Prokofy Neva

Oh, I missed that -- then it means it is nearly half what it was in its heyday. That's sad, because I think the premium account is a really good buy in the world of online things, you get a virtual world perch, a house, some Lindens to spend, and regular gifts -- plus the sandbox alone is worth the price. I got to sandboxes several times a day to work on things and fix things. I had also forgotten that the price hike made people quit. I had a surge of tier donations when they created the 1024 versus the 512 account and also had land with more prims. Then some of these began to drop out with the price hike. Even so, I have more tier donations than ever in the history of SL so I think that's another not-advertised advantage of the premium account -- it isn't just for your own land or Linden Homes, but to donate to a group, as there are quite a few willing to take tier donations, whether projects and communities or rental agencies. Still, I guess they're not going to reach that 100,000 just with the trailers. I just sold a waterfront for like $5/m after months of waiting, and then only to a neighbour who wanted to grow her area. Waterfront prices remain high in really good areas, but I see them for $2 or $3 even nowadays. Even if Lindens add hundreds of more sims with trailers, which has always been a beloved theme in SL, and more nice Belli homes, I don't think they are going to put a dent in the rentals market for the simple reason that I think a lot of them are alts of existing island owners/renters who want to "slum it" in a trailer or have a house to decorate, always a draw. You're so right about the "living organism". Right now the London Sims, which have been in SL for 10 years with a variety of activities, traffic, things to do, as well as home and shop rentals, are closing. They might sell to another owner who might keep it as London but more likely will not -- so many of my "real life sim" landmarks resolve into sims unrelated to their one-time real country sims...

OK, I can't believe I bought two more backdrops. They were so deliciously tempting and when I saw them in at least tiny model form, they seemed "complete enough" to make a skybox out of. One of them even came inside a dome. So I went to a skybox and tried to put several of them together, as one seemed too small. Oops, I have 1000 prims before I knew it. And the waters didn't match and I spent a fruitless half hour trying to tint them to match (at least they were on mod) but the build construction was too different and the light and shadow made them seem like different colours. I tried to take off trees and walkways -- but some of them were all-in-one pieces of mesh. I got a cliff down to just...90 prims. Put that with another island or house on water, I'm up to like 400 prims. Where am I going to put those? That's a lot of prims to give away as "management prims" or convince people to pay for along with their lesser allotment. I contemplated putting them in the land preserve -- they were so pretty! So detailed! So fabulous? But I don't have 400 let alone 600 prims anywhere to spare like with no interactivity. I am considering this idea of having more advertised "photo places" as suggested above, but I don't know, it could get expensive. To make good on my expense, I've got to try to rent out one of these gorgeous backdrops now. I think it's going to be a non-starter...Even just one backdrop alone is a whopping 196 prims...So much for the idea that mesh will reduce prims. No wonder the Lindens had to add more prim capacity to land.

Oh, you mean those profile pictures. I should post to those more. I see you visited Sovkovo and Cooper River, I love those sims.

I would wager that what drives people from the Mainland are ugly builds on the ground, not the stacked-up rentals. I am puzzled by these stack empires, however. For several years, I had one next to my rentals on one sim, taking up the entire sim. The owner opted to use those sort of weird landscapes with the folded edges that are designed to make you think you are "on a beach" or "in a forested valley" if you perch your skybox amid them. He had furnished houses that looked pretty decent for the price. None of them were rented, as far as I could tell. I never saw green dots, beyond the rental agents. I had to struggle to place my own skyboxes at different levels of his which were everywhere so that my tenants felt like they had privacy -- but I need not have bothered. No one ever came. I wondered how they could stand not having their own radio station, i.e. dedicated land to have their own stream. That seems essential. Stacked up, you can't (I have some apartment buildings like that where the channel is changed all the time). All of it, so odd, but I looked around the grid, saw tons of sims with that same logo all over hogging the map -- surely they must make money? But maybe not, because eventually that sim was sold for a low price, than abandoned by several would-be land barons, then chopped up after being bought from the auction, etc. etc. But still, they're in business elsewhere. On another sim where I saw that stacked-up model, which annoyed me endlessly as those tenants and owner constantly encroached on my land, but worst of all, left up plywood for months, the person went out of business and the land remains abandoned. Still, when I saw some tenants refund and they told me they found a cheaper place they liked better because of its changing scenery, I went to the link they gave me and found stacked-up heaven -- a puzzle about the radios (and they didn't use that well-known "Internet radio" device unrelated to land). I found the cheapie sculpty furniture there a horror and the scenery also ghastly, but there's no accounting for taste! I guess this business model works, especially for those willing to put out nicer mesh houses and scenery. But I have no facts or figures on this, only anecdotes.

