Second Thoughts

post@posterous.com

post@posterous.com New form of heckling from the Emerald Viewer gangs Visit Ross (43, 228, 59)

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Yourenotgoing Anywhere

Yourenotgoing Anywhere Creepy child for sure Visit Ross (49, 229, 58)

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Yournotoing Anywhere

Yournotoing Anywhere Creepy little girl av with weird BDSM type collar -- this is the infamous Imnotgoing Sideways who destroyed NDI by pushing Carl Metropolitan out. Hugely creepy man always feigning to be helpful to newbies, etc. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. He's now decided to join regular nuisances like the Woodbury goons to bother me in the infohub. Visit Ross (46, 229, 57)

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Landmarks Petition

Landmarks Petition Come sign my petition to save the landmark in Second Life as giveable inventory. Visit Ross (52, 70, 42)

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Reprising the Enterprise: Will Working in SL Work?

Soviet special store for the elite and foreigners, known as the beriozka.

There's a strange bug going around in Second Life in the last few days, where your avatar suddenly finds himself alone on the sim where he happens to be, surrounded by endless blue water -- and on a kind of hill or stump with the bottom of the sim missing and the builds poking through into thin air. You crawl around in a laggy terrain and find yourself moving into negative space if you try to leave. Relogging, deleting settings.xml, all those tricks don't work -- and when you see your alts don't have this problem you realize the sim is messed up -- one part of development somewhere else us bleeding into your sim where it shouldn't be. Concierge has confirmed it is a bug being looked at by "engineers".

It's like the way grey squares haunted the grid, before the Lindens made p2p and then made grey squares ubiqutious. Or the way that suddenly , before the Zindra continent and adult verification was ready, you would be arbitrarily blocked from a sim and unable to fly on it, even sometimes getting a funny message about age verification even if you were in PG. The work on that program was leaking into the rest of the grid...

The silos that these Enterprises are supposed to want -- like! -- to be on are in strange contrast to the silos that we were all supposed to "hate" when these same programmers and gurus of Big IT told us haughtily that we "can't" be in walled gardens, that this is so 1990s with /fail Compuserve and AOL, and that we "have" to have an open and interoperable system.

Of course, we see now that open is as open does. Open for me to disclose my consuming habits to you and be available for your scraping in your ad campaigns, open to your endless widgets on Facebook, open to your endless special features you need to plug into SL -- but closed when it comes to your corporate communications and your accountabilityy and closed when you need a secret haven for development -- which is the cave you go to after scraping all the ideas from the playa of the main grid, to mark up and resell.

In reprising the press coverage from her campaign, that dutiful little marketing marm Amanda Linden rightfully gloats  -- except for some mild criticism from Dusan, who is almost like inhouse nowadays, really and "one of ours" for the Lab, there isn't a single discouraging word. One would hardly expect her to link to Prok's blog *smiles*. When it suits them, actually Lindens do, and that's why some people tell me to strain my criticism through a sieve of respectability in the hope that some element of it might "get a larger and/or more influential audience".

No thanks.

Much of the good press that Amanda got was caused by that press MISREPRESENTING what the product is about, as Chris Collins implied falsely that actual opportunities for both Enterprise and content makers to find each other:

“Out of the box, the system comes with content such as meeting rooms and conference areas, which are just ready to go,” Chris Collins, Enterprise general manager at Linden Lab, told me.

“There’s also a marketplace - an area where users can purchase content for their meeting rooms, or if they’re the military, it could be content for tanks and planes, all the way up to full software applications.”

This "area" doesn't exist as such as we know, and is basically just a Second Inventory operation or a ticket that has to be filed individually. Unless Cubey Terra put some freebies in the Enterprise Library or various notorious arms dealers from XStreet have suddenly been made respectable, I'd have to wonder where the military is getting their stuff. They will have to hire people to make it from scratch or shop on the main grid with avatars they alread have, or use XStreet, and do the upload reset trick.

Running the Rivers Red

In response to my declaring war on Justin Bovington -- a symblic and understandably futile act -- somebody named David Peters, who could be their PR guy, tells me I'm in danger of being seen as a blog bully.

Guffaws.

Who spends $25,000 a year and gets back peanuts? Who spends $55,000 a year and gets back..whatever you get? Hello, David? Fuck you. Fuck you very much. Who is the bully in this setting?

Of course, we could expect this from Justin, whom I actually charitably thought back then was just a bit heated about tackiness as befitting from a Brit who tends to hate Americans, and not really sinister -- but now I see the problem is deeper.

