Prokofy Neva

No, it doesn't, because that is some warmed-over 1960s or 1970s pop psych paperback thesis which has no validity. Worse, it's truly a ghastly thesis for society, because it means that little children playing in their schoolyard who now have no legs after a Russian bombing "deserved it" because of some conflict about which they could understand nothing. That little children in their cribs in Gaza bombed by Israel "had it coming" because of something their rulers did. It's about as far away as you can get from any notion of civil society and the rule of law -- and just law in a liberal democratic society. It leads to "might makes right," because at any time, a vicious griefer, like a terrorist, can say they were "smashing capitalism," or "evil land barons exploit the people" and should have their sim crashed. Or whatever. In fact, this is the key to understanding the griefers' success in society -- that people like you enable them, by thinking that the targets somehow "attract it" or "deserve it" by either "bad karma" or unspecified "bad deeds" -- even if the punishment isn't commensurate with the alleged crime. Thanks for illustrating this principle so nicely. It explains a lot. That you get a bunch of yahoos on the forums to nod and smirk and likey-like means nothing because this principle is NOT one you actually ever want applied to you. Let's say you put out 500 prims in a 70 prim rental, deliberately. The landlord returns all the prims and evicts you. Did you have this coming? What about you made this happen? Were your actions in fact to blame, not "something about you"? Was the landlord fair? Did he have a rule like this? Etc. When you get in a car accident in RL, or even you just lose your expensive virtual car in a crash in SL, you don't say to yourself, "I shouldn't have put out those 500 prims."

Let me suggest that four years of crashing my sims and driving my paying tenants away, and hounding me in SL and RL, would be a value greater than $7000L, so I'm all for any kind of compensation. "Forgive your enemies and do good to those who hate you" -- if only it worked in SL like it works in RL!

I would call it NO PAYMENT INFO ON FILE BORN 2007

Yes, I would often go to my happy place, called "my real-life apartment in the real world," whereupon griefers from SL would call my RL phone and play the Soviet National Anthem in the middle of the night, scaring my RL children. Sure.

Had a gal fly up and hand me $7000L in her account to make amends for her griefing me with a gang of losers for years. That's the sort of reparations we must all encourage. I got a mesh body, mesh head, and bought some original art works. In general, I don't think griefers reform, however. They just grow older and write thinky faux scholarly papers about "transgressive behaviour," "altnerative communicative strategies," and "signifying otherness" in virtual worlds.

Always and everywhere, since time immemorial, since Cain and Abel, since Beaver and Eddie Haskell, griefers have pretended that they are cultural or political and you are behind the times and that you just haven't learned to use de-render. "Am I my brother's keeper?" "Gee, Mrs. Cleaver, that's a lovely dress!" It's a method in and of itself so I don't buy it and never have. Move along.

Yes, I've noticed that many times. And I've made those kind of documentations and wondered, my God, what does it take. And the reasons can vary, I guess. The person might be the son of someone famous the Lindens need to keep happy. The griefers may have the capacity to get on either social media or even mass media and make it seem like they are innocent victims of this evil company -- I've seen them do that many times over. The Lindens like to avoid controversy and media. Or perhaps the person in question pays them a lot of money for islands, islands you can't see. Or maybe they don't have the staff to follow all this up and think you're a whiner or I'm a whiner as a result. They also are wedded to this religion that you can control your own experience and gosh, you must be deliberately riling up the griefers and you must enjoy them griefing you at some level. That griefers can harass you from Linden roads which are "safe" for them doesn't matter. That they can buy into a sim on an alt and use that as a perch to launch toxic particle takes doesn't matter. That they can stalk you in both SL and RL using God-mode and hacking doesn't matter. Etc. Etc. They think you should just ban a person or put in a security panel and shut up. And maybe they aren't wrong, because you could try that on another sim, another alt, before they IP track your or use some other social engineering to stalk you. The Lindens don't want to be a government or even play government so they let some resident groups they bless play government and try to do their minimal best with the CS staff, and call it a day. SL is indeed more toxic as a result because people have more and diverse and devious ways to make people miserable they don't like or whose ideologies challenge their own, and they deploy them happily on a platform where the providers either share their technolibertarianism, technocommunism, or nihilism, or just don't have staff. Whereas a huge game company has to maintain the peace better to have more customers and keep selling games. The dynamics and levers are different. The Lindens could stop policing all griefing instantly tomorrow and there would still be 20,000+ islands bringing them in their basic revenue. WoW or Fortnite or Minecraft could never afford to do that, and don't. It's a truism that the Lindens will never contact you, never discuss a case with you, never report what they have done about a situation, you will never know. RL isn't like that, and is a better place as a result in most countries. You know, the right to face your accuser; the publication of the charges, the plaintiff, the defendant, a court of law, a verdict, etc. etc. None of that obtains here and someone could be flying around named "KillProkofy" crashing my sims on the daily and the Lindens will shrug because they don't like my blog or something. Years later, you may learn that some miscreant who is now a university professor was actually banned by the Lindens for harassing you and may have ruined his career for a time. But most of the time, no one will ever give you that satisfaction. In these kinds of situations, I could recommend multiple ARs from different people (not alts) -- that can get their attention and persuade them you're not just a whiner, it's a public nuisance. You can document and blog all of this outside of SL and try to name and shame people in general but you have to have stamina for this, they will retaliate, and the Lindens will pounce if any of this is put inworld. Etc.

