Unverified but potentially show stopping bug with the RC

In addition to the odious "Showcase" the new RC may have a very ugly bug if Adz Childs report on the JIRA is correct. Where ejecting an avatar returns objects without warning.

Now the idea of hte feature is ejecting a griefer also removes the objects that the griefer left behind. But it does need to be labelled, the comments are right. There is ejecting, there is even ejecting and banning, but then there is also ejecting, banning, and returning.

Working Girls' Union Local #69

Time for another meeting of the WGU! The first one was a great chance to meet Vixyn Felisimo, whose site, VelvetVixyn, is my new homepage. Ladies out there should be reading this instead of Cosmo (sorry, Cosmo).

WORKING GIRLS' UNION - Local #69
Wednesday 28th May @ 9 pm SLT

This will be a relaxed round-table discussion for Second Life sex professionals⎯escorts, dancers, madams, and club owners, whether you're new to the game or an old hand⎯to share your experiences, vent your frustrations, ask some questions and answer those of others.

Sex in SL provides its own set of rules, written and unwritten. There are defined borders and of course large swaths of grey areas, relatively 'normal' clients and those that test or redefine your perceptions entirely, novice mistakes and a seasoned pro's reevaluations. This talk is sure to provide valuable insight to the nature of the profession, the nature of sex in the digital medium, and hopefully be a great resource for beginners and those more experienced alike, allowing us to expand and hone our craft in an open forum.

Note that despite the name, this event is open to sex workers of all genders & species; however, you must be a sex worker as outlined above. As always, seating will be limited so IM me your request to attend; the parcel will be closed during the duration of the talk. Also, this is a text-talk; I don't have voice capability, but others are free to use it.

All the best,
~Shrutiyan Anatra

Your Pay for Play Future

new "search" is way broken in the RC.

One from Eshi

Music for the eyes.

1.20 RC7 Notes

Release notes for the new RC

I've joined the SL Dev list and will post updates from there more frequently so that people know what is coming.

Yedo continues to grow

Latex can take you to the strangest places

Here for example.

Putting SL in perspective

One month of rent on a sim is enough to treat a vaginal rupture caused by childbirth. Fistula isn't a problem in developed countries because it's primary cause is prolonged labor, and it can be corrected after birth with a simple procedure. These things aren't available around the world. That's why half a million women die every year from childbirth complications. That's fifteen hundred a day. Give you an idea, that's 5 to 6 times as many people as read this blog every day.

SL5B looking for famous old content

Do you have a piece of history?

Spain's Defense Minister Goes on Maternity Leave

Gave birth to a boy.

Court Upholds anti-Child Porn pandering law

In a world where 6 year olds are being sold bras we get a United States Supreme court decision in US v Williams that essentially makes it a crime to claim to be breaking the law, regardless of whether the law was broken. The story runs like this, originally congress passed a law, Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996 which became inserted into the Federal code as 1 U.S.C 2252A(a)(3)(B).

The opinion of the court in Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition was that the original prohibited a substantial amount of protected speech. Specifically:

(1) The CPPA is inconsistent with Miller. It extends to images that are not obscene under the Miller standard, which requires the Government to prove that the work in question, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in light of community standards, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, 413 U.S., at 24. Materials need not appeal to the prurient interest under the CPPA, which proscribes any depiction of sexually explicit activity, no matter how it is presented. It is not necessary, moreover, that the image be patently offensive. Pictures of what appear to be 17-year-olds engaging in sexually explicit activity do not in every case contravene community standards. The CPPA also prohibits speech having serious redeeming value, proscribing the visual depiction of an idea–that of teenagers engaging in sexual activity–that is a fact of modern society and has been a theme in art and literature for centuries. A number of acclaimed movies, filmed without any child actors, explore themes within the wide sweep of the statute’s prohibitions. If those movies contain a single graphic depiction of sexual activity within the statutory definition, their possessor would be subject to severe punishment without inquiry into the literary value of the work. This is inconsistent with an essential First Amendment rule: A work’s artistic merit does not depend on the presence of a single explicit scene. See, e.g., Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Attorney General of Mass., 383 U.S. 413, 419. Under Miller, redeeming value is judged by considering the work as a whole. Where the scene is part of the narrative, the work itself does not for this reason become obscene, even though the scene in isolation might be offensive. See Kois v. Wisconsin, 408 U.S. 229, 231 (per curiam). The CPPA cannot be read to prohibit obscenity, because it lacks the required link between its prohibitions and the affront to community standards prohibited by the obscenity definition. Pp. 6—11.

Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition

Basically what the court said in Ashcroft v FSC was that child pornography can't be outlawed if it wasn't made with children, and doesn't violate other forms of obscenity law. However the new law was much more narrowly targeted to outlaw presenting material as being child pornography, whether it the material is or not. More over, the original statute tainted the material in question. That is if material had been claimed to be child pornography, the having it was a crime. So if a book seller sold a copy of Snow White claiming it was about a teen living lustfully with 7 ugly dwarves, and was purchased with that belief, then having the the copy of Snow White itself was criminal. The court overturned both of these provisions.

As often happens the Congress passed fresh legislation aimed at overcoming the defects in the original law. The Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003, yet another acronym act, sigh. This statute removed both the tainting, and the criminalization of the images.

The facts of the case are depressingly common, a chat room which was used to swap child pornography had a particularly stupid swapper who thought that the best way to prove he wasn't a Federal Agent was to show everyone that he had actually criminally illegal material. It was exactly the circumstance that the statute was intended to catch: peadophiles swapping actually child pornography and telling each other that that is what is on offer.

What was at issue in this case was whether the statute was overly broad on its face. For a statute to be overturned as overly broad, it has to be proven, in effect, that it invalidates a large amount of protected speech, or allows such selective enforcement as to obviously invite abuse. The standard of substantial amount of speech is intended to set a high bar for invalidating a statute. The reasoning is that if some protected speech is covered, then courts can grant exceptions, but if there is a broad chilling effect, then the statute must go.

The new law made it illegal to engage in activity that "advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits" material which is intended to make people believe that there is an exchange of child pornography. In the decision the court made some important limitations on the law. First it said that the verbs must be taken together in context. The law cannot be construed to make illegal merely advocating legalization of child pornography. Moreover, in Scalia's decision, material which looks like children having sex, but is not, isn't illegal, because, according to Scalia, it is absurd that reputable companies would want people to believe they had produced objectionable material with children.

This last is a slippery argument, because clearly we do sexualize children, and even "reputable" commerce push sexualization of children. However, this is beside the point, because what was really at issue was whether it could be made a criminal transaction to offer to enage in another criminal transaction, even if the underlying criminal transaction was impossible. The court has held that, yes, offering to do something that is illegal, even if it is impossible to carry it out, is in itself illegal.

Interesting in this decision is the stiffness of the rebuke to the 11th circuit:

What renders a statute vague is not the possibility that it will sometimes be difficult to determine whether the incriminating fact it establishes has been proved; but rather the indeterminacy of precisely what that fact is. Thus, we have struck down statutes that tied criminal culpability to whether the defendant's conduct was "annoying" or "indecent"--wholly subjective judgments without statutory definitions, narrowing context, or settled legal meanings. See Coates v. Cincinnati, 402 U. S. 611, 614 (1971); Reno, supra, at 870-871, and n. 35.

The court decision bludgeons the 11th Circuit particularly hard in saying, first that the basis the lower court decided on was wrong, and then, even if the standard of strict scrutiny was not applied the lower court would have been wrong.

How does this effect Second Life? Not really much. It is already more broadly against the rules to engage in creation of images and acts here than the American Law allows. That is there are plenty of things that are perfectly legal under American law which are against the ToS here. The ToS is also much more stringent about what constitutes advertising than the the revised statute. In limiting the statute in particular ways, in effect pruning away potential vagueness, the Supreme Court left behind the law that Congress probably intended to write, and did so without materially harming the rest of us.

"Why Europe?"

