Slate: Why are engineers more often terrorists than other professions?

Jobs and the nature of the field argues slate.

Vampire Spam

I got spammed by a vampire... it is a great deal les frequent now, but they are worse than ever...

[15:29] LotusEffect Darkwatch: hey cutie
[15:29] Lillie Yifu: hello
*spammed bite*
[15:32] Lillie Yifu: loser
[15:32] LotusEffect Darkwatch: i see
[15:32] Lillie Yifu: no you don't but then losers like you, never do
[15:33] Lillie Yifu: so play count spamula with some one else
[15:33] LotusEffect Darkwatch: haha your funny
[15:33] Lillie Yifu: that makes one of us
[15:33] LotusEffect Darkwatch: yeah funny looking MUTE dick head.

He's part of the management at Pixie's Paradise Club,and is a paying member, so he knows he can get away with this, since LL almost never bans permanent members for anything.

More change like this and Jeb will be in the white house.

I count the bodies long in the numbering
I feel river of blood flowing down over the cataract of blivion
I don't know why we love you like we do.
You take our money and burn us like cigarettes.
Washing us clean of our birth

Take to me to river, drown me in water.
Baptism in the worship
Change we can bereave with,
only hope till there is nothing to be pried from our fingers.

1600 bodies, blown through some yet to be built wall.

Take me to river, drown me in the water.
I carry no cross,
and now you know why.

It's just war. Just war. Just war.
Just like the one, we lost before.

As they say, a memo for the clue impaired

No really, I don't make these up...


[23:37] sneaky Tigerfish: u into voice?
[23:37] Lillie Yifu: with people I like
[23:37] sneaky Tigerfish: u will like me
[23:38] sneaky Tigerfish: give me a try
[23:38] Lillie Yifu: umm I already dislike you
[23:38] sneaky Tigerfish: w/e then
[23:42] sneaky Tigerfish: i did not do anything
[23:43] Lillie Yifu: I am sorry I've handed out all my clues, you'll have to ask the next person for one.
[23:43] sneaky Tigerfish: just being be a bitch for no reason
[23:44] Lillie Yifu: that was stupid

Oh and by the way

for you face light haters out there, you can turn off attached particles and lights. Bling and lights go away, and, at that point, they don't create as much lag as the prim clutter you are wearing yourself.

Bling has been noxious for some time, long ago leaving the tasteful and interesting behind, and reveling in the ugly. Face lights are generally badly made, but not all of them.

If you don't know how to turn them off, don't be rude to those of us who do.

There is a sim in particular that I'm going to avoid, precisely because the local ignorati have started a crusade about this, not realizing that other things, such as color changing titlers, are much worse.

In the days of those days

Julie Bindel is a long time crusader on the front lines of sexual violence. Sexual violence is a pervasive part of almost every woman's imaginary world, even those who have never expereinced more than the most mild forms of it, because I don't think any of us can say we've never experienced any of it. This is because the threat of it is all around us, and it is a fear that pierces into the core of our most hard won possession. That is, namely, our sense of personal bodily control. Autonomy is won in slow hard steps, and sexual violence, the threat of it, and the imagination of it, destroy hat autonomy.

There is also the other part, and that is that pregnancy and reproduction necessarily involve the loss of this very same thing. As a result, sexual violence stares back at us from our fantasy life. Where and how to draw the line of the push in, is no easy thing.

Bindel writes in the guardian as follows:

It started about 10 years ago: prior to this I had no male friends. There were certainly men in my life whom I liked and respected, but no one I would meet up with for a drink and a heart-to-heart. Why? Not, dear readers, because I am a man-hater. As I have written before, I only hate those who rape and abuse women and children, and those who do nothing to stop other men doing so.

The bunker mentality is easy to come by, but I can only imagine what it was like to be part of radical feminism in that time. But the bunker sensation, that sensation where it seems that there are wolves with teeth and fangs in every direction, is common to every time and place I think. Little Red Riding Hood survives as a story, because there are so many woods to travel through.

I am sorry for her that she did not have the ability to have friendships with men until late in life. I am also even more sorry for a world where I understand how it happened.

And could happen tomorrow to a young woman trying to be herself.


And is probably happening now.

Professional Sexism at work

AWGroupies is a techie group. It had a prupose once, but it has become mostly a chat room for projects.

Now think on something. He's a real person, probably a manager or other person with some position. If I were to apply for a job at his company.. would I get it? No, he'd find a way to sink me,for, basically, not submitting to his "master" fantasies.

I've been told I am too aggressive about these things, but the reality is the reverse: sexism is endemic in the technical fields, and women who do not submit to it, and push back, are first treated with contempt, and then with hostility.

The half-anonymity is a threat: he can strike back at me from his real, in sl terms, identity, with his professional connections, if I don't accept his imposition on me.

[2009/12/15 0:56] Herc Serpente: There was a time when "jazz" referred to more than music
[2009/12/15 1:26] Herc Serpente swings the bat, hitting only air
[2009/12/27 16:31] Herc Serpente: I'd really like to get to know you, I like your blog. Chatted with you as an alt on AW Groupies, I don't usually disclose our 'relationship' though
[2009/12/27 16:31] Herc Serpente: add the people i meet here
[2009/12/27 16:31] Herc Serpente: odd
[2009/12/27 16:32] Lillie Yifu: hello
[2009/12/27 16:33] Herc Serpente flushes with excitement
[2009/12/27 16:33] Lillie Yifu: How are you?
[2009/12/27 16:34] Herc Serpente: i'm not usually so tongue-tied
[2009/12/27 16:34] Herc Serpente: you haven't even completely rez'd, but i can admire your subtle tan lines
[2009/12/27 16:35] Lillie Yifu: thank you. I like deail
[2009/12/27 16:36] Lillie Yifu: you are stillmostly gray to me
[2009/12/27 16:36] Lillie Yifu: so waht brings you here?
[2009/12/27 16:37] Herc Serpente: I enjoy the arts
[2009/12/27 16:37] Herc Serpente: theatre, especially
[2009/12/27 16:37] Herc Serpente: erotic themes are, in particular, attractive
[2009/12/27 16:37] Herc Serpente's fingers trace the tan lines on your chest
[2009/12/27 16:38] Herc Serpente: Sometimes it's possible to find partners who share a similar appreciation
[2009/12/27 16:38] Lillie Yifu puts his hands back on his chest.
[2009/12/27 16:38] Lillie Yifu: I'm not one to be pawed randomly
[2009/12/27 16:38] Herc Serpente looks to see if his fingernails need trimming
[2009/12/27 16:40] Herc Serpente: did you think it a random gesture? It was made with careful intention
[2009/12/27 16:41] Lillie Yifu: That's true.
[2009/12/27 16:42] Lillie Yifu: don't talk to me again
[2009/12/27 16:42] Lillie Yifu spits in his face
[2009/12/27 16:42] Lillie Yifu: hows that?
[2009/12/27 16:43] Herc Serpente: unexpected, perhaps unprovoked? A "no thanks" would be less ambiguous
[2009/12/27 16:43] Lillie Yifu: Definitely provoked, asshole

models revolt over revolting heels

There's no reason for these things.

SL Blogger/Musician Needs Your Help

Details here.

She's asking to help by buying her CD of acoustic folk.

Tour Eiffel 2

Tour Eiffel 1

The new version is much better than the old texture driven one.

Trust

I have come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of people, those who have enough money to live, and those who don't. Quantity isn't the issue. 

They don't get each other, and that leads to trust problems.

Any man who asks a woman "are you an escort?"

Isn't going to score with her if she isn't.

I'm thinking of burning a bridge

I will decide in the morning.

[not going to do it.]

Dark Star of the Ballet Stage leaves us

Georgina Parkinson radiant physical presence who moved with a tremendous power in every gesture, and taught an exacting way for students to express that power within themselves, has died. She danced with the Royal Ballet during the peak of Sir Fredrick Ashton's reign, and came to be the ballet mistress of American Ballet Theatre.

There was an androgyny to her face, an almost vampiric stretched quality to her movements, and a tremendous flexibility that defined the unbending steel of her poses. She flowed into positions, and then sustained them, and taught that same way. At the same time, she was always discussing, always changing, always searching, always fitting. For the dancers she knew had talent, she would work and weave their own uniqueness into the steps. She talked about how having a role created on you was an intensely personal act, and how it had worked in the Royal in her time, how the choreographer would set the problem, and the dancers would have to solve it, often having their changes added to the steps.

