The Story of Stuff

Guest blogged by Whisperwolf, with comments from Wildcat.

Browsing the internet I came across one of the best short animation-films I've ever seen. Called the story of stuff and presented by a lady called Annie Leonard, this film exposes the true cost behind todays society of use-and-throw-out. One really shocking thing that she said, which I checked out (and found to be true) was a true reflection of consumerism. What did President Bush tell people to do in the days after 9/11? (apart from bomb Iraq, I mean.) Pray? Spend time with families? Grieve? No. He told us to shop. Don't let the terrorists win, continue our daily way of life - in fact, we should shop more just to spite the terrorists. Yeah, that'll show them.

Do everyone a favour. Watch the film yourself, and when you've watched it, publicize it. Tell everyone you can think of about it. Blog about it, as I have done. Perhaps THE most important point she makes is that it isn't too late to take this back off the corporations. But time IS running out. The planet's resources are not finite. Watch. Care. Get involved. The planet is depending on you.

You know, wondering around in Second Life I see the echoes of the consumer society. Second Life is the ultimate utopia for consumer spending, where shopping is god, but ultimately there are no production costs, no problem with disposal, no using the planets resources. I look at Second Life and I see that its training us to think like consumers. Want your own land? Consumer. Even if you get your own land, you're going to want stuff to put on it. Even if you don't, every day there are group IM's about costume events where virtual money is up for grabs, but to enter you've first got to have the costume... so get out there and buy, buy, buy.

I was somewhat shocked to see on the television adverts for the latest version of the popular board game Monopoly. It's now available in a CREDIT CARD edition, complete with a mini computer (batteries not included of course). Each player has a credit card and when they land on someone elses property they use their credit card to pay the rental bill. They don't even have to work out the bills any more, it's all done by the little computer. One of the main parts of monopoly when I was a girl was doing the maths yourself, and if you got it wrong or wasn't paying attention and didn't notice before the next player rolled the dice for your turn, then you forfeited collecting that rent. It helped teach maths. That's gone in this version.

And you want to know what is saddest? What's the most likely way the kids will see their parents buying this new version of Monopoly? With a credit card.

I'm tempted to start an alternative sim, one where people donate things to be given away. One where with every giveaway, people are alerted by notecard and links to things they can do to save the first life world. Whisperwolf is right, time is running out... and we that play Second Life prefer to ignore that and take our consumerism into a virtual environment. But that won't stop the planets resources from being exhausted, and when they are - Second Life will cease to be, because it can only exist through the parts of the consumerism chain we all ignore or take for granted. When resources run out, and there's nothing left for power generation, so Second Life too will vanish.

Worth thinking about, worth doing something about, before time does run out.

Crossing borders

During the time I've been involved with Listening Ear at supportforhealing, I've seen a lot of cries for help. Some were obviously more a cry for attention, some were genuinely distressed people who needed help to find their sense of self, once they did so they were able to pick themselves up and go on.

But nothing could prepare me for a conversation I had today, and it wasn't even at the Listening Ear hut.

My spirits rose when I saw the online notification for someone I haven't seen in Second Life for a very long time. I was quick to greet the person and establish an IM conversation. Very quickly I realised that there was a serious problem.

People in genuinely suicidal moods (as opposed to depression or clinical depression) generally fit into one of two categories. The easier category to deal with is those who do something that draws attention to their mood; they can often be quickly identified and, although it can often be difficult, they generally are doing whatever it was that was identifiable because at a very deep down level they DON'T want to give up their existence, which is what someone trying to help them can use to find the key to then help them rediscover their sense-of-self. The harder category are those few people who are meticulously putting everything in order so that they can just slip into oblivion without any fuss and with as few as possible noticing. The person I spoke to was in that category.

In such cases, the ONLY warning sign is the putting things in order. And in these situations since they've already given up, giving such a person reason to go on living is one of the hardest things in existence. It brought me up short, and through a wall of tears forced me to consider something very seriously.