This is a good post to bookmark as a very good example of the wild prejudice against "land barons" in Second Life, who make it possible for Second Life to exist beyond a VC's whim. Since it follows my comment, it is directed at me, but I have to chuckle, as my land holdings are tiny compared to actual "land barons" and I am not a land baron, running a small Mainland rentals business and supporting the SL Public Land Preserve. Look at Tyche Shepherd's reports which are instructive about a lot of things. I believe there are about 25,000 islands; of these, about 5,000 are Mainland, and a good chunk of those are owned by the Lindens directly i.e. not sublet, if you will, to those "direct" owners that you glorify in your post and imagine are helping the Lindens become "weaned" from land barons. We don't know how many premium accounts there are -- at their hey-day in 2007-2008, when the Lindens still helpfully posted economic information, there were about 100,000. There might be that may or more today but given how many islands have been lost and Mainland abandoned since then, more than 10 years ago, it's just very hard to say. I would think it's likely, if not for the fact of so many alts. Ebbe Linden is no different than his predecessors in wanting "diversity" of revenue streams. I think it's safe to say that today, with the expenses of pets, mesh avatars, fashion, gatchas, etc. that spending on these consumer goods outpaces rent or tier for many avatars and that means likely the economy inworld for residents is no longer made up of mainland land sales and rentals as it did in the first decade of SL's life or island rentals inworld as it has in the early part of the second decade. Think about what you spend on your premium account (let's use the figure of $11.99 or about 3200 Lindens although this cost varies) or a rental (let's say a 4096, which might be $4,300 Lindens a month) , then think of your purchases of furniture, fashion, pets and their food, vehicles, etc. and I think you'll agree that more is spent on mesh body parts, clothing and accessories, pets, etc. than housing. It's hard to tell what the average "consumer basket" is in SL because we just don't have economic figures. But going by what I see hundreds of my tenants buying (and most of their rentals are more like $150-$350 range per week), housing is not their chief SL expense. But for the Lindens, there is no way they can "wean themselves from land barons" simply because it's the core of their revenue. So your allergy to what you imagine is the land baron "aesthetic" and your stereotype of Monoply-style moneybags characters, they are what make LL possible to exist. The Lindens can only tax a sale of currency or a purchase on the Marketplace -- they may have ambitions to tax more, but it won't reach a figure higher than the sale of even cheaper sims over the years. The premium accounts, whether 100,000 or even double that by now cannot hope to make up the core of their revenue even added to their "taxes". Sims generate from $175 for a grandfathered private island to $229 for the newer islands and $109 for the homesteads, which require island ownership. That means even if you take just the lower figure of $175 -- which you wouldn't, because grandfathered are in a minority -- you'd see revenue of $3.5 million from tier *per month* or $42 million *per year* -- and that's what Crunchbase says their revenue is currently -- while once it was $75 million, they've been losing a million a year in the last ten years, according to NWN, who put their revenue at $50 million in 2017 (read that article, based on Tyche Shepherd's reports of declining island ownership and increased abandoned land, to see how this figure was generated -- from tier). They couldn't get much more than a million from premiums even if everyone paid the full rate of $11.99 and didn't annualize them. It's doubtful they get more than a million from Marketplace sales although this is a hugely unknown figure (I'd be interested in guesses, but going by "items last purchased" which you can see as a ticker on the MP, I'm not seeing it. Right now, for example, I see "what customers are buying" is a dress for $250, hair for $350, dance system for $765, a skin for $1299 (BTW more evidence that those customers are likely paying for skins and clothes more than rent, because they don't just make one purchase of such items per year). So the Lindens need to re-rent servers to exist, and that's what makes up their world. Whether they get it "directly" from end-users like yourself in the Linden homes, taken as an aggregate (a smaller percentage of their income) or "directly" from "land barons" (the bulk of their income), they need this to make and maintain a virtual world. Maybe some day the costs of the Lindens' vast server farm may be shifted to consumers, but not any time soon. Now let's think of the actual human beings behind the title of "land baron". I'm a single parent of two living in low-income housing who has worked multiple jobs at the same time my whole life to support my family. My SL business is more in the category of "hobby" than anything else. But having gotten to know some of the "land barons" over the years, whether the Chinese immigrant Anshe Chung (who might have been declared a "millionaire" on the cover of Business Week" a decade a go but who isn't in the "Fortune 500" by any stretch) or numerous other people, mainly from the US, Europe and Asia, who don't fit your imagined stereotype whatsoever. If you lifted the lid off SL and its anonymous avatars, you'd see more retired postal clerks in Columbus, Ohio shopping at Wal-marts or even working part-time there than you would