you're gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul

Continuing from yesterday's drama...this seems to be an issue affecting both those who've converted to the new Direct Delivery system (which, at this point, I can safely say should never have been launched in its current broken condition), and those who still run with Magic Boxes.

So that means it affects, on average...EVERYONE. And yet, the Lindens are still screwing around with whether it's a "showstopper" on the JIRA or just a "Major" issue. Get your crap together, kids--this is not the time to play amateur hour with party hats. These are now officially peoples' lives you're fucking with, to be blunt.

Here's what I have yet to figure out (mainly, because I'm afraid to have anything that costs any amount of Lindens shipped to me from the Marketplace):

(from the shopping album)

If I order this item (which I won't, but if), will I get the brown Argyle sweater that I can't see, the micro-fox avatar which is pictured, or something else entirely? And will I be paying L$10, L$700, or some other figure entirely?

(from the shopping album)

Maybe it's just me, but the longer this drags on and the more businesses are hit, and hit hard, the more this seems like a metaphor for Second Life as a whole--Don't waste your time and money buying things, just keep paying us your tier fees, because we're just going to set the world on fire until everything's ash and we've sold the company off to some other sucker. See ya!

In unrelated news, is there a way to tell who owns a sim if one cannot travel there and just pull up land info? For some reason, I am a) in a subscribe-o-matic I don't want to be in at a freebie hair store, but b) find myself unable to go there, because apparently, I'm banned from the Sea Magic sim. And I don't even know why!

There's starting to be mounting replies on the main JIRA for all this nonsense; so over the next few days, why yes, I'm going to be crawling through and editing the choicest bits into entries. You're welcome.

In the meantime, blogs are starting to pick up on the fact that the Marketplace has gone haywire. Miss Twine's blog mentions the problems, SL Universe lists it as an unmitigated disaster, the Wastelands blog goes into an entire history of "half-assed features" (wonderful term), as well as mentioning a little squib on Tateru Nino's blog that barely and briefly skims over the surface of the developing controversy, and Ciaran Laval weighs in on how LL seems, at present, to be so staunchly behind the catastrophic clusterfuck that is the Marketplace at present, that they're now outright refusing to offer any customer support on the Magic Boxes.

Yes, really.

And Crap Mariner hosts an entire entry full of Second Life oddity, including the creepy zeppelin sex moment on Penny Arcade, and, obscurely, yesterday's post from me. Woo?

The upshot, of course--as with most of these issues--boils down to drama-drama-drama-Second Life sucks-drama-drama-the Lindens are evil-drama-drama-drama-we're all going to die...

...but, see, while that's hyperbole, in a very real sense it's also accurate. I don't think it's entirely an unfounded reaction, either. Think this through. More than one person I know is using income gained from Second Life sales to pay rent. To buy food. To afford to clothe their children. To keep them in Mountain Dew for long late nights with PhotoShop on the beta grid.

Every single day, every hour the Marketplace is in such a shambling, viral, diseased condition is one more day, one more hour where these people will start to wonder--Is SL worth it? Should I get a real job? If this fails, what do I do next?

And every day, every hour, every minute where all we're hearing from the Lindens is be patient, this will be fixed soon, we promise...we grow a little more embittered, a little more angry, a little more panicked, a little more contemptuous. If they can't figure out--after months, literally, of Marketplace issues before now--how to fix this soon, then why have that business in Second Life? And if there's no business, then why have that sim?

And if there's no sim, then why log in? A follows B follows C, and if the Lindens don't see it, then really, they've all gone blind with hubris and are hemorrhaging intelligence points from all orifices, flat out.

I have never been more grateful to no longer have a financial stake in Second Life than I am, right now. And I haven't been this disgusted with the Lindens since the whole Zindra meltdown, frankly. And unless I've been right all along--that they really are trying to drive users who create content off their grid, to prepare for a sale to another tech firm--I can't see any reason why they're launching services that are so profoundly flawed, that they're only going to have to go in and overhaul later. It. Makes. No. Sense. To me. At all.

Anyone feel like explaining, I'm willing to listen--that includes Lindens, should any happen by--but I can't see a good reason why they're being this cack-handed with their coding.

[Insert from the Editrix: Discovered this from a friend--seems the three JIRA issues I found are only the three that the Lindens are bothering to keep track of. Between Sera Lok and Sassy Romano, there's at least a dozen, maybe more--and we're still in the early stages.

[The overwhelming majority view so far is that Marketplace needs to be shut down, rewritten, then relaunched--any takers on whether the Lindens will think this is a sound idea and implement it as a fix?

[Yeah, I didn't think so.]