When we first met and got talking, I established fairly early on that the person I was talking with was married. That, to me, puts someone firmly off limits. If a guy is in a relationship, that's a sign to me that they are not for me to try and dissuade for my own personal gain. And yes, I'll admit it, I was tempted having seen this guys heart to tell him to dump his lifemate and come be with me. Perhaps more tempted than I've ever been in my entire life. But I didn't, and now I'm forced to confront the possibility that this was the wrong choice.

In our all-too-short conversation today it became apparent that this person has completely given up. His partner, I've always felt, was not a good choice for him; she uses him shamelessly, is lazy and unsupportive, and would much prefer getting attention than giving it. He has a business, but he told me today that he's winding that up. Alarm bells started ringing. I found myself in shock, ticking off the signs of someone who has lost all hope. His soul, as it were, seemed like it was already dead, and the following of his body was just a formality. Glib as I have been from time to time at Listening Ear, I found myself totally lost for a way to find SOME assurance that he could examine, even cling to, in order to pull himself up from the edge. I still find myself fingering a credit card I can't really afford to use, contemplating heading straight for the airport. If I truly believed it would do any good, I would do it.

But I don't. All the signs are that he's given up, and if that's so then there is nothing I - or anyone else - can do. And if that's the case the best I can do is respect his wishes - give him dignity in his slipping off into oblivion.

But I'll mourn. Oh, how I will mourn if he does indeed slip beyond my help. So many things, so much could have been... so much could be lost. I know he reads this blog, and I'm not trying to guilt trip him. What he decides to do is his choice, and no matter how much it affects me, he will always have my support and my love. If he wasn't sure of it before, he can be now.

I will go on, for those who I can help, for those who have still got enough of a sense of self that I can reach out and touch them and help them find the will to go on. I'm a healer, it's what I do. It's all that I do.

Even when I can't reach those I love.

Stay safe.

The JIRA issue that won't die

In it's long and distinguished career, JIRA issue Web-382 has gone from being a carefully worded attack on a group somebody didn't like, to a moderately serious proposal, to something almost workable and finally back to being a carefully worded attack again.

So why won't this issue die? Quite simple. The original poster won't let it.

And of course, the original poster just has to turn out to be Prokofy Neva, perhaps the most outspoken person in Second Life's history. Prokofy is an unbeaten expert in turning things around and beating people with slightly different things while pretending those were the original things, with being the schoolteacher disciplining recalcitrant schoolchildren and with the most interesting set of double standards which she will never admit to.

Let's have a look at the wording of Web-382 for a moment:

It is too easy for feature suggestions and bugs to be prematurely closed.

This must surely be the point at the heart of the debate, and this point I don't have any problems with. But she goes on to say:

A small group of coders here on JIRA are constantly closing and resolving issues in the belief that they know best, yet they do this at times without consent and support. This results in undue pressures and discontent, and makes it very hard for the author to re-open his proposal in the face of hostility. By providing the authors with a feedback period some of this can be avoided and if deemed appropriate the issue in jeopardy can be kept open.

And here is where the problems and the biases start to come out. It all revolves around the idea that she has of this "feted inner core". Now, she's not big on conspiracy theories. Just ask her if the US government were behind 9/11. But when it comes to Second Life, there's definitely a cabal and there's definitely a 'feted inner core'. Naturally, she's a target for this group because she's the big Defender of the Second Life Freedoms. So, if she opens a JIRA ticket, and somebody closes it, it's because they are in one of these tin hat groups.

JIRA-382 has ceased to be a productive discussion. At one point I backed her into a corner which she got quite vicious about. Part of debating a propsal where the consequences could be unexpected is to consider hypothetical situations. I posed two: Firstly, if someone were to directly or indirectly insult another person (for example an immediate example of Godwins Law) then where would the JIRA stand on closure? Linden Labs simply don't have the manpower to spend a lot of time on the JIRA and this means that if other residents don't tidy things up (closing duplicates or pure waste of time tickets) chances are nobody will. If issues can't be closed without the permission of the original author, and that author purely wants to use the JIRA like a soapbox or to grief someone else, that ticket isn't going to get closed. The author will just re-open it. 382 itself is a perfect example of that. Secondly, if someone does decide to deliberately misuse the JIRA, and Linden Labs don't notice - who is going to police it?

