The One Billion Rising event was an inspiration for people all around the world. Here in Second Life, the event was a success – both for those taking part, and for the discussion that followed.
Now we want to build on that – but how? How can we translate the energy and enthusiasm into progress in continuing to work on this issue?
And in Second Life too, people are asking how the campaign can be moved forward.
Yellow Hibiscus at Virtual Ability
We have some ideas – but we want to hear your thoughts too! So come along to one of two open discussion at the Yellow Hibiscus Cabana, Virtual Ability Island FRIDAY March 1st at 1pm SLT
and SATURDAY March 2nd at 4pm SLT
Come and share your thoughts on what should come next.
Discussion in text as much as possible, with optional voicing of Local chat, and voice-to-text transcription for those who need it.
There have been several charges levelled against the One Billion Rising in Second Life. One was that it was invalidated by its refusal to address the issue of violence against men. Or indeed, the issue of all violence everywhere. So often was this repeated that in the end I actually wrote a post about it – which you can read here.
A second charge that was made against the event (in Second Life and in the real world) was that it was in some way invalidated by the fact that it was organised and attended by middle class women. Several commentators made this point – including one who, in addition to stigmatising the protest as “middle class” felt the need to stress that they had working class parents.
Middle class women in Mayfair?
Here I want to stress my perspective as a Brit so there shouldn’t be mis-interpretation. For me, “middle class” is a term that refers to white collar, professional workers. It covers a wide range of trades and professions – ranging from company directors to shopkeepers, from university professors to office workers at management level. It’s the widest class in the UK – the upper classes are a smaller part of the system, generally being seen as people who have inherited land and/or titles. A company director, no matter how wealthy, would not be seen as part of this class – although he or she could marry into it. The situation might be different in the US.
In the UK, the working class would be seen as people who work primarily in junior positions, manually (or jobs where manual labour is a core component). It would also largely include the non-working population who are claiming state benefits – although some of those might generally be seen as unemployed middle class. Again, this might be different in the US.
The middle class is the largest class in the UK at present. In previous times, the working class has been larger proportionately; one of Margaret Thatcher’s ambitions was to ensure that as many people as possible should identify themselves as middle class, and therefore aimed at raising living standards and matching aspirations, with the intention that the new middle classes, their aspirations to – for example – own their own home, should then vote for her party, the Conservative Party. For about a decade, this strategy was highly successful.
Ironically, despite the fact that so many people aspire to join the middle class or would classify themselves as middle class, the name itself is frequently denigrated or used pejoratively – as it has been in discussions of One Billion Rising.
And I believe this is wrong in this context – for four reasons.
1) This event wasn’t just for middle class Westerners
Of the many, many exciting aspects of this event, one of the most exciting was its global nature. The Guardian newspaper live-blogged it, and reported what happened in the UK, the Democratic Republic of Congo, across the US, in Egypt, Ethiopia, Australia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, India, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, Germany, Albania, the Netherlands, Somalia, Israel, Hong Kong, Nepal, Iceland, Turkey, the Maldives, Italy, Poland, Indonesia and … oh yes, they featured an event in Second Life too.
This was not just middle class women – although middle class women were involved. In Albania, for example, one arena featured a centre for Roma women – one of the most disadvantaged communities in Europe. In some countries, where dancing is seen as shocking, women marched or watched films, or talked. In some countries where dancing is frowned upon, women danced in their own spaces – Virtual Evangelical referred to having seen it on a Saudi Arabian blog. In Bangladesh, at least 1,000 acid attack survivors were planning to take part in rallies across the country.
It goes without saying that there are middle and even upper class women taking part in all these events. But they are reaching wider. Women of all classes are joining in, from the Queen of Bhutan to Indian street vendors.
Someone made the point on a blog that it would probably be more useful if women spent a week reading the newspapers than dancing. But that presupposes a free press. It presupposes that women have access to newspapers, and the means to purchase them and that – once they do have them – they know how to read. The idea of dancing was chosen, in part, because it is a simple, low cost activity that is easily understood.
2) Violence against women affects middle class women too
This really should go without saying, but the abuse that women face crosses class boundaries. Middle class women are beaten up and raped too.
3) You shouldn’t limit protests to the people affected
This is actually a more general point – because, as I said above, middle class women ARE affected by the issue. But even if they weren’t, even if no single middle class woman was sexually or physically abused, I believe passionately that it would still be right for middle class women to protest in support of their sisters – just as we welcomed men into One Billion Rising.