This vibrant seeking artistic freedom rested on a basis of absolute assurance in technique, and it was liberating, even for those who could only touch their toes into the sea of freedom that she had once sailed on herself.

Near sunset

Wish my forgotten wishes, and feel a forgotten rhyme,
from touch of the forgotten lore,
and dust upon forgotten times,
from droplets of forgiven hours,
that fall from forsaken flowers.

Narcissus, first flower of forgetfulness,
whose Lethe bathes us in our sleep.
Give the forgotten memories,
that we never can forget.

Forge a forgotten fire,
from a forgotten flame,
forgetting is more beautiful than any recall.

Lillies that fill the valley,
roses by other names,
lilacs by the courtyard bloom,
and daffodils follow the rain.

For each forgotten petal,
that opens in forlorn passion,
their finds a place,
where rests your face,
upon my lap,
and fear no evil,
even in the valley of death.

For I have forgotten the fears,
that are whispered in years,
in cradle and crib.

Set me feet on an earth unborn,
untorn by wars,
unturned by years,
untouched by tears,
undrenched by sorrows,
unblemished by age.

It has been forgotten,
because it never was in their hearts at all.

There is something to be said

about a blingtarded avatar with a tag that reads "Intelligence is hot."

Delicate impulses that reach for the caress of keys,
that softly hold all the arcane secrets of the heart,
if only we should dance upon them,
and leave behind that trail of steps,
the tracks of the windings of a mind
that fumbles with the meanings of its motion

Ian Welsh's avatar

I redid Ian Welsh's avatar, the first version being a rough job in a hurry. I think he's pleased with the results, even if SL isn't his thing.

Also this one...

I tried to capture a kind of brooding romantic look to him, because I think that is what lies underneath his writing, or so it seems to me when I read it on his blog.

Go, give, and gain, that which is more valuable,
when given away.
Love, and knowledge, linked in this,
stationary they have no existence,
in motion they are bliss.

Not much of a poem this morning, not much of anything. But then, I'm doing art irl right now, and that means less time for SL, and all the minor things that I do. I'm actually sorry that I won't be able to show pictures of my current rl project, but that is the cost of not being an integrated identity.

back

I was ill for a few days and was in hospital for the last two. Nothing to be overly worried about, but it was not fun.

I was tempted to do a parody of someone logging into my account and telling the world about my demise, but my sense of humor is still recovering.

The trees, their sails of leaves once filled by summer breeze,
had set a course for wintered nights,
now frozen and becalmed, berift of billows.
It is as love is full of heat
only to turn to gray and barren stem,
a sketch of what might have been,
and what will be once again.

A Quater of Young People "Sexting"

I have once or twice. Have you? Survey says you have company. Though I think the break downs would be interesting to see a

Pregnant Fish

Guardian reports that ancient fossils found in Australia are the earliest indication that some fish gave birth to young alive: long before any previous evidence for it.

Every girl want to be a princess in the morning, and a queen in the evening.

A rivulet
     that
     falls
     and fallen is
                       the cataract of contact
                       the gushing foam and whiteness,
                       It scours out
                       cleanses us to life,
                       like growing algae
To beneath the placid pool of satiation, for which we yearn so far below

I can feel the hurtling hell that comes towards us,
that eats the energy of these times
and spits it out as spires filed with marble, silk, and whores.
The finest, imported from everywhere in every color,
the marble I mean, the whores are mostly blond.
And the silk can be dyed anywhere that fingers come the cheapest.

The edges of night

The edges of night bleed into day with hard dimensions,
distances between sleep and waking, which in measurement defy,
the number or the ruler.
How would our rulers tremble if the boundaries of our countries,
matched the boundaries of our souls. Unbound by petty ties to paltry pasts,
from which we did not come, and to which we do not owe anything,
except the tattered times they left us.

No fucking please, we're feminists

No fucking please, we're feminists.
We want to be worse than what we oppose.
Take on the dark corners of the human soul?
Please that's hard.
So much easier to play at passion,
and scrub our sight of what offends it.

No pleasure please, we're pornographers.
Why would we want to give, what can be gotten,
when frustration pays so much more.

No commonsense please, we're cacophony,
and how much better for us,
if every scrap of sanity,
is drowned out by the din.

Falling Between Worlds

Today I received nasty notes from two sides of teh world. It reminded me of a truth conveyed by one of my professors, that noise, not discourse, dominates the passions of the moment. It may not quite be nothing that is signified by this sound and fury, but it is the comments of those who are detached from it, or whose position is enclosed by art an irony, that end up being of the most interest to a waiting eternity.

The first was from someone whose sim I posted about here. It was of that genre that I was first introduced to long ago, that out the outraged club owner attacking a bad review. A parcel full of lies, and then attacks against the reviewer for not understanding the great contribution to humanity that running the sim creates. One reason, I think, LL does well, is that while ego driven meglomaniacs may be a dime a dozen, many of them are good for $295 a month in sim fees.

From the opposite side of the world came a broadside from Stop Violence Against Women, which as become the Bowdler Society of Second life in it's anti-pornography campaigns. On one hand I can understand victims of abuse becoming harpies about anything which might trigger their own deeply embedded agonies. I do not think men begin to understand the prevalent fears of unwanted pregnancy and sexual violence have in the minds of our gender. However, Stop Violence Against Women has passed from protecting people from triggering pains, and into the realm of doing violence themselves. They are not going after people who force their fantasies on others, but to try and block the working out of fantasies entirely. The patriarchy laughs, by multiplying repressive anti-sexuality, it pits woman against woman.

It is hard, again, to express the powerful sense of being watched that most women have laid upon them by their mothers, and other figures of authority. It is we who must say "no," and be the guardians of the economic and social relationships that are attached to procreation. It is not that our desires are less, but it is that our burdens are greater, that we enter into the world of sexuality with a heavier sense of our place in it. It is absolutely essential to liberate ourselves from the burdens, without losing understanding of the risks. And doing this requires claiming our sexuality. This often involves transgressive fantasies, and transgressive actions. Men transgress with permission, we envy this about society.

Often this involves pornography, partaken of alone, or shared with a romantic partner. One could stuff whole libraries with books that a woman offered up to a man, hoping he would see her secret self in it. Fantasies of being forced grow out of this, they strip away the responsibility of saying no, of beign the guardian of reproduction. They elevate the very brute aspects of masculinity. Rape, slavery, force, kidnapping, ravishing... all play some part in the fantasy of being stripped of agency, and in this, finding it. Finding a focus on personal pleasure, uncoupled from that bearing pressure of our mother's eyes squeezing at the back of the skull. It is a palpable physical sense.

SVAW has chosen to be antagonistic, and even more so, violent in their language to those people, including me, who they do not approve of. If Hard Alley is doing violence to women, so is Stop Violence Against Women, which, instead, chooses the sub-feminist and anti-feminist narrative. This narrative is the narrative of sanitization, that every centimeter of the world must be made safe for the sickest. In doing so, they would kill the healthy. They also promote an unhealthy fear of what is, in fact, feeble.

I've walked, often enough, through various rape and forced sims. I have never had anything all that bad happen to me. In fact, the reality of rape sims, and most of the men who partake of rape porn, is that they are weak and under confident in their sexual fantasy role. One time I went looking for rape role play, to see what the state of it was, and found myself having to entice and tease a man to be up to playing it. Rape roleplay is almost the reverse of the sign of a true sexual predator. Instead of being the play ground of the sexual predator, it is the province of men who really feel as bound up in their own guilt and weight of restraint as anything else. Before they can release, the need a woman who is not merely helpless, but almost vamping them from the chains.

It is not that there are not sexual predators on Second Life, there are. However, they do not, in general, put themselves in any one kind of place. Instead, abusive sexuality, and abusive use of it, are all over. In dance halls, malls, escort houses, orgy rooms, businesses, both rl and sl. I've been pressured for sex talk by Linden Lab employees, and by employees of known rl businesses, just as I have been pressured for sex at job interviews at Fortune 500 companies. It is not rape play which creates, or even houses, sexual predators more than any other. Thus protesting a sim which abides by the adult content rules, and is this known only to people who are expressly looking for it, goes against the need to create spaces which are civil, and civilized, by creating spaces that are expressly for transgression. We need our closed doors, and our carnivals, as much as our intellectual spaces. It is inappropriate for a male to enter into a group for, for example, public affairs, and then begin hitting on the builder of the set that a show is filmed on. Yes, this happens. Who is being more problematic? The guys who hang out in a seedy room hoping for a consenting partner? Or the man who inflicts himself on a woman during a book discussion?

