those few people who want to bother promoting the Mainland so that they feel they have some company and can advocate on policies or try to improve things directly in their back yards. BTW, I view "Mainland" as *not* Bellissaria. And that's an important issue to debate and people may fall on different sides of it but managed/zoned Linden Housing sims, while technically Mainland, are not what I've taken to calling "Legacy Mainland," i.e. as SL was first conceived by Philip Linden, before even the private islands were put in. And here I'll quote our famous leader: "I'd say, stay on the mainland, the idea of clustering and the magic spell of working with your neighbors is just a great appeal." Philip Linden, Town Hall, Second Life, 7/7/06

So what are these "wide variety of builds other than warehouses" given that freight is the main concept? I wasn't deterred from buying and renting out land by Lake Caldera, for example, because I find that GTFO locations don't always stay and sometimes fold their tents but there is quite a hulk of a one over that lake. And I could site others that were like this, i.e. in Itame, that are gone now. Once again, I can only tell you what I see in front of my eyes every day, and what I have seen isn't likely to make me go seek out lovely farmsteads but I'll keep it in mind.

GTFO is fine for what it is, but what I think would be good is if there was competition to GTFO based on a different concept. With "get out the freight" literally the root of your concept, the builds tend toward the concrete and steel and the warehouse, whatever eggs or baked goods you might weave in. So as I said, it would be good if some other group made a game/activity focused more on travel itself, or sort of scavenger hunts, or put and take of items, rather than the big builds which require owning or renting land. So for example, I could put out a box on my land that would be coded in such a way that someone could deliver eggs or milk to me or flowers or whatever. Just an alternative idea.

Hi, I appreciate what you're saying, and I realize you are describing your own hub which is more aesthetic than a warehouse by having a farmers' market/diner, but I have to tell you, the overwhelming majority of the GTFO sites are warehouses that tend to be drab, iron-and-steel-clad, and seas of concrete and fencing. I have land on 50 sims which I share with other landowners, and I visit as many in a typical week, and I see LOTS of GTFO, and as I said, most of them are warehouses, and quite a few of them blighting the view, i.e. near Lake Caldera. If you had analyzed a total list of GTFO, and told me, "Why, 50% of our GTFO locations are farms and only 25% are concrete warehouses" or whatever, I might believe you instead of my lying eyes, but for now I'll believe my lying eyes.

I think what happened is you experienced the "bounce mesh" problem. When you attempt to put out many mesh gatchas on other mesh, they bounce. I'm told this is due to poorly-made mesh. You get a notice even on land your own "The owner of this land does not allow..." as if you didn't have the group. It doesn't then return to "Lost and Found". It disappears from inventory until you relog. Did you relog before attempting you search? Then it seems to be in the general objects file unless you filed it. That is, if you bought it from the MP and put it out on your land, which I'm confused about. The "take" issue only applies if you buy it inworld. I can understand why those sellers put up those lengthy and crazy disclaimers, because scammers claim they lost something and wangle another free one that way. Most real merchants, not re-sellers, will demand a chat history and "my accounts" entry to send you gatchas again. I think it's safer to buy them inworld, and I often do that for people who see something on the MP if it is an expensive rare. But the bottom line is, once they pay me, it leaves my inventory, and after that, I truly am not responsible. The whole point of gatchas is not to make them copyable so that they have value. You can't put them on copy or no one would buy them from the machines. I've had the experience you describe once or twice on the MP in buying zillions of gatchas. It's not a reason not to buy them on the MP.

When it says "pet version" does that mean it requires feeding?

I decided to make a group, Mainland Appreciation Society, if you want to join. 5e2e4251-e859-ea64-007b-1213b3c240d0 Unfortunately it's not showing up in search yet so IM me for an invitation and then you can invite others. It's going to be awhile before I can hold meetings but it's a start.

I'm curious to see how this does in Animesh. I love many Animesh things but I find the Hayabusa animesh trees are really just too wild and crazy. It takes awhile to tame them with the settings so they don't seem like monster trees, although in some Halloween areas I want monster trees. But I'm not sure animesh is meant for everything in SL. Animals seem an obvious application.

I didn't realize you could buy a herd for guests to ride. $12,000 is an impossible sum for me in SL, i.e. I don't want to spend that in SL, but RL, but I will keep it in mind.

This is a great thread, I'm so glad you started it. So often threads are discouraged or removed because a specific company is named, for good or ill, and criticism is lodged. Yet it's precisely this sort of comparison shopping and debate that is required to have more informed consumers and a better economy in SL. The reasoning behind the ban are varied -- some of it is a hangover of MMORPG culture where no company is allowed to be mentioned on forums so as not to compete with the game company. In SL, I think it has more to do with fear of libel lawsuits. Except the best corrective to fake news is to freely publish real news and commentary. It's way more important that a consumer rights or BBB sort of organization, which has had a number of historical disasters in SL because many people think the way to compete is to disparage your competitor and it becomes very biased quickly. Not so if you allow free commentary and comparisons. I love the way the Teegles look wandering around in a field. They seem very natural and they really bring SL to life. I don't mind if they have a cartoonish or painted quality because I think that style fits better in SL than photo realism. That said, I have no desire to own or ride a horse. I encourage it at the SL Public Land Preserve of course and allow it for my tenants, unless they want to put out 50 breedable horses that lag a sim. But pet/riding horses are a different story. My own partiality is to Jinx just because I'm more familiar with that company and have bought many nice things from them, ranging from pets to gatcha wandering animals and one of my favourites, a typing pose called "Calling Down the Planets". I bought a rideable Llama (for which you are supposed to by the Water Horse) simply because I wanted him actually as a pet, I liked his movements just "as is" and put him in a field with goats and lambs in "Woods Between the Worlds" (in the world Felimath). $500 is a big expenditure for me and the llama add-on was like $450, so I will be awhile before I get the Water Horse, which I realize I need to have the other rideables work. I did get the gatcha Aslan mount which is really wonderful, although Aslan in C.S. Lewis rarely allowed people to ride on him, it was a special occasion and I respect that.

The Lindens like to do things with reference to other systems on the Internet. That's why they imported Ebay's software into their auctions (Pierre Omidyar was on the board of LL for a time). But that change brought some negatives even if it was more efficient. It used to be that you could see the record of past auctions, and ALL the bids -- not just the winning bid but all the bids. Now you don't have any of that, it sinks into a memory hole. But that information helped create the sense of a market and most importantly, showed you who was deliberately jacking up bids to try to inflate the value of land so that their existing land would sell for higher prices. So at least there was the social pressure involved -- if you saw a land baron invaded auction after auction merely to jack up prices, you didn't buy from him. I don't know of any system where you pay up front for some service or good on the Internet, and wait for it to come, other than Amazon purchases and subscriptions. And land in SL is neither. It recurs like a subscription but it isn't media. And it's a one-time purchase but then has the tier on it. So it's hybrid. Perhaps the upfront cost is a way of deterring bad behaviour. But I think publicizing the names of all bidders and keeping an archive of land sales would create a kind of deeds office that would deter bad behaviour. Except...the Lindens don't want to do things that make their land seem more real, a thing of value, and not merely a bracket around content. They try to shy away from things that they think might invite more attention from tax authorities. Of course land is only server space and really is only that bracket for content as the Lindens see it. But it is also a sense of place, a literal grounding, a place to which memories and sentiments attach, and it's different.

Yes, I really think whoever comes up with some kind of gathering and fetching and carrying game that doesn't involve heavy trucks and heavy equipment but things like baskets and blueberries will win a lot of followers. Those farm systems where people grow and sell or trade food is one form of it but it doesn't incorporate the desire to travel and build, which people would like.

Historical Hunts is a group of sims that have various RL historical themes from the Middle Ages and also various times in history like the Ottoman Empire. They put on various themed hunts and marketplaces every year, i.e. Renaissance or Silk Road (currently it's Halloween). Woodbury is a very long and complex story (and simply misreported, and deliberately, by publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education). Basically, it was a group of students and drop-outs at a suburban California commuter college who rented islands in SL supposedly for educational purposes, but who heavily griefed people in a variety of ways, used malicious scripts, crashed sims, and stole copyrighted material -- all with the connivance of their professor and dean who found such "transgressive" behaviour something interesting to study. They were related to 4chan and Anonymous, the forces that have caused so much havoc in RL, although a lot of fake stories are put out about their supposed altruism and working for good causes. The Lindens wound up confiscating their sims -- and multiple times as they returned on alts. There were a number of leftwing professors who backed them and gave them positive press and also Linden programmers who identified with them and covered for them, but in the end, a crashed sim is a crashed sim, and copybotted items are copybotted items, and Philip Linden pulled the plug on them -- and rightly so. I was one of the dedicated abuse-reporters of this group so they targeted me and my tenants for all kinds of bizarre harassment.

Strawberry is a highly talented and very good person. And of course she is free to follow her dream and make her career as she pleases. But I do want to point out as I have elsewhere that there is a generic thing here that is happening that is not good, and that is when the Lab raids the community and creams off its top leaders and turns them into staff, leaving the community more dependent and with more of the distinction blurred. Some people don't care that these distinctions are blurred. After all, the Linden staff are the kind of people who are unique and special anyway in that they want to do this odd job that many people in the field of social media and games would never take or even look down on. They like SL virtuality and that's a plus, that's a basis for shared understanding. But it would be better if communities -- plural, as there isn't just one -- had their own leaders who interacted with Lindens as equals. The true test of power and equality comes with justice, as in RL. And that's why these invocations of the idea that the Arbor Group or the Justice League or this one or that one "had the Lindens come running" acquires such myth-like proportions. I was recently studying the WayBack machine snapshots of secondlife.com to try to find the economic statistics (I only found 2 pages out of many years, odd). And I read the police blotter, which was only a fraction of the ARs that got read and answered. Michael Linden used to hold office hours where he really gave a sense of the dimensions of the griefing problem and the policies to respond to them. I don't think it's so much that some residents had Lindens running at their beck and call. It's that some issues were more amenable to Lindens to solve than others. Case in point: some of you remember the Sutherland Dam meetings I had every Friday, which every Friday were heavily griefed by Woodbury, using the affordance of the nearby Linden road as a "safe" territory from which to bombarb chat, spam particles etc. etc. There was endless harassment and endless insanity from these goons -- who including at least one off-duty Linden as I later found out. In that entire time I ran those meetings for years, there was ONE police blotter report -- despite the thousands that dozens of us filed to try to stop this harassment. I refused to cave to it because I thought freedom of association was worth fighting for. The goons didn't want anyone using the Internet for anything serious and wanted it to be all anarchy and riot. And what was that ONE police blotter? A well-known RL lawyer who sided with the griefers (!) who filed a report on me when I pasted the nasty thing he said to me into chat. This was "disclosure". Can you imagine? THAT was the only public police blotter for the years I ran those meetings, which were always lively and well-attended.