I'm just staring at the ceiling, waiting for the feeling

On my wanderings tonight, I came across quite the opinionated little vixen at one of the stores I'm frequenting for their lovely Advent fare. In addition to the rest of her groups, she was, notably, in these:

• *Animal Rights Advocates*
• Stop Child Pornography
• AGAINST DOLCETT & -TORTURE RP
• Feminists
• Gender Square
• Second Life Anti-Gorean Council
• SL Left Unity Feminist Network
• Stop Violence Against Women

Hmm. That's rather a lot of strident scolding all bottled up, there. Now, to make my position clear, I'm not pro-animal cruelty, or for abuse against women. And, as irritated as I am at the movement in general at times, I still consider myself a feminist.

However, in her picks, she has this statement concerning the "AGAINST DOLCETT & -TORTURE RP" group (and yes, the group name does have that perplexing dash):

This group is for everyone who is beware of the danger of role playing Dolcett, snuff and torture phantasies in SL.

I refuse to take you seriously on any of your issues until you learn to spell. Or at least use proper grammar.

So, it's taken me some time for processing, beyond the screen, but I think I've finally figured out part of why I'm just not drawn to Second Life at the moment. I think a lot of it's tied up with abandoning my store.

To be clear, I was never an effective merchant. I had fun designing things, but over the entirety of my business history--under any business name--I've sold less than twenty objects total priced over five Lindens.

I've been in SL more than five years. That's less than five objects a year.

So I was never a success as a business owner, I want to make that clear. Whatever the trick is to running a successful operation, I wasn't doing it, and I never really did make much of an effort to, past the first year. I'm not blaming anyone other than myself for the business failing.

But I'm now reflecting back on other things, and adding them up again. I never broke the bank as an escort, either. While I did do pretty good, overall, as a dancer, the bottom dropped out of dancing (at least my style of dancing) when the casinos left. I failed as a madam; I failed as an event hostess; I failed as a virtual real estate agent; I failed as a land manager.

At this point, I am facing squarely two facts: the Lindens I have, to spend on rent, shopping, and parcel decoration, are solely being funded by other people; and, while I have a strong virtual work ethic, I'm just not drawn to doing anything I've failed at in the past.

And I haven't yet found something I want to take on as a new career.

More to the point, literally the only times I'm entering into Second Life as a whole is for the various Advent calendar presents (and to be ruthless about this, I'm over 75,000 items in inventory now, and adding to that with new items is just making me depressed), or to pay rent.

And I sold off my last Caledon parcel, so I'm only paying rent to Lady Serra. And I'm even reconsidering that...as much as I love Winterfell, and want to support it, is it worth it to continue paying rent if I'm not coming into world for any other reason than buying more virtual time on a virtual medieval (ish) server?

Overall, all of these considerations are also not doing much good for the guttering holiday spirit. Part of that is that we haven't dug out any of the holiday lights, or ornaments; I haven't had the inclination or the finances to make my own ornaments (as I've done most years); and I have zero idea what to get people, either in SL or in RL.

I'm at an impasse. I'm hoping this feeling of being frozen in place will ease at some point, and I'll at least understand what ways forward remain (even if they lead to places where I walk away from Second Life). I mean, at least it would be doing something, not just standing, frozen in indecision and regret.

(Of course, the other part of the problem is currently feeling overwhelmed by the amount of fun ideas I've run across this year. Just a brief sample of the things I've been trying to decide between:

• Making hot air balloon ornaments
• Making vintage ice skate ornaments
• Making needle-felted holiday lights
• Crocheting round teddy ornaments
• Making twig trees from found objects
• Making balloon and string ornaments
• Making waterless snowglobes

...and all of that? Just came in to start perusing this past few days.

So...lots of things to consider in the background. Hopefully, I'll manage to thread this needle--so to speak--and continue on, in some capacity, as a Second Life resident. But it's far from easy...and, as usual, the Lindens aren't helping in the least.

Not that they ever did...

there, covered in ash, covered in glass

Had a very odd comment come in on the shop blog:

I fool infer from a scarcely any of the articles on your website at this very moment, and I definitely like your tastefulness of blogging. I added it to my favorites entanglement page list and will be checking stand behind soon. Cheer report register in view my site as well and fail me conscious what you think. Thanks.

I had to publish it. Had to. It was too weird to delete. But the strangest thing? Was that inference to follow their blog...which I have no way of accessing, as it was an anonymous comment.

Weird.