But it is harder to go after the later, less fulfilling of gastric upset, less violent.

Let me tell a tale: I went to a sim with one of the leaders of SVAW. She was almost shaking with fear. I do not know, of course, whether this was real, or merely what she projected to get her point across, but it is how she presented. I was unafraid, and told her that in reality, there was little to nothing that anyone there could do to her, except say mean things. SVAW is composed of cowards, and is led by cowards, and preaches cowardice. Courage is not protesting the unpopular, but instead facing it, and facing it down. Pushing it back from the center stage, and reducing its acceptability. SVAW does not do this, and does not fight the tangle every day of the male dominated world of techies. Instead, they act as if street theater on a sim is some noble calling.

I say this is a sub-feminist narrative, I should, I think, explain this. The feminist narrative is simple: nature and society place upon us certain weights, and we demand that we be liberated from them as excuses to hobble our free participation in our own lives. We are feminists not to escape our gender, but to celebrate it, and, at times, places, and in ways acceptable to us, I don't pretend consent is truly the reality of entering into the erotic, express our gender. A feminist believes, and must believe, only two things. That our gender does not define us, and that we have a right to our gender as part of us.

The anti-porn crusader is engaging in an age old exchange: suppressing the freedom of women, in return for a power granted by men and other subfeminist women, to engage in oppression. Stop Violence Against Women in SL, has become Start Violence Against Women in SL. It's violence is embedded in the ideologies, and fears, of its founders. From that fear, they would deny, and indeed attack, people who have aided them and helped them. They bite the hands that hold them, they hate the people who help them.

It saddens me, because it tells me what I have read: that power is so seductive, that even those who would do good, are ensnared with it. As a nobody, writing nowhere, and for no one, these hollow words into empty airs fall, as I feel I am falling between the cracks. But it is the bellowing of those who have their pornographic needs, SVAW, is panic porn, and is everything it's founders say they deplore: anti-women, anti-feminist, committing violence of mind and spirit.

It is essential for people to claim their sexuality. As feminists, we have to accept that the process of doing so is like a journey into the wilderness, or the dark abyss, or the lands of the dead. It is a place fraught with monsters, magic, and mystery. Within the murk of the tangled forces of the erotic, including the desire to engage in that dangerous journey which is bearing and raising a child, are images and narratives that are not pure white and wedding. But only by facing, and encompassing, our darkness, can we be whole again.

I have walked through my darkness, and in doing so become a more whole person, I would wish that the leaders of SVAW would face, rather than run, from their inner fears, and rather than attacking women who are claiming their lives, learn that they must embrace the inner dragon which gnaws at the roots of the soul.

Latest Illegal Orgy Room Rockets Upward

Since LL's adult content rules, one of the constant games has been the creation of illegal orgy rooms. LL does nothing about violators until there have been a flood of complaints. This should tell any legitimate business that Linden Lab is a porn company, and that any business which goes into LL has got to get used to the idea that their employees will be cruising for sex at work. With all of the problems that entails.

The latest addition to the bestiary of mature area orgy rooms, titled in a fit of ironic nuance, FREE SEX AREA BEACH & NEW COMMUNITY. It rocketed from near zero traffic to 10,000 and now to 30,000 in two weeks. It has staff. It's a very serious attempt to engage in the end run of being mature until LL gets around to warning them, and grabbing the traffic that comes with this, hoping to hold on. LL routinely gives many of it's adult content violators winks and nods, while comign down hard on others.

Now, as a person who is deeply involved in cyber-sex, you might think I am against the adult content rules. But this is wrong, though not entirely so. The entire dance about having some verification standard, which means nothing, is absurd. But the need to have a clear division between sexual and social areas of Second Life is based on a few clear realities. The most obvious is that sex areas get swamped. This means that everyone else on a sim with a sex area has their performance degraded because of this. Buying land any place was always waiting for the next sex themed build to see an unlagged sim, and set itself down.

But there is also the social reality that people in the search for their particular kind of sex inflict themselves on everyone within reach. They don't care about 100 no answers,so long as they get one yes answer. The result is human spam. There's no cost to the person serially propositioning people,and cost to each person they proposition. The reality is that men beleive that if a woman sets herself in an orgy room, even for a minute, evne once, then she is forever marked as a legitimate target for an IM for sex later. Even months later. Because of this reality, a line that warns people where they are going is important. People have a right to their fantasy lives, and to have spaces to work out their fantasies and enjoy their sexuality. Other people have a right not to get "wanna fuck?" in their IM box from random males.

This is particularly true of people who are survivors of sxual abuse or sexual assault, where such behavior is "triggering." This means that it calls up the horrible experiences of before, in a present and vivid memory.

The reality is that the people running these builds are not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, but to be able to make money. They set up their malls. Free Sex, is Cunt Camping. Guys hanging out, waiting for free... That is, traffic. Which is then sold. This is porn pollution.

On top of that, the fly by night areas are, and always were, pretty ugly. It is also the case that there is a lot less actual sex going on in them, precisely because they are magnets for freenize wielding newbies.

So that is why I am reporting on all of this. The old orgy rooms need to go, and be forgotten.

A boundary case in M Space

Concurrency, that hobgoblin of many minds,
that cry out in winternight
for contact that strays
from some far beyond.
And then, in huddled nowheres
go, to solace of a solitude
shared with yet alone, another,
who, an island universe upon a quantum foam,
has found an ekpyrical encounter,
that begins the worlds a new.

Morning, Noon and Night

Morning, Noon and Night,
your memory beckons me,
the feel that is the hard hand
that points to the hours of your desire,
for me.

I hope.

Mourning moon that's bright,
an orange that bloated eats the horizon,
no farther from me than your affection,
no colder than your last words,
to me.

I pray.

Now that you have gone away,
I hate, with that intensity,
of hyperion dawn electric,
that shivers away the aching hours,
of leaf swirled wind unto the dawn.

I watch.

And seen the cleansing rite,
of November dawn,
that pierces veil of gray,
and finds me lucid this first time,
with nothing left to say.

I turn,
and your ghost vanishes from my memory.

Fustino Meridoc: "Wanna fuck?"

-- Instant message logging enabled --
[11:22] fustino Meridoc: wanna fuck?
[11:25] Lillie Yifu: No but filing an abuse reprot against you amuses me
[11:26] fustino Meridoc: we are in a place when we can ask free
[11:26] Lillie Yifu: nothis is an illegal orgy room
[11:26] Lillie Yifu: and youare breaking the ToS
[11:27] fustino Meridoc: u could have just answer me
[11:27] Lillie Yifu: I didi
[11:28] Lillie Yifu: I'm filign an abuse reprot again for sexual harassment
[11:28] Lillie Yifu: care to go for three?
[11:28] fustino Meridoc: no u did not answer me
[11:29] fustino Meridoc: but if u want do what u want it's a your problem
[11:29] Lillie Yifu: What leter in teh word "No" haven't they taught you in kindergarten?
[11:30] fustino Meridoc: i did not kindergarten
[11:31] Lillie Yifu: THat's obvious
[11:31] fustino Meridoc: i give u a suggestion
[11:31] Lillie Yifu: I give you one
[11:31] Lillie Yifu: stop right now
[11:31] Lillie Yifu: or you will be making trouble for yourself

[11:32] fustino Meridoc: i'm so afraid..........................

Yes, that's the truth, both rl and sl, men know there is no penalty for engaging in sexual harassment.

Ll continues to wink at mature orgy rooms, and it takes endless complaints and pushing to get them to do anything about even the most egregious violations.

Leaving Escorting Again

Real life first, always.

The effect of going Adult

Rape, Torture, Kill - now called BnB, held out as being "mature" rather than goign adult. I wrote here that tis mainstreamed rape in Second Life. Now that it has gone mature, we can see the effect. It's two parcels now have 20K traffic between them, when it used to have over 33K every day. More than one third less.

Not every parcel that goes adult sees such a drop off, even ones with very hard core themes. However, for generic orgy rooms, the drop off is severe. Basically, from the data, one can see that instant low investment hook ups are something that the buys who pursue them are not willing to do even the most minimal work for. It's almost like a dog sitting under the table hoping for free scraps. However, for more specific fantasies, adult registration is not a barrier.