see yacht owners on the Riveria -- there aren't any of those. Anshe incorporated in China years ago and invests in multiple worlds and I don't think she has a fraction of her one-time presence in SL despite the many people whose last name is "Chung" in SL now. From what I can tell, the honor of top landowners in SL belongs to completely other people, and has for a time, including at least one who left SL to start another world. The average land baron has more of a chance of being a single black mother in Detroit, who has to spend more than 12 hours a day online waiting on her customers in person, than a middle-aged white geek in Silicon Valley who never logs in while his minions collect rent. The small business owners of SL -- that's what they are, small business owners, whether with popular content creations or land, are moms struggling with cancer or injured war veterans trying to stay ahead of the latest twist of policy on games. They are not Mark Zuckerberg. If you are a wealthy person, you wouldn't be spending your wealth on the curious niche of SL, where land businesses are risky, with potential for huge losses, very slim margins, and enormous amounts of sweat equity. It just isn't viable. If you have money to invest in something online, you would be wiser to invest in an app or a shopping site. As for "LL has some wonderfully talented employees and contractors as well and I'm pretty cool with buying directly from them when possible" -- unless the Lindens have some secret businesses or alts I don't know about, the ONLY content you can "directly buy" from a Linden is a Linden home, although you could indirectly say you "bought the view" if you bought land on the Mainland beautified by a Mole-created road and some scenery. There isn't any content you can "buy from Lindens" except the Linden homes. And what I see is at least some business growing up around the Linden homes with furniture that fits their styles and sizes, add-ons, and so on. So while I realize this is reality for you -- "I don't see myself getting another large empty plot in a vast wasteland of other large empty plots and siphon the money I pay LL through a land baron. I quite like paying it directly to the Lindens and I think they are learning some really fabulous lessons from the success of Bellisseria" -- it isn't for an enormous amount of other people in SL. The fact that the Linden Homes have oldbies in it who have NOT given up their island homes is hardly the only factor that lets us know that -- we are also able to open up the map and see where the green dots are. They continue to be on private islands, which are not the "vast wasteland" that you might see on some parts of Mainland. It would be interesting to know how many direct owners there are of islands versus land barons -- given that most of the large rental agencies seem to need at least 100 islands to generate even a modest income I should think "direct owners" of islands is still a smaller category of owners. And again, think of those rental agents -- there are hordes of people, some from third-world countries, some from the third-world like environments of the United States -- serving clients for long hours and minimal pay. And a certain percentage of people making the content purchased by this nation of island renters. The content creators of SL work incredibly hard at very labor-intensive businesses with little return and increasingly high costs to be viewed at events or in classifieds and aren't on the Fortune 500 list, either. The Lindens do not view land barons as "siphoning off" their revenue -- what they pay IS their revenue. There's always been this peculiar factor of Linden content (land next to Linden roads and builds or water being more valuable than other land) and now the Linden Homes (at least for some small percentage of users) being a draw, and along with that, the value of the Linden presence inworld for their fan base (which ranges from coders who come to their office meetings on the server to people who like to get into snowball fights with them). Hence, this statement: "Hopefully once the fussy people get homes (or get homes they're satisfied with) @Patch Linden and the gang will start coming out to play again and that sort of fun with the much loved Lindens and Moles can't be offered by anyone other than LL." I'm trying to think of the last time I saw a Linden inworld. Maybe six months ago when a Linden actually teleported to a sim to try to get rid of this crazy prim that wouldn't delete? And before that...a year ago? More? It might actually be that my last substantive talk with a Linden was a few years ago at a tech show in NYC when Ebbe had a meet-up with residents. Let me suggest that the Lindens couldn't justify paying for full-time, benefited adults to come inworld and play with their customers, but maybe they can get some interns to do more of this? If the "fabulous lessons" that the Lindens have learned from Bellisseria is that to reach their core user base -- mainly middle-aged low-income employed or retired women, and to a lesser extent, semi-employed young men in their 20s who often make up their partners -- that they need to provide the kind of intensive staff time that we associate with Club Med vacation line-dancing or assisted living complexes in Florida, they know they will be out of business. No online world platform wants to become a caretaker for residents. The Lindens may have ideological aversion to land ownership (that I know is a fact for many of them) or aesthetic aversion (which you share with many of them) but they know where their meal ticket is and who saves them time, talent, and treasure -- the land barons of SL.