So now I've been branded a troublemaker too. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be in the 'feted inner core' or the 'coders cabal' - probably the latter - but regardless, the fact that Prokofy Neva has double standards isn't supposed to be relevant. What do I mean by double standards? Well, this self proclaimed champion of SL civil rights holds two very different views about age verification at the same time:

So a list of adult consumers with their avatar names and RL birthdates will be in the hands of one of the most aggressive and persistently nasty BDSM types in Second Life. Maybe the BDSM community won't care -- they like abuse, and maybe even this kind of RL abuse of their privacy. But as it spreads, and begins to be used by any club, or any rental, or anybody who just wants to be free from the plague of kids harassing and griefing you, it could become the device of choice, as it advertises being "better" than Integrity by not taking your RL name and drivers' license or Social Security number.

She gushes in her hate filled blog entry about a resident-created age verification system called agelock. But then she immediately goes on to say:

Hey, give me Integrity *any day of the week*. They are a real-life registered company with a business reputation and a bottom line to fulfill and a board of trustees. If I fear they've abused my trust in taking my info, I can protest -- with lawyers, by getting Congress involved, by getting the media on it. I can't do that with these anonymous avatars in Second Life!

I've got news for you, Prokofy. You can't. Nobody can. It comes down to an issue of contract law. We have a contract that we agreed to with Linden Labs when we all clicked the "I accept" on installing for the first time. That contract is enforceable. If Linden Labs breach it, ultimately they can be called to account for it in a court of law. We have no such contract with Integrity, nor do we have any idea what - if any - safeguards apply in the contract that exists between Linden Labs and Integrity and as such the very reason - unaccountability - that she cites for Agelock, also applies to Integrity. Yet she's passionately in favour of one, and passionately against the other. A double standard.


Ironically, the very reason Web-382 won't ever go anywhere is because the original author of it is the best example of why it should never be implemented. Somebody who absolutely MUST have their say, is abusive of others and won't let the issue be closed.

So I've called on Linden Labs to finally put an end to this self serving soapbox facade, by actually telling everyone what, if anything, they intend to do. Either to say "This part of the issue makes sense, we're looking at the viability of implementing it" or to outright say "this isn't going to be implemented, case closed." While I doubt they'll bother, it does show how badly the JIRA can be - and is being - manipulated for personal reasons, in an issue that simply won't die.

Finger pointing

There seems to be a need among some people to always have an enemy to blame for every little thing. Somewhere down the line we've become a culture of finger pointers, and you can see evidence of it all over the place.

I'm referring, in this instance, to Jira Web 382, which in its original form was quite deliberately worded to be finger-pointing. While I have nothing against backing up a proposal with factual information, finger pointing is always subjective. One persons enemy is another persons friend. To say a group of people you don't like is responsible for something that is somehow sinister and conspiracy-theory isn't a seemly way to conduct yourself in a public forum setting.

Unfortunately the shield the internet provides us all makes that kind of thing much easier. You wouldn't go up to a belligerant drunk who is holding a smashed bottle and shout at him for being wrong about something unless you were prepared for him to take a swing at you, because that's exactly what he'd do - but on the internet it's easy to take vicious swipes at someone just because they disagree with you, and for this reason everyone with even the smallest of grievances can cause an escalation of these grievances to sometimes monumental proportions.

In the case of Jira 382 I've apparently become a hostile tribemember who purely wants to get her own way in everything. I've even been referred to (by inferrence) as a Nazi because I'm taking what I see as a stand for what I see as right. Suddenly there are battle lines being drawn, and I'm taking quite vicious fire from people I don't even know. Aside from reading with some amusement, odd comments on the Linden Blog about how Ann O'Toole keeps commenting a lot, I'd never heard of her, and I've never met her. Yet according to her, I'm a Nazi. According to her and Ciaran Laval I'm part of the "cabal" (Prokofy's term) that is involved with this, despite the fact that I've never actually closed a JIRA issue (other than trying to close this one), which you can see from my JIRA profile.