How some poor merchant lost a sale tonight

I sent a link to a specific xstreetsl item. The person logged in to the generic marketplace. I checked and got the same result after closing the browser from a link.

This is very much the wrong behavior, when someone gets a link to a specific item, then they should go there, even if login has to happen.

So some merchant lost a sale. Because the person lost interest.

A poem

Ageless formless roaring void,

that now beholds my small soul in its hands

and tumbles me amongst the leaves of fair forgotten folk

who reside deep in within the grottos of myth.

I fall, I spiral, I twirl, I turn, I fly without wings,

without the aspiration of wind,

or the flutter of feathers breath.

No agnel of another age comes to catch me

and in falling find, that there is no bottom,

to the anguish of a life lost.

RTK finally moves to adult

The Rape Torture Kill sim has finally been moved to adult, after dozens of ars, complaints to LL employees, and public pelting. For reference, it is usually a matter of days, not hours, before a sim is moved from mature to adult after complaints.

The Train Wreck

She is kind enough to link to one of my rants, but writes a thoughtful and elegiac post which is much better on the subject of rape than anything I have managed to come up with yet.

From a Distance II

From a Distance

VS sim as seen from commonwealth.

Adult Content Rulz? Don't make me Lulz.

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Moonson's History (Fiction, for those who don't know it)

While discovered in the 19th century, and first excavated in the early 20th, the civilization that grew up between India and the Middle East was a cipher to history. It left no monumental architecture, and little text on stone or clay. Indeed, there was more than a little argument over the nature of the script, and the possibility that it was a proto-literate, or pre-historical ideographic system rather than a developed syllabary or other form of writing. This changed with the discovery in the far north of a cache of papyrus scrolls, which are now known as Rupar I, for the site there were located near. As importantly, at Rupar II, an interlingual was found, allowing the first reasonable decipherment of the later script. This interlingual was, at first, confusing, since it seemed to have the Indus script twice, and a later script which, while an obscure variation of old Chinese seal script, was readable. It was only at this point that the first of many mysteries became revealed: the script had encoded many different languages, and the interlingual was the key between an Indo-European tongue, closely allied with Sanskrit, and another, which was a language isolate, though somewhat connected with older Dravidian languages, and perhaps Sumerian.

For twenty years Rupar I and Rupar II were hidden from the scholarly community, as explained by Rao and Himmelberg, because of the politics of the discovery, which can be left aside for the present commentary...


The Rupar Texts and Their Significance Wei Huang Li, Journal of Mathematical Linguistics, April 2041, Vol 9, No. 8 pg. 897


The Banner of The White Tiger

a

There is something new under the sun. That sun which streams now through the portal to the courtyard, the hear leaves of ivy tied with bits of twine to a trellis, the shapes decorating the edges of the shadow on the floor. The shutter swings slightly back and forth in the cooling breeze that is the distant touch of the season of storms, which the people to the east call, the Monsoon.

I was born in the same place of the sun, with that same breath of cool dryness retreating from warm wetness, where the touch of the air was arid, and the weight of the air held a smell like clothes left damp in the corner. I was called 6th moon daughter on my birth, and so they left me with the nurse, a woman who had had so many children of her own that she numbered them. It was not until I was five that I was given even a use name, so much like a clay pot on a shelf is a young daughter who may or may not be beautiful or useful.

So when the time came for me to have something more useful than 9th Moon, my father began calling me after that name, Monsoon. It was a word with a foreign sound, and as a merchant of Deslapur, he knew that people of that moment had a mania for all things foreign, just as they had a mania for the very soft beyond soft wool that came floating down the river in flat bottomed barges, moved by pole or oar, or simple sail, and which was spun into cloth as fine as gold. As a man of means, he had the luxury of naming his children, and only selling them in marriage when they would fetch a good price.

I suppose I should set more of my tale. The name he gave me then clings to me only in the darker nights an corners of my life, when passion overtakes me or my lover, or when I think back to those days of weaving and learning to trace the symbols that showed what was in a jar, or was bound up in a sack. The stick figures that chase each other, and were then the signs of wealth and trade.

Trade, my father's favorite word. Everything was trade. From a sweet lump of honey, to the task of the day, to moments of his affection, everything was in trade. So he set me to taking stylus and tracing lines in clay, which was then fired, to show what had been packed. The other merchant's scribe would do the same, and the two were placed together. I would read the scribe's, always "his," manifest, and he would read mine.

Those running figures, well they would be more valuable than almost any trade I would make with anyone, and certainly with him.

So here I sit, in a warmed stone room, a beige sandstone, and I am dragging a feather sharpened with a bronze knife to a point. In the shaft of the feather, there is a dark rich black fluid, that is ink. As you read this, remember, that ink is the blood of civilization, it flows, it bleeds, it dries. Its formation is life, and where it grows, it is life.

I have written now more words than many people will read in a day, and by the end of this manuscript, I will have written more words than many people will read in a life time. You will have read more than most people will ever know, or have known since the beginning of beginnings, which, even now, stretch back farther than anyone can know or remember.

This is new under the sun. Before memory was in the mouth, with rhapsodes reciting, and reciting, and filling in where their minds failed, with wit and skill weaving a tapestry before the ears of the audience. I know these rhapsodes, because here, where is here? A yes, another thing that is new under the sun, we call it Chancery House, and in it all that is to be done is written, all that has been done is recorded. We few in our hands copy out the rules, writs, and laws, words I know that may be new to you in the form we mean them here, and by doing so, set on inexpensive papyrus, they are carried out by horse and runner to the edges and bones of this, our empire.

Empire! Heavens what a word it is, so foreign in the mouth that we must spell it out rather than using compact signs. It is a foreign idea, a foreign word, and it was foreign to us when I first walked the warmed earth as a child. We heard of empire only as stories from traders from the west, or traders from the east. Shorter folk, but fatter folk, who gleamed with scented oils and glowed with tied beards.

But so it is, our empire. And you, because you are reading this, are advanced far in the service of that empire. You know my name, you have probably heard it, but that of course, is not the name I sign this with, because I write this as the hand of the goddess, who is moved by the will of the Sun God, Ramathan. More on this in its due course.

So realize, as you attempt to add flourishes and touches to the speech you set down, that it will be sealed into a bone, or stripped around a Sumer stick. Then it will be carried. It will be received by some official, who will in turn carry it to the person it is intended for. That man may be drunk, tired, or just having finished exerting himself with his wife, his boy servant, or his goat. In this condition he will go to the Chancery of the village, town or city, and the writing will be handed to a reader. She, almost always she, will be your sister, and she will read what you have written, though, of course, she may be tempted to improve what you write.

Have pity on her, because she is not your equal. If she were, she would be here. Have pity on her also, because she will have to explain what is written to the annoyed official, and he will be annoyed, and this man whose knowledge of signs goes no farther than where to shit, who is still sweating with lust and is afraid in his bowels that this means his death, for how often is he called? And for what? To almost no good purpose. You do not scribe joyous news often.

If you are here, in this place, you have also spent some time fucking with the priests, and perhaps whiling away pleasant time with your sisters in passionate embraces. Do not ever scribe in this state, because, even if carried to the remotest land of Sutakegn, she will smell it on your papyrus, that scent on our fingers from intimate touch of a man or woman. She will know, and will regard you badly. Her eyes will peer through the parchment at you. She does not have your face, and will be jealous of your scented baths, and soft linen robes, and worked leather sandals, and tied locks of hair, and adornments of the flesh.

It is not wise to place your life in the hands of such a sister.

Have pity her and develop your hand carefully, and embellish not for the sake of it. Only write such things to others who will appreciate them, and the moment of their reading. Everything you write for others, is fiction, and it is also true. If you write that it is decreed that such a man must die, then he must die. If you write that Third Plow Tiller owes a dram of silver for 10 drams of tea, then he does. Everything you write for this inner place, among us, is fact, it is also false, because it must never leave this place, as certain secrets must be clenched in your thighs, or a touch of amber is held by an old woman as she dies.

So sister, having spent time evolving to the state where you can not merely scribe, but write, and not merely recite, but read, these pages gift you a thing that you have not seen outside of this house.

A book.

What is this book about? It is about what I know and saw, it is of the founding, and of the Chaos Wars, and of the men, and women, and gendery, who made it so. It is of people who have no names to the public mob, but who are more precious than the yellow saffron spice. In the Theogony, you will learn about the birth of gods and goddesses, and when they come, and what hours are appointed to them. But here you will learn of the birth of cities, and how this place came to be.