So a while back, Turner asked what was the deal about Minecraft, anyway? And I started writing, and got almost an entire entry before I realized--I'm going into how one plays Minecraft, now why. And I may end up publishing that at some point, but that's secondary. How has little to do with why. And why is the question a lot of people are asking, not just Turner.


(I finally decided to go with a round sun and moon option. Surprising how effective it is, watching it rise and fall.)

Why the draw? It's not the graphics, right? Free-to-play games now have insanely high-end graphics, so much so that many systems are starting to stagger. Even browser games are, these days, surprisingly sophisticated. So what is it about the land of cubes that draws us in?

1. Creativity.

Imagine the world as your canvas. You are the only inhabitant of a demon-haunted realm, sure, and that can be a down side, especially at night--but what you do between running from monsters and learning your way around is up to you. Make a castle. Make a fort. Make a sailing ship; make a spaceship. Recreate the planet. Or do what your instinct drives you to do--the only limits are the limits of the game itself.

Each individual map is, on average, six times more vast than Earth. Notch, the designer of the game, has said it is not an infinite map base--but that someone would need to play for approximately six years straight to go everywhere on the map. That's a lot of terrain to explore, to farm, to dig, to mine, to build.

2. Innovation.

Nearly every day, as the game is developed, someone comes up with a new way to use the game, or finds a new bug. The game is in alpha now--it's not even close to beta yet, and at times, it's glitchy as hell. Some of the glitches become major exploits, and are weeded out in the next update--and the updates are frequent. This is a living, growing thing, there's little that's static about it--and even the 'fixed' game mechanics reflect this.

I mentioned farming. You can farm wheat for bread, by harvesting grass from woodland areas. You can farm reeds in sand by the shore of the eternal sea. If you really care to, there's a way to make fences, and you could conceivably fence in a large enough area to keep track of cows, sheep and pigs that spawned. Sheep give wool which makes art (with enough wood); cows give leather (which can be used to make armor); and pigs can be killed for their meat (which, once roasted in a furnace, heals half your hearts per little piggy chop). If you can't--or don't want to--be ambitious enough to farm crops or animals, then make a fishing rod out of spider-string and wooden sticks.

If you don't want to farm, you can explore, digging down to endless caverns deep beneath the earth to do battle with the creatures of the deep. If you're really jonesing for adventure, dig deep enough to find diamonds; make a diamond pick; find lava; throw water on it; then laboriously mine out the obsidian. Ten cubes of obsidian in a rough square gets you a one-way pass to the Nether, which arrived on Hallows' Eve, and is creepy beyond all reason.

3. Competition.

I'm sure there is competition aplenty in Multiplayer mode; I wouldn't know, I never play Multiplayer. I play Single Player. Can you have competition all by yourself?

Absolutely. I have a not severe, but noticeable, fear of heights. Every time I build a tall structure, I face that fear. And it hasn't stopped me once. It's slowed me--because I can't build up that high without having that shiver down my spine. But Monolithia? More than four stories high, each story twice my height in the game, and I built it, block by block, on my own. I was the only one there; I was the only one who could. And I was able to get it done.

Or take spiders. I'm not afraid of spiders, I like spiders, but for the past six months I have had increasingly terrible spider nightmares. (I know why now, and I'm not going to go into it; suffice it to say that for someone who likes spiders, this was horrifying.) Spiders are one of the monsters in Minecraft, and they have a unnerving ability to jump directly at you and you die.

This is bad. And at first, I loathed the spiders in Minecraft, because day or night, they attacked me. But steadily, day by day, night by night, I began to overcome that atavistic fear. I learned how best to defeat them, and learned to take even death in stride.

Or let's talk jumping. For most of my life, I have been bad at jumping in both arcade and console games. In fact, in Runes of Magic, there's a perpetual Easter mini-game that I fail at, every year. Every single year. Because I can't jump up the little platforms to save my life.

In Minecraft? I'm learning to jump. I've gone from being afraid of heights to measuring distances and jumping with equanimity. It no longer bothers me.

The only one you have to beat is yourself. The only one you have to heal is yourself. Take of the world what you can use, and give back in terms of structures, trees, reeds...You can stay within the fixed terrain of the world you discover, or pave it over and build skyscrapers; it's up to you.

Why play Minecraft? Because it exists in the pure spirit of game, itself. You can eke out a meager existence in a scratch-built hovel; you can build a working computer for simple calculations. Nihilistically, you can blow everything up and start over.

Ultimately, it's entirely up to you. And that's the draw.

if you play, you play for keeps

I'm participating in the Twisted Christmas Hunt from December 1st to December 30th. As always, full details on the store blog, but I had to mention it here.



