out pops the cracker, smacks you in the head; knifes you in the neck, kicks you in the teeth

(from the Train Wreck Love Life album; image courtesy Historic LOLs.)

Though to be fair, the love life, these days, is fairly free of wreckage. I am, of course, still wary of this, and waiting for bad things to happen is just part of what I do. Still, I did have to link this, for obvious reasons.

All right, in other news.

The resizeable mesh project seems to be zipping along; apparently the Lindens are working with him to actually implement the coding changes he's working on, so I tend to agree--this is far from the worst thing that could happen.

Why are there banana Dachshunds? Does anyone have an answer? (There's also apple owls, scallion cats, and carrot bunnies, among others, but the banana pups confuse me most.)

May I present to you the Origami Apartment! It folds, it pleats, it maneuvers to entertain. (Which made a friend remember the Hong Kong transforming apartment, and yeah--different execution, same basic concept.)

"I'm appalled that Linden Lab is so completely disreputable and its employees apparently so completely incapable of identifying ethical behaviour or even understanding just how badly this reflects on them, that they have taken absolutely no action to protect their rapidly diminishing reputation."

That was from a blog post made back in August (not mine), so the bulk of it is dealing with issues that have already been resolved (the great Buy an Ozimal bunny, it'll help Second Life promotion springs to mind), or issues that plainly won't ever be resolved, no matter what amount of wrongdoing comes to light (JLU and the Dragonfish data leak). Still, there's valid information there, which leads me to the entry posted yesterday.

This came in the mail this afternoon:

From: "Second Life" {secondlife@e.secondlife.com}
To: emilly.orr@gmail.com
Date: Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 3:31 PM
Subject: Please disregard earlier Second Life Renewal Reminder message

I could just stop there, but hey, I'll carry this out entire.

Dear Emilly

Our sincere apologies. You recently received an email from no-reply@secondlife.com in error. The message subject was "Second Life Renewal Reminder," and it stated that your account would be charged for the cost of a renewal of a Premium Membership, and on a date that is in the past. Please disregard that email. We will not be charging your account for the stated fees.

Again, please disregard our previous message and accept our apologies for any confusion. If you have additional questions, please contact support.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab and the Second Life Team

Now, there are a few interesting things here. First, the Lindens have moved from "Dear Emilly Orr" to "Dear Emilly". I'm a neo-Victorian online, not (so much) RL, so while I note the added 'familiarity', it doesn't offend me.

Secondly, it's an apology letter. The Lindens actually apologized. They don't do that. In the half-decade I've been involved with SL, they've never done that to my recollection (at least, without temporizing it heavily to make the apology sound like something they're doing for the courtesy of it, but it 'shouldn't count'). So...how many residents received this letter? And how many complaints, notecards, IMs and phone calls did they get?

Third, yeah, let's talk about the mention of calling support with additional concerns. First, it would have been nice if they'd provided an actual support number, but I also know that if I dig long enough on the site, the phone number turns up.

Here's the problem with that, though--while I, personally, have had good luck the few times I've needed to call (and only twice as a Premium account holder; the other times I've been Basic), by and large the average report is that if one is not a Premium member, one does not call support. Period. Because there's no help on their help lines, for non-Premium members.

So...they're stating they sent the email in error; they're apologizing (and profusely, for them, which is even more stunning); and they're asking people to call support if they need any other help.

You know, those tentative urges towards resubscribing as a Premium member? (Not so much for the Lindenhomes, because they're fairly useless for me, and not so much for the "gifts" designed for Premium members, because I have more than enough virtual things, but mainly for the member-only sandbox options.) They've been fairly effectively quashed by this. I think it's going to be at least six months if not longer before I think it might, possibly, be a good idea again.