"“Many brands have experienced pollution and even counterfeit of their brands in other 3-D worlds or environments--not to mention the questionable material that users put forth that led to a tarnished image for Second Life," said Justin then in 2008. Ugh.

Of course, I could helpfully point out to the snobby Justin that the infamous penising of Anshe Chung occurred because A SOLUTIONS PROVIDER, MILLIONS OF US, WHICH HAD A HIGH-PROFILE MEDIA CLIENT, C-NET -- COULD YOU GET MORE GOLD-PLATED THAN THAT?!!!! -- REFUSED TO PUT ON AUTORETURN AND GROUP-ONLY SCRIPTS AND MANAGE THE SIM PROPERLY.

That the blatant criminality of those devs regarding Anshe's right to dignity and their sheer callous indifference to securing a space would then be put on *us* as content-providers or merchants on the main grid -- well, I just GASP IN AMAZEMENT.

The flak from RiversRunRed David Peters thinks that we have to calmly and collectedly discuss this. No. Not with people who are not in good faith and not decent.

Let me reprise Mr. Peters:

Comrades

Comrades Comrades standing on guard by the voting booth to intimidate voters and help steer their collectivist comrades and alts to the opensouce option. Visit Ross (49, 225, 58)

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Alexa Linden Should be Next to Go Overboard

Dusan Writer claims there is a war in Linden Lab. Well, there always has been, really, between the overwhelming majority of devs and the tiny percentage of suits or community managers. That coefficient is now changing, we're told, but it's still war.

The degree to which the coders feel under fire these days from new Linden policies is evident not only in their increasing self-referential cockyness, which has become dangerously unhinged from reality, but from their strained and neuralgic nearly paranoic response to simple questions.

Rob Linden is gone, and that's a good thing. Watching the encomiums to him on SL-Dev (the coders' dev list, not the SP list) is sick-making, but also helps out all the fanboyz and problems. If Gigs Taggart is sobbing, we know: mission accomplished. Yet if he is still chortling on one of those test grids named after Hindu gods with the other Lindens that will merely replace Rob accomplishing the same aid and comfort to opensource extremists, then we know the fight is not over.

Of course, we now have the distinctly unpleasant prospect before us that looks something like the Balkans or one of the stans -- communist federalist power being overthrown by various creepy or fascistic nationalisms. Make common cause with the one against the other, and you'll likely end up a statistic. It's hard -- and slow -- to get rid of centralized communism *without* nationalisms, but it's hard to make them a temporary expedient. That's roughly where we are with something like Marketing going after the Code Cave now. Not a pretty sight. These new Marketing Lindens are a horror in their own right, as they are cynical (at least some of the coders are idealists, and that means you can work with them) and power-hungry (at least some of the coders were humble and you could work with that). Even so, one has to try to steer the fight for civility and freedom in the Metaverse through these troubled waters.

Now that Rob is gone, and his replacement will have to be able to perform even more squarings of the circle than he did with the opensource program fitting within a corporate context, there is still what you might call the Triage Lindens. They're awful, and they have their paws quite firmly on the features set of SL which they achieve through "the tyranny who shows up" for their bug triage meetings -- usually an excuse for opensource extremists to use their technical knowledge to push through various changes to the viewer that benefit the copyleftist class. These Triage Lindens include Soft, Alexa, Rodney, Q and others -- I now boycott Linden office hours as a matter of principle again while they maintain the corporativist SL Work Marketplace -- so you may have more information.

The fact that these people are seen as a problem not only by me but even by their fellow coders is witnessed with the formation of a group, which while sycophantic and fanboyish with its "We Love Lindenz!" monograms, is still basically finding fault with the way the triage is happening. Community Triage, search using PG and M both checked, is run EddyFragment Robonaught. He saw me at a Frogg concert and asked me to join his group. When I found that it was heavily moderated, and you couldn't swear and such, I declined. But if you are a moderate fanboy of office hours, and not a total symp, perhaps this group is for you. Robonaught feels strongly that the JIRA and the triage needs reform, but he is a perestroika liberal, i.e. wanting to move cautiously and slowly with incremental steps in collaboration with Lindens who in fact are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

There's Soft Linden, of course, whom I've blogged about before with passion as one of the horrid ideologues of copyleftism and collectivism posing as rugged individualism. I see now this freak has a panegyric to Italo Calvino on his profile. Sigh. I mean, read it, it's priceless. The boy Cosimo who leaves the world to live in a utopia, and makes up his own rules. Perfect fable for extremist extropian coders, eh? Calvino was a Eurocommunist (his father was a follower of Kropotkin) who got off the boat on the 1956 invasion of Hungary -- but once a communist, always a communist, even if "reformed". He's now to serve as the hero of little sandbox foxes hogging the features set in SL in our time lol. But my bet is that Soft will weather any purges made by the Alphabet Suits because of what he will style as his keen native intellect but which is actually better described as his finely-honed survivalist cunning.