I've even updated the Midnight Mania board with one of them, and--if you care to hunt around, and you don't care to wait until the board locks--there's a dollarbie ottoman somewhere in the store.

Just go upstairs at the store to see all six!

follow the smoke going higher and higher

The people behind the Fallout games have finally decided what the MMO-playing world needs: humor. They could have something there...

More from the Unknown Hunt. (See part one if you're coming in to this now.)

Stop #11: Clothes Culture. The clue: 'OMG I'm so randomly placed.' (Yes. Seriously. That's her clue. It's...sort of a play on words?)



The prize: They're...capris. Might have been improved by the addition of prim cuffs; and the T-shirt, while a nice print, is photorealistic enough to make my breasts look pitted and lumpy. Good Halloween effect? Maybe? But I doubt it's what the maker intended.



There's also a pumpkin novelty bra, and I swear retextured freebie male jeans. I may be wrong on that last one, but...geh.



Worn: Sterling Artistry's Briar Rose Fairytale eyes (I think that was a store freebie); Fades Pony Stilettos in Mandarin (sale item sometime earlier this month, but the shoes themselves are still available) from Malfean Visions; Discord Designs' "Hayley" braids in Amethyst, bought at the recent Wear Purple promotion; and Curious Kitties' Azil Autumn Spirit skin, in Snow, bought on the Marketplace for nada. (This skin? Is gorgeous. Really, really gorgeous. This skin I would have paid full price for. And if you have any understanding of her normal prices? Trust me. That's saying something.)

#12: Finishing Touches. The clue: Bad crow - go to the corner and think about what you've done! (I have no help on Finishing Touches. I found it on a fluke. She has an arcane mind and she hides things in deranged places.)



The prize: Three Halloween luminaries. Nicely done, two prims each, little bit of glow; but it's all modifiable if you want to change things.

#13: Bottle Bird. The clue: Bird Bath.



The prize: Silver and black bat-covered short boots. They're kicky, but the toes curve up oddly. And at first I was wearing the invisiprims and the viewer 2.0 alpha layer. (Don't do that; your ankles disappear.)

#14: Nexx Neko Playground. The clue: 'This birdy is outside where it's meant to be.' (This one's difficult, but it helps to realize she means this--so just wander around outside the store. You'll track it down.)\



The prize: Cute little Hallows diorama with poses. (Would've shown the poses, but it was all in multiple pieces, and I didn't want to take it out of edit to sit on things.)

#15: Prim Savvy Furnishings. The clue: 'I have my wings spread as if to take flight....though I am actually hidden well in plain sight!' (They're not kidding. This one was very inventive.)



The prize: four separate "Pirate" t-shirts (Green is shown); with an animated shoulder parrot (he's kind of cute); and



a multi-configurable pumpkin that has glow off and on, your pick of pre-loaded emitters, and a small but decent selection of 'carvings'.

#16: 3 Star Design The clue: "Down the Stairs and through the fog, past dolphin sweet and at the top of a rainbow fall you will see it!" (It helps to remember there is fog involved; it's not hidden in an insanely complicated place, but it will take some diligence to track down.)



The prize: This one's amazing. A "haunted dress", in aged brocade printed with poppies and skulls, that 'poofs' skulls and a wandering ghost. I love this one.

#17: Moonlight Shapes. The clue: Hiding in plain sight. (She's not wrong, but it's also cleverly concealed.)



The prize: "Jane" shape. (There's a male shape included as well, "John".) This one's not bad. She's insanely tall, but the face is cute, and the proportions aren't surreal. And it's modifiable, which frankly, is ideal in a shape--buying a shape gives us the starting point, and the choice--keep as is, or tweak it closer to what our minds/hearts say we 'should' look like? So that's a good thing, also.

Worn: The 'Forgotten Bride' dress in Zombie from Curious Kitties (full price purchase from the Marketplace. Impulse buy? Yes. Bought with limited PayPal funds, not Lindens? Also yes).

#18: MOPY. The clue: "Out where the kodama play, near the hidden corpse." (For those who may not know, a kodama is a Japanese nature spirit, of sorts. They live in trees.)



The prize: Two jacket-layer tees, one green (I Love Halloween); and



one charcoal grey (Murder King). Eh. But the hidden corpse is amazing. Pick a survival horror video game made since 2000; it looks exactly like that.

#19: =Flutterby=
Clue: "Where happy little bluebirds fly???" (If you think it through, this one's a gimme.)



