so I took a blindfold of denial and bolted it to my eyes

This next bit gets odd.

It started when I was trying to track down pictures for the Wonderland Hunt. Seems that page only has a few, and pictures of the other items are oddly difficult to find.

While still trying to target the perfect search term or terms that would hunt pictures up, though, I came across this entry by Izzie M from the end of August. It had a link to an article on the Alphaville Herald, which led me to this.

So...a very long time ago, as SL reckons time, there was some other controversy about the JLU that bothered me. Mr. Venkman mentioned he wanted to talk with me; I sent him several notecards, heard nothing back, and, after thinking it through, decided that whatever had happened, it was likely over and done with at that point, and we all could probably move on without issue. I was discomfited, but I'm rather used to that at this point, on many levels.

But now this. I can't get past this one. I'd known about the data compilation, but I'd shrugged it off as simply sleazy, not dangerous.

But gathering IP addresses for comparison checks? If that's true--and from everything I've been reading, it seems true--then aren't they doing the same thing as the makers behind RedZone and Voodoo?

At least one of whom has been convicted and is now in jail...

That, and the whole cyber-stalking claim. I think 'stalking' is perhaps an aggressive word to use, but that whole 'good, he got what was coming to him' attitude about a griefer who died of AIDS?

See, I'm too close to this issue. My father died of AIDS, or at least, of complications from AIDS, and I know--I know personally--it is a slow, lingering, awful way to die. It's better now--the suppression drugs are better, the care is generally better, doctors know more now than they did--but the early deaths still haunt, and my father was one of the early ones.

I don't care what anyone's done--griefers are horrible people, yes, and they do stupid things for ridiculous reasons, and it harms innocents, at least off Second Life--but to, in essence, commend a dying man for having the bad luck to get HIV, which then developed into AIDS? That really bothers me.

In going back to the List blog, I also noted this entry. So Baht McMahon broke the wiki leak?

This is deeply, deeply strange. I know these people. I thought I could trust them. Now I'm not sure who in the JLU can be trusted, and I'm more than discomfited this time, I'm outright worried, and more than a little unnerved.

Still working out what happened to when and where, but it's really starting to sound like the casual roleplay group that morphed into protectors of the grid are now descending into squabbling, tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood. Who--at least as of September 3rd of this year--have an active cease-and-desist order from the Lindens. That, I think, is an official judgement call that the JLU is no longer trustworthy.

If they ever were.

[Insert from the Editrix: there's now a second part.]