Because, if you impose that limitation, you are saying that unless you have experience female genital mutilation, you can’t protest on behalf of your sisters. You are saying that unless you have been through the hell of a forced marriage, or an acid attack, you have no right to stand up and say, “This is wrong. This must stop.”
And if you start to slice and dice in that way, you are left with one terrified girl cowering in the corner of a room … because her experience is unique and, if you have not been through it, you have no right to protest about it.
And that is so very clearly wrong.
Middle class women dancing in the tropics?
4) The middle class – and middle class women particularly – are routinely stigmatised in a attempt to silence them And other women should not be a part of doing this.
It is an age-old problem that where we should be uniting, women attack other women. They negate what women are doing. They belittle it. This happens for a variety of reasons, many more complex than the one that is usually cited – that these women want to curry favour with men. I think we do see that, even in an internet age (the appalling attacks on Kathy Sierra involved other women, for example).
But to assume that is the case in every instance is wrong. There’s a space for valid criticism and a space for valid critiquing, and that is important – indeed, essential.
But the use of stigmatising terms does not foster debate. It promotes the skewed disparity in language that consistently sees words that reference women acquiring a lower value than words that describe men.
Don’t believe me? Run these pairs through your head and remember, once they were completely matched as a term for a male – a term for a female:
Sir – Madam
Master – Mistress
King – Queen
Bachelor – Spinster
Courtier – Courtesan
In every case, the female pair of the word has either become less of an honorific than the male term, or has acquired a secondary meaning that can be used pejoratively.
In the same way, “middle class” has become a pejorative term, occupying the space once held by “do-gooder”. It implies people who, through economic stability, are out of touch with the “real world”. It suggests that these people are patronising and (frequently) domineering, attempting to impose their own world view on others.
And yet …
If one looks at social history, it has frequently been middle class women who have brought about great social change in the world. In times when working class women had little leisure time to give to things such as protests and social change, it was middle class women who were in the vanguard with the male social reformers – from Hannah Moore to Elizabeth Fry to Florence Nightingale to Josephine Butler to Octavia Hill to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. And that’s just Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the best known women.
There were, of course, far many more nameless middle class women involved in campaigns – sometimes as decorous as the slave sugar boycott. led (in Sheffield) by Mary Anne Rawson – but rapidly spreading across the country. Arguably the first political boycott of its time, the refusal of British consumers to be slave-produced sugar played a significant role in the ending of the slave trade in 1833.
Sometimes the campaigns were rather more dangerous. Josephine Butler had to escape through the window of a hall where she was speaking to avoid an angry mob on at least one occasion. And one thinks too of the bravery of those women who campaigned for Prohibition. Nowadays we might find their campaign wrong-headed, but there’s no doubting the courage of those women who marched into beer halls and fin joints and knelt down and prayed.
The stigmatising of middle class protest has continued into the twentieth century too – it was one of the charges levelled at the women of Greenham Common and their protests against the nuclear weapons sited there, suggesting that their protest was, in effect, a “fashion statement” and that they would, soon enough clear off to their nice warm houses.
Well, the women have gone now, So too have the missiles.
And conditions in prisons, housing, medicine and nursing have all improved. The slave trade is long gone in the UK, women are not licensed and bullied as prostitutes, and women have had the vote for nearly a hundred years.
Thanks, in part, to the efforts of middle class women.
One that got all the participants excited was the Art installation we chose – which was Gracie Kendal’s Ce n’est pas une peinture on LEA15. The dancers changed into the skins that Gracie provided, and the special hair designed by Fuschia Nightfire – and danced on the water level. It made for a fantastic segment!
Here’s some background information:
GRACIE KENDAL also know as Kristine Schomaker is a new media and performance artist, painter and art historian living and working at the Brewery artist complex in Los Angeles, California. For over 14 years, she has been working with various interdisciplinary art forms including online virtual worlds to explore identity and the hybridization of digital media with the physical world.
Gracie Kendal’s Ce n’est pas une peinture at LEA 15
Whether virtual or physical, the object-based work Kristine creates combines elements of color-based gestural abstraction, animation, pattern and design, neo-Baroque and Populence.Using installation, text, photography, mixed media, video and performance for her ongoing conceptual project My Life as an Avatar, she visualizes a narrative/dialogue with her virtual persona, Gracie Kendal. She documents this experience on her blog.