Yes I have. I don't like them because they are stupid, repetitive, and even if I don't get killed in the first frame, I have to do so many repetitive and stupid things to avoid being killed in the next frames that it just isn't fun or interesting.

Well, from what I gather, FS is "open source" and you could just code your own version of FS without the things that annoy you. No? "Tool tips" require you to hover "just saw" and it's just annoying. I think you're just looking for things to pick a fight about, especially when you could just make your own home brew here. I can't and won't. So I want the SL Viewer to be workable and intuitive. I don't care what third-parties do. I'm not paying them. I want LL to make workable and intuitive viewers. There's a reason why LL hasn't just bought out "the most popular and most used viewer in SL."

I fail to understand why I need to commit to "muscle memory" a series of unrelated symbols instead of READING a coherent WORD. I'm not a monkey. It's ok to have HIGHLIGHT TRANSPARENT to drop down. I see no objective reason why it was moved. To say, "oh, but you're in build mode already" -- that's not the only use case for HIGHLIGHT. Sometimes you're trying to find a lost prim that is lost BECAUSE it is transparent. Sometimes you are trying to PUT something on transparent and move it around or remove it from sight but you can't SEE it.

Jouissance

I would say YES. Games keep people from becoming too nasty and uncivil and weird by having goals, quests, XP, points, prizes, etc. These serve as kind of guardrails to prevent the "hell is other people" problem of virtuality -- which amplifies it painfully. SL is open-ended, so that for some people, becoming nasty and uncivil and weird IS the game. That IS the goal, the quest, the prize. How can you "walk around the robots" as a colleague once said about trying to get around crazy bosses, weird board members, toxic fellow employees, the nasty general public etc. You have to find things you like doing, find groups of people doing those things, and meet them and go to their events. To be sure, a lot of sifting might occur here, so much that you won't want to stick with it. SL isn't for everyone. I would say the Forums don't represent SL, it's social life, or its groups, except that wouldn't be true, since the Lindens keep the forums nasties in power through lack of modding and selecting modding so it's part of how the culture gets shaped. It sounds like you have a fairly active ability to self-criticize and that's good in moderation and I think that most people in SL who get into bad things or have bad things happen to them are either weak, "tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine," unlucky, or online pugilists. I think it's ok to fight bad things and they do get better some times. But not right away. I could tell you "try these 10 things or groups or events" but they may not be your thing, and frankly, even the things I fill my time with on SL sometimes aren't really my thing. "Second Life/God's Waiting Room on the Internet"

I like SL's generally more painterly and even somewhat cartoony look (I don't like Pixar and fortunately it's not Pixar, just slightly painterly/drawn/ which for some people means "cartoon". Photoreal really looks ugly in SL.

Yes, they monkeyed with this to put in PBR, and didn't think it through from the perspective of the normie, let alone the dummy. I've accepted that things have to be in Advanced and Developed -- imagine that! -- and now they make those menus appear with one click, so it really is pretty simple. Even people like me use Advanced and Developed because often that's where the Lindens stick things they are tired of, don't like, don't want to explain, when they front their new shinies. I get all that. The shortcuts are not useable be me; I don't like them; I won't use them; I won't memorize them; if they are forced on me I may, but since this was once a drop-down menu with readable human words and not a code stand-in for real worlds, I object. If you, as a more or less literature techie person, are infuriated by Firestorm, well, understand that at least one of the reasons I don't use FS is THAT.

