Prokofy Neva

I deal with this issue constantly as a rentals agent. It is the kind of real-life human behaviour that is hard-wired into the brain from evolution, the territorial imperative, and you can't get rid of it online so you have to work around it and if anything, accommodate it. The fear and hatred are rooted not only in a need for resources, basically food, shelter, and fire, and keeping "the other" away, but later fear that one's progeny might not actually be one's heirs, i.e. if the wife had another partner who fathered her children. Paternity and property rights go together. Since you don't really need any of this in SL, especially the proof of paternity and the food, why don't you just open up your house and if anything perch on top of it like a bird since you don't need shelter? Why are houses like RL houses and not branches in a tree (mostly)? Again, you can't erase human hard-wiring so don't try to. People really, really, really fear a stranger even going on their sex furniture with someone else, let alone their own partner -- and this is in a world where you can't catch STDs or AIDS. The Lindens over the years gave up their cosmic engineering around this issue and put in property ownership, property lines, ban lines, and allowed orbs -- which I think they should have deprecated at the dawn of time. Later, they put in "avatars can't see me" -- which you would think is the ultimate privacy. But yet it isn't, because the fear of somebody in your house, maybe on your sex furniture or just "there" with their cooties is completely unsettling. It's the biggest reason for move-outs. Yet the people complaining about it usually can't afford the expensive humper bunkers on the homesteads or islands. So they make skyboxes and orbs -- but it's never enough because someone could still cam them (and Firestorm and others let you know when someone cams you. So why don't these paranoid people lock up their land with orbs or "group only"? Because either they don't know how, or their landlord doesn't allow it (like me, on the ground, although skyboxes are ok), or they still want the convenience of their friends arriving easily -- but want to vent all their paranoia and hate on strangers that stumble across the line. I think there's also a basic lack of good will in SL that could have been remedied much earlier in its history by not allowing ad farms and griefing as much but honestly, I don't know how to do it today. Except by patiently telling people who get crazy like this that the reason you landed in their yard is because you always type in the name of a sim to the world map and TP there rather than hunting for LMs, and for 10 years the 128,128,0 spot was a big, empty, abandoned field, but today it's their back yard. And? So what? It's not worth ejecting over when I immediately fly away anyhow? I have zillions of LMs of stores and various interesting sites that are now changed, and I go there and land in somebody's house sometimes, and get a boot. They don't care about explanations. I don't know how to fix this. Over time, as land gets cheaper and it is easier to get rid of annoying types without maximum security methods, perhaps with soft bumpers that leave 96 m on parcels for people to pass through or something, or with some kind of system of verification that lets people know you are not a creep (they also tried that in early SL with pos rates and neg rates and it went in the opposite direction). Hell is other people. So is Second Life. But since those other people might be your customers, at least if you are in business you learn to think twice before ejecting people.

You can always call me about a prospect like that, I might be able to take cash rent or a tier contribution, I give $450/wk credit for 1024 m contribution.

Uzbekistan. Seriously.

The edit window opening over the very object I've editing. Yes, duh, you can push it to the side. But it keeps coming back! It's amazing how people don't believe this happens although I've put ample numbers of screenshots in the tech section. It's so perverse. The only reason I can figure this goes on is because most creators work outside of SL and so they don't notice this, which humble prim wranglers do notice. And since they are a lobby that have LL's ear, they haven't mentioned it as an issue so nothing gets done. Yet anyone merely placing furniture could be bothered by it.

You can file a ticket and the Lindens run a script to do this for you. When you file the ticket, make sure you explicitly tell the Lindens they have the right to log on your avatar and run this script or you will go several rounds sorting out permission to do this. And explain that you know what is involved, i.e. folders filed by alphabet or numeral, which then require a lot more filing on your part, but which will enable log on.