I don't know. I found it odd that I could not find a single tenant or friend to take the boathouse for a month. Maybe people just want their own property, but it's not all that (I have boathouses for rent with more room around them and more flexibility). The houses still seem awfully dinky to me. Are there really community events that aren't contrived? I don't know. I don't think they have that much affect on rentals because I think it's a different category of people. I'm not aware of tenants leaving for Belli. But maybe they have and I don't know. It's funny that it is mainly oldbies in it, apparently. And that means these oldbies may have land elsewhere on other accounts.

So what's the deal here, you have to keep refreshing the Linden Homes pages until you see something other than: Meadowbrook Tahoe Elderglen Shareta Osumai BTW I released a house boat and it was taken within a minute.

what's the URL of your blog?

I see more and more of AuctionServicesLinden land and I'm a bit puzzled. It's neither for sale nor rent, as if it is going up on the Lindens' Auction. But some of it is so weird, lots of jagged parcels stitched together that must be hard to auction off. I'm going to try filing a ticket about it and see what I get back

Yes, that's essential. Vendors have to be in your group and they also have to have ban powers. If you don't want them in a development group, put the land they are on in a separate group and put them in that group. Some have to set vendors to a group anyway or even need separate parcels to put search terms in. You need them to be 128 m to have a search/places ad, but even without that, they can do a classifieds ad with a landing by their vendors. You could put "payment information on file," but this draws a lot of complaints. I only have one sim with this feature which I offer for those who get really, really tired of being stalked by ex-partners and griefers re-spawning. But it means they can't invite their friends without PIOF. Still, you could consider making one haven like this. When you abuse report, get whole parties of people filing the ARs so that you get the Lindens' attention. They themselves say this and one AR in a mass doesn't get noticed. Make public lists of those you have banned and why, so there might be some social cost. Even if they make new alts, there's still a possibility they might use the same name or a version of that or some might know them. I have dealt with this for 15 years and I will go on dealing with it in all kinds of ways, ordinary and creative, because I think it's vital to establishing a beach-head in the Metaverse that encourages human civilization instead of anarchy. Take turns with your friends and colleagues dealing with this as it gets tiresome, be able to log off to break the attention of griefers. Five day old ban does not seem excessive -- you can always have a minimal info area for brand new people that has scripts and object creation turned off except for group. Be strong -- you're in the right, and you will ultimately prevail. Don't get discouraged because you are interesting and they are not.

There's another element to the backdrops phenom which I hadn't realized or thought about, illustrated with this bloggers' lament. I do a lot of social media posts about home & gardens, but I don't count myself at all among the H&G bloggers, which are a world apart I'd never want to be in. I don't believe in accepting free content from creators with the expectation that I'm going to blog about them -- and positively. I've made very few exceptions to this rule, mainly a few times when I was really stuck finding the perfect item in a designing contest and a creator offered something. I think by blogging about what I genuinely like and even more, by buying something to put in my rentals, I'm more authentic and lead to real purchases by real people instead of traffic to showy web sites that don't have clickthrough to purchases. In the world of payola blogging, it's a part of the system to get the freebies, sometimes entire gatcha sets which, to be sure, are often put on no-transfer. And it's part of the culture that it has to be a beautiful, gorgeous scene with little comment. And that drives busy bloggers with very low compensation in Lindens, if anything, and the freebies, to use backdrops. If they have lots of blogging duties to get through, rather than gallavant around the grid looking for settings where they might be able to rez (or might not), or see something used "naturally" in its environment (or have to struggle to set it up), they need to do what amounts to poorly-paid marketing and advertising for creators and make them look good at low cost in time and money. The backdrop isn't just for amateurs blogging their SL in a way that makes them look best; it's the blog slaves working for either creators or events or feeds doing this. I realized this is probably a lot more responsible for what we see in terms of Backdrop World than anything else! I'm always noticing things like the top creators disappearing from the top feeds because they've quarreled (or been priced out), or bloggers being dropped or not accepted on a whim, or bloggers being dispensed with entirely (I actually can't help thinking that's a good thing). Merchants pay a lot to be in events, and they except 360 service, which can include blogs, ads, feeds, even videos of their work. What a lot of work! It can't be done without backdrops.