But now there's Alexa Linden. Alexa has played bagman for the Stallmanite faction on the P-JIRA for ages, being the one to comment such as to close, or actually close many a proposal and to enlist G-team to police malcontents and dissidents. Alexa sometimes sounds thoughtful, but that's only a temporary ruse to get her way down the line. BTW, with both Soft and Alexa were're supposed to say "she" but they are both likely "he" -- but who the hell knows, so I'll distribute their genders randomly.

Alexa has now blatantly, publicly, and thoroughly violated the Tao of Linden, speaking in a hugely snotty and critical way about the anticipated viewer design changes in what she evidently thought was the "privacy" of her fanboyz base in the Battery Street Irregulars, a group of furs who chafe at the fact that the iterations of SL are tested not on the actual live grid all the time where they could see more stuff blow up and crash, but on various beta grids.

The Herald has rushed to publish it -- and that's one of my rare for-the-sake-of-public-interest-only links to this scurrilous harbourer of copybotters -- make sure your virus protection is on.

What's breath-taking about this dissent isn't that it is dissent -- one would like to think that it's ok to disagree with your bosses at the Lab and have all kinds of fun collaborative discussions that only result in Love Machine taps.

No, what's gaspingly amazing is that Alexa takes on the same snotty, knowier-than-thou condescending bullshit tone of the IRC channel and the office triage that she takes with fellow coders (they are always particularly nasty to each other, always with the STFU and patch or GTFO, etc.) *about other Lindens*.

In my experience, Lindens just never do that. They may slightly roll their eyes *just a tad* at the antics of this or that Linden whose behaviour is riotously terrible, but they never break ranks. This is krugovaya poruka or what is called "defending the honour of the regiment".

That is, her diatribe on the viewer here is a direct, Exocet-missile hit against the marketing Lindens ported over by M Linden from Organic or cribbed from McKinsey in order to make this new "webfortable" viewer as Khamon inimitably called it. Duck duck quack quack, we're webfortable!

Imagine. I mean, you don't talk to people at work like that -- or about them, because it eventually gets out. Even people hired only for short durations, if that's the case (that's how originally they did the Navigation and Landmarks project, which unfortunately is bleeding into a lot of the current thinking even having been killed off once).

The unnecessary nastiness, which is perfect for my blog and even necessary in a democratic society for political debate, is out of place in a work situation which is supposed to be conditioned on a collaborative spirit. When the language and nasty memos get this loud and possibly even deliberately leaked by the writer in a false sense of imperviousness, usually somebody is heading for "separation". I think we'll see Alexa thrown overboard next.

I'm not even going to get in to what she is saying. A lot of it is jargonistic and deliberately knowier-than-thou referencing various programs and supposed "what we like to call the RIGHT way" thinking of programmers. All of that may indeed be crap, and the Marketing pukes may indeed be right to take all that out. We'll have to see. Or Alexa may actually be right on some things, for the wrong reasons. Or even the right reasons. But her premise is not -- "30 years of doing it this way" isn't an argument that revolutionary new platforms can make. It's Web 1.0 founding-fathers' syndrome and it has to go.

We've long waited for the normal people to show up at Linden Lab and overthrow the geeky and retarded (because not user-friendly) viewer design decisions. Now they're here. Unfortunately, we can't wish them too well as they will mess up the viewer, too, out of idiocy and greed, but on the way, they may knock out some of the geek annoyances and eventually, mindful of the bottom line, might be amenable to revisions and rollbacks.

Meanwhile, set the Triage Lindens in your sites. Challenge them. Show up at the Office Hours. Overthrow the fanboyz like Gigs and Gordon and Gareth and all the other Gs.

Moon over Belarus

Moon over Belarus Check this out! Visit Belarus (216, 180, 212)

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Declaring War on Justin Bovington of RiversRunRed

Wow, just wow. I'm stunned. You don't expect a long-time friend and seeming promoter of the world of Second Life to do this.

I can see I did absolutely the right thing by cutting Justin Bovington's friendship card in Second Life and on Facebook. Justin, who is Fizik Baskerville in Second Life has really betrayed all of us who work in the inworld economy of SL.

I thought at first he was going along with this bad idea of SL Work Marketplace because he wasn't directly involved in it and/or didn't know much about it -- but that's never an excuse.