Dear Oz, thanks for getting on the forums and providing answers! I read them carefully. I have been in Second Life for nearly 15 years now, imagine that. And what a long, strange trip it has been. And most of those "flat" folders in my inventory come from the old days of 10 years ago when everything was done this way without a thought, and no one ever said anything about it, neither Lindens or knowledgeable residents! It may seem hard to believe, but if there had been more messaging about "inventory hygiene," we would have done it. People talked about how large inventories lagged you and how you should try to control them but they *did not connect that with log-on issues, ever.* Remember, those were the days when the Linden library and all Linden made distributed items were put on all perms, creating endless opportunity for griefing and appearing as if a grief object was made by a Linden, or made by the person who rezzed the Linden item out of the library. That's not done anymore, but it's unfortunate because you can't convex hull some of the high-prim things like the avian teapot because they're not even on mod anymore. Actually, more than half of my inventory (60,000) is carefully -- painfully -- filed in sub-folders off "Objects" that obviously do not hang directly from the root, especially after an inventory loss of 15,000 items last year you may recall which led the Lindens to change some things about trash warnings. That hurt! Actually, I have come to see this loss as another problem - the ability to accidentally put 15,000 items into a prim -- something I have now seen replicated at least once, creating an object that Lindens had to take multiple times to get off the server (and that only had like 5,000 items in it). That's insane and there should be a hard stop on it as it is too easy to do -- especially if you have a large inventory that loads badly BUT you have in fact sorted it into sub folders, which means an entire sub-folder can be shoved into a prim when your cursor slips (obviously this isn't done purposefully). EVEN SO, another good chunk of my flat inventory is caused by a very modern and pernicious phenomenon called "silent unpacker," a script that automatically unpacks purchases, especially gatchas, right into your inventory "flat" where obviously it isn't sorted. You can't be a good citizen and file your purchases immediately away from the "top level" into a sub-folder of a system folder (like "objects" or "clothing" sub-files) because it has already zoomed out of the box into top-level inventory! When I look at my "flat" folders I see other than those of 10 years ago, they are numerous hunt items, gatchas, and sets that the merchants deliver in folders right to the top. I really loathe that script because it makes you lose inventory -- you bat away incoming items thinking you will file them out of the box and then whoops, they're gone (if single-copy). As for this new Linden "de-flattening" filing service, it is definitely a good thing -- although highly arbitrary as it is filing all "top" objects, photos, and landmarks into either alphabetic or dated folders. Only *some* things are put in alphabetic folders and not for every letter of the alphabet - so I ended up with a set of like 6 folders with "!" and "C" or whatever. Then the dated folders are arbitrary in the sense that the date only reflects either an arbitrary date or the oldest date or something and not of most of what is inside the folder. Still, from there you can work at sub-filing. So I'm not complaining -- since log-on was my goal -- just explaining that it's arbitrary. Fortunately, search works. For me, however, this process led to error messages "Can't Create Inventory" when I logged on -- with a dozen things. And still does that. What are those things not created? Who knows? There's also the funny issue of the things that *didn't* sort. They should have -- as they were at top level -- I remember them, they are some of my oldest things OR things I didn't manage to delete which griefers spammed at me. That suggests corrupt or malicious files. Among these are the infamous Rodney Linden Bear with its chat commands to create orbs to ride to people or kiss them and so forth -- total nuisance. Rodney, an extreme cosmic engineer did not last long at the Lab, possibly due to his friendship with the Woodbury miscreants. Someday, a Linden should examine that Rodney Linden Bear closely -- it's not on mod so a resident can't but I do see an obvious Woodbury prim in it. Also: even wearing a system avatar with no attachments, I still get "fail" messages. I will take this up with the relevant Lindens. But it's better than trying to log on 30 times even on totally empty sims and not getting on. Thank you! Now what do you think about my idea to have the ability to store inventory online rather than on your avatar? After all, inventory is on the Marketplace so it can "go" online. The KittyCats breedables let you put the cats online in a "Menagerie" where you can view and even feed and breed them online so they don't take up prims or lag your sim if you have a lot of them. So isn't it possible?