I look out now, and the sun has fallen to kiss the mountains over the slow wide river that is south of the holy city. Mehragrah, may your name be remembered. And if not, remembered, felt as a soft rustle on the tips of fingers of scribes until the moon eats the sun, and we all return to the shapes of animals in the darkness.

Remember, your sister Monsoon loves you, and from this love she gives you this book, the book. The forbidden book of the garden.

b

From the vast vault of night, from his throne behind the moon came Ravidarin, the messenger of Ramathon. He slipped silently over the gates and came down to the hall with the vast hearth. Seated around it were the kings of men. He bore a box, and in the box was the voice of Ramathon. When he entered, he was seen, cloaked in silver. All fell in awe and were silent.

Wordlessly Ravidarin opened the box, and boomed the voice of the God of Gods. The voice was heard to say: "In the city of the Harakine, they have fallen from the ways, and fallen from the sky like a punished star. I bless you now. On my rising, in the fields, go take the staff that the moon's lord, my messenger, gives you.

And Janmathsani took hold of the staff, still in Ravidarin's hands, and grasped it. And the light flooded over him, and he wrested the staff from the grip of the Moon's god. On its cap were the horns of the ram. And they all bowed before it, and Janamthsani became annointed king. They drank and ate that night, and sacrificed a virgin ewe. They slept, and in the morning marched out to the field before the Great City, Harakine.

Up was set the ram's horn's standard. Up was flew the bright red cloth, soaked in berries and bright to the eye. There might grew the warriors of the God of Gods, Sun of Suns. There shown the polished light of their glittered shields. Row upon row, rank upon rank, day upon day. Behind the walls of cold stone the defenders shook. They were very afraid, at the sound of the roar of the horns, and the bleat of the drums, and the whistle of the flutes like arrows. And they shook in terror. Then the great God, the God of Gods, Sun of Suns, spoked. The air reverberated with his warmth. Lo his warriors charged, and all was cleansed of the city that was unclean, and all the darkness illuminated.

As I said before, all you scribe is fiction, and all you scribe is true. This is the truth, because it is set down, and read through out the land where ever, and when ever, people are gathered to celebrate the Great God Ramathon. Except that is not the way it happened. We did not worship Ramathon, or any likeness of him. The ram's horn standard came later. And if you think that the great city fell to a charge of might warriors once, then you do not know war. I hope you do not know war.

We didn't either, not until that time. We got to the very walls of the city, and still did not know war. How then did we get there? Why was I with the army? Because it was not an army, and it was not, until that day, a war. And it is a good deal farther than a morning's march from the city that the story speaks of. You know it as Rajatharin, the King's Stand. It was not known as that, because at that time it did not have a king, did not want a king, and wouldn't have thought to anoint one. As for the celebration? We did not sacrifice a virgin ewe. Maybe virginities were sacrificed, but the only things unsheathed were firmly attached to pelvises. There are more things wrong than this, but too many to simply list.

Instead let me tell the tail as best that I can. First I must write of the lay of the lands. At that time in the south, was the island bounded by the Run of Kutch, and the broad bay of Hakra. The two arms embraced three cities: Deslapur, Surkatoda, and on a small island off the coast, set deep in the bay, Dholayaira. The city you know as Rajasthra, the King's Stand, was then called Kaliban, and it was far up the river. My father had been elected to negotiate a treaty, not of war, but of trade. There were dozens of small issues, the most important being the wool of that region being barred from being spun or woven by our laws, and they, in retaliation, would not allow wrought metal goods beyond their city at the point of where the river Harkra breaks up into many rivers. There were excuses on both sides, about this and that. But the reality was that this was a negotiation over power.

My father also had secret instructions, which I would only know of later. It weighed heavily on his mind. Our journey took the third moon of that year, slowed by the rapid flow of waters from the far north's melting snows. I remember eating little and feeling ill, and spending the days under the tent in the middle of the boat, spending hours practicing my hand on a slate with chalk, spinning, and embroidering. The men working the oars smiled at me constantly, until my father's glare made them start to look away. My clothing was modest in the extreme this time, because the strengthening sun was harsh on my skin.

After this slow progress, looking out over lands, both tilled and fallow, wild and tamed, we saw in the distance a low hill, and populated on it clumps of low buildings, loosely scattered like a child's blocks. Before the city was a bridge, whose dark timbers were worn of paint that clung to the edges near the banks of the river. The spindly legs of the bridge grew thicker in the center, and it looked like some great centipede stretched out over the river, which here was narrow and fast moving, a rich orange color with the silt from the mountains. There were white swirls in the water that I watched obsessively, trying to stay away. The long journey had left me listless. It was at this point that the owner of the boat, a thin man with a long nose and almost hollowed out cheek bones came to me.

"Miss will want some." He offered a cup of liquid that was pale green, and had an acrid reek to it.

"It is medicine?" I looked directly at him and felt the vapors of it rise into my nostrils. It was pungent, but smelled leafy, like the aurora of a tree captured in a cup.

"It will cure what ails the miss. I promise."

Having heard many stories of offered medicines, it would have been foolish to take it, except that my father was an important enough person that it would have been unwise to attempt any such thing with me. For a moment I had a vision of myself as being drowsier and drowsier, and then, something, happening. My understanding of sex was not clear. I had seen people moving together under covers, and I had seen animals having sex, but connecting this to my own body and what it would mean had not happened. I knew the owner wanted sex with me, because his eyes had been all over me the entire journey.

I took the cup. I drank it back swiftly. I felt nothing, and continued to loll in the swiftly setting sun. It's orange bloated spider body clambering to the horizon. But as the day prepared to sleep, I found more and more energy, my eyes opened, as did my mind. I resumed scatching on the slate, and began to play with poetic phrases that I had heard, rather than just scribing exercises. At last I could remember one song I had heard sung several times, and set it down on the slate. I brushed it clear with the sleeve of my cloak.

At this point my father looked down on me and beckoned me to stand. My mind and sight had taken on a peculiar clarity that they had never had before, and even though the light had grown trickier, the details were finer to my sight.

We passed under the great wood bridge, the river narrowed, and the sides rose, seemingly carved out of the stone, and rising higher than the mast of a sea boat. The sun was setting and behind us, with the cups and shapes of the sheer cliff face having dark and deep rims and rings the sucked in the light like the holes in a skull. One place in the river turned and two such round shapes stared back, in a lopsided face. I was standing, in a brown traveling cloak, held by a clasp made of bronze with a leave shape over the pin. Beneath this I had a heavy wool over tunic, and beneath that my linen dress, now grey from use. I wore boots made of worked leather, that my father had made for me. I had travelled with him before, and my feet had been cold. He was not a man to suffer the same problem twice. My father was more richly dressed, with layers of cloth and wool, and a cloak that was heavier than all of the clothes I wore together. He had a girth that had grown with the prosperity of years, and a roundness of face in which was set two shining eyes. He was prone to smile, and had wrinkles at the corners of his mouth from it. His hair was now cut short in straight lines, because he was too busy to have it carefully done. It fell straight and dark. He was tallish, but no taller than I, a fact that made others stare at me, because women are seldom my height at all.

He stared up the river, his features clearly darkening in thought. He turned to me and began to speak:

"Monsoon, I will need you to scribe for me on this. The people here need to learn to set on papyrus the agreements, so that when I return, there will be proof that we have made the bargains that we set out to make. And proof that they are to be held to. Do you think you can do this?"

As usual, he offered no preamble to his statements. I replied as I usually did.

"And what have you to offer me?" It was almost a ritual phrase among merchants, because people would point to what they wanted, and, if they did not show what they wanted to give in return. needed prompting by gestures and questions. So it is in trade when people do not speak common languages.

He first turned his head, but then, gripping the rail of the boat, rotated his body fully around to look at me. He drew breath, thought for a moment, and then spoke again.

"There."

Sprawled out before us was a single division in the river, that spread out like fingers of a hand grasping. Along both banks were cluttered low buildings, blocky, and encompassing of courtyards, from which could be seen growing flowering trees. In the prow of the peninsula itself, taller buildings, surrounded by a wall with ramparts. Stone, not brick, decorated with colored banners. The tallest of which was one I did not know, a green banner with a white tiger. I pointed to this and looked at my father quizzically, but he did not know, and shrugged. Clearly change was a foot here.