In my field one of the most important questions can be boiled down to "Why Europe?" Why, of all the competing possible societies a the cusp of the modern moment, did Europe vault ahead? There are many explanations, but the roots of almost every scholarly inquiry begin from Joseph Needham's monumental Science and Civilization in China. Andrew Leonard reviews Simon Winchester's biography of him here.

The answer that is common is that China "stopped trying." This however is not where the facts have led me, and I am going to take a few paragraphs debunking:

In the epilogue, Winchester asserts that the consensus opinion of current Sinologists is that "China, basically, stopped trying." That's too facile a summation when one is writing a biography of a man who devoted his entire life to understanding why China failed to capitalize on thousands of years of scientific and technological innovation. Winchester then skips through the main contending theories that attempt to explain China's failure: China's bureaucracy siphoned talent away from a potentially entrepreneurial merchant class, China did not have the spur to competition that Europe's many warring states inflicted on each other, China's totalitarian government quashed initiative.

But Needham himself, writes Winchester, "never fully worked out the answers." (Although he did propose, halfheartedly, a variation on the bureacracy thesis in his essay "General Conclusions and Reflections," a portion of which is online.)

The answer is half there already. One part is that Europe, alone, was situated to reach both Africa and the Americas. Many of the enthnocultures of the new world, which were crucial to the vault to modernity, touched Europe first, and gave them trade goods with China. Tobacco combined with opium for example. China was in the wrong place geologically. Water power, not steam power, drove the first part of modernity. Europe has far more of it in a small space than China does, and must use much less of it for irrigation.

China didn't stop trying, instead, it bet on the wrong things. Europe bet everything on conquest and on metallurgy, only to be rewarded with a continent full of people to conquer, and a series of technologies that came out of this: electricity and the steam engine. Europe does not really vault ahead in most technologies until the early 1800's, I can rattle off a dozen where it will be after that date where China is finally surpassed, but Europe was a global center of empire by 1700, when the outcome of a direct military conflict between China and Europe would have been in doubt, and Europe was still behind in a host of ways.

China also did not have the synthesis of modern mathematics, and this was clear by how Chinese mathematics never reached what is called the calculus.

Lastly, China had a technology that Europe did not have, and it was one that they invested a great deal of effort in: political unity. The Europeans tried over and over again to reach the level of unity that China had, and the level of action that China had, but failed repeatedly, and in a series of wars that history students learn in mind numbing detail. War of Austrian Succession? Of Jenkin's Ear? The Seven Years War, which probably lasted Nine Years?

But while China invested a great deal in the technologies of unity, and was more unified for a great deal longer than its European competitors, it was the wrong choice at that moment. It focused China's energies inward, right at the moment when going out ward would have been most profitable. The crucial century, the 15th century, shows how several innovations in the Eastern Pacific world, canons, print, and the factory, failed to make the same kind of changes in China that they would make elsewhere. Europe, to some extent, locked out of both the unity game and the game of land empire, was forced to turn to the sea, and it was the sea empire that flooded Europe with goods and ideas that would, in turn, give them the confidence to conquer even more.

As Andrew Leonard notes, the age of Europe as overlord is ending, even if you add in the American Century, and a century from now, who knows what the dominant culture will look like globally. If so, perhaps, some future scholar will look back at our moment, and wonder how, with everything in its favor, America "stopped trying."

Openspace sims

The land store is open and islands seem to be delivering withing 24 hours. So a reminder we do openspace sims for 325 USD, which includes the first month tier as long as LL includes tier with an island, and 79USD a month after that. We take Linden or paypal.

This is considerably better than places that are doing 400/125, don't you think?

Going through withdrawal

I realized today that i was going through escorting withdrawal. The reality of my time on sl was that from almost the first I had a determination, and my ability to play the escorting game was an almost impervious armor to anything that could be said or done to me. Whatever people told me, however bad, it was not as bad as clients would say to me in the course of ordinary business. Call me a whore, so did the last three guys when I wouldn't come down to 250L :15. Scream at me, so did a heavy tipper at a bondage club. Spit on me. Had that happen too. And the Linden kept rolling in, and I could make myself better and better.