So we get a situation that's gone from factual to hearsay to bitter contention. People aren't researching before they shout their mouths of. If we were all in the same room, I wonder, would that happen? In my RL job I have had to deal with drunks wielding broken bottles, and let me tell you it isn't a situation you really want to be in. But the confrontation is limited to those who can see what's going on - the whole picture - and still want to risk being hurt if they become involved. Not so these internet confrontations, where anybody can - and does - wade in, often far more viciously than they'd ever dream of doing IRL.

I'm sure they get something out of it. They must do, otherwise they wouldn't do it. But it seems a really sad aspect of the internet, reflected in some ways in Second Life that those who would be sitting quietly at their chairs looking the other way in a confrontation, are at the forefront of finger pointing and shouting from the safety of their keyboards on the internet.

Could this be the most reliable form of age verification yet?

I have some of my best ideas while lying in the bath. This one came about as a result of me thinking that if I wanted to start a “mature” MMORPG, how would I go about age verification in such a way that it was the most secure and policeable ever? I then attacked it with two criteria: How would I implement it, and if I was deliberately setting out to abuse it, how would I do so?

And then it came to me.

What I would do would be to make a deal with a telephone service company that provided specialist premium rate numbers. I’d tie my computer system to theirs in a similar but more extensive way that Ebay and Paypal use. The age verification routine on my website would give the person about to go through the check a unique identifying number. It would also feature prominently the warning “CALLING THE AGE VERIFICATION NUMBER WILL COST $5 PLUS APPLICABLE LONG DISTANCE CALL CHARGES. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS CHARGE, AND BY CALLING THE NUMBER AND PROCEEDING YOU ACCEPT LIABILITY FOR ALL CHARGES RESULTING FROM THIS CALL.”

Here’s the thing. The number it gave me to call and give my identification number that I’d just been given can ONLY be called from a domestic residential landline. It can’t be called from a mobile, and it can’t be called from a public callbox or a business landline. It can only be called from a domestic landline, which, correct me if I’m wrong requires the owner of the landline to be over the age of consent in their country.

So, I call the number, and I enter my code, and I’m age verified. I haven’t passed ANY identifying information that could be abused to any third party, and by verifying that I called from the number at that address, I do provide a method for legitimate law enforcement to track me down should that ever be necessary.

Now here’s the kick. I know you’re all thinking “How does that prevent my 12 year old calling the number?” Well, the answer is, it doesn’t. BUT, when the parent/owner of the bill gets their monthly telephone bill, ONE call costing at least $5 is going to stick out like a sore thumb. What happens if my 12 year old has done this? Here’s part two of my idea.

Say my underage son/daughter has done this, and I get my bill and find out someone made a call to “ age verification” which cost me $5. I contact my phone company, and ask who the hell this is? They do a check their end, and they say “Well, we can’t refund the money, but there IS an abuse line on their record for people who feel that they’ve been the victim of fraudulent use.” I call that number, and register my telephone number, then I go and ground my kid.

My kid throws an almighty sulk, and decides that while grounded they’ll play the mature game. They go to sign on – and their account has been banned. Raising a query about the number automatically results in an account ban for the misusing account. Furthermore, the telephone number is ALSO banned, so when (s)he goes to open a new account and tries to age verify again, the number won’t connect from that landline. Without it connecting, they can’t verify.

I’m not claiming this is foolproof. I don’t know any system that WOULD be foolproof and implementable across the globe. But as far as I know It’s the best I’ve seen to date… I would welcome feedback on this, and if anyone wants to knock the idea around a little, I think this is a firm foundation for a secure method of age verification that doesn’t require giving away potentially illegal information, it would work worldwide, it wouldn’t require very much in the way of equipment to make it work and I recommend this idea to the population!