The prize: Devil and Angel shoulder bunnies. They speak when clicked (and their list of 'sayings' can be added to by configurable notecards inside them). There are also carryable versions.

NOTE: Flutterby is on Adult land. If you are not yet age-verified (or do not wish to be), the organizers advice you skip #19 and go directly to #20...which is, well, me.

#20: Lady Disdain. Clue: Going up?

I admit, I hate hunts where the maker gets arcane to keep you in their store longer. I tried to make it absurdly easy. While you're there, going out the front door will lead you to the doorway to my haunted house, which I am quite pleased with for this year.

But I digress.



At Lady Disdain, you'll get the Hauntine dress in green,



and the Zombie Hunter outfit for men. Which I've only worn previously on a male avatar, to snap vendor pics, so I'd forgotten how good it looks on girls.

#21: Razorblade Jacket
Clue: [03:01 PM] "Wander around, look UP look down, you'll find me perched in a comfy spot." (The store is HUGE. All I can say is--the clue made no sense to me, but the bird does turn up.)



The prize: Is...odd. There's a 'open heart festering chest' jacket-layer t-shirt that's not bad, but it also comes with a 'Bloody Heart and Chest Parts' sculpt.



Let's just say that the designer behind Razorblade Jacket has...an inaccurate understanding of anatomy. Either that or he lives in a place where hearts really are the size of any other five internal organs combined.

I won't lie, running this hunt with SLUrls and pics, it's not easy. It's given me an all new respect for Schnaeppchen and her blogging skills. She makes it look effortless. It's not.

not a soul on the ice, only me skating fast

night, lift up the shades
let in the brilliant light of morning

spider
spider spider spider
all those legs and lurking in the dark
staring at me

I don't mind the staring
I mind what it's trying to do
I mind what these dreams mean
I mind what they're telling me

but steady there now
for I am weak and starving for mercy

is my subconscious that unaware?
does anyone think I don't know what the risks are?
does anyone think I don't know
just how much I stand to lose?

I step forward
I step--
one step, one step, walking forward

walking on dying embers and glass shards, diamond-bright and splintered
walking on broken bones that turn and twist underfoot
walking, even if I have to walk in ever-widening circles
walking forward

sleep has left me alone
to carry the weight of unravelling where we went wrong

moving because it's what I have, it's what I fall back on
like breathing, even though I keep forgetting to breathe
late at night I will wake myself with huge inrushes of air
and I know
I've forgotten to inhale again

it's all I can do to hang on

rubble beneath my feet
primed to turn an ankle
skeleton keys and flanges, wood and stone, carved and grown
grains of sand, grains of wheat, grains of hard red rice
sharp hard shattered chunks of craze-cracked green glass
blue and brown frosted pebbles
worn smooth by the endless tumble in a turmoil sea

to keep me from falling
into old familiar shoes

splashes of color on the uneven ground
as if some great dying beast who bled liquid paint
staggered through

it has been at least two months
since I talked to any of my old friends
it has been longer still since I talked to any old loves, barring one
there are tremors of finality in the air

everything changes
everything falls apart

I have severed ties with the Consulate
I have very nearly severed ties with Caledon
I go back and forth on whether to sell my last remaining parcel
I'm not sure these days what's keeping me there

love has made me a fool
it set me on fire and watched as I floundered

no social activities, even the ones I wanted to attend
the last two weeks have been barren of so much
I've talked to a few people, but always, always
at a distance

winnowing
through the life I'm leading
deciding what's nourishing
and what's chaff
what I can discard
what I must retain
(at all costs? any cost? on a whim?)

unable to speak
except to cry out and wait for your answer

a change is needed
it's been too long, stuck in place, frozen, shrinking
from the demands of movement

I am going to rebuild the store, in my time away from
building on the last sim in Solace
and refocus my energies on what I told myself
I was going to focus on six months ago

can't stop to feel myself losing control
but deep in my senses I know

third time charming
or something like that
and we'll see what happens then

(Lyrics taken in small uneven sections from Sarah McLachlan's Stupid.)

no words can paint the picture of the Queen of all Argyll

Grace, over at the Etherial Musings blog takes on Inception as a film, and as an exercise in moving science fiction. I think she's right on all counts. (Warning: there are spoilers, though they're minimal.)

There's newness (of a sort) announced over on the Lady Disdain blog. More of that click-and-win angle, but I'm having fun with it. At the least, it's allowing me the option of going through old designs and deciding what's good, and what's abysmal. (There are a few I'm setting off to one side in the Needs work, but it's a good idea pile.)