It was the adrenaline rush and the mastery. It was a place in sl in a world when there were hundreds of would be escorts, and dozens of clubs. And I rode that wave. It pulsed and surged through my finger tips. Paypal, linden who cared? Cyber, vox when it became possible. I had my bad days, and customers I could not please, but many came back and back.

Quitting this does more than dent my income, it makes me look out on SL, and want to throw up. This must be what it is like to quit drinking, and see squalor in bleeding colors. It isn't just the massive mounds of mainland cluttered with ugly, it is the social world here, which is so much like the stupider parts of high school as to make one's teeth hurt, and the lack of taste in what is hip as to make one bleed tears of blood and soul.

Bebop reality is rapidly becoming beslop reality.

I'm not going to name names, sometimes telling the truth is so pointless as to be an exercise in emotional masturbation with a curling iron. It's just going to sear your insides and no one else will even get off or get up about it. Is there anything to be done? Well of course, and it will be done. People don't want to live in squalor, well most people don't. It's that squalor is what they are being sold, and the people who make squalor well are busy making large exhibits of their pointless mediocrity.

But that doesn't need to be, and often it occurs because people with talent allow their egos to run riot, and forget that all the world doesn't play SL on some computer with an air conditioner crazy glued to an overclocked something or other 3000 video card with more ram than I have hard drive space. What they present stops being bleeding edge, and is instead makes you want to cut your cornea's out with a razor blade rather than suffer it for another moment.

Again why name names? They won't listen, if they did, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.

So this is why I believe we are going to have to go the long way around, with people fleeing both mainland, and what is considered hip by the narrow world of sliques and slugliness. Avatars aren't mere decoration on primotonage, they are the point of this world. If pushing pixels is what you want to do, then you can do it with Maya much better. But that is the sad reality, avatars are often smarter than their human creators, who rush to slag, slugly, and slop, only to be pinned down.

The future will get here, if we listen to our avatars a bit more, and less to the still screen shot mentality and easy herd driven grapevine.

Sorry, I just had to vent before getting back to work. It's moments like that that I put on music which is the cry of the forgotten, the genius overlooked as people stumble from one bad rendition of the well known classics to the next, interspersed with the latest lay of the artistic director or ballet master whose ideas on choreography compare favorably with the tortures of a madhouse in the darkest dickensian days.

I need to build something, I am not sure what yet, but there are a few thousand new huge prims, and imagination is free if you have it. And unchained by the prattle and cant of those who can't do, but can self-promote, maybe it will be worth something.

Rauchenberg's Little Boxes:The Death of the Patron Saint of Mainland is food for thought

What I study in real life can be called "the capitalist aesthetic." What this means is that people develop a taste in art and decoration for things which show of the capital that they use. The same is true of other kinds of income. What we term "folk" culture is really the culture of cooperative labor.

People praise artists who are able to make people reflect on what those people do every day. Artists are the high priests of a way of life, and the people who have a way of life and work show allegiance to the artists who elevate that way of being. This is why coverage has been so adulatory in the old print world. Rauschenbergs way of making art is, basically, what a newspaper does every day. Find objects produced by artists, comment on them, and smear this with the crude brush of lived in sensationalism. It's also why Rauschenberg is the patron saint of Mainland.

Robert Rauschenberg is the kind of art who should be seen through this lens, and particularly the celebration and lionization of his work. He was born in 1925, and died recently at the age of 82. Whether you know it or not, his art has a tremendous influence on Second Life. Or more exactly, I think, would be to say that he forced the acceptance of a kind of artistic activity which much of Second Life exemplifies.

The place to start is with his works and the combine this with his context.

This is one of Rauschenberg's best known works, the Sphinx Atelier, sorry for the typos in the file name, may Google for give me. It is typical of his works in that period in that it centers around images form media, that is things he did not create, the sphinx and the firemen, and then overlaying both other images, and his own painting.