It figures

The latest big thing in gaming for virtual world enthusiasts is bringing your avatar to life in the form of a miniature figure. I didn't realise that a company called "Fabjectory" has already been producing Second Life figures for almost a year, so when the news broke that my other favourite virtual world, World of Warcraft, now also had a company producing miniatures I thought this was completely new.

I have to say, I am surprised that Linden Labs didn't link it from their blog. A quick search on the official Linden Blog confirms that no, I didn't miss it, there never was a link about it.

I have to say, though, you can see where business backers and professionalism tell. The Figureprints site is slick, modelled on the WoW site and the quality of their models is fantastic; as you might expect from a company set up by the former VP of Microsoft Gaming. Figureprints got a whopping ONE MILLION hits in the first week to their website, and are now so popular that they actually have to have monthly draws to decide who gets the figures. The figures are manufactured by a 10,000 line script that actually grabs the exact details of the original avatar from Blizzard's studios and renders it in dull grey. It's then hand painted and finished, lacquered, placed in a glass display dome and shipped out to the lucky recipient. Signs are that the other big boys, including Sony Interactive Entertainment are very interested in Figureprints, and looking to get avatars from their world produced too.

Which begs the question, since Fabjectory have already been around for a while - why aren't they getting all the good press? Chances are it's at least partially down to their presentation. Fabjectory meet your avatar within SL and take pictures and measurements, dimensions and details required to make your avatar from scratch. They save the time in the print process, by having the miniature made from coloured materials, but the end result isn't as pretty and they also charge substantially more if you have a complex avatar. My normal wood elf avatar in Second Life would cost around $99, but my furry complex werehouse avatar would cost quite a bit more because of its complexity and detail. In comparison, Figureprints charge a flat $95.

I can speculate that Figureprints also have a much better, newer, next generation printer than Fabjectory (four of them, in fact, each costing $50,000) and this is also bound to influence the quality of the finished figure. While I'd like to see a Fabjectory model "in the flesh" so to speak, a quick youtube search doesn't turn up any hits, which again would probably decrease their marketing traffic.

By contrast, look at this guys jaw drop when he sees his WoW figure. While I'm already in the draw for a Figureprints WoW figure, I think I'll give Fabjectory a miss...

Cory Linden leaving: could this result in a viable rival to Second Life?

With official confirmation that the Chief Technical Officer of Linden Labs, Cory Ondrejka (a.k.a. Cory Linden, the Spaghetti Monster) is leaving the company at the end of the year, this has the potential to have serious repercussions to Second Life.

I can't help but wonder if Cory and Phillip have had a falling out over Age Verification. There have got to be some Lindens who think that going against the wishes of the majority of Residents is a seriously bad idea, and when Cory joined the fledgling team (he was the fourth ever employee to join Linden Labs) back in 2000, the emphasis was on a company that interacted with its userbase, something that has lessened increasingly in the past year, first of all with Lindens being able to make their online status hidden, then with contact directly with Lindens being removed via the live help vanishing, and now with them being unwilling to listen to their userbase over age verification.

Which begs the question, since Cory did a LOT of the coding for SL (he also wrote the LSL) - what will he do now, and is it likely he will join a company, or even found one himself, that produces a rival to Second Life? Certainly he's got the technical know how to do that, and maybe even develop something better starting again from scratch, because part of the reason he coined the term Spaghetti Monster was that the coding for SL was becoming so twisted and difficult to follow that a bug wasn't easy to find and eliminate purely because the code of the monster was no longer simple and neat.

I've said all along that in my opinion, Age Verification when it's made mandatory could conceivably destroy Second Life. Cory, who has always been an advocate of the Open Sourcing of Second Life, may already be planning to make his own version of it, and if he does AND leaves out Age Verification... well, a few years down the road it might be HIM that's the CEO of the successful company, him doing the hiring and firing while the memory of Linden Labs is consigned to computing history and an article on Wikipedia.

Watch out for Cory Ondrejka. He might be leaving Linden Labs, but I really doubt very strongly that this is the last Second Life residents will here of him.

GOOD LUCK WITH THE FUTURE, CORY!