Gracie Kendal’s Ce n’est pas une peinture at LEA 15
And now … let’s do a jigsaw, taken from the video One Billion Rising in Second Life!
Dancing in Gracie Kendal’s Ce n’est pas une peinture at LEA 15
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Catch up with your Prim Perfect jigsaws (showing images of Second Life and other virtual worlds).
If you’d like to submit a photo of your own to feature as a jigsaw, send it to the Prim Perfect Flickr Group. It should be sized 800w x 600h, or else it will need to be re-sized.
Join us at 2pm SLT today, Monday 21st January, for the first show in our current season of Designing Worlds at our studio in Garden of Dreams as we tackle an important issue that is affecting a growing number of businesses within Second Life – griefing used to run an extortion racket.
The guests with Saffia and Elrik
The griefing issue was tackled in a number of blogs – including Prim Perfect (When will we get to grips with griefing?), and we decided to follow up some of the stories we heard as a result on that.
We’ll be talking to Kiff Clutterbuck and Dina Petty, the owners of Junkyard Blues – whose notecard to group members about the extortion they were facing triggered a widespread concern; to Frolic Mills, of Best of Second Life, who encountered a particularly appalling griefer who attacked (and continues to attack) the fashion industry; to Robert Galland, owner of Galland Homes, Member of the Second Life Bar Association and real life attorney, who gives a legal perspective of what has been happening,; and to Rails Bailey, volunteer mentor and head of security at events like SL9B, who talks about ongoing security problems in Second Life.
Or – if you can’t attend in person – tune in at 2pm SLT on Monday for the live show on http://treet.tv/live – where you can now chat with other audience members and even some of the participants during the show – or catch it later in the week on our shows page on the Treet.tv web site at http://treet.tv/shows/designingworlds – our very own version of the iPlayer!
Our guests on the show: from left to right – Rails Bailey, Robert Galland, Frolic Mills, Dina Petty and Kiff Clutterbuck
Many readers of this column will know about Gos products – Gospel Voom is an awesome creator who focuses on high end, high quality items: shoes, sunglasses, coffee machines. It is – compared with some – a small product range, but so beautifully crafted (and scripted) that whenever a new product is released, there’s always a thunderous stampede to the store.
Gos has been on the Designing Worlds show several times, often talking about copyright and Intellectual Property issues, and he’s one of the people I wave to on Plurk (which I find more relaxed and chattier than Twitter – but I do tend to avoid the OMG -teh DRAMUR there). So I would definitely count his as a Second Life friend – and I was horrified, a few weeks ago, to learn that his beloved cat Archie had been in a terrible accident. Despite being hideously injured, Archie made his way home to Gos, trusting him to take care of him. And that is, of course, what Gos did.
Archie Appeal – before and after the accident
I had a cat who was in a similar accident, where she suffered a shattered jaw and lost the sight of one eye. But she made a full recovery and lived seven very happy years with me after that. So I’ve been sharing that experience with Gos – but I’ve also been aware of the hideous vets’ bills he would be facing.
In the UK, you see, if we are in a horrible road accident, the NHS will take care of us – and go on taking care of us for however long it takes – I’ve cause to know and bless that! But vets’ bills are impressively large – vets invariably drive better cars than doctors.
So friends of Gos, aware of what he was facing, asked if we could help out. And in the end, a small event was set up to race funds for one week, based in the Truth District. Today is the last day – so do pop over if you get the chance; there’s some neat things on sale, with profits going to Archie’s vet bills. So far, it’s raised 800,000 Lindens – it would be nice if we could make it over 1,000,000 by the end of today.
Archie Appeal in the Truth District
Now, as the fundraiser comes to an end, Gos is starting a project to pay it forward – to provide an opportunity for other pet owners in similar situations to have a chance to provide their pets with a similar level of care, through the wonderful PDSA (the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals), a UK-based charity devoted to caring for the sick and injured animals of people in need.
Let Gos explain further himself, as he does in his thank you letter:
Archie and I would like to thank everyone who’s contributed to this fundraiser. All week I have laughed with you, cried with you and shared stories of heart wrenching sadness together with others of unbridled joy. To feel so much empathy and to be the recipient of so much kindness has left me both bewildered, humbled and immensely grateful.