The boat lazily slowed, and reached stones that were set out into the current of the water. The wall loomed above us. Set into the wall was a great heavy gate, worn by many years, and dented. Behind it were wooden doors, studded with huge nails that looked as if only a giant could pound them in. Even though it was dusk, torches had been lit and there was business loading and unloading. I smelled the smell of the liquid, and saw sacks of green leaves, dried and curled up, and some fresh. I saw the sign on the side of them, and copied it several times on to my slate, and in the air with my finger.

I followed my father, who, despite his bulk, was adept at weaving through men scurrying about their business. There were some leers at me, perhaps thinking that any woman with painted eyes must be a prostitute, since this was not the more ceremonial dock. I wondered why we chose to arrive here, or perhaps not, my father was glancing in all directions, carefully noting the signs, jars, boxes, bags, piles and urns. He would stop and take a deep draught of the air from time to time, soaking in the flavors that hung here. Noting the colors. I could only follow his glances and understand, after he had laid them, why that particular thing had found its way to his attention.

We passed between the open jaws of the gate, and between the swung inward doors. They felt of dampness, and there were stains of dirt, blood, oil, and smears of grease on them. The handle was black, darker black than at first, I thought could be naked metal, but so it was. The city had had many battles, it was clear, and I hoped that I would get a chance to hear some of the story tellers, not for the battle stories, but because almost all such stories featured some romance and bits of poetry which, if properly recited, could transport the listener into a waking dream.

We began cutting our way through the street, the fronts of the houses and buildings were simply stone built up, occasionally carved with figures. Only doors. Nothing opened on to the street. The street itself was of carefully fit together larger stones, each three or four times as far across as my feet. In this were set proper drains, to snake away the water. The sides curved so the middle was higher than the edges, and the edges had steps up from the general lay of the stones. My home town did not bother much with streets, but had channels and walk ways slung between buildings. But they are no more, or would be no more soon.

Up the slowly inclined street, which ran parallel to the eastern river, the Gungaria, as it was then called. We finally reached the point where we were higher than the wall, and below was a clutter of square within square roofs: the centers being courtyards. Within them I could see circular terraces and bowed trees, from which budded flowers. We halted before a thick non-descript door, my father halted, presented an inlaid ivory token, which clearly gained him admission, and then pointed at me and presented another. We walked in through this door, twice as wide as that of an ordinary house, and into a low darkened room. A slab of wood was set across two stones, and behind it a person sat on a round stone with a square of filled cloth. I guessed it to be some kind of pillow, though it was very plain compared to the embroidered ones I was used to.

The door slammed closed behind us, and we were pointed to a hall, set into which were drape covered entry ways. Behind us two men carried our baggage. We entered in, and the room was empty. My father never slept in other people's beds if he could help it. We brought rolls to sleep on, reed mats and sheets, with two blankets each. I was, however, too aroused by the effects of the medicine to sleep, and was happily checking characters and set myself on finishing another row of embroidery. My father, by contrast, was snoring within minutes, his hand clutched around a short blade. It was deep into the night before sleep took me, and I listened carefully to the goings on, the shufflings, the arrivals, the sounds of conversation, distantly grunting exertions, I did not know of what kind, and the laughter of women, I think playing sticks with some men.

But then I fell into the dream world, and I will, in the next scroll, recount what happened there.

Batterers for Equality

Double XX on the rise of the batter's movement.

House Passes Sex Tax Amendment

I am beyond angry, beyond fury, beyond words at the passing of the amendment which bars the health insurance exchanges from providing abortion coverage, nor for the public option to do so.

Linden Labs, and the mainstreaming of Rape

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You cannot turn back the clock

I have a build of the LL viewer with basic stars fixes

Next is to build and test snowglobe, and then fix stars near the horizon, when the viewer starts to alpha the moon out. Fortunately there is a function to blot out stars near a heavenly body, so I will have to make it apply to stars close to the moon.

Escort Oasis. Adult Content Rules? What R Thoz?

From their parcel description:

Escort Oasis tm sm is a diffrent kind of place. It is a busy freelance club, lots of hot girls and guys. dancers and escorts keep 100% of their tips. Free ad boards, 12 free private skyboxes, 20 dance poles, freebies, MALL and shops. o

Looks like another example of how LL allows people to flagrantly violate adult content rules.

Why should any business owner follow them? Several large businesses clearly don't.

RTK Does the Whack a Mole

Rape Torture Kill, the sim that most flagrantly violated adult content rules, has a new owner of its parcel. Here are the rules:

BNB FORCED SEX
ROLEPLAY SIM RULES

1. Safe Word always to be respected:
Code Red - This means STOP

2. OOC Titles mean “Out of Character”
DO NOT ask them to role play or for sex

3. Non RP related harassment or abuse
will get you banned.

4. No Child Avatars

5. Must be a adult in real life – No kids
Kids found will be banned

6. No Use of Bite huds (vampires, werewolves, etc)

7. Only BNB – FSR Prostitutes can charge for sex
Please report others to owners

Looks like the new owners are just as much in violation as the old ones, but obviously think that if they take the Kill out they are OK... The people running it are long time SL people, so they know exactly what they are doing.

A friend's big suggestion

There are at least two open source planetarium programs that draw to Open GL. It would be a huge project to merge them, but it would be possible. The upside would be an incredible viewer experience. The downside? A slower, larger, viewer.

What do people think?

Lillie's Sky To Do List

Learn how to add a debug setting
• Add settings for sun and moon texture
• Add setting to not draw day, which creates space.

Clean up LLSky and LLHeavenBody
• HeavenBody should have parameters which determine it's motion relative to the background of stars.
• Clean up LLSkyInterface so that there are HeavenBody equivalents of all Sun Calls

Moon
• Unlock Moon from Sun
• Phases of the moon. Textures of same.

Moon Illusion

Download current LL Viewer Source Code
• Add changes.

Write Next To Do List

Sky Fixes

Note that the moon is now in front of, not behind, the stars. Note that the stars now cluster along a "galactic equator" and have a more realistic scatter. None of this was hard to do... an art major pixel prostitute could figure it out.

Next step is larger: the moon moving relative to the sun, and having phases. This is harder than it looks because LL assumes the two are on opposite sides, and there are some lighting things to deal with. There is also the problem that old code hasn't been cleaned out, even though it is not actually used.

More later.

Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.

You will need to click on this image.

Stars

Poetry Year - End

There in black lace and robes of velvet the morners gather,
a rocky cove on the ocean of grief.
They are in pictures we have made, in color more fantastic,
in shapes more vivid, in edges more clean.
The mourn as we do not mourn,
cry as we do not cry,
feel loss as loss is denied us,
save in extremities of war or panicked ill fortune's grasp.

It has taken on a death of its own, these years,
a gulf that separates us from our pasts and present,
where, across the sea, and across the sands,
forgotten people mourn, in forgotten lands.

[Last one of the poetry project. It is time to put my fingers to other tasks... Though of course, more verse will visit these pages from time to time.]

New York Times on the End of the Museum Boom

Museum boom ends.

With the end of easy money, comes the end of large donations in pursuit of "the edifice complex."

Which is why I am turning my thoughts to the idea that brought me to SL in the first place: museums. Specifically the display of art and other objects, which even if they are nominally 2D, have a 4D component. We do not grasp a painting instantaneously, nor as a flat object, but instead over time, from different vantage points. Looking at objects in 3D over time produces a different effect. It is time to have a boom in innovation and renovation, rather than excavation and self-glorification.

Poetry Year October 24

Words are a distant sun,
So frail to be, unseen even by sharpest eyes.
Words are a distant sun
a billion suns, a billion suns around a billion suns.
So far so frail, so weak,
but brought inexorable the tide,
the filaments of dark that curl clawed fingers,
and hold the fate of all in their hands.

Poetry Year October 23

So much Time is wasted
So many minutes chase each other down a spiral drain
And we hear them sucked away
Before they are tasted on our lips
Or are there to bring refreshing moment of inspiratio,
Even as idle pleasure that lights like fresh sun
Through old clouds.

Poetry Year October 22

What are you waiting for?
For what, for what?
For what calling scream in the middle of the night,
the crash of glass and metal in the soul,
that upends and flattens all delusions of a working life.

What are you looking for?
For someone you, even though, you do not know who?
For what is this longing,
to stand a top the city's highest tower,
and spread your arms to tip forward,
falling into flying,
as the stuff that fantasy is made of.