Rauschenberg is best known for works in the form known as collage, where objects are combined together, often whole, and then presented. The "Boston Symphony Poster" presented here is a typical example. The violin, the glasses, and the amusement park ride in the background are taken from the commercial, and capital world. They are polished productions of professional artists, engineers and so on. They are combined with intentionally crude scrawl. The comment of the art is that there is such a vast gap between the products of the capital world, the old craft world, and the present. This has a technical word, that technical word is "alienation." Alienation is the separation of people from the world they make and live in, because they no longer have control over the tools with which it is made. It's something that was named by Marx, but is common in the art world at this point, or more specifically in commentary about the art world, and among artists. It's not a particularly new idea to this work.

If you have gotten that, that Rauschenberg took things from the commercial world, he worked for a while making department store windows, and then "lived on them." You have the basis of his art. He did very sophisticated things technically in order to appropriate, including use of silk screening and different media. But these were all in service of a simple process. Find things, combine things, and then live on them.

Which brings me to talking about context.

In this working method Rauschenberg follows the early 20th century art movements which collage media objects with personal artistic acts: Picasso and Braque's cubism, and most especially Duchamps' Dadaist works. Dada and cubism wanted to have an different relationship of artist to the world. Previously the artist made his or her proof of being an artist on the ability to create form out of light and shadow in black and white, perspective in the handling of vanishing points and foreshortening, and combining these with some handling of materials, whether the color of paints or the properties of bronze. The result was not necessarily depictive, but depiction was the standard against which the art was looked at. El Greco isn't being a realist, but he is stretching and distorting from a sense of the real.

In the 20th century this strong sense of centering of art around techniques of abstraction of the real world broke down. Partly because the techniques were widely available. Anatomy, shading, inking, became procedures which were common to illustration and hence no longer separated artists who had them as an elite. It was also the case that photography made the raw depiction of objects no longer a revenue stream for artists. For much of history, what we think of as the great works of art were exceptions. Most artists lived on more mundane commissions, and only occasionally had one where they had permission to do extraordinary things. This is why we generally only study a few dozen works out of the long careers of most artists, the rest being relatively ordinary production.

So here comes the 20th century. It looks different, it feels different, it pays different. What is an artist to do? One response was to manipulate that real world very directly, and prove that the artist could still smash, fold, an remake that world. That's the response of collage.

He was part of the New York City post-war generation of avant-garde American artists, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Andy Warhol, who had a different sense of what it meant to be in the world. Their idea was that art and life are a continuum, and that the old society of art was too focused on the mastery of particular skills and forms, and not enough on what they saw as modern life, and existential reality. Cage and Rauschenberg have particular links in how they talked about what they did, and both produced many conceptual works that tried to demonstrate this. Cage did sound collages, and both have a single celebrated work which is about absence: in the case of Raschenberg, his Erased DeKooning came from taking a drawing by deKooning and erasing it, then displaying it.

deKooning was on the other side of a branch in the response of artist as imposing raw emotion on the world. Rauschenberg and the other artists like him used found objects as focal points, deKooning, as with Jackson Pollock, wanted pure action. The Abstract Expressionists used primarily traditional media. It's hard to think of it this way, but the abstract expressionists were the conservatives in the argument over how to impose action on art.

And that's where I get to the focal point of what Rauschenberg was talking about in his most famous quote: "in the gap between art and life." What he meant by this is fairly simple. When a person focuses on shaping the details of something, it creates a bond, a relationship. It is compared with the loving attention on a child for a reason. We set things apart that are the products of this lavishing of attention, even if there is no conscious attention, as art. Life often has such moments on things not meant to be art: a meal, a baby, a phone conversation. But there is a gap between what we elevate as Art, and the daily business of living. Warhol, Cage, Rauchenberg, and others, wanted to obliterate this distinction between high art found in galleries and low art found in posters, and between both and simply living and being oneself. It's appealing to be well known for being yourself. I suppose until you try it sometime.

This is why I say Rauschenberg's capitalist aesthetic is central. He's a person, in a world filled with polished products of a machine which makes things that look like art, but have no attention, and people who pay attention to those objects as if they were art, consumers I mean, who don't have the ability to make anything like them. Even Kimball and Perl, who foam at the mouth about Rauschenberg, are Rauschenbergians: they find the objects, stick them together in their little box, and shit words on them just to say they were their. If you think Sphinx Atelier is ugly, then ranting about magnifies it by participating in this same process.