For those of you not aware of what befell my little beastie three weeks ago he was out late gamboling around ‘his’ neighbourhood when he was struck by a speeding car. The impact was so severe it shattered his jaw, fractured the hard palate in his mouth and left him blind in both eyes. But somehow he managed to get himself home to me. I will never forget the sight or the sound of my bloodied and broken moggy crying for help.
When my friends in Second Life heard of what had befallen my Archibald they rallied around and asked what they could do to help. Some asked if they could make a financial contribution to Archie’s vet bills, whilst others offered to make something to sell on his behalf. Out of this upwelling of support Caelan Hancroft brought us all together to form the Archie Appeal at the Truth District sim courtesy of Truth Hawks.
When this event was first proposed I was very uncomfortable with the idea of being the recipient of charity. I’m far happier putting in than taking out. My late father was a Director of a local sports charity so being dressed in a monkey suit and rattling my collection tin in smokey pubs was a large part of my childhood. But this time, right here and right now I was desperate to do all for my ‘boy’ and I can’t thank people enough for giving me the opportunity to do just that.
Archie on the mend!
Since we opened on Saturday the 25th of September we have raised in excess of L$800,000. This money will go a long way in contributing to Archibald’s ongoing treatment. He’s going to need further operations to repair his fractured bones along with extensive dental work as the few teeth he has left are broken and there are a lot exposed roots to come out. He then needs a consultation with an Ophthalmologist so that I can have his eyesight fully assessed and if possible repaired.Â
But now that the week long fundraiser is coming to a close I want to take all this positive energy and goodwill towards Archie and to “pay it forward”. So from Monday 3rd September I am going to be raising money for the PDSA which stands for ‘The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals’ which is a UK based charity devoted to caring for the sick and injured animals of people in need. To avoid any confusion I will be removing all vendors and donation kiosks associated with the Archie Appeal and asking anyone who set one up on their own sim to do likewise. I have asked a very dear friend to help coordinate with the charity so that we can proceed with complete transparency and accountability and to ensure no conflicts of interest.
If you’d like more information or would like to get involved please contact me in-world or via my email: stephen.gospel@gmail.com
Moreover, the legacy of Once There Were Real Names can be crippling, because the implications are still (Still! After all this time!) undigested by the Lab.
The situation relates to losing your password – a common enough problem. If you go to the Second Life website to request a new one, you have to confirm your hint – pretty standard, and so far so good. Then you are asked:
Three last names of your friends are listed below, what first names belong to them?
Well, let’s leave aside people like me with huge friends lists – so if presented with Last Name = Hax, I would be all at sea as to whether I should fill in Emmanuele, Ulyth or Robustus. I’m a power user and (hopefully) less likely to forget my password.
Instead imagine that you are someone who has been around for the last couple of years and has a regular friends list of … fifty? seventy? Including people of your own generation, of course. And you are presented with this:
Second Names for Second Lives! Image designed by Toady Nakamura
Ah, we are back in the Kafkaesque territory of second guessing the Lab. Because, you see, the fiendish cunning of this ploy is not that you need to give the name of any three residents – “Oh, there’s Bob Resident, Lucy Resident and Tom Resident – I’ll put them.” No – you have to identify … the exact three Residents that the Lab have in mind … and put them in the correct order*.
I’m unsure how many goes the Lab allow you. Someone can calculate the mathematical probabilities of getting it right if you have, say, 10 avatars surnamed Resident on your list. I should imagine you’re going to be getting into some serious number crunching in order to select the right three AND arrange them in the right order.
And let’s not even go into the fact that many, many Residents prefer to be known by display names and prefer to be known as, say, Bob Austen, to hide the fact that they originally signed up as WhatTheHellShallIPut.
But when the Lab are looking for ways in which to retain users, perhaps lowering the barrier on retrieving a lost password might be among them.
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*Update – whether you need to list specific Residents in the correct order is currently being debated on the Last Name Jira. If you feel brave enough to experiment, please let me know!
Today’s Prim Perfect jigsaw is a tough one – but it’s also one that comes with an important message.
Second Lie, the mysterious avatar who always has the latest witty answer to the vagaries of Second Life, is bowing out – but with a final act of love – and the offer to donate to Relay for Life of Second Life one penny (US cent) for every “Love” he gets for his post on his Second Life page:
secondlie.scribe
After years of snark, derision, and mockery, SecondLie is ready for his curtain call: the greatest act of love in Second Life. For every “Love” on this mySL entry in April 2012, SecondLie will contribute a penny to the Relay Wizards For Spunky team in Relay For Life, up to 10,000 Loves ($100US) Thank you all for years of laughter and mayhem, get the word out, and bring on the love!