This is stupid, because it is contingent on people using shortcuts; agreeing to that system; finding that system useful and intuitive. I DO NOT AND THAT'S OK That's why the UI still has REAL WORDS on it that do the thing DIRECTLY without surprises, or most of the time. This is a good example of how techs make the world more brutal and stupid, even as they claim that we are stupid lol. We're not. The Lindens changed the pull-down human-readable menu, used by many people. That YOU don't use it as a tech and like short-cuts means nothing.

Excuse me? I'm not you. They're annoying because they aren't a button with a label on it in human-readable language that you can click to get a result that matches that human term. That you find something that says alt - F8 "useful" means nothing to me. I'm not a tech person; I don't care. I don't wish to develop an entire glossary or lexicon of terms that "mean a thing". I'd rather study literature and the terms *there* like Jouissance. I never use ctr-alt-t. I pull down "highlight transparent" so I can see and understand what I'm doing. And that's my right. It doesn't mean I'm stupid; it just means I'm not you. Ctr-c is ok as far as it goes and we've all been forced to use it. I will never, ever use ctr-f when I want to go to search AND pick the OTHER thing like "places" or "people" in one swoop. They aren't things "everyone must know" because GUESS WHAT, the Linden techs, silly creatures that they are, still put human-readable normal words on their buttons. Good!

You seem restless and have a lot of threads going. You might want to channel that energy into starting your own grid, maybe using Open Sims or some other kind of world/game and try out these ideas. You might want to start trying them out YOURSELF by buying and tiering just one sim -- that doesn't cost much -- dividing it into 4096s, and seeing if people will fill up that sim for you and keep paying cash or putting in tier, however you arrange it. Then try two sims. I've done that for nearly 20 years, I'd invite you to branch out from your 16m2 and try running a sim, then you will have insights to give the Lindens who really don't run sims, in a way; they don't live here, they just work here. I don't see how this will increase their revenue because: Customer Service State. Read about that theory in various books. If the 4096s is bundled with the premium, instead of just 1024, it is essentially free then.

The fact that you need to purchase a Premium Account with its now 1024 m2 to buy anything of that size or more (if you add tier) on the Mainland is actually a great deterrent to blight, although imperfect. If you made the land free, you would end up like San Francisco, which started a plan to hand out US $750 per month to the homeless, and thereby attracted every drug addict who could get bus fare to SF and wound up with hordes of folks with the fentanyl bends all over downtown, most of the main brand stores pulling out due to theft and mayhem, and just general chaos that now is leading to the recall of officials. You would end up like many sims did in the early years of SL when you could get First Land for merely $512 ($1 per meter) and it was gamed with alts and bots and filled up with masses of junk and flipping insanity. The Lindens may not make money off Bellisseria, I am told by those "in the know". I find that hard to believe, as they get a stable premium and are putting out loads of sims -- more than is under tier by individuals currently on the Mainland. Just look at the map and the Grid Survey. We're talking 3000 regions -- and the Mainland is only 5000 regions -- a certain percent is made up of Linden roads and parks, and then you have X percent abandoned. Neither Bellisseria or Mainland are any kind of cash cow or even stable revenue center. A lot of it is a cost center because of staff time, Moles have to be brought in to build, wrangle sims, etc. The islands remain the revenue generator. Why is this so hard for all the big thinkers on here to grasp? Look at the map and look at the price list. There are under 30,000 regions. Of these, let's say under 10,000 are Mainland plus Bellisseria. That leaves a whopping 20,000 regions generating the current island tier. To be sure, some are only $178 + tax as they are grandfathered. But the overwhelming majority are 1) $349 for a set-up fee to buy and then 2) the full tier of $206 per month. So work out the math and you see it clearly. Let's say the 3000 Belli sims were completely fully sold (they aren't by any stretch) with 20 customers per region, each paying the annualized $99 fee -- that's 20 x $8.25 x 3000 = $495,000 per month (in an ideal world -- it's likely 30% of that). Now over to the islands, not even looking at the set-up fees. 20,000 x $206 = $4.12 million. Again, that's idealized because some of those are only homesteads that are cheaper, some are grandfathered. But even allowing for that, those islands are there, on the map, and not gone into the ether, because they are tiered, and that means $206 + tax per region per month. The Lindens would have to create like 10 Bellisseria continents to come anywhere near their island revenue, and the demand just isn't there with under 50,000 concurrency. The 10% tax on the Marketplace sales where "millions" of items are sold doesn't in fact involve millions, and in fact doesn't reach that figure of island revenue, either. Let's say the Lindens took 10% tax off 500,000 items selling per month on the Marketplace. That's only US $50,000. Not $495,000. Not $4.12 million. Put in any numbers roughly comparable you like, but the point is the same: islands are the revenue generator unless in fact people are buying millions of little different coloured dresses on the MP that I'm not aware of. It's in the interests of island dealers to keep the Mainland ugly, blighted, and driving customers into their arms; some used to openly advertise this theme to get business. One would like to think the Lindens are neutral, above the fray, etc. but their self-interest is at stake, too. They need to have the islands, which cost more to set up (Mainland is $0 set-up) and generates $206 per region, to be the main product -- and PS it's much less customer service, as people who buy islands run them themselves pretty much, and don't file tickets about neighbours encroaching, griefing, blighting because...there are no neighbours. They're like that town in "It's a Good Life."