It is also why Rauschenberg's era is over, and why he is the patron saint of Second Life Mainland, and the horrors that it presents aesthetically. Rauschenberg's alienated blandscape is not ours. Tools are falling into everyone's hands that allow them to make polished products. I've burned a CD and given it to friends, so have you, probably. Or made a webpage. We've got other options to media than shitting on them with paint. Jed Perl rants and wails about Rauschenberg, but that's to miss the point. Rauschenberg was the product of a time when people live in a world that went in one direction, from those who could make and present, down to those who could only consume and kvetch.

Rauschenberg was famous for piling objects in small boxes, and sort of pasting them together. So too do many people on SL. Scavenge for freebies or cheap things, and then cram them into their little cluttered box. Next to the other little cluttered boxes.

The failure of the pop art world to be workable in our virtual age comes from a host of failures. One of them is the alienation itself. They were wrong about where things were going. Look at Warhol's films. What you see is an increasing distance from everything, even our own physical bodies, and especially our art. Second Life is part of the reverse trend: we are closer and closer to everything. We even refer to our avatars as "me."

The failure of mainland as an aesthetic and commercial project is seen in the Bay City build by LL. Mainland is a giant alienated beast parting its cheeks and defecating on computers, the spatter spreading in all directions. It clings to everything we do. Leaving aside the crassness of charging us 295 a month for islands and then competing directly against us, sometimes by using free labor, LL has realized what was obvious from long ago: little boxes make neither art, nor life. Not even second life.

Rauschenberg is gone, and soon his era will be over too, because, it does not work. The very thing that made him an icon is going to kill him, in that he is praised by people who work their worlds as he worked his art. I'm here to bury him, because his way of working is strangling my world, and is in complete opposition to how things must be for me, and others like me, to survive at all.

A blog about sex... one year later on

A year ago, I started this blog. It's been, yes, a year of this.

I promised there would be sex, and I think I've lived up to that. Not a daily sex column kind of sex, but about all the ways that sex informs our identity here and in second life. I've tried to write about the club world and the direct sex industry, which I've been part of, with a candor that I wasn't finding. I have written, a great deal about how there is a volcanic craving for sex and affection in rl, which translates to here. I've taken on such things as rape play, sexism, yiffing, escorting, and the boundaries of rl.

Very few people read this blog at first, it was weeks, often before anything was noticed. And the blog changed. I didn't think I was going to post over 30 poems, the first act of a musical, or articles on building. I wasn't a builder when I started this, and did not even know what say, a huge prim was.

I didn't know I was going to be building avatars for rl people.

I didn't know many things.

I've seen my crop of newbies get fabulous... just take a look at Elusyve's evolution. And being in the island renting business? A single sim seemed hopelessly out of reach.


It's also time for changes. I didn't come to sl to be an escort. I've tried to escape many times, and kept falling back in because the money is always there, and I know that without escorting, I'd be a chick with a thing for marble and rococo masters... But I've got to get out of it, or rather.... no or rather. I've tried to lobby for certain things, more sanity in how SL's economy is run, more entry paths for players, and my being an escort is part of that old insanity.

So here it is. One year, a blogiversary, and a time to say good bye to being an active escort. I've done all with it I can, and I don't want to run a club.

On the other hand, the topic here remains sexual identity, not in the narrow sense of having sex, but on the broader sense of sex. You see, biologists keep asking, "why sex?" The answer over and over turns out to be that sex is how life rips apart and recombines, remakes, rebuilds, tests, overturns, spreads, sorts out, joins together. And that means any time we do any of those things, we are doing what four billion years of physical life has taught us to do, even when we build, and move into, virtual worlds. Gender is part of sex, but so is everything we do that remakes ourselves, and the world around us.

This larger sense of sex is what still fascinates me, and what still is brought to a crest in moments when we give ourselves over to desire. How long will I keep doing this? I don't know. But as long as it is, it is a blog about,

Sex.