@WhirlyFizzle I have had dozens of error messages saying "Fatal Error! SL Version Checker" - something like that. I'll try to capture it when it happens again. @Oz So if I unchecked getting automatic downloads and only want them on demand, why is it still doing this in the background I totally get it that you need to distinguish between 32bit and 64bit. But after all, we did this before, for years, by looking at what our system was and choosing the correct SL download. And as far as know, it didn't work otherwise. And if SL is offering me a download when I log-on mandatorily (again, I thought I had unchecked "automatic" but maybe it fell out after so many re-installs), wouldn't it already know whether I had 32bit or 64bit? I mention this merely because it's one more layer of stuff in the struggles to get logged on. So I wanted to find out more about it so I could shut it off possibly. The reason I don't opt to have the candidate viewers or optional downloads as I used to enthusiastically because my log-on is so fragile now, it takes dozens of times to get logged on. Apparently the diagnosis for this now is inventory files (which Lindens now re-sort for you) but that's not a total explanation.

I noticed that odd cursor, too. Although it was a big tan cross on light background. It was so strange that while browsing through the world map, I thought someone had made a little island with a cross on it until I realized it was the cursor itself! This lasted all through the last version of SL but seems to be gone now and I didn't screen shot it. I wondered if LL changed the graphics to the cursor. I don't use double click on inventory because it only makes whatever I click on go on to my avatar, which then strips off my attached clothing.

So, it used to be in the old days, when my avatar wouldn't work chronically and I couldn't log in or I kept crashing, but only on my main account with a lot of inventory, not on the alts with hardly any, the Lindens -- without asking permission to do so, because it's a given that they can do this -- would log my avatar on and do a bunch of tests and often respond to me that they had removed a "corrupted file". I had this happen multiple times. But now there is a new nail for the hammer to see, which I learned after some 10 days and 3 Lindens went back and forth multiple rounds to get permission to log on my avatar and re-do my "flat inventory". Since I went to a lot of trouble to re-organize my inventory after a big inventory loss last year of some 15,000 items, I was puzzled. What is "flat"? Inara Pey happened to mention in some notes on a users' meeting: There is some work being carried out by the Lab that improves their ability to fix back-end inventory issues. This work is getting an “unusually thorough” QA pass, so may be a while before it is ready for support deployment. Also, the Lab is working on a new log-in process that adds more checks to the inventory queries performed during log-in. Currently, some of the queries, a necessary part of the log-in process, can be subject to database look-up failures that go unreported to the viewer, leading to inventory issues for the user. The new process will ensure that if a query fails, an error message will be returned to the viewer, allowing it to request further look-ups. However, it will be a while before this enters production. A reminder that large flat inventories (e.g. thousands of items on the same level) can cause the inventory queries to time-out and log-in to time-out. Should this happen, an inventory transform can be requested from support, which breaks large flat inventories down into a folder structure. So what I've put together is that it is not the files I have put under the system files like "objects" but the ones that go in "flat" at the system level themselves. These are mainly old files of years ago when this is how everything automatically went in. And also some new files that I don't manage to catch that have that horrid "silent unpacker" that automatically flings everything into your inventory, not letting you pull it out of a box's contents so you can sort it properly. This new feature of SL merchant practice is contributing greatly to the "flat inventory" problem. So now the Lindens are going to reorganize this flat inventory into alphabetical files -- although I hope the 50,000+ items I have under "objects" in all kinds of categories and sub-categories (but no more than 3-4 down) will not be de-filed. My inventory is 117,000. The Lindens should say if really there is a ceiling for inventory. It seems to me after about 90,000 is when I began to have all these problems. If I had known about the "flat" problem years ago I might have solved it sooner. I find the only cure (or seeming cure) for the inability to log on now, or the log-off immediately after logging on, or not all inventory showing up, is to log off, clear cache even several times (force it to clear as you first click to start up again) and deleting the "settings" files finally manages to get me back on. But usually not for long. Anything strenuous, and it's "Darn!" all over again. Since SL inventory can be held outside of the world on the Marketplace, naturally I wonder why there can't be inventory storage online so that the avatar isn't weighted down. Sort of like the "Cattery" in the KittyCats system where you can hold the cats online. They could even charge for this. But if you can run the Marketplace, surely you could run Warehouse where I could keep unused inventory that I don't want to delete. There's no question that the less inventory you have, the better your avatar works and has less problems with log-ons and crashes and also with clothing errors and whatnot. I still think that since I didn't have this problem some months (and some SL versions ago) that it isn't about inventory but something else, maybe indeed a corrupt file. OR there is something different about the way the Lindens do inventory now so that this is happening. As for Inara's notes, I'm not getting why "more checks" will mean better log-ons. I should think it will worsen them.