Now I can see that he is saying things that are absolutely fucktarded and need the absolute biggest pushback that anyone can muster - he's asking that it become MORE closed. (And BTW, not for the first time -- he's gotten flak before for complaining about low-quality content in SL).

Here is how he is quoted in Infoweek -- and please, don't tell me his is misquoted or out of context, as these PR campaigns are carefully prepped and staged way in advance:

However, Bovington sounded a note of caution on the Second Life Work Marketplace. "It has be less Xstreet, more Wall Street. It has to reflect relevance, rather than drowning us all in deluge of content: clothing, furniture and avatars," he wrote, adding "if [Linden Lab] attracts the right people to develop these apps, this could be the tipping point."

What a raging fucktard. And what an amazing bunch of dupes on the Metanomics list right now claiming that "this gives us more choices". 

It's as if he isn't realizing -- or pretending not to know! -- that he and his fellow elite FICs on the GSP list are *already* the "right people" attracted to develop these apps. It's as if he is predicting some "flood" to come *even among these filtered ranks*. !!!

I could see how Bovington could support SL Enterprise -- his company Immersive Workspaces sells to it. Understood. Well and good. I could see how he even might tacitly support the closed Soviet store because he didn't think it through, or he didn't realize its ramifications or just didn't think it would be that big a factor. Understood, but not forgiveable.

But now I see that not only does he support it, he is enthusiastically *aggressively* telling Enterprise to stay away from XStreet, and to build a WStreet that doesn't "flood" content and has only very filtered "relevant" content. What an asshole! so he and his friends can sell a refined set of goods just to their special business friends and cut others out of the market. I find this absolutely shameful and appalling, if not criminal.

"X" is of course discredited with the idea of porn and X-rated items, although they do not make up the bulk of items on there. Easily discredited, given all the slutwear and naked butts and barely-covered boobs on the page when you open it up.

It just boggles the mind -- not only him doing this, but all the sordid little fanboyz and wannabees cheering it on.

Since when do we have economic rules in free enterprise liberal democratic *America* that can creates closed Soviet-like stores where only the elite can sell to other elites, and also make public calls to stop "flooding" the market?

It's as if an elite craftsman of Shaker tables first worked with the federal government to create special maximum security zones no one could enter except an approved, classified list, then signed a deal with IBM to sell furniture to them in a secret and closed store, then made a public warning to Ethan Allan and Ikea to stop trying to sell to IBM anyway, and stop flooding the market with their tables-- and told IBM that they can't shop at Walmart or Ikea even with bulk contracts. It's insane. No one would ever find that *necessary* to do in an open and free economy. That the Lindens and this sordid little wannabee list of 30 GPSs need to do this shows us that without a monopoly, without a closed economy, *they can't compete*. It's ugly corporate protectionism of the worst kind.

What's especially deepy fucked about Justin Bovington's claim to "stop the flood" is that there isn't any flood. Duh! Precisely because it's a closed shop, where only his little friends get to sell stuff -- or recommend their friends. He needn't have worried -- most of the few 14 customers already grabbed all their stuff from SL with copybot or Builderbot or other lovely products the Lindens have done nothing to stop (and now we understand why! They needed them for this short list of customers paying them $55,000 a pop!!!). They will get their content into their grids as they need to, and likely won't even go to Linden, or if they do, they will upload it all on one big sim as Glenn Linden has advised, basically using the exploit deliberately that Stroker Serpentine discovered and litigated about in his first lawsuit that involved the "restore sim" exploit to recreate another copy of items. Imagine that!!!

The fact that Justin had to come out and acitvely lobby to keep out what he sees as "crappy content"   lets us know he was reacting to pressure from not only me but others who have been saying "open it up". He's now trying to intellectually justify NOT opening it by implying a flood of cheap Anshe Chung sculpties will invade his precious aeshetic "immersive" workspaces.

Choice would, in fact, involve an IBM or an IndusGeeks or any other kind of firm having the right and freedom to buy Anshe Chung if they want, or buy from Kim Anubis and her friends. THAT is what freedom is; people think having these big customers in the first place is the freedom.

Many Seasons for the Many

Many Seasons for the Many Hey, it's Thanksgiving when the leaves fall, Christmas, and Cherry Blossom Time all at once here in the warm tropical sim of Columbia on the Heteroceta Atoll continent. That's how we roll. and that's what Second Life HAS TO BE about Justin Bovington, and you CANNOT STOP IT. If you find it culturally tacky and excessive TOO FUCKING BAD. Visit Columbia (249, 78, 32)

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