There's a hunt coming up, and, rather than necessarily wanting to run the hunt--though there's interest--I'm rather more intrigued by the concept of being part of the hunt. At the least, this particular hunt? Will give me much more exposure to stores that, at least tenuously, consider themselves part of the RP community.

The down side (and there is one) comes in this neat little description from the hunt's organizer:

Theme: Roleplay. This can be clothing, furniture, vehicles, weapons, etc. It can be from Fantasy to Sci-fi, Gorean to Medieval.

Seriously?

So...clothing, furniture, vehicles, weapons, props, whatever--that could potentially be used in settings as diverse as:

* Trayus Academy? (I'm assuming they're not encouraging branded Star Wars RP props, but then, Star Wars RP remains large on SL.)
* the Shipyard? (General SF roleplay, but according to all sources, fairly well-done.)
* the Dark Den? (I've never been able to get a handle on exactly what it is, as it seems to comprise modern and Gorean themes fairly interchangeably, plus a lot of Goreans I know are in the Dark Den RP group. Maybe that's just their interpretation of island style?)
* Doomed? (One of the oldest SF/horror RPs on the grid; it's an sf RP, so they can always use gadgets and gear.)
* Legacies? (I'm not sure how "no holds barred" applies to Victorian horror, but then, I've never gone to look, either.)
* Midian? (I love how Midian City is this dark, oppressive, toxic, burnt landscape of urban decay, but she sounds so chirpy and upbeat about it...)
* Toxia? (I was around when Toxia first launched, so I still call it that, not Toxian City. But it's prime dark urban madness RP.)
* Necronom VI? (The other widely-known sf RP on the grid; highly detailed, larger space, and a space station, not a ship...but with something of the same problem. That problem being invasive, alien, and tentacled.)
* Gor? (There's SO MUCH, and so much variance, to the Gor lands; I just liked this story of an escaped kajira who became a Panther. It's rather well done.)

Is that what they're telling me? I mean, look, in one sense, roleplay is the props; without the props, some of us can't really buy the mindset, and flail a bit, trying to figure things out. In that sense, anything that adds to the end user experience would be a good thing, right?

On the other hand, though, there's a wide wide spectrum for RP in Second Life. Just in the quick examples I tracked down, you've got futuristic cities, decayed wastelands, Victorian horror, savage fantasy, Star Wars, tentacle sex, government conspiracies...and that's without going far from the beaten path on SL RP.

So who knows? I have some ideas, and it might be a fun hunt to join. At the least I can apply, and see if I'm accepted.

(In something nonrelated, while finding background links off the grid for those particular RP mentions, I tracked down this article which boldly states that MySpace, Second Life and Twitter are all going to spontaneously implode under the weight of their own hype.

(Now, don't mistake me, I'm one of the most virulent critics Linden Labs has, for good or ill--but, like the changes or loathe them, they are still here, three years later. So is MySpace. So is Twitter.

(In fact, Twitter's multiplicity of tweets are now being archived, by the Library of Congress, no less--so even if Twitter does implode, bright and early the first January day in 2011--those tweets will still remain.

(And, me personally, I think Twitter's a diverse enough community that it's going to last a while. Will it last out the decade? Yes. Will it last another decade, until 2020? Who knows? Personally, I think Second Life's on the way out, or at least, on the way down, if they don't check the jagged slide downhill, in terms of service interruption, grid stability, and consistent userbase; but even SL, I don't think is going to be gone by 2011.

(MySpace? MySpace hit the music boom. And, while more people are setting up their own websites, or moving to FaceBook, MySpace is still there. And what people care about the service doesn't even touch on the look of it--they want a MySpace account because it's got easy embeds for streaming music; it's got a link system that can dole out website/FaceBook/MySpace/Twitter/whatever other form of net media that's desired, all at once. In the right hands, all a designer has to do is put up a background that doesn't suck, choose a constrasting color for the print, and MySpace literally does the rest.)

I can't breathe easy here, 'less our trail's gone cold behind us

Here I go again
Slipping further away
Letting go again
Of what keeps me in place...


(Ruminating at Tweedle. You can find intriguing skyboxen, large tree lamps and tableaux, and a variety of fun and seasonal decorations here, including the highly amusing cardboard trees in several seasonal shades.)

There is a curious schism at present, between lives. I spent today by myself, wandering. From place to place, new-found or treasured of old, I wandered. I was twitchy under my skin, it kept changing. And I was alone.