To where are you going, to where? And how?
What locations beyond the edges of faded maps,
in between the navigator's gaps,
where glowing white is not an empty space,
but a somewhere, with it's own sense of place.

Catch me, I am falling, free fall, free flight,
the windows racing by,
the wind rushing up to cushion this streak,
from high in the air,
towards a destiny below,
where all and everything
a moment, for a moment, only a moment,
stops.

Coiled in agony,
boiled in ecstasy,
shattered and flattened,
my body pulled to languid end.

I wake, and am warm in your arms,
and you are warm inside me,
and like a body that from tower tossed,
I lie here, looking, upward, at the your beautiful stars.

Poetry Year: October 23

Given Line:
"I cannot yet then have you, 'cept in portrait, shadow, dreams"

and what dreams may come will hold a lantern light
beside the only road we need to walk upon.
The shadows are not shadows, but reflections of the inner silence,
that holds the spaces between the fragments of noctural melody,
and thus,
in waking find that gift of gifts, sleep,
and sweet repose, where lives the lucid memoires
of our better mind.

Examples of Sexual Harassment in Second Life

In Egypt, the BBC reports, a sizable minority of women are victims of "phone stalking." Men call, often at random, and demand to know the woman's name, and then often demand sex or threaten for sex. Women do not report, because often these violations are not taken seriously. Egypt is passing tougher laws.

Linden Labs pro-sexual harassment policies place them behind Egypt on the scale of enlightenment. In Second Life women are expected to submit to sexual harassment constantly, by people who are knowingly violating the terms of service. One reason that no company in its right mind should do business with Linden Lab is that doing so indicates your support of sexual harassment and sexism. Having followed abuse reports of sexual harassment, I know what almost every sexual harasser on Second Life knows: that there is no penalty for doing it, so why not do it?

Consider this dialog from an illegal sex sim in a mature region:

[7:12] Olsin Skute: you look very pretty dear..are you taken?
[7:12] Lillie Yifu: Hello
[7:14] Olsin Skute: you are not interested?
[7:14] Lillie Yifu: in what?
[7:14] Olsin Skute: in getting to know me better..;)
[7:14] Olsin Skute: i stand behind you
[7:14] Lillie Yifu: it depends on what you mean.
[7:15] Olsin Skute: well....i mean that i find your av quite beautifull and i would like to talk more with you....maybe eventually ending up where we may become more intimate
[7:16] Lillie Yifu: No thank you, I am just here reporting the sim for ToS violations
[7:17] Olsin Skute chuckles.....
[7:17] Olsin Skute: andf you dressed that way...really now dear....
[7:18] Lillie Yifu: so?
[7:21] Olsin Skute: so.....this is a sim for adult fun...everyone knows that and that is why most come here.......if you want to simply look and observe then thats fine although plucking silly excuses out of the air only works with the youngsters here..not me....enjoy yourself dear however that may be..
[7:21] Lillie Yifu: thank you for coming out and violating the ToS , I will report you now.
[7:21] Lillie Yifu: beijos
[7:22] Olsin Skute: as you wish....says olsin with a soft smile on his face and a chuckle in his throat

Olsin knows there is no penalty. His RL is untouchable, he won't be so much as warned by Linden Labs, no matter how flagrantly he sexually harasses women.

Linden Labs is objectively pro-rape, objectively pro-sexual harassment, objectively sexist. They are a company that sells the ability to sexually harass women to men who want to do it.

From now on I am going to look up companies and politicians doing business with LL, and start publicizing, in a larger forum than this, their pro-sexist ties, and support for sexual harassment and violence against women.

One More Mature Orgy Room Down

Metal88 Carter's Free Sex rooms have been unplugged, and no surprises, he is not moving to Zindra.

For those who do not follow such things, let me explain that we are watching the death of an SL business model: the orgy mall. Now in the real world, I very much doubt people would go to a mall with naked guys with hard cocks running around propositioning anyone who might possibly be XX endowed, but in SL for a long time things worked this way: traffic pushed one up in the rankings, traffic is basically how long an agent is in an area, 1000 traffic points is roughly one avatar day. To generate traffic, parcel owners had to attract people, but generally the number of people with money to spend is lower than those who are just hanging out on SL. So to attract the hangers out, owners had to create reasons to be there. Now actual content is hard, but getting people to hang out is easy: give out something for free. This was called "camping."

One form of camping is giving out Linden Dollars: for sitting, by money trees or other games, and so on. Another form of camping is content camping: midnight mania, lucky chairs, and so on. The point of this is to give out something and make people wait for the chance to get it. However, even better is to give out something that costs you nothing. Hence "free sex." The point of free sex is to attract the chat room crowd. The people who log in, grease up, and ask every female handle their age, location, and measurements.

In a phrase, attract cunt campers.

As far as I know, I'm the only person who has admitted to doing any kind of survey or research on these in sl, and have blogged about them often. I still need to publish my survey of pick up lines, but that's for later I think. Anyway, to get to the heart of it. Mostly these places had newbie guys, many still shouting for how to find a free cock, and sex equipment lying around. There were a few female avatars who would play in such places, but mainly women who were there were there for another reason entirely. One was, of course, to laugh at the guys, another to fish out the very occasional guy worth having. But mainly, it was to spam something: vampire bites, advertisements for escort services, other sex clubs and so on. My count was that there were between 8 and 20 males looking for instant, no strings attached, sl sex for every female.

And in the main, women looking for no strings attached sex were seeking to try it out with someone who was not relationship material, and then move on. This led to the approach of men learning to ask women if they wanted to "try" the sex poseballs, because they assumed that their best chance was with a first time girl. Given how badly most of these men did SL sex there wasn't a second time.

Cunt camping had, at it's peak, a dozen major orgy sims. That's full sims. But for much of the last two years there were five main places: Neva Naughty, Free Sex Empire, Free Sex Land, Bukkake Bliss, Sexyland by Mixter Merlin. There were also a few other smaller ones, such as Sex4All. I'm half writing this list so that it is somewhere in the memory of the internet. There were also mainland orgy rooms, Bordeaux for example. I am leaving separate both freelance escort houses, and specialized places, such as BDSM rooms, even though there was some overlap. The reason is that specialized places sold specialized content, where as the orgy rooms had general purpose malls.

Now that is the key: the people who shop are the ones paying for the orgy room. Even if they buy at another location, because the rent at the orgy room is part of the overhead of the retailer or designer. There is no such thing, as free sex, but there was a system by which sex pollution could happen. I call it that because the costs were born by others, both in terms of providing the place, and in terms of other effects. There was almost no scam on sl that did not route people from the orgy rooms to the scam. Whether it was spamgames like SLBloodlines, or fishing expeditions.

It also has a long term social effect: men who pass through orgy rooms continue to ask women they saw there for sex. Harass in some cases. This is true whether or not the woman displayed the slightest interest.

An important reason for adult content rules is this: LL can only run at a certain level of concurrency on the main grid without major problems from various systems that are basically near their capacity. This means that LL's business goal is not more people, but to have more profitable people. Cunt campers, almost by definition, are among the least useful people on Second Life, in that they are relentlessly dedicated to neither paying for anything, nor contributing anything. They do not generally build, script or much of anything else. It is a big deal in an orgy room, and used as a pick up line, to have a place to go. Often this place is an LM to someone else's skybox. Adult content rules, by providing a very low filter, get rid of the people who make a free email, make a free sl account, search for "free sex" and then begin running around.

The cost in traffic of going adult is hard to measure, since many simply pulled the plug. Sex4All, Sexyland, and Free Sex Empire folded. Sexland dropped from around 60K to 21K, and most of those were looking for slesbian sex. I say this being fully aware that many are men irl, but be that as it may, that makes it a specialized, rather than general, desire.

However, for special purpose orgy rooms, there was no final drop off in traffic. The BDSM rooms, such as Bondage Ranch, saw no final drop off in traffic. Basically, people who want something specific, will register as adults to find it. People who want hit and run pixel pumping, have moved elsewhere for their fix. At this writing there is one old style orgy mall left with high traffic: Bukkake Bliss.

One can see why this model cannot survive the adult content rules. It was always basically a scam: selling access to other people's free sex, and charging content buyers for the privilege of funding a cock dump.