I agree, although this is really another topic. Skybox and dome blight isn't so much about the backdrop tide, unless you think of skyboxes, in cramped box-like spaces, as a kind of "backdrop" (and I have to say, some backdrops have evolved into 3D spheres that are more immerse and in the round, so much so that you wonder why they just don't make scenes without the "fourth wall" especially to enable mixing and matching them. Which I do anyway. But it would make it easier. The blight you describe is fixed by moving these items at least 500 m up into the sky. It's absolutely unconscionable to put up those giant, sim-wide domes within the view -- they are 100 m often. Absolutely no excuse. They could be rezzed anywhere, and it's not even that the owners look out of them -- they don't have that feature in most cases. It's not like they want to be at helicopter hover height and look at the nice view created by others. It's that they are too lazy to first put a board up in the sky above 500 meters, then rez that dome. Or merely change the Z axis on that dome to shoot it up into the sky. It's pure laziness that they want to lift it up in the view with an eye to the ground. It's true also that people don't seem to rent those stacked-up boxes. I see them all around, and they're empty. How can the owners pay tier? Then after awhile, I see them abandoned. I think the pattern of a few big rental agencies that had had success with this model and do fill their units has gulled some into thinking they can just copy the outer format and do the same -- even if their skyboxes are ugly and their customer service non-existence.

Tiny flecks of white floated and swirled in the column of light. Snowflakes? But one landed on his hand: a fleck of paper. And now the ripping buzz of the saw was still louder, and there was also the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner... Brrrap! A tree shredder! Ahead of him, everything was empty bookcases, skeletons. Robert went to the end of the aisle and walked toward the noise. The air was a fog of floating paper dust. In the fourth aisle, the space between the bookcases was filled with a pulsing fabric tube. The monster worm was brightly lit from within. At the other end, almost twenty feet away, was the worm's maw - the source of the noise... The raging maw was a "Navicloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel..." The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in a tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stiched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. From Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge. Published by Tor in 2006

Yes, the thread is worth reading all the way through, especially this tweet which points out cogently that the plaintiff didn't actually find LL in breach, re: the substance of her job, finding security vulnerabilities! So all this yammering about Tilia is speculative. It's like the way Edward Snowden and his fan club falsely claim that "the US government is spying on you" merely because they, as an elected government of a liberal democracy, legitimately spy on some select people suspected of crime or terrorism, with methods or tools that "hypothetically" (or as I often point out "hysterically and hypothetically") *might* be used against "anyone". The capacity for a breach isn't a breach. I think this case will fall apart.

Oh, I see that now. Duly noted. Well, that thing about which we're talking about.