Alone seems to be how I spend most of my time, these days, on the grid.

I like it here
But it scares me to death
There is nothing here...


(The zombie kissing booth at FallnAngel Creations. Note the new frock behind me--you'll find it under Ballgowns and it's called Queen of Hearts. Spendy, but worth every penny, available in far more colors than just black and white. And the hair in the ad you can find over at Falln Sanitarium.)

Is it a good sign or a bad sign that unless I specially request it, or attend at the urgings of friends who refuse to let me drift completely from the world, all I do here, I do by myself? It's not a bad sign that out of world, I live with, and adore deeply, two people, and know my heart is captured and held by two others. Love, I am not without. Valentine's Day as a holiday holds no terror for me, unless it's what to get for all these varied loves.

But on the grid, now...it's just me. Is this a good or bad sign?

The light is beautiful
But I’m darker than light
And you are wonderful
But this moment is mine...


(Hanging out at the sick sim, above the main drag.)

Maybe it's just a sign of burn-out. I'm no longer enchanted with scavenger hunts, what with the total and extreme glut of them, these days. Even the scavenger hunts for places I adore, like Falln, I don't always attend. And hunting out interesting freebies lacks appeal when my inventory groans at 62K.

All of this dust
All of this past
All of this over and gone
And never coming back...


(Very large angry kitties on the sick sim.)

And really, while I enjoy dancing, and I do want to spend time with my friends...at this point, I'm not even going out of my way to strike up conversations with anyone. I rarely speak in Caledon chat anymore, and I keep pulling open one or the other graphics program, staring at it, thinking Why bother? and closing it.

All of this forgotten
Not by me...


(Ripple effects: looking up through the water at Alirium Gardens. The tree behind me is the Ordinary Tree in Insanity; it's a good name for such a random collection of wildly colored leaves.)

Maybe it's ennui. Maybe it's just something that happens to people who've been on the grid this long. I'm coming up on four years, this summer; maybe all the changes, all the frustration, all the selective deaf ears of the Lindens is finally wearing on me, to the point that I just don't have the patience to spend on the grid that I once had.

I find comfort here
'Cos I know what is lost
Hope is always fear
For the pain it may cost...


(Relaxed contemplation on the green at Alirium Gardens. The dress is part of Nomine's contributions to the Stumblebum line, in particular, the Skully Red Dust Storm dress. To date, it's the only 'babydoll' style I like, and have ever liked, on SL.)

Perhaps that's part of it, too. I'm still recovering from somewhat serious illness--the flu I had did not turn into pneumonia only due to extreme paranoia and overbearing diligence on the part of my loves, pouring medicants and herbal teas down my throat, making sure I kept warm, and making sure I stayed visible, which meant the wee netbook, propped on my lap. The netbook will run SL...barely. When I didn't have the energy to fight through the lag, I sat and sewed, or nodded off, awakened only by coughing or by the next dose of cough syrup, or the next cup of tea. I didn't touch my desktop for nearly a week.

And I have searched for the reason to go on
I’ve tried and I’ve tried
But it’s taking me so long
I might be better off
Closing my eyes
And God will come looking for me
In time...


(Meditating on "Elven" flowers at the Arachne Market.)

I'm still coughing, but that's the last trace of it. To me, my voice is still creak and crackle; to others, it is deep and mysterious, and to be fair, of the two, I'd rather be Mata Hari than a Mogwai after midnight, so it works.

All of this dust
All of this past
All of this over and gone...


(I'm going to have to write and ask, because I am enough in love with The Deck's patio furniture, I want to know how much and where I can get--and while the pieces are all over the shop, the vendors for them are not.)

Maybe the desire to play on the grid will return. I do know that this patch of discontent is hitting at the worst possible time, as I'm attempting to get up and functional both my main store, and the satellite branch on the additional bit of Morgaine. I think there's all of three items, maybe four, at either location, and in Twilight Tears, I'm just unhappy all the way 'round with the build in the first place.

All of this dust
All of this past
All of this over--


(Building over Glidden.)

I may end up just going for a huge, hollowed-out megaprim, the dimension of the parcels I'm allowed to play with on Twilight Tears. Something gargantuan and empty, pattern the walls with stars, the ceiling with comets, the floor with grass...and put in trees and dances and more gravestones and fog....It's not that I lack ideas, just the drive to put them into physical form.

I can see myself
I look peaceful and pale
But underneath
I can barely inhale...