I think you could hit parts of Bellisseria and find this effect you are looking for of the decorated houses, as they have in Queens, New York or Pick a Suburbia in the US, where there is always some family every year who spends a fortune to put like all the reindeer, and lights, and Santa and a manger and the whole nine yards, and everyone drives by to gawk. Surely there is That Guy in SL! But where? lol And the answer is: look at the BBB web site which has a blog called Parade of Homes with the "House Beautifuls". Now, where is this blog. Naturally I can't find it now but ask around. The Lindens have a Winter Wonderland set of sims with stuff showing off the new PBR effect which isn't quite what you mean but you could probably enjoy some of it. Look on their blogs. I think if you go to Robin Loop, which starts around the Electra and Juanita sims, you would have a nice drive, see some fun little stores and cafes and see some of that effect -- I've seen it driving through there. But of course, it's not concentrated as it would be in RL.

I don't want to use keyboard short-cuts, they are annoying and often are more steps. I want a drop-down menu. It used to be under Advanced/Highlight and Visibility, where, you know, it belonged, logically. Then someone who is a specialist in UI no doubt moved it because somethingsomething. I get all that. So where is it? Yeah, I tried under Build and kept looking under Build and not finding it. But that's because you had to "just know" that it is now under Build/Options. I read the liner notes for every patch. Why don't they inform you there "We moved highlight/transparent from Advanced to Build" or "it's only under Build now, where you didn't know it was," etc. They don't really plan for people who build INWORLD instead of in Blender. That's what this is about.

OR....JUST A THOUGHT The Lindens could fix the bugs in their viewer and you will stop crashing. Which they did, and a new patch dropped.

In the latest version of the viewer with PBR. Second Life Release 7.1.2.7215179142 (64bit) It's not where it used to be under "Advanced" and "Highlight and Visibility" If it "doesn't work that way any more" because "something something", how do you turn a clear prim or mesh red so you can see it?

Perhaps they'll make it "clubs only' to try to siphon off the avatars filling up and lagging residential sims in little clubs.

1. If they are auctioning 16m in Kama City, I have yet to see an auction link for that, and it would be the exception to the rule. 2. Boy, have I ever been to Zindra! LOL. 3. I see you are already backing down from your original claim. Happens. No, I don't block anything. I keep G, M, A on and suffer a little bit of eyeball chloroxing now and then after the awful sights but yeah, to be in business you have to. 4. I've seen abandoned land in Zindra. Sit there. For days. I've seen land at $1 and $2 sit there that I have bought and flipped. 5. I am not a Boomer, as Eisenhower was my first president. I'm actually in the cohort known as "Generation Jones." Happy to be alive! I am the man, I suffered, I was there. Agonies are one of my changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe. I am the mashed fireman with breast-bone broken, Tumbling walls buried me in their debris, Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades, I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels; They have cleared the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.

I'm old enough to remember that Linden bear in the BDSM get-up. The guy was the liaison for Zindra. I fully expect this "steamy new region" to be as robust and functional as.... ...the Helios Casino and Lounge. Say, did they ever get the swag stuff put in there?