This lawsuits bundles together at least three separate issues that may combine in the plaintiff's head as being the most effective way to litigate against LL, but which are separate. And it may be that any one or more of the three claims are false, but then others may be true. We do not have the facts but at this point there is enough press coverage that it is more than fine to discuss it -- you don't know what a crippling effect this could have on our world and it's important the Lindens/the media have the facts from our side, too. It's also important to remember that this woman did give a lot in this job, and has been hurt, at least from her perspective, and it isn't necessary to disparage her as a person or ruin her life just because some of her claims may not be proven at least in legal terms. 1. Discrimination against on grounds of race or religion. I should think the Lab would be the last place to look for discrimination, as they have had a fairly diverse staff over the years, although like all Silicon Valley geeks, they don't like religious belief (especially the Christian sort). My complaint about their staffing is that they recruit from the user base which I think is a terrible idea, but it's a specific set of skills and "culture" so they justify it. And there is less of this than there was but it's not totally gone. But they seem to be genuinely open to diversity so this claim may not "stand up in court". 2. As for privacy, all companies online face this issue -- look at what just happened to Capital One, and the hacker, who turned herself in, seems to be mentally ill and has zillions of files from 30 other companies. All hugely weird. And then there's Russia and China... It's good that this role was conceived of "compliance" as it really should be another person/set of eyes on the existing security Lindens who are set in their ways. But staff at that level can only recommend, and shouldn't fume if they don't get what they want. Until Section 230 is changed, there isn't a whole lot the Lindens can do. They should welcome this change as it will actually relieve them of this sort of harassment suit. I don't see anything wrong with Tilia in this regard. You have to give your Social Security number to get a bank account or a credit card -- why is it such a big deal to give it to a company from which you intend to make money, to whom you also gave a credit card? And it's not required to just purchase tokens with money, but convert those tokens into money. I see a lot of Europeans complaining about having to show a passport as they would for a job or a credit card. But if you are a creator selling things in SL, this *is* a job or a bank card! It's not a unicorn fairy land. I think that's what is jarring people. I myself am puzzled as to why, having once provided this when they went through their age verification panic years ago, why I need to do it again, and I am also finding when it gives me the message that I have to "do more," it "goes nowhere" and I can't get it to work, but I figure it's buggy and I will get it sorted. As for the claim of no compartmentalization, this is speculative, and doesn't square with the experience I have had over the years dealing with Lindens and Moles. Every time I mention something I think is related to payment issues or my RL location or something in dealing with a support ticket, they say they can't see that information, they don't have access to it, and I believe they really don't. But as has been pointed out, there are logs that will likely come out in discovery, and I think this is a distraction. 3. Now for the claim of *****, this is something that has not been eradicated from SL. And this may be the only charge that sticks, even if this former Linden doesn't get any traction with her wrongful termination claim. Although here, too, she has to have the facts, or get them, and they may not be available. We have all seen these hideous Hentai ***** graphics on the events page which have been shoved into your face each time you open up search. I and others have AR'd this zillions of time; these are clearly children, and making a Japanese-style cartoon out of them doesn't fix that. But I was noticing the other day it's finally gone. It would disappear and come back again and again -- and now I see the timing may be related to this suit. I hope so. I don't think ***** is that common, even so, because most people do realize it is a crime in many countries and isn't just a cartoon and isn't just "nothing" you can use this awful euphemism with. Very rarely I do get child avatars who attempt to rent and have profiles filled with those "Daddy and Me" sort of groups and put adult furniture in their skybox -- so out they go in a jiffy with an AR to the Lab. I ban child avatars explicitly from a number of venues where they show up like camp sites, as do others who run sims. There is some static about this as "discrimination," but I find club owners and such hold the line on this because they don't want the problems associated with it. I have universally known the child avatars to be trouble for 15 years in SL, time and again, over and over, so I am absolutely immune to claims that they tend to be innocent. And any time I've given them the benefit of the doubt, if they didn't *****, they griefed or just made life for others miserable in other ways. It's a distressed persona that I personally want to avoid. YMMV but I don't care. The point is -- yes, LL is vulnerable here because of their ideological commitment to diversity, to which they think this extends. Yes, I realize there are even quite famous child avatars in SL and on the forums who are innocent. But the pushing of the envelope on this goes on constantly and I think this is the most serious thing in this case for LL. The problem is that without Section 230 being revised (which I heartily advocate for many reasons), they won't feel any heat to change this, and they only can sample-police it with key words now and then and ban a "Lolita" club or respond to ARs. To me, their stubbornness about removing those really graphic images on the events was emblematic of the problem, however. I hope the parties get through this. Nothing the plaintiff has changed is so systematic in SL, or based on actual malice or negligence on the part of the Lindens, and therefore it shouldn't get traction. If the facts can be found on some of the issues, even discrimination, LL has the means to change it.

Oh, there, thank you, you've explained it to me! Every time this discussion comes up, I recall this photo on social media of the Kentucky Downs. This old lady was watching the end of a horse race with a look of joy on her face, totally in the moment, while two young people beside her with fiddling with their phones and trying to get the "photo finish". I sometimes go out with my children and find that they want to capture things with their phones -- pictures they never look at again -- rather than just living in them. Of course so many public places have people in twos or threes all looking at their phones, not talking to each other. This gets most absurd when you see a couple out on a date just thumbing their phones the entire time. Decades ago, the French philosopher Guy Debord said, "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." He's very difficult to read (and committed suicide). Maybe it has become too hard to look at reality. I remember Philip Rosedale (founder of Second Life) used to say the skyscrapers in New York City would all become empty because no one would need to go to work, they would all work online and live in a virtual world. Well, maybe they could fill up those towers with servers or something. I appreciate how you have related it to a RL trend, because we tend to think that in SL, we are somehow isolated from, or different from RL trends, but we aren't at all, if anything we're an early or concentrated form of them. I am trying to think if one form of activity is cannibalizing the other, and I suppose it is...