(Drifting down in a bubble looks more peaceful than it is. The bubbleport system just came down at my new main store above Twilight Tears, because we're working on a simpler, less erratic teleportation system. Even assuming that were fixed and purely functional, I just don't have the stock, at present. It's a very large empty store currently.)

It remains to be seen if my unabashed love for SL will triumph over disheartening cynicism. I'm not pulling either way, though I do know that--contrary to the last time I spoke of leaving--I would miss SL if I did go.

Maybe that's part of it, too. It would just take too much effort to leave and uproot everything. I have a home here. I have--if disjointed and lonely, at times--a life, here. And while it's not as vibrant as my first life, it does exist, still. In spite of it all.

I can hear myself singing that song
Over and over until it belongs to me...


(Can't go home again: where my home stood, two years ago, in Rivula.)

The Second Life of today would not have captured me in 2006, when I joined. But the Second Life I joined in 2006 is far, a thousand leagues far, from where we are now. M Linden seems to want nothing but business networking; there's still mass confusion over what's allowable and what's not, in terms of camping, lucky/unlucky chairs, and Adult ratings; and there's deep, deep unhappiness at the Labs. I predict more departures for better, less stressful, climes, by more Lindens who care about people, not profits.

Can't go home again, clichéd but true...but what happens when home leaves us, first?

(Lyrics are taken from "All of this Past" by Sarah Bettens.)

and you'll fight it, you'll go out fighting all of them

Dragon Age Origins: Meet Oghren! (If you don't get why that's funny, then keep in mind--the voice actor who did Oghren? Also did Cowboy Bebop.)

A few, so very few, updates on the merchant thing.

I'm currently bashing my forehead against the warded spiked padlocked acid-dripping gate that is MVX. I take everything back I've said against Slapt.me, bring it on--anything to get me out of trying to list on MVX.

I hate MVX with every further step I take to list on this thrice-damned quasi-merchanting service.

Check this out:

* It was difficult to make an account;
* It was difficult to track down the server box;
* Once the server box was tracked down, rezzing it out meant actually rezzing out the server, not a box that unpacked the server with instructions;
* I had to click Edit on the server box to find the instructions;
* After dragging in what I thought they wanted, I found out they didn't want what I thought they wanted (and I had to export out all of my box art to my hard drive later when listing items);
* and all of that was before I started the insanity of listing items.

On top of all that the page looks like it's shiny vintage 1996 for webcoding, and that is...just...insanely scary. It's the 21st century, people. You can do better than that.

But the Bloody Carni dress, the Bloodscratch EGL dress and the Rapture's End gown are all up.

So...now I have five items in the skybox just dedicated to vending: Apez (which is starting to look like the least terrible of many terrible options), Slapt.me, MVX (which, unless they DRASTICALLY IMPROVE are only EVER seeing three items listed from me), meta-LIFE (which may well be the second runner-up), and the hippo-Vend server box, which I need to revamp, restock, and get up and running again.

And if Cariama is serious about telling me when they launch, I'll have a sixth scripted prim from them. You have to be kidding!

What was the point of this? Oh, right, because Linden Labs got stupid and greedy. Gosh, I nearly forgot. Turns out we know now where the mutant glowing bunny comes from--Pink left eBay for the Labs. Oh, GOODY.

Second Life Update briefly analyzes the problem; which I don't entirely get on reviewing it, because who ever searched for free items on XStreet and not using "free" or "freebie" as search terms?

In the meantime, entries keep popping up on forums and blogs:

I’m saddened to have to add my name to the list of merchants leaving XStreet SL, but I have no choice.

and

Smaller merchants are now leaving XStreetSL, as well as any merchants who cannot afford the listing fees for their products. I myself would be paying well over L$1000 for it, which just isn't viable for me.

and

SLUniverse takes on the price hikes.

and

This is going to kill a huge part of Second Life's economy. Only those who are earning thousands from their sale will be able to pay these fees, and even they won't be happy about this.

and...and...AND...It's getting insane. I think this is starting to rival the negative feedback generated on the OpenSpace debacle.

And are they listening? Oh hell no. The Labs don't care.

choking on saltwater, but I'm not giving in

The Oilpunk Trilobyte. Keen! Where are the plans?

Antonius Misfit analyzes XStreet's anti-competitive measures.