I am writing this summary because since the introduction of adult content rules, it was clear that this particular business model was going to go away, it relied precisely on the kind of people that LL wants to get rid of: the people who have no intention of ever spending any money. LL does not care about sexual harassment, not by their employees, not by residents, not by anyone. They even encourage it. However, they do care about money, and this was a group of users who were creating more cost than benefit. They aren't doing it because they are nice people.

After adult content rules went into effect, several parcels and sims decided to ignore them. This had been true of the old PG/Mature ratings, but adult content ratings have an even stronger incentive to break them. As I noted at the top, today one of the most flagrant of the adult content avoiders, pulled his parcel. He had 35000 traffic, on a 2048m parcel of mainland. That's 1/32 of a sim, using almost all of the sim's resources. Metal88 Carter, the person who ran it, ran two other parcels of the same kind. They are gone as well.

[Picture is the nearly empty Free Sex Land orgy room.]

LL Tells Developers that Encrypted Chat/IM is a ToS violation

A message was sent to developers today stating that viewers that violated the ToS would not be allowed to be registered. This means that the content law suit is having an effect. In future only compliant viewers will be allowed to log on to SL. The three things listed specifically were

1. Encrypted Chat,
2. Downloading or copying content,
3. Getting personal information without consent.

2 is pretty much straightforward, 3 is merely automation, but

Encyrytion?

For many geeks, I think, that is a deal breaker.

Jonathan Bishop has posted this to a developer list:

I have just spent the last hour or two reading the blog on this topic. The
quality of the discussion is so completely uninformed from essentially a few
people that are being allowed to monopolize the comment threads that it is
almost dysfunctional.

So I am going to comment here where at least people with some idea of what
the issues are will see it.

I see a clear benefit of having a list of SL browsers that are "recognized
by LL" to be, say, well behaved, not likely to steal the user's account
details, or intentionally corrupt their machine, or duplicate their content
and email it to the chattering masses. But that is where it stops.

The idea that a registration system should (or even could) be devised that
forces each browser to be pre-approved before accessing SL would
e3ffectively halt OS development and defeat the a key purpose of OS'ing the
code in the first place. Why?

Firstly, because the development life cycle is to test the thing being
developed under real world load and conditions. Something that can only be
done on the grid - until the server code is OS'd as well.

Secondly, a key advantage of OS is the flux in the development and product
pool: the ability to pursue many similar paths across many teams
concurrently so that innovation occurs and gradually the better, more useful
solutions emerge. The whole point is a lack of stability across the entire
development tree but stability within each branch and trunk. Once
registration and authorization is mandatory the branches cease to stray from
the trunk.

Thirdly, the cost in time and resources for LL to code verify every
candidate browser would defeat the economic benefit of LL outsourcing it in
the first place, and the diversion of resources from server enhancement, and
key feature innovation would increase the risk of a competitor duplicating
and catching up to the SL solution. They would be better scrapping the OS
browser's all together.

Fourthly, it is too late. The key information about how everything works is
already "out of the bag", so any attempt to close it without massively
changing the server interface would be ineffective.

Fifthly, the suggestion made by some on the list that a binary hash code
could be used to verify the integrity of the browser version connecting
(a-la-unix code version verification) ignores the fact that (a) the browser
can report any number it likes to the hash request, and even if that could
be avoided, no one can stop me writing an injection dll and hooking directly
to the winproc, the ports, dynamically replacing procedure calls or wrapping
the OpenGL dll or the win32 dll, or any one of a dozen other ways I can
inject my own library into an otherwise legitimate app - that will continue
to report the hashcode correctly, once it has loaded. Anyone who doubts me
and has a Logitech camera attached to the computer - take a look in the
windows temp folder for a dll called Lvprcinj***.dll - that is the Logitech
injection dll that ensures the camera can always function regardless of what
is running.

I think a registry is a good idea to protect non-programmers who want to
download an alternate viewer in safety. Beyond that - for example as an
enforcement tool - it is a waste of valuable resources. And yes, I am a
content developer who wishes copybot (et al) did not exist, but I would not
for a moment claim the world should be made "safer" by tieing the thumbs of
the browser developers. As someone who essentially uses the LL viewer, I
have no personal position to protect with respect to the OS browsers - but I
100% support what is being done by the OS developers, and am very concerned
that the predominant tone of the comments in the blog thread is dangerously
uninformed, self interested, destructive and simply technically wrong.

Regards

Jonathan Bishop

But that isn't what this is for. It is about the content duopoly and the law suit.

Poetry Year October 21

the elegance of the arc contains more meaning than any human pen may so ordain,
such blind making of all that might be and is, has not bent to our ear to whisper,
the language or the code of its devising, nor to enlighten us by celestial glimmer.
What majesty it makes to our smaller sense, the show that it shows to deign,
and then deny, the multitude within every whirling ghostly quanta in flight.
But solitude has it's rewards, as we reap the shares of harvest imagination,
and all we need is a simple change to scale imponderable mount.
I've discovered of this, a marvelous proof, which I can recount,
as soon as I stop fighting with this word processor's pagination.

Adult Policy Violation of the Day

Here is the complete rules set of Rape Torture Kill, a Mature area:

Welcome at R.T.K (Rape - Torture - Kill) Forced Sex Role Play Sim.

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Please take a moment to read our rules,it may be boring but this will help you to know what is alowed and what is not to avoid misunderstandings.Thank you.
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Be aware that this is an EXTREME Roleplay area so if the words Rape,Torture,Discrimination,Bad language,Stalking,Harassing,Drugs,Crime,Abuse,Death sound of limits for you then please leave.
(Stalking,Harrassing,Bad language and Discrimination is strictly within a consensual roleplay.In any other case
you will be banned at once).


Any other avatar except Human,Dogs,Cats-Neko's and Beasts is prohibited! This includes but is not restricted to Centaurus,Robots,Vampires and underage avatars (Chidavatars) ( If you're 5’3” tall, but have an "adult appearance", you're just short, that's ok).


Free fuck seekers this is a RP area, you can have fun but you are not allowed to disturb other residents,if you see that they're Role Playing !!!DON'T!!! keep IMing Females and ask them the very usual "Wanna fuck?".Respect others and !!!DON'T!!! walk around nude,try to be a part of this city,be dressed and when the time comes you can get nude with 3-4 clicks.Thanks!


Do not interrupt roleplay scenes,if you want to participate then kindly ask them,if you want to watch then please stay at a 20 m. distance.
When you are in this sim forget everything,you will live the role you will choose,you will work on it and you will
make him/her an active resident of this city.

If you get killed here you will be banned for 3 days (you cant get killed and walk around after a minute.)
If you get wounded then you must mark your body ie.wound layers,weelchair etc. and again you must be wounded at least for 3 days(no ban).


No Escorting or sex for money except if you are a slut,then you can ask 250L$/hour but of course you can get fooled and get raped and/or killed.Also you can apply at CUM-INN sluthouse and poledance.Management takes the 20% of the tips.(Dont forget that we are a RP area,all these are to help the Role Play not to earn money,so do not expect to tip you a fortune.For example a 50L$ tip is like a 50$ one,think like that.)


No Griefing,grief is also when you have attached a huge amount of prims on you.Please keep your rendering cost close at 4000.We have many menu driven sex objects so the lag wll make the RP boring till the menu pop up etc.
( Go to Advanced menu ~ if you dont see it then hit CTRL+ALT+D ~ then Rendering/Info Displays/Avatar Rendering Cost/Now look over your head your rendering cost and try to reduce it.Hair and prim clothing creates the most lag.So if you have Damselfy,Sweet hair - hair or Blow-up Skirt detach them 1st.However we dont "ban" those brands we just inform you.To turn the rendering cost text off do the same again.)


Weapons are allowed but only for RP of course.You can have them attached to make the sceene more realistic.(Honestly if i could trust you i could allow the use of them too but out there are assholes who have fun when ruining other people fun.)


If you have a problem with someone use the easy way,dont continue and just leave him/her to be an asshole. Simply mute him/her and call the police in R.T.K Forced Sex Roleplay Group (always IC ~In Character using /me)and make a report of the incident, a clear report not like please ban " X " because he called me bitch. After that he/she will handle the rest.

If you want to Observe the sim then please wear this object (It is an Observer tag over your head it will attach on your right ear and you can be safe from everything,please respect all the residents while you are in the city,you can talk with the ppl who they dont RP though and ask them to learn more about this place. : 􀀂

I leave it to you to decide why LL has done nothing about it, despite repeated reports.