I see this all the time now as an error -- but I never heard of it and I swear it wasn't there before. It's even an exe file. Why is it even needed? What, LL's servers can't themselves tell what version is logging on without having to put files on your computer to do this?

It's not clumsy. It reflects a truth for many people. If it isn't your truth, perhaps look again. The "Grief Olympics" is exactly what you entered into, when you began to complain about some moral lapse on my part (pretending it's a "clumsy comparison"). "Not unlike" is not "like" or "likened to". Perhaps you are uneasy about SL in general as something "frivolous" -- many people have this worry and feel they can be shamed by others for wasting time in a virtual world. But that's on you. You're welcome to have the last word, as this is truly a stupid hypothetical discussion that you decided to get preachy about due to your own apprehensions.

In my lifetime, I have had my grandparents, parents, child, friends, relatives, close neighbours all die. So I don't speak idly. I imagine you have not had anything remotely like the experiences I have had (especially with the death of an infant). I realize your gunning to somehow shame me or coerce me into writing something different but I won't be doing that. SL is something I've invested a lot of time and effort in. If it stopped tomorrow, indeed this would be a great life change *not unlike* the death of a person, the loss of a job or home or whatever. A *life change*. If you find that somehow frivolous, that's fine but as I said, I won't be changing what I write. I don't take to moral brow-beating.

I guess "not unlike" doesn't get across to you very well.

I find it hard to believe that this tactic will catch on, people are so used to prims/land impact. There isn't anything wrong with borrowing prims from water or a commons to give more prims to parcels. It's what group rentals on the Mainland are all about. It seems like an exotic thing to be offering in meters as most people won't do the math.

This is merely a new form of the old racket of putting land for sale so it shows up on the map and in lists along with also offering it for rent -- done all the time, habitually by some, and even I do it occasionally. Advertising is a serious problem in SL. It is very hard to get noticed, there is really no advertising realm as I've mentioned many times, and so people use these techniques, and I'm not surprised that particular aggressive land dealer has latched on to this auction/rent technique. Of course, it runs the risk of having someone buy it after someone has rented it and the landlord hasn't come on in time to change the status.

Don't you think that if SL itself disappeared, Open Sim would be not far behind? I have been to all those other worlds and didn't care for them much in part because they didn't have old, familiar places I have owned or built or visited or shared for 14 years in SL. So if SL went away, I don't think it would be that compelling to go and try to work from scratch unless a significant number of content creators and potential renters might show up in that other place, but I don't know if I would have the stamina to start over, having done this twice, first with The Sims Online, then SL. I think then I would rather go and work on a novel or my memoirs or writing political blogs or something in that vein if I couldn't have the inventory and land and connections to people I had in SL. Sad, but then, not unlike the end of college or the death of your parents or a divorce or a move to a new house or any big life change.

Maybe what needs to happen is that you and others who care about supporting the arts in SL should just walk around the LEA and all its works and raise money and find sims to create an independent LEA. I'm not saying that would be easy, but if all you did was get a 4096 and have some small exhibits, it would be a start. Perhaps you might find one of these big companies would donate a sim to you for a time.

