Prokofy Neva

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.

Followme is a Woodbury alt, you know.

Jack Linden, God bless him, took four very long years to declare ad farms illegal, when it could have been done on day one, and saved the Lindens' bottom line to boot. I recently came across my photos of them at the time -- don't forget initially, they appeared because abandoned land chunked automatically into 16m squares (!) under the hugely hippie crazy collectivist belief that people would just take a few they needed for prims and leave them empty. Sigh. Then they stopped doing that crazy thing, but then land barons themselves chunked them up to force sales. I'm glad you pointed out the very salient fact that land barons were needed to hold the tier on all this craziness, and did. And yes, it was indeed enlightened self-interest but I think some of them genuinely wanted to see a decent Mainland. The problem is the unenlightened selfish land barons who didn't even need the money -- Mr. Lee's Hong Kong told me in RL once at a conference that he was a highly-paid computer professional who just enjoyed watching what happened when he set 16m parcels to sale next to my waterfront rentals. Indeed. GTFO is, on the one hand, a welcome thing because it "gives people something to do," it engages people in building and driving and exploring and such -- I had some tenants who created GTFO warehouses on my rentals. BUT the big problem with them is that they create huge, ugly warehouses on a sim, often by waterfront and roads, of course, and that brings down the whole sim. So it's a mixed bag. Not to mention their blighting of the map with their insignia. GTFO is everywhere, like Tiny Empires even though it doesn't offer any cash value, as I understand it, but is something to do. Maybe someone can beautify GTFO and get them to plan trees and put ponds on their big warehouse sites, but it's not really a solution for Mainland beautification. As we've said before, the main problem with the group claiming to "salvage" and "beautify" microparcels is that they put up these ridiculous, stupid, ugly plinths with these ridiculous, pointless "good neighbour" aphorisms that leave out even the basics, like not building over two storeys. They are absolutely impervious to common sense or entire sims of people pleading with them to remove these idiocies. They are as bad as the Bush Guy in their way.

I had to blink in amazement at this highly subjective and strange post. The Lindens don't think in terms of "pulling back" or "growing closer" to groups like this -- they've always had a policy of keeping them at a distance. Yes, in the very early years, there were things like Jeska Linden posing for SL Boutique billboards and other Lindens TPing in their friends to hear musician friends and things like that. But gradually as the land barons' group began to demand written policies and more fair policies -- a whole saga in itself -- and as they drew from the existing resident population less for Linden staff, they became more professional. I don't know what this curious reference is to the "similar" group but that isn't really the story. As for Zindra, Brent Linden, who was assigned to handle the "community" had to deal with a very aggressive and only partly liked individual who arrogated himself as leader -- as happened for a time in Nautilus, BTW. It seemed as if Brent was broken by all this but in fact when I followed up with him several times later, including oddly enough recently, he said his reasons for leaving the Lab were actually unrelated to all this. I'm bewildered why anyone really needed a leader or even a Linden for Zindra. There was the initial skirmishing about how to transfer people who had Mature but wanted to be moved to Zindra because their activities were publicly adult, and the question of how the sims would be built (people hated the roads) and whether child avatars should be allowed (they never should have been, but they're a powerful lobby). But after that was settled, what were Lindens needed for except to turn over land purchased on the auction or stop difficult multi-sim griefing. I'm not getting this. People made their own homes, clubs, etc. and the Lindens were not relevant. Nautilus was not different, with a guy declaring himself