So today’s jigsaw is an attempt to spread the love further. Just go to Second Lie’s my.secondlife.com page, log in (if you aren’t already), then click on ‘love’ in the top left of the comments section of Second Lie’s posting. And you’ll have contributed not one but at least 15 cents to Relay for Life – because fourteen individuals have pledged to match Second Lie’s donations.
And on to the jigsaw:
Fascinated by the light - with thanks to Crap Mariner
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Catch up with your Prim Perfect jigsaws (showing images of Second Life and other virtual worlds).
If you’d like to submit a photo of your own to feature as a jigsaw, send it to the Prim Perfect Flickr Group. It should be sized 800w x 600h, or else it will need to be re-sized.
I think, actually, despite some denizens screaming, “Epic Fail!”, Rodvik’s right and they are wrong.
Epic Fail, as in the case of the Homestead debacle, sees people packing their bags and leaving. Epic Fail sees the owners of closed garden Open Grids rubbing their hands with delight and laying on extra greeters.
This one is a Fail, because a lot of people are unhappy. But they’re not – in large numbers – announcing that this is the tipping point, this is what will make them leave and never cast an officially Linden-sanctioned shadow on the grid again.
A Fail may well be a contributing point, along with a range of other factors, such the huge cost of land in Second Life compared with other venues (and ones where the evolution of preferred Second Life features is growing all the time), and the inevitable shininess of newer forms of technology. Half a homestead sim in Second Life or iPhone contract?
Where are all the Residents?
One thing that I wonder is … how deeply engaged are the new Residents? They’ve been here getting on for eighteen months now and yet …
Where are the top content creators who have the surname Resident? I can name twenty top artists whose work I – and may others on the grid – adore, twenty top musicians whose concerts I’ll cheerfully attend because they are great musicians. But none of them are called Resident. I’ll go further. Where are the cutting edge fashion designers, hair creators, skin makers called Resident? Where are the builders of homes, or furniture, the garden designers, the landscape artists with Resident in their surname? Where are the community leaders who have attracted passionate followings?
Cold Logic - a popular mesh clothing store owned by ColdLogic Resident - but three existing avatars are the real creators
I’m not talking here about people who have established nice businesses. I’m not talking about existing creators who have taken on new avatars to manage businesses or launch new lines. I’m talking about the brand leaders, the stars, the (urgh) SLeberity creators whose names are well known across the grid. The Residents have had eighteen months to reach that level. Why can’t I think of a single one?
(And I would really love the answer to that to be, “Because you’re an uninformed idiot, Saffia – what about X, Y, and Z Residents?” Please feel free to put that in the comments. Please tell me about lots of brilliant Residents who are leading the grid but who I’ve overlooked).
The Bullying that gets noticed – and the Bullying that is ignored
In one of their pronouncements this week, the Lab announced that as part of their new policy that TPVs were no longer allowed to show denizens which viewers other denizens were using – not because it reveals the comparative popularity of, say, Phoenix or Exodus against the default Lab browser – oh no, perish the thought! – but for the highly laudable reason that it has led to bullying, with people feeling pressured to use other browser when, really, they would prefer to stay with the Lab’s one.
I fully applaud anything that is a protection against bullying and griefing (so let’s hope that removing “Resident” from all possible places doesn’t break security tools). But why are the Lab so conscious of the bullying surrounding the third party viewers and so blind to the fact that many Residents have felt that they are treated as second class citizens – and have said so, repeatedly, on the Jira requesting the return of second names, and in numerous other fora? Blind to the fact that older denizens have confessed that they are guilty of treating denizens with the surname “Resident” (or single names) as newbies, not entirely to be trusted in matters of business?
Linden Homes - beautifully built, but where's the community?
The Need for Community
In his message, Rod also talked about the importance of community – and he’s spot on, there – it IS community that keeps people in Second Life. What’s the fun of life as an urchin in a grimy steampunk town if you’re the only one there? What’s the the point in roaming the streets of a magnificent futuristic dystopia if you really are the only inhabitant? How can you show off your latest bling or home or mesh dress or exquisite Queen Anne gateleg table if there is no-one to admire it? Why scale the mountain alone?