"Europe" and "European Union" are not synonymous, but they significantly overlap. Do you favour Brexit? Again, that's the issue, if you are making so much of this non-point. If you are really engaged in significant charity work, then you shouldn't have any problem admitting that getting non-government money is difficult and private foundations are scarce in Europe. You may have some specific experience in some specific country that has shaped your view, but it simply doesn't square with the hundreds of Europeans I have dealt with in the non-governmental sector for 40 years. Since my identity is easily traced and yours isn't, you can rattle on about this as much as you like, but it doesn't distract from the basic truism everyone knows in this business. For some reason, you need to be perverse, and you have likely even forgotten the original reason why. But this is a thread about LEA, which is exactly like some bureaucratic and useless government agency that is biased when it isn't politicized.

Where can we see your art?

What *would* be a measure of success? In the real world, artists and galleries have metrics, whether good reviews (or any reviews), number of visitors, number of donations. They might still have "art for art's sake" but there, too, they will have some kind of ideological or aesthetic criteria, and more and more nowadays this is about political correctness. But still, they have a yardstick or some kind. What do you use in SL? Traffic? Donations? Blogs? It's not quite the same.

Europe is indeed an idea and a continent and remains so. The European Union isn't a "country" but a territorial body that attempts to align its votes at the UN and have unified policies. Are you for Brexit? It's always easy to talk about "plenty of charity, secular and religious" when you are not the fund-raiser or even the giver, but you just have a vague idea. I could like up 50 European NGO leaders from Europe who could tell you how hard it is to raise money from the PRIVATE sector as distinct from the EU or Council of Europe or governments. There isn't the tax incentive we have in the US, for example, where people can write donations off their income tax. There are large companies like Skype or Mercedes Benz that have philanthropic programs, but there aren't as many in the US. Everyone in the non-profit field knows this. That's why there are so many Europeans with American grants.

What no one ever admits about ObamaCare on the left is that the individual states had low-cost insurance for poor people who "can't afford insurance". I know, I was one of them as a single parent, and my son also benefited after he had a terrible accident and took more than a year to rehabilitate. State and city programs take care of people in those situations at the cost of high taxes which is why some corporations leave New York. Yes, Missouri doesn't have this level of care. But by and large, the states all have this. You could argue that the job of the federal government should have been supporting the Missouris and leaving the New Yorks alone. No one ever did because socialists like global not local plans. So people who can't afford ObamaCare and don't fear the punitive tax for *not having* it because they have low income or won't pay taxes do have options and still do. It's easy to blame insurance and drug companies and we can all tell horror stories and I have many to tell. But the reality is, the human propensities to prolong life, enhance life, and avoid sickness are the root of the issue and that won't change.

