except for the space between the mirror and me

I have to start this entry off with very bad news from Octoberville:

I hate to be the bearer of bad/sad news, but PixelTrix, due to personal issues with in the company, have decided to disband. The island(sim) is already gone and there will not be an Octoberville next fall.

To our fans, customers and friends; We have had a fantastically fun time with you over the years and we can never thank you enough for all that you have done for us. We've met wonderful friends and have forged great relationships with so many of you. Thank You.

Master Kaos

So what does this mean? Without asking the main participants, I don't know whether it was a professional falling-out, or a personal breakup. As friable and emotionally wrought as BDSM relationships can be, friends forming businesses together can be just as charged, and just as prone to failure. Unfortunately, it leaves me with a potentially dysfunctional group for a few days, because--in the time between getting that group notice (about one PM PST, on the 28rth) and now (about five PM PST, same day), all group notices have been deleted, and half the titles of players have been dumped.

Considering how hard Mm. Allen and I worked, last year, to get Octoberville Epic titles, I'm irritated, so I'm taking a few days until I'm absolutely sure it's dead in the water.

The one thing I do know: Octoberville, as a sim, is gone.

Okay, one more comment from the TPV thread on SL Universe. From Sredni Eel:

Lindens should be required to spend a certain amount of time in Second Life doing the same things normal residents do: Go clubbing, go shopping, try to build in a sandbox while a buttshelf brazilian noob tries to sex you out of the blue, and all of the other fun and exciting things we all know and love. Then maybe they'd be more inclined to make improvements to the user experience.

This should be etched in 30-foot-high letters of FIRE on the main wall of the break room/group conference room/Rodvik's office. Wherever's big enough. Because this has been the problem for years now--that maybe two Lindens out of every fifty actually interact on the grid they're supposed to code for.

They desperately need to know what the user experience actually is, to properly code for it. Or to use a ridiculous example: if you want to make donuts, then you pick up a recipe book and look up how to make them. Or you go find a bakery and watch what they do. You don't go to YouTube in the privacy of your office and watch videos about bears and cars, and make donuts based on that.

(Though to be fair, I think it's rather the reverse--we're telling the Lindens that we use their world to dance [synchronized, or, well, not], to make art, to recreate reality [in fantastic or realistic ways], hunt, and to achieve the impossible. They listen, they go off to think, and then they give us in return...well...this. Which is pretty much the Lindens putting together a product that misunderstands everything about how their userbase lives, day to day, night to night, in their world. They just don't get it.)

At least in my opinion, since 2007, at least, there's been a steadily growing, basic disconnect between what we do on their grid, and what the Lindens think we do on their grid...and it's only becoming farther and farther apart, the actual versus the virtual.

And, unfortunately, here the virtuality is all on the Linden side--because they just don't know as a group body how we work, how we play, what we want, and--perhaps most important--what we're willing to buy and keep around. Until they understand any of these things, we're always going to have these problems.

And talk about brain-breaking concepts--someone's come up with SuperWhoLock on Tumblr. The hell, people. The hell.