And Miss Ordinal Malaprop takes on the price hikes with some excellent points (as expected):

The distribution of the message that Xstreet is for a certain sort of person to make money. It is not a general method of distribution for educators or philanthropists. I also say "a certain sort of person" because the economic engineering here encourages certain business models over others. There is no economy of scale and no attempt to allow for one; you should be making small numbers of high-priced items that all sell well, not even small numbers of high-priced specialist items (see above).

and

A corollary to that is the message that Linden Lab is not interested in you making things better for other residents by means of its services. In fact, Linden Lab would rather that you didn't, and will charge you more if you intend to.

And she's absolutely right. The Labs, at this point, have no interest in being everyone's virtual world--unless the end consumer has money, and lots of it, and a desire to give lots of it to the Labs--they couldn't care less.

Again, individual Lindens? Nifty people. At large? Mass mob of intoxicated bookies screaming for blood.

So, based on yesterday's revelation--I could price my one demi-free item back at L$4, and remove the in-world free option, or I could reduce it to L$1 or L$0 again, and then get hit with that L$102 (L$99 plus the L$3 commission) fee. It wasn't worth it to me, so I'm now entirely off XStreet, with, sadly, no other clear alternative on where to go.

Bah.

In vendor news...I hate Apez. I really do. They are not at all intuitive, they are hard to use, they are hard to figure out how to get started, even, and the mere concept of getting a vendor box to start seems beyond their ability to make simple. It was agonizing work trying to figure out which little highlighted word went to the right damned place.

That having been said, I'm running the same test I'm running elsewhere, only this one has an option for in-world, as well. So you'll find the Bloody Carni gown and the new revision of the Bloodscratch gown on the grid in Black Sands, as well as on the web in the Apez store...somewhere, because unlike XStreet, they do not maintain separate shop sections.

I'll be adding more when I can, I think, though, anyway--because as frustrating as they are, they are established, and it gives me time to test out other firms, and see how they work.

Over on MMORPG, they're discussing what makes a healthy community. They're talking about MMOs, and their sometimes drama-ridden forums attached therewith, but I wondered if the same rules applied to SL.

What makes a healthy community?

I view community health as a combination of how active conversations are, ease of entry for the newcomer and general online safety. For my purposes as a community manager, customer satisfaction with the game isn't a component of the community health. If customers are dissatisfied, I want to make sure that there is a readily available channel somewhere in the community where they can discuss their issues.

The Labs tell us this "readily available channel" is the blogs, and the blog forums. I say, that's deceptive at best, and maliciously duplicitous at worst. One wonders what it takes, honestly, to get through Linden egospeak; as many have said, individually, Lindens are all right; but as a collective, they're an ungodly mess, and willfully deaf to boot.

Dealing with emergencies

When I fire up my browser to look at the forums, I know that anything could happen. A major exploit could be emerging. Servers may have gone down two minutes ago, and there's always an eight page thread on login troubles which will grow past 50 pages within the hour. These are the ones that need to be jumped on immediately.

In the face of a major service issue, people aren't posting contemplative thoughts, sharing strategies and insights. They're posting their real-time emotional responses to the issue at hand. It's a mob, calling for a fix to the problem, threatening to quit the game, and calling for developers to be fired. In their heightened agitation, players start flame wars amongst themselves, the word idiot will get thrown around and people will generally make themselves miserable while they wait for a response from you.

The Lindens have seen this. Over and over they've seen this. They've had residents calling for resignations, calling for firings, calling for the heads of various Lindenforms to be delivered to them forthwith while they burn effigies of Philip in heated pixel flames.What community managers need to do, Mr. Wachter points out, is be aware of these pressure points, and realize, community members are customers, and while their problems are generally problems with developers, programmers, coders and the like, getting an honest answer--or at least something that feels like an honest answer--is important when the customer thinks there's a crisis.

If you don't recognize the bad decisions before they go public, then you're back on the damage control treadmill.

Where are the Lindens right now? On the damage control treadmill, maybe--though I'm fairly sure they're not even close to the damage control treadmill, they're still standing around in shock because the whole damage control gym blew up.

Ciaran Laval speaks on Linden reaction to the BBC article; and I'm terribly amused by one point:

Now first of all, I do find it rather humourous that the lab are complaining that M was approached to do an interview about "a look at Second Life today - what's it up to, where's it going, why so quiet in the media after such great press a few years ago, etc." I find this humourous because not long back I attended an office hour that was about "Freebies, Demos, and Promo offerings on XStreet" that somehow got morphed into a policy to introduce listing fees for everyone selling an item of L$1 or more on XstreetSL, so providing input on one thing and then discovering that it ends up being about something else is an area where residents have experience, maybe Linden Lab will understand how that's not such a great thing to do to people now, hey?

Yeah. So not wrong.