mayor, and multiple people, including me, starting newsletters and groups to try to track it all -- with the main issue there being people building giant towers that ruined the view for others who had bought the same hugely expensive land, and the Lindens refusing to make a rule about towers. I think the reason Bay City was more successful was because it grew out of an already-existing "city sims" community with people like Lordfly or Osprey, although the people today might not want to admit that. There was already a solid group of power players and Linden favourites who wanted to make the themes there. Really, the theme is partly what makes the community. I don't think the Lindens ever had their heart in Zindra because it was being done as merely a way to avoid lawsuits or credit cards pulling their services or whatever, to sort of cordon off all adult activity (which didn't work). I don't think they even liked Nautilus much. But I think Michael Linden and some of the other moles liked building the Art Deco stuff and hanging out with residents they liked and there were some who liked 1950s diner stuff and it worked. The reason Bellissaria has a great chance of success is that the Lindens have put their top staff to work on it (they didn't with the other communities, but assigned it to lower-level liaisons as they were called then. They eliminated all the wrangles about tall buildings or encroachments or ugly builds by having it all completely controlled and zoned with only a set list of housing. The theme of Wonder Bread 1950s suburbia also helps along the atmosphere where the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Her Chums, along with Veronica and Archie, can go on healthy walks together and sock-hop dances where they won't be necking in parked cars. So it's all good. The Lindens didn't go dark because of Zindra. The Lindens went dark because of lots of things, which one could debate endlessly -- I would point out Woodbury and its banning (deserved) was a factor, but also the departure of Jack Linden. Jack was in charge of the community and had the title VP as well (not sure if Patch was) and he was responsible for at least trying to clean up the welcome areas, Brown & Boardman, etc and creating the themed continents. Michael Linden was also very willing to sit for hours in meetings with residents. When those two were gone -- not to mention Robin Linden who was really the heart and soul of community relations for some years, there was really a gap. M Linden came in who pushed the "creator" stuff even more than Ebbe does, as if SL is only a boutique sandbox for developers, which it is only in pnart. He ignored communities completely except for the art galleries for which he had a personal affinity. The question all of you should ask yourselves is why you need the Lindens to build communities. The Lindens should only be facilitators. They shouldn't even be like the GMs on Club Med, organizing your parties. You should be doing this. The cult of Moles and Lindens and looking for the fanboyz relationship to sustain your social life is doomed because Lindens burn out on it and residents become resentful. Companies always send out some really friendly person, often female, but not always, to listen to players' concerns -- and then, like the famous Tigger in TSO, they get squeezed and ground between the massive indifference of the corporation and the wrath of the player base. So don't go there. "Don't burn down Party committees, build your own," as Poland's Solidarnosc used to say. Don't orient yourself always to the autocratic leaders of your closed society; make your own society. While you're all nattering about Zindra or Bellissaria, I see all kinds of groups that I happen to belong to, such as Fallen Gods or Historical Hunts of EVO, who have thriving communities, with meetings and town halls to decide issues large and small, all kinds, events, dances, fairs, etc. etc. without any reference to any Lindens. Lindens are far in the distance, re-setting a sim perhaps, or helping with the HUDs that won't work. They are plumbers. They're not your local assemblymen; you didn't elect them. Yes, people have all kinds of different takes on the history of SL. History is not only written by the victors, but those with time on their hands...

I have different colours, too, but when I rez them out, they say "Happy 1st Rez Day, Prokofy," not my actual year.

Yes, "protected" is constantly misused. I see land for sale described as "protected on all sides" but there's only Linden water on one side and *my land* on the other. They're calling it "protected" because I'm stable and have been there for years. As Walter White might say, "I *am* the protection." Except...if a store with a giant parking lot buys it, I may not remain...

I don't have an informed opinion on this because first, I couldn't get it to work and gave up. Then, I noticed that land barons were doing it, and I was puzzled, because I thought it was for "end users" to sell to others on their sim or other end users. But of course an automated system can't really distinguish "end user" from "land flipper" in any fair and rational way, I guess. Except...there is a simple thing that should be done, which is to enable the selling of land on a sim FIRST to any other owner on that sim before anyone else gets it. Perhaps the Lindens figure there are too many empty sims to bother with such a plan, but I have to say, it causes havoc to those of us trying to just get by and keep our sims nice. Example: a land baron who has bit off more than he can chew tries to get me to pay a high price for some waterfront on a not really spectacular sim where I already have a fair amount of land (I like it, but New England rock isn't to everyone's liking). I refuse to pay it. He chops it up and a lot of other small or big rentals agencies buy it up and try to rent it and fail, then either abandon it or let it go for less and then God knows what ends up on it. Meanwhile, there's a huge parcel that says "Linden" and "auction" that is a mystery to me because I'm not sure where I "go" to buy this. It's no longer abandoned but on auction. But then...it isn't. It had no takers? or? Then I noticed *the same* land baron who was starting to firesale his other parcels has it, and then nearly instantly he flips it to someone else who really doesn't appear to be an alt. Then...I notice it's Linden again. Who knows what goes on. But if the Lindens would just enable any land in any sim to be FIRST reviewed by existing residents on that sim (or even on the adjacent sim) that would be helpful. I now see that with the Linden auction stalled, that big parcel will sit there and not likely even be eligible for purchase by others in the old-fashioned "$1/m abandoned land" fashion. Speaking of which, a large, nice waterfront parcel suddenly was abandoned next to me on a sim where I had a lot of intensive projects for years next door, and where I had land -- some of which I had been chased from by this self-same abandoner who put up a big build, blocked the view, then topped it off with access-only, making all of us in the area have to fly around it. I finally sold my land for a song, but then when I saw somebody else doing the same thing a year later with one near it, I bought it because I like the sim. So I thought, hmm, I wonder if the Lindens would accept an offer to buy abandoned waterfront on a large parcel -- something that in my experience they used not to do. They would tell you that it might go on the auction -- where you would fight with land barons to get a parcel next to your existing one. Especially waterfront. So while I was trying to make up my mind to reason with Lindens to try to get this 8192+ waterfront that was abandoned, whoops, a land baron asked the Lindens for it and grabbed it and was about to put it for sale. I asked him if he'd be willing to sell it to me for a low price since I knew he just got it for only $1/m. He wasn't willing to part with it for $1/m and I wound up paying $13,000. Ouch. That's the difference between US $50 and US $30. That was painful. But thinking how this nice parcel could soon fill up with a store (ever notice how stores LOVE to go on waterfront, and even building gigantic concrete parking lots on waterfront? They like looking at the view!) or some vampire castle with access-only again, or who knows what, I decided I better "buy the view". Now I need to sell the equivalent because I don't want to be holding more land. Really, it's all the same to the Lindens -- they just need the land under tier. To be sure, they get some percentage of a currency exchange or cashout with land deals like this, so maybe they need to encourage it, but it's depressing. I suppose the mechanics of engineering local auctions that detect if someone is already a parcel owner are too complicated to do... PS When I talk about giant parking lots on the waterfront, this isn't an abstraction. Here you see my little house next to a giant parking lot extension on the waterfront. Oh, that was a dream I had last year of being on the outermost waterfront of SL (a dream my neighbour had before me). We had coexisted for a long time happily and then...this. What some people do in a situation like this is sell out. That's why you see nice waterfront on the map going for a song -- and you TP in excitedly and then realize it's in a situation like...this. How can such a thing be stopped? Well, I could point out that this land now occupied by a huge fast food restaurant was once abandoned, yet I never asked for it (nor did other long-time neighbours) because we thought you couldn't buy waterfront for $1/m, that it had to go to auction, and we didn't want to bother to trigger that and then get outbid. So we ended up with something really worse. There's really only one answer to this, I guess, and that's: Bellissaria. That is, Lindens utterly controlling all the easements and waterways and public land rigidly and having pre-built houses and rules (like no commerce). The alternative -- trying to enforce rules like "no builds over two stories on waterfront" or "step back 16 or 32 m from the property line to build" are seen as "impossible" to enforce.

I have rentals for $50 or $100 a week but generally it's a camp site, a B&B and skybox, an elven hut, that sort of thing. It's hard to justify taking, say, 512 m of land and renting it for only 50 Linden a week (which comes out to about $0.75 per month), when the tier you have to pay on it yourself to the Lindens is about US $1.37. You see how that works? People want these ridiculously cheap rentals, or they want you to give them some deep discount, but the cost of the rent we pay Linden Lab in turn is fixed -- they aren't handing out deep discounts, except for 10% bonus for grouped land and the slightly lower tier after one sim as compared to parcels' cost short of a sim. It's not really viable. Of course, you will find people who have rentals for $50, of varying quality, as either a loss-leader (they hope people will come in at that level and then move up and pay more for larger lots), or out of generosity, or merely because they just want to cut costs on their sim so they can enjoy it, and not meet costs let alone make a profit. The very cheapest land I have is $125/225 prims, and I even have some corners of it with paying .5/prim only for what you use in towers or mini-skyboxes. They actually go empty. Because in fact most people, if they are going to bother to rent, will pay somewhat more to get something nice and bigger, so they can furnish more extensively. If you're interested, stop by the office to get the latest listings for all our rentals or go directly to the cheapest parcels.

Would you call this scene light-hearted?

The jello spawns the mobiles, see. There are a lot of natural formations and lakes or ponds around Bella, and you can be sure none of them will be despoiled because they haven't been parceled for private ownership. I guess the original Lindens did this on the legacy Mainland because they wanted to wrest every dollar out of every sim and not have to carry a load of land that wasn't under tier. But the result -- abandoned land -- made them hold more land in the long run.

So I was out flying around today, having managed to recover my Dire Wolf Mount RARE (after yet another big inventory loss), and I noticed that the Lindens have prepared giant blocks of lime jello for us. I love this plan, because it sounds economic and soothing. There's much to be said for it; as a Mole explained to me, when you need furniture, you just cut a block off, say, if someone visits. Of course, you'll eat your way through the walls, but I suggested that if the Moles delivered a sack of jello mix say once a month we could mix up new blocks. Then I saw that some of the lime jello was spawning mobile homes, including mobile homes with a view on to the Dinky Houses. The few times I've visited Bellissaria, I've felt like it wasn't the Mainland. It's like a cross between Linden zoned sims like Brown and private islands. What to call it? RefreshLand, since to get there, you have to refresh the page a zillion times. I've actually done this a few times myself -- you never know, it's like trying for a rare gatcha when you happen to go to a store on 50 Linden Friday. But as you can see from the skeletons in my Halloween installation, the story isn't so much that people die waiting for their homes, refreshing the pages into eternity; it's that they've stepped on the bones of other skeletons who did the same thing for aeons before them. I wonder if it wouldn't be more humane simply to make a sign-up sheet. You file a ticket, as you did to transfer to Zindra (there you could pick several lots and hope to get one of them), and first come first served. Isn't it bad for your computer and the servers to keep refreshing pages? Doesn't it use more electricity? What would Greta say? How dare we? But I imagine as my daughter's middle school teacher used to say about the mad dash to get into NYC high schools, "Every pot has a lid." So I imagine that sooner or later, everyone who wants a Linden home will get one, maybe in a year or so. And maybe this is the managed future, like "managed democracy" a la Surkov in Russia. I will continue to like my Mainland crunchy and craggy and hopefully it will be left for those who want to keep digging there. Yet another tenant was complaining to me today about Hector Lake, where some of the residents have put up ban lines, which makes the channels to boat extremely narrow or impossible in places. It's really too bad that the Lindens didn't make the entire Lake "Linden Land" and not parcel it arbitrarily like that so that some people can play troll on your desire to boat across the water. It's crazy. I see there won't be that problem in Bella because, of course, the Lindens have parcelled it all out and not cut into any bodies of water in doing so. In the Sims Online, even in Free Sims Online as it is re-engineered today, the residents in one area make up neighbourhoods, elect a mayor, and then that mayor has some properties with super powers. It's too bad that there was never devised some system that would have public land with easements that some people could have the responsibility to clear grief prims from and such. But this of course cut into the extremist libertarianism (or communist collectivism, depending on how you see it) idea that people should be able to do whatever they want on their land -- and with such "individuality" thereby force everyone in a 4 sim range into their coerced collective farm -- unless they sold or fled or quit SL. Remember King Kong in the water? I'm now looking at Nomad's Big Boy in the water in a similar place. Imagine. 15 years, and no progress has been made on water, on keeping it clear, on enabling people to boat on it or merely fly over it and also look out on it without seeing giant structures or ad boards. I was comparing the green dots on the immediate part of the mainland where I happened to be working with the Bella Ideal Lands. The green dots nearest to me were likely bots, as when I flew to them, they turned out to be a group of line-dancers with similar names, not talking at all, in some sort of Emporium that seemed to involve lucky this or fishing that or freebie the next thing. Meanwhile, in Bella, the people dancing on a deck seemed to be real -- for one, broken up into couples and not in a big clump line-dancing -- but I was bounced away by several security systems as I attempted to fly closer. Perhaps the "public" party venue itself was closed to outsiders. I wonder if they let non land-owners into their parties.

There's a group called "Mainland First" that is mainly moribund now, the founder, who was once very active with all kinds of public venues left SL in frustration. The Roads group is rather sectarian. I was expelled *I think* because I criticized those idiotic "good neighbour" pillars they put everywhere that in fact blight the landscape. So a new one should be made for a new generation.

Here's where we have horses you can rez and ride.

At the SL Public Land preserve you can join the group for short-term camping for a donation or get a long-term rental. This is the headquarters where you can pick up the notecard of listings.

I love Sovkovo, it's really well done. What they did was take Latin letters that look like Russian letters and so that's why you see it appear as "Cobkobo" -- it's a kind of spoof. (I'm a Russian translator). The way it would normally be transliterated from the Cyrillic is "Sovkovo" as I've written it. It's a mythical place but named in such a way that any Russian could understand the reference is to "Sovok," which is the term used to describe people with Soviet mentality. It's hard to convey, but the idea is something like a "yahoo" or a "rube" or someone who is backward, admiring of the Soviet past despite its oppression. This installation in SL has a lot of little features like a Soviet/Russian provincial town, they really did a great job.