This is all very thoughtful and well said, and it's true that art enhances the platform that LL wants to sell. I'm the last person to think of corporations or corporate-sponsored art as somehow inherently unfair, corrupt, or ineffective. That's what socialist governments are like, and LL is more like a socialist government than a real corporation. I don't think corporations or capitalism are "inherently corrupt" the way socialism is; but of course corporations and capitalism in a liberal democratic society must be regulated and be under the rule of law. Linden Lab is not a corporation like most, for ideological reasons. The founders and even the current staff have their roots in "the California ideology" or technosocialism of the Chomsky or AOC type or technocapitalism of the oligarchic or Randian type and so they don't behave like, oh, Wendy's or your local hardware store. The chief strange thing about LL is they run and cringe from their main, best-selling product -- land, i.e. servers, and that means they run from their chief customers -- end-use land owners and rental agents. They don't embrace them, culturally or economically. Once in awhile they wake up to reality and lurch forward with a discount on islands but then only offset it by raising the cost of cash-outs. Imagine if the Hoover people ran from and loathed vacuum cleaners, and felt their real destiny was to launch Moon and Mars space probes to get lunar or martian soil samples. You would think they are crazy. LL has this deep illusion that they can break from their main product and core customer base -- land and land-owners -- and get their income from skimming content sales in the form of tax, or in currency sales. No government including the European Union in the history of the world has made the large bulk of their income from this VAT-like action. Yet the Lindens persist in this delusion, which explains why all their advertising is about "becoming a creator" and all the people they feature and fete are creators. You might think their reasoning is that creators create content, and therefore they serve those land-owners who want to put something on their land. But that's only partly true of the economy, which is about services (renting or sex work or model training or clerking or blogging) as well. The Lindens' concept of "art" is "what the creators we fete do" -- so their logic is "Let's pick the cream of the crop and fund them." But for all the reasons we've all been saying, it doesn't work. They can't have a logic like, "art is good as motel art or for ordinary mass-taste people to put in their homes". That would be culturally and ideologically verboten for them. But it's true. The Lindens can't embrace their chief customer and chief product, and so they become completely unconcerned about their chief problem -- that only 1 out of 10 retain or whatever the low number is. If you only care about content and taxing content production or purchase, you think of the population related to that as not so terribly important -- less creators/buyers, just tax more. Or if it grows slowly, ok, but it will get there. Whereas if your chief product is in fact land, then you worry about people not staying and buying land. Hence Linden Homes, which is sort of their crash plan to catch up on all the years of running from their chief product, and somehow harnessing it to their ideology -- that is is not a free market, but what they create and manage, and hence their feted creators and content purchase is at the center of the project -- which is why they are back to planning a Busy Ben's mall. LOL. Every other day, it seems, I stumble on people who have bought cheap land or even land a bit expensive but still not crazy (PG waterfront) and made art lots out of it, even if surrounded by blight. It gives you hope. I saw this just last night. Oblivious of a giant sex worker sign, someone was making nice art and beautifying the world. It wasn't even art for sale. So it's true that if artists think of parcels and not sims, they could do more -- but even sims are only $175 a month, which means you need to sell other things, whether rentals, souvenirs, landscaping services or whatever, and there is not only no shame in this, it is not somehow "unaesthetic". I don't anticipate this changing. The Lindens will go on as a very idealistic California-idea corporation that will continue to shun land as mass low culture and poor taste and "heavy" or something, since it requires servers. Of course content and sales of content require servers, too, but the Lindens pushed a lot of the stores off land on to the MP in order to reduce servers. I think there Grand Idea is to have a world that is really only like a trailer park that you hook up to. You have to bring the trailer (server) or even the parking lot, too, and you just hook up to their electricity. I think inherently, because the California idea and LL are elitist and techno-utopian and shun and fear mass taste, they can't be democratic and free. And that's the only thing that continually brings new life blood into the art world, that big cities like New York or Los Angeles attract young people, and minorities and poor people have a chance they don't have out in the sticks. There are the two ancient Greek methods, Sparta, where a small, select group of elite youth are taken off to a mountain to be educated in a strict and isolated environment, or the Athens approach, where out of the free and democratic class of 40, perhaps 1 or 2 geniuses might emerge. And it seems Sparta didn't leave a legacy except in places like North Korea.

It's worth pointing out that the ills you list are not *caused by* charity; they merely persist *in spite* of charity. The overwhelming amount of charity in this country isn't given by "religious kooks" but by mainstream religious organizations. Catholic hospitals, to mention but one area, regardless of what you think about abortion or predator priests. Thank God -- literally -- for the private sector both religious and secular that have established a civil society more responsible to those in need than any other society in the world. Once you see how dependent Europeans are on government and how hard it is to do charity in the private sector there, let alone in Russia or China, you might have a better perspective on "Murica". Failing schools and prisons are terrible, but private NGOs rather that local or federal government have done an enormous amount to help people. Take only something like the Innocence Project or the Vera Institute. Again, I think this is something you're saying out of ideological belief rather than close personal experience actually seeing the difference between city and private programs related to justice or health, as I have. With ObamaCare now in practice, and not undone by Trump, and with the states in fact having similar health care programs for the poor long before Obama -- I know, I benefit from them -- it's hard to talk about "insurance and drug companies making health care unaffordable." Again, whatever your own personal experience and belief systems, the overall truth is that the majority have benefited from such government-sponsored health insurance and it's hard to go on with these talking points from the radical end of the Democratic Party. The idea that you can't sell things to support an art sim and that this "disrupts" the mood or theme or immersion is what perpetuates the poverty of the art world. It is very easy to weave such items into the experience and I have seen it done often and do it myself.