Unfortunately, though, the ideas that Rod refers to in his post – “something along the lines of a new mainland like region or making mainland better or rethinking the whole way Linden Homes works” all seem to involve asking denizens to spend money. I can certainly think of ways of making Linden Homes better – and creating communities by having themed districts – so you can live in a bustlling Irish coastal town, or on the French Riveria, or in a Tuscan hilltop town or a community of houseboats in Srinagar or Palafitos from Venezula or Chile, stilt houses from Thailand or Papua New Guinea, or in a futuristic city on Mars, a community of sky pods, or a New York brownstone. Think how the builders would support this – the gusto with which creators would design furniture to fit!
Linden Mountain Homes - they're great places individually, but where's the community?
However … if there is to be a project that asks people to pay, it has to be something that genuinely excites them and involves different sections of the community. And at the moment, the community is … sore. Repeated blows from the Lab have hit it badly: the second names desire has been denied. Mailing list systems have silently failed thanks to a choke imposed without warning by the Lab. A swathe of content that depended on knowing people’s online status affecting delivery, messaging and a host of other vital tools was threatened by the new Third Party Viewer rules (although there has, fortunately, been some listening there). People are confused as to how the TPVs that they love are going to be affected by the new rules – hell, the developers are confused too! We’ve learned senior people have left the Lab, that quarterly statistics will no longer be available. The new Received Items concept looms closer (Inara Prey explains it beautifully here). Oh, and the two month exclusion of AngusGraham Ceawlin from the grid, finally (in part) resolved only after Phoenix developers became involved.
In short, it’s been a pretty terrible ten days or so for eagerly engaged denizens of Second Life.
Inis Caiseal - where real Dublin weather reflects stormy days for Second Life
Is there a way to turn a Fail into a Win?
There is a way forward though, something suggested as a possibility by Rod himself that could begin to turn this around. In the same post he says: “some of the early ideas (like you get to pick a prefixed last name after you are a resident for say six months) can also be chatted about.”
Wouldn’t that solve a lot of the problems that have made denizens so frantic? Admittedly, Residents would have to wait a period of time, and that might cause a certain disruption in any business they had created (by the time I had been inworld six months, I was already working on Issue 3 of Prim Perfect), but I don’t think it would be impossible to overcome. One would probably need to look into how first names could also be tweaked at such a time – so that you could go from being Joe30056 Resident to Joe Snuffleglum or, indeed, Joe Howarth – but this, to me, does seem to be a way of turning Fail into Win.
It does seem to me that it would offer Residents a reason to stick around. It would give them a point in the future when they join the join the Second Life community as fully fledged members – and become part of a rather special family of namesakes. And the name day party as you take on your fully-fledged and personally chosen identity could be really something special.
After several months of the fastest growing and one of most popular Jiras ever seen on Second Life, the campaign for the return of second names in Second Life has had a definitive answer from Linden Lab, in the form of a forum post from Rodvik Linden – Last Names Roundtable. Actually, Roundtable is a slight misnomer, as comments are disabled there – but interested parties are able to continue the discussion on the thread on Rodvik’s Profile thread.
I will say in passing that it does seem a little odd that attention is focused here, rather than on the much more detailed discussion that has been taking place on the Jira. I’m not quite sure why that is … is it that the sheer length of the discussion on the Jira is off-putting? Is is part of a Twitterisation of discourse that means there is a belief that anything worth saying can be said in a short paragraph?
Anyway, to the point.
The essence of Rodvik’s post is that Second Names won’t be returning.
The only concession to those people who argues strenuously for the return of Second Names is that the Lab will be introducing the possibility of having a dash or possibly other special characters that will allow residents to create something that is a closer approximation to the name they want – for example Fred-Williams as opposed to fredwilliams (or by now fredwilliams3006).
However, there doesn’t seem to be any help for people who have signed up with Resident names that they hate but are stick with. It looks as though they just have to create an alt to get the minimally improved names.
Seond Life names get a no!
I think, on the discussion, Allegory Malaprop put it best, asking if it would really have been so hard to give newcomers the choice between a second name, OR coming in as resident. As she points out, the continued existence of portals show that both systems are in fact operating in parallel.
Rather worrying, Rodvik talks of taking steps to remove places where the Resident name appears. I am assuming by this he means not the actual virtual places like Clubs with announcement boards that see user names rather than display names, but the scripts that render these names in the announcement boards. However, