there's nothing that can't be turned around

It's been a dizzying few days, the train wreck's deep in the mountains now, where the footing goes treacherous so I'm actually glad I'm on rails...even if the fires rise. I think things are easing, the fires aren't steady-burning, but oh, the warmth from the metal grows intense.

In the meantime...where am I now?!?



Apparently? Babeli. In the middle of a pool, deep-flowing cistern waters from the pipe below. Well, at least it's not a box...

But after that, things got very interesting.



Wau, I couldn't live here. Okay, so a friend of mine heard about a protest Angela Ge was staging, and she'd arranged a meet with Torley Linden at Torley's office in Linden Village.

Yeah. Torley's office. It's like a watermelon exploded, I'm not kidding. The bench I'm sitting on is the exact shape and shade of the Brach's coconut neopolitan candies, or those old-school licorice Allsorts that were so popular from the fifties to the seventies. (In finding that pic, I'm amused to note, there's a site devoted to licorice everything, which amuses me greatly.) Just about everything else is shiny shiny shiny.

At any rate, we gathered...and waited...and gathered...and waited...and snarked some...and joked...and waited some more...Apparently Torley was on a conference call and couldn't break away, so Frontier Linden came in and said he was looking for someone else, please be patient, and if we had any questions he could answer...?

About seven people asked him about the vagueness of Daniel Linden's blog post, and he fled.

While later--I'd crashed, and came back just after he arrived--Matthew Linden arrived, the tech support manager. He had no connection to public relations or the social implications, he knew the tech.

The protest was doomed to fail.



Mostly, I sat and stared in goggle-eyed amazement, wondering at the kind of mind who loved watermelons so much, they had to live inside one. But more than that, I thought it was important, even if I didn't say much, to come as a doll. My tag said "Doll Advocate/Emilly Orr". It was my small statement of protest in and amidst everything else.

The questions limped to a halt, having unsuccessfully redirected from deliberate vagueness and the need to tighten and further define language in the ToS, to system security and server issues, and one by one, we left, generally unsatisfied with the whole thing. But I did go. I was there, at least.

I guess that's something.



Now, if I can only figure out why I keep sitting behind benches...The Art of Bench has failed for me. I must practice more. Apparently, it's a skill one needs to keep sharp.