you smile and I don't understand when you tell me the writing ain't yours

Is it just me? Is my current attitude towards grid-wide hunting a byproduct of age and ill grace? Because I'm scanning the usual suspects to get an idea of what I might want to hunt out (when one's inventory reaches 66,000 one becomes inordinately careful on what one acquires), and I'm suffering an extreme fit of ill temper over certain things.

I would have to carve bits off any tattoo artist who gave me this, for instance. And I do believe a pixellated judge would nod and understand.

Maybe I'm just cranky in general right now. A "Hot Scmergel" dropped by the Solace sales office:

[18:37] Emilly Orr: Hello, Hot! Let me know if I can help with any Solace Beach questions.

She said nothing, just danced in place. I pulled her profile.

"Like every one says"I DON'T DO DRAMA" and I'm here to have fun,so lets party,I am a party girl!!!"

Aside from the quotation marks, that's exactly what's on her bio page. Riiiiight.

Idly, I scanned her groups. Handful of shop groups, the rest of her slots are almost all dance groups or lesbian groups. I snerked at "Kittens Lesbian Erotica", whose group name is almost a description: Kittens Lesbian Erotica - **WOMEN ONLY** Club.



Riiiiight. Because when I think of lesbians, I always think of seven-foot-tall booth-tanned "party girls" with latex stockings and bad hair.

[18:41] Emilly Orr: Or, y'know, just hang out and watch you dance untl you mysteriously disappear for no reason.

Ten minutes later? She's STILL dancing obliviously away. I finally drop her an IM, and ten minutes past that still, she sends back this:

[18:57] Hot Scmergel: ty

No, really. Thank you. Honestly, it was a bright spot in my entire day watching your anorexic ass dance badly.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe what I really I need is a rocker and a crocheted shawl, and I can just randomly show up places and yell at the kids on my lawn.

[19:09] Cornelia Rothschild: 1. Buy hoodie that says 'Cutie Pie' for cat with anger management issues. 2. Dance cat around. 3. ???? 4. Profit.

If only we knew more about Step 3....

[9:53] Darlingmonster Ember: two points to share for ISC, one... Xstreet seems to not allow logins for me
[9:54] Darlingmonster Ember: two... the new 'emerald' site 'Phoenix' seems to already have been hacked
[9:55] Darlingmonster Ember: (not a tech person, pls excuse the lack of specifics)
[9:55] Glorf Bulmer: Much problems with logins today: http://status.secondlifegrid.net/2010/09/04/post1083/
[9:55] Darlingmonster Ember nods
[9:55] Darlingmonster Ember saw that...and was wondering about the shutdown of the XStreet exchange

I've been watching, and ever since this, no one else has reported computer problems with downloading New Phoenix. I'm still wary, because so much went wrong so quickly with Emerald and the Emerald devs, but either they discovered the problem, and replaced the client, or it was one of those rare coincidences. They happen. I don't know either way, so I'm reporting it as a potential false positive (so to speak, and tipping the hat to Mr. Telling for the term).

[10:00] Tali Rosca: Notice that the marketplace is planned to *come out of beta* come January. Some 3 months after they shut down the existing version.
[10:01] Glorf Bulmer: One of the advantages of living eight time zones ahead of LL... you get to log in before things crash
[10:01] Darlingmonster Ember: they even noted on the lead page.... we do understand Xstreet Exchange has a higher level of service... we will be planning to match that... someday
[10:01] Tali Rosca: By all use of the "beta" term, that means that for 3 months, we do not have a production-ready marketplace we can rely on for actual work.
[10:14] Emilly Orr: Of course not. Why would the Lindens bother with creating a functional market for virtual goods?

Why yes, I am bitter at this point. Obscurely, I'm still hoping to be wrong. But think of the problems it would solve without user content allowed in SL. Copybotting? Copied product would be easy to spot; it wouldn't be created by a Linden. Worried about kids in SL? Don't bother: the Linden creators just won't make Adult content. Zindra sales down? The Lindens can kill the continent; no more lowered sales.