That's very well said. I agree that there is way less attention to scripting and interactivity to the point where one famous designer recently put out a whole skybox and furniture set with no sit poses in the chairs and couch. I was surprised and annoyed- and it wasn't the first time, either. I myself put in the poses because even slow learners like me can use the newly-revised version of Lex Neva's tool to place poses. So why didn't they bother? Maybe because people shooting photos don't use the poses inside chairs as they don't work always for the scene you want, or they are repetitive or awkward in conjunction with clothing (I've seen this with Designing Worlds, they have to bring their own poses with them). And maybe they know that people just drape themselves around a build posing, not living/interacting. Or maybe they are just under the crush of events, which are like sweat shops. I make it a hobby to take all these gorgeous looking mesh food and drink items that don't dispense and make them dispense, even if I have to put some over-primmed cocktail from 2004 into it. I will scour the full perm items on offer in search of something that might be close enough to use and even managed to make a whole brunch tray myself after long hours of struggle because I couldn't believe this scrumptious sprinkly toast couldn't be put in your hand and "eaten". Lately, this space has filled in with bento, but it seems unless you have the bento hands out there, if you take the food with bento anims, it may go in your hand but then you "do nothing". I'm puzzled by the mechanics of this but have found it repeatedly. I don't have bento hands and I managed to make something that still worked for the animations but they don't always and I have no idea why. Some bento creators are also deliberately not making the eating/drinking anims but just "hold" because it is god-awful hard to do, lining it up for both male and female, small and large, human and furry, etc. Some diligent makers will put in like 3-4 sets of these anims. I am at heart a sim from the Sims Online so I want things to be interactive and dispensable. And I find there is a contingent of people in SL who want/like the same thing. I am trying to understand the life of the backdropper. I suppose are some people who only get backdrops and only use them in sandboxes or no-autoreturn land -- I do see them there. That way they don't have to buy or rent land although you could do this on a 512 with the elaborate nature of these backdrops (they are terribly primmy however). But others (including my tenants but also neighbouring land-holders) put the backdrop up on the roof of their house and shoot there, or put it in the yard somewhere or the sky, but still maintain the whole compound of house, pool, helicopter, skybox, garage etc. The backdrop is just like one more luxury. Backdrops are less expensive than houses, but put them in a gatcha and you can make a fortune from them.

The SL Public Land Preserve which I run and which is helped by many people with tier, cash, and content donations allows you to rez at the locations after you join the group for $5. Look it up in search/places you will likely find something that is scenic although I have to say I focus more on usability, interactivity, things to do, quests, hangouts, etc. more than "scenery" although some places are indeed pretty and I see them cropping up from time to time on blogs or Flickr.

You've just hit upon something here -- it's about the poses. Good fashion or exploration photographer shows the avatar not just in some vacant-eyed, system feet-splay, but often with elaborate poses that feign action and even facial expressions. The reason those gorgeous exploration sims in destination can't have poses is because poses seldom can be used by third parties! That is, if I buy a pose for, say, reaching up to a bookshelf, or twirling an umbrella, I can't put an umbrella or bookshelf out with that pose either in it or in a poseball (not used so much anymore) because only I can use it, nobody else. Then what's the point? I can only use it to pose my avatar and snap some pics for Flickr, since Twitter doesn't work anymore. To be sure, sex furniture has poses that enable couples to sync. That's not all of SL, however. I will even go out on a limb and say that I actually think people spend more time shopping and decorating and photographing than having sex in SL. Seriously. But an ordinary rock or tree pose thing doesn't have what an adult chair has. And that's likely because of permission issues. If you sell an animation a thing that can be used by a third party, it would have to be on transfer and copy (I think that's the story). There are theft deterrence scripts for such things (I've commissioned one that works pretty well and I see others, on various principles) but in general, the issue of furniture and its poses and the abuse by thieves is an age-old story. So that means it is rare to have a thing, a station, a tree, a rock, stairs, that other people besides the creator (initially) and you, the owner, can interact with. Interact! With groups of friends. So you're not just in a pose by yourself photographing. I have wrestled with this mightily, and have got various scripters to make, for example, a music box that third parties can play (in a hunt); some food and drink dispensers that the buyer and his guests can both use; perhaps a few other things. But mainly it's not possible -- hence backdrops I suppose. I once got this Necromancer set that I thought would enable me OR a visitor to a haunted monastery be able to cycle through things like wielding an axe or flying or crouching or whatever, in some kind of smooth routine (I know there is a dining table that enables all the guests to be in a smooth set of animations, for example). But t'was not to be -- what it did enabled me to pose with it as if I was in the act of wielding an axe, etc. but not animated, just posed. That would be perfect for fashion magazines. Or making story books, which I have also tried to make in SL (the way we used to do with the Sims Family Albums) but it's all just too hard and time-consuming. When you point this out, people inevitably reference Experience. I've also wrestled with that. It's somewhat buggy. And the things you can do with it are limited, like you can have a woosh teleporter without the map pulling up, or you can have a thing you buy or pick up and then you can walk through a wall or a gate, or you can have a HUD and collect things in a basket or backpack in conjunction with the HUD -- horribly laggy. But that's about it. Somehow I thought Experience was going to enable the ability to have third parties (not creator or owner but visitor) click on a thing and have it take you through, let's say, wielding a pick axe to pound on a rock, find a gem, pick it up, polish it, etc. The way the first Linden machina about the Wild West had "acting" in machina (people argue about this) actually a big set of anims that you click on once and it takes you through the whole series. I realize the reason there aren't more of these is that it is hard and time-consuming and then becomes costly. I was hoping Sansar would advance this more and maybe it has but I was there a year or so ago the only thing that was better was being able to control signs in the environment.

