in the lonely light of morning, in the wound that would not heal

Awesome--she's showing her knees!

SN@TCH is one of the stranger businesses on the grid. Ivey Deschanel started her SL business with a single small store full of rockabilly sass and tattoo shirts. She's now expanded to a full sim and rents space to other merchants who are becoming equally well-known. She's part of the group that runs a highly successful--and usually deeply upsetting--haunted house every year, which changes themes but always offers something of a mystery to solve, some well-thought out design, and freebies along the way.

Her latest card advertising her 'Humpday' item this week featured this passage:

"Humpday Happiness is clouded this week by the lingering stink of some skank but don't let that deter you from shopping at all the fab places just cause a little scunge and her snot-nosed friends smeared her bad mojo on our fun."

The hell?

So I looked into it. Seems a Miss Penelope Thiessam got involved last week for the Humpday stores, all worked up because she's been banned at SN@TCH and doesn't even know why.

Well, I'm not entirely sure why, either--though I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say that posts like these, for better or worse, are likely what got her into this fix. Just as my posts on Step Up! got me banned at sims sympathetic to their cause.

It happens. Is it fair? Depends on your definition of 'fair'. If that means everyone gets the free right to comment, and no one has the right to ban anyone from their parcels because they're 'public businesses' or something, then no, it's not fair. If you mean everyone gets the free right to comment on their own blogs, or leave comments on other blogs, and the people who own the businesses in SL can decide whether or not they want certain folks on those parcels...then yes, it's fair. Fair as anything else, I suppose. (And note, that is NOT my advocating a no-ban policy--by all means, keep to your bans! Hells, I'm banned on my own cognizance from a set of sims, never to visit more, because those individuals would rather I didn't go. I can do that; they're allowed to not want me there. And for the folks who can't seem to get the point, there are individual avatar bans, per parcel and per sim. That's what the ban system is for.)

Miss Ivey did end in a good mood, at least:

"I'm outie, ya'll have fun and whatever you do, be yourself. You don't have to conform to what anyone else says is cool, do what makes you comfy and happy and fuck anyone that tells you you should be anything else.

Vive la RESISTANCE!"

Absolutely. Go see SN@TCH if you want a chance at a rather primmy, but very pretty, gothic skybox. It even comes with bookshelves, a plant and a fireplace, all low-prim!

(Insert from the Editrix: leaving the link up, in case anyone's interested in retro--think 1950s, not 1850s--fashion with a modern twist, paired with your typical trash neko visions--but the skybox is long gone. Much much happened and I didn't end up getting this out until now.)

The main thing is, beyond any personal drama for whatever reason--we're in a recession. And while a lot of consumers on the grid are internationals, a lot of the makers of items on the grid are from the US. So we're coming up with anything we can to get people in our stores.

Some folks are discounting all older stock to cheap or free status--I'm looking to do that with my older designs in a bit, actually. And some folks toss up new stuph, old stuph, or on the cuff stock towards Wednesday sales (L$69), Friday sales (L$50) or various other forms (I've seen Tuesdays, Sundays, Mondays...) for several reasons. First, of course, is: a sale is a sale. Running something for L$69 or L$50 or L$25 means that item sold for that price. (I once paid rent on a 1024 parcel of Caledon for three straight months from a single Linden pack of madras textures on XStreetSL. Of course, that was before they cocked that entire system up, but that's not the point.)

And at this point, many of us just like making sales, period, rather than keep our going rates and not sell a thing.

And while these sales opportunities have never been my focus, as they are Miss Thiessam's, I, too, get disgruntled when it seems that it's a recycled piece of stable fodder trotted out again just because the designer had it lying around. (I have no problem with retints, and I am Miss Malaprop's target audience for striped stockings; I think I have half of all the stockings she's ever made--but I understand as well why someone might roll their eyes at "yet another retint" from makers like Schadenfreude and Silent Sparrow.)

What I think she doesn't realize is holding to all these varying sales can cause great strain on a designer. There you are, trying to get out your own releases of a week, and you now have the additional pressure of a specially marked item to get out as well. If you're very prolific--and not everyone is!--you can balance these disparate goals equably.

But if you're not...well, retints are going to sneak in. And sometimes that is not a bad thing--there was a point at which one designer I followed made everything she turned out for the group a particular shade of blue or pink. So that only the group gifts had that shade. It became a point of solidarity at group gatherings to see how many of us were in the group tones.

Or to take another example, Mr. Azriel Demain, the mind behind FallnAngel Designs--he generally picks one to three (and generally it's closer to two) shades for each hunt he organizes, and just about everything is in that shade. Yes, it's a tragedy if you decide to hunt for things when he picks deep gold, say, and your skin doesn't match deep gold; but at the least it's a way to try out his designs and decide if you'd like them in non-deep gold. (Which is sort of the point of hunts, to get an idea of how a maker designs, and whether or not you want more from that maker. I've found more than a few designers on the grid that way, actually.)

At one point--he's changed this policy now--he'd toss in hair in the hunts that was always in the Party shade--sort of a streaked pink/purple/black. It gave you an idea of what the hair looked like, on--back when he was new to making hair--and, if you really couldn't stand the Party tone, you wouldn't so much worry because nothing on the hair floor was in that tone if you really liked the style and wanted it in colors closer to, y'know, hair.

The point is, it's a lot of pressure on designers to produce. So once in a while they hit it out of the park--as I thought Miss Deschanel did with the Angel skybox--and sometimes it's a ground ball. We can't always predict what will catch on with people, after all, and some people are going to hate everything we do on principle. It happens.

Being a muckraker m'self on occasion, I can see both why Miss Thiessam feels she needs to tell people that the Emperor has no clothes, as well as see why Miss Deschanel took it personally and banned Thiessam from her stores. This also happens; fair or not, it's what we deal with on the grid. If we irritate more than we charm, we get banned. If we calm down, we can have a chance to get un-banned--but that's only if that maker has any interest in unbanning us.

Me, I'd just farm out photography to friends, and stop mentioning the banning every week, if I still wanted to cover all the stores on the sales days. And, if there was a store that I desperately wanted to retain access to, I'd contact the maker.

Like the time I got banned from Temenos due to a misunderstanding--I contacted Miss Zoe Llewelyn and explained my side of things, AND that I'd still be a loyal customer and send folks her way--because to this day, I adore her neko skins. And I got the ban reversed, for which I'm again thankful, to this day.

But that's me. And there are people I refuse to apologize to on general principle--and I'm still banned from those sims. I understand why, for the most part, and I accept that. Maybe it's more a case of acceptance in general--if what I say offends people, they have the Linden Labs-guaranteed right to ban me. Just as I have the blog-guaranteed right to complain. What I don't have the right to do is insist they reverse the ban because everyone should have access to their stores; because it's "unfair"; because it's a case of designers being overly sensitive, or whatever other excuse is being bandied about.

It's a ban. If you want access to that store, apologize. If the maker doesn't accept that, you tried. Move on. There are so many makers of so many things on the grid; why get tied up, incensed and enraged, over one? Move to the next three hundred.

Trust me on this. Both you--and your avatar--will live longer.