Yes, I know, this is becoming my Prokofian delusion: and it's one I really, REALLY hope I'm wrong in believing. Because destroying user content in SL would really, truly, once and for all, kill user interest in SL for a great many of us.

And then there's this:

And lo and behold, the castanets were made.

Damn, if those aren't the truest words ever penned...

Speaking as one of the types who frequently gets hysterical at the drop of a hat, even I've backed down on the sturm-und-drang posts. I've hit the wall of Why am I really here? Because I design clothing (that never sells) and hold hunts (that no one attends) and okay, the charity end of things, I do well on, but I can't rely on charity work to pay me anything--and that's not the point of charity work in the first place.

And the SL job--of the six sims I was hired to work on and redevelop, the owner sold three. Not because I was doing a bad job, but because there's just not enough people wanting to rent. (She's going down to one Adult-rated sim, she's cut out easily 10% of her commercial sims, total, and she would have cut down more residential sims save for many of them are homesteads, or grandfathered in--and thus, now cannot be sold.)

In point of fact, my work in the sales office hasn't seen a commission sale in three weeks.

Topping all this off, there's no one I spend serious time with who wants to be in SL. And, because of the process I went through, essentially severing all social ties while I recovered from first one blow, then another, then a third (yes, one was Radio Riel, but the others, being RL-based trauma surfacing with an insane suddenness, followed by intense relationship trauma, SL and RL), I hear about dances, about celebrations, about social talks and I feel not only an extreme disinclination to attend, but also I wonder, again--why am I here?

Now, I do want to reassure anyone reading along--especially landlord-shaped people--this is not my extended farewell to Second Life. But it's caused some pondering, admittedly. We aren't quite (RL we) financially stable enough to simply buy three months of rent in advance and make everyone happy, so I have to do one of two things: create things and sell them, OR work for someone else.

And don't mistake me--though the lack of commissions currently is galling, I have sold things, and I don't plan on changing my style because it works for me--when potential renters want to buy. And while I am pondering the business, and working on a new line of products, I know that the largest hindrance to my making sales is not my work, but a) the glacial slowness of updating my various lines paired with b) the fact that there are so many people out there offering so many things for sale--and a great many of those merchants have more skill than I do (and that's not sour grapes, that's just honesty--I am just now learning how to shade, how to highlight, and it's a slow process for me).

But it gets daunting on more than a few occasions: whatever I explore in the world, I explore alone. Hunting, once a keenly thrilling social activity, has become bland and dull. I have to weigh the cool stuph I find against several thoughts that almost instantly follow: "Will X want to know this? What's the point of one more cool frock if they're not in world to wear the last six I told them about?"

And, between the annoyance of constant grid-wide hunt notices, and the merchanting end of things (my merchanting, as well as everyone else's) feeling so desperate...I'm going to be ruthlessly honest, here: Second Life just isn't fun anymore.

And, see, if it were just me, then okay--everyone goes through bad patches, and summer's turning to fall, and there are a lot of folks, not just me, balancing work needs against life needs, and finding the virtual part of our lives falling short.

But it's not just me. Logging in over the past four days? Today was the first day that the little statistics reader on login registered more than 40,000 avatars in world. Now yes, I'm from 2006, and I remember when the entire world staggered at 30,000 concurrently--but there have been a lot of server upgrades, base code upgrades, since then. Moreover, if SL was having major login problems, a server farm or two crashing out, that's understandable--annoying, but understandable.

But that's not it. There's just not more than 32000 to 36000 interested in Second Life most of the time. And that? Is kind of scary.

So, to finally get around to answering Miss Dio's question--has Second Life changed, or have we? We have changed. I think it's unmistakeable at this point. But that's not the problem.

The problem is, Second Life hasn't changed to keep up. Or if they have--because she makes an excellent point about Philip--then they've changed in ways that don't align with the bulk of the grid.

Irreconcilable differences, here we come.