You know, this issue plagues me, too, since I began trying to police scripts more on sims with lots of active objects and low script time, especially one that kept going down to its knees almost like on schedule (until the Lindens moved it to another server, but even so, I'm going through and trying to weed out high time scripts). I don't know if there is some spec like "the maximum script time on a homestead". Because what matters is the interplay of all the scripts and avatars and pets on *your* homestead. It's the accumulation of them, along with the avatars, that can make it laggy. Sometimes it seems some really high time scripts are whaling away on a sim and it isn't laggy at all, but that's because there aren't more than 2000 scripts anyway. I find when it gets above 5000 it becomes problematic and 6000 means it is almost out of time. Yet they limp along somehow. In this regard, I do wonder if what you can't see doesn't lag you personally. Recently, a tenant put up walls around her store because it seemed that her customers would arrive and have everything rez faster if they didn't have the whole sim to look at. I suppose that's the theory behind the decision by many merchants to put stores up in the sky in boxes. I don't allow big walls like that so in exchange for removal I went around trying to delete things that might lag the sim -- to my horror, I found some sion chickens (yes, I still have them!) had hatched their eggs while I hadn't paid attention, awful! But even with them gone there was still little script time -- it really means deleting bunches of stuff, furniture not being used, doors that could simply be taken off, scripts inside trees which can be removed and they still work, etc. etc. But I do wonder if what you don't/can't see doesn't lag you. I should think it would still lag the sim overall anyway.

Years ago it was somethingawful.com and then 4chan.com and then various reddits, but I don't know now. What you're describing does sound more like Tiny Empires though. I see infestations of there around and I no longer allow them in my rentals because they fill up the sim and annoy people just with their presence. I see bunches of them in the Linden Homes, BTW.

In one sense all of SL is just a backdrop. I get that people like to pose and play dress up and take pictures -- but why wouldn't they want to do this more in the round, with action, in full-fledged builds? There are so many amazing places in SL. Destinations is just the tip of the iceberg. You could be posing without the edges cutting off.

I've just been going around to events, and buying things at events, and I've been marveling once again how many backdrops there are! Most events have more backdrops than real houses! The idea is to have a thing to pose in that isn't a whole house or park so that you can take fabulous photos for Flickr or your fashion blog -- which is more of a thing than the actual living in virtuality these days. It's weird how it evolved. These backdrops are often prettier and better designed than full-blown houses or forests -- which is why I buy them sometimes even though I don't do fashion or home & garden photography but just blog my thoughts or experiences. But the reality is, they have way more prims often than a real house. I have even written to some of the authors and asked if they *could* make a real house out of their backdrop, it is so nice. In fact, I just made a Secret Garden area with backdrops out of the Enchantment event because some of them were so cool. And what, people are going to come and pose around them and then post to their blogs or social media? They might. But I always try to make them into actual houses or chambers or forests, I try to string some of them together. Or take them apart and mix and match them. But this is madness because they not only are high prim, they often have no backs! And sometimes I've had to spend a day applying backstops to the backdrops so they aren't weird from behind, and even put walking prims on them, and by the time I've done, I've built a whole town and have no prims left over for tenants. I am still trying to understand the psychology of wanting to come into a virtual world, with all its magnificence, the ability to fly and teleport and explore, geographic contiguity and so on, and spend your time posing in front of a backdrop you can't even walk or sit on. Is it due to lag? Thoughts?

I have a device called Random Compass that does that, people fill it with landmarks and you click and go to a random one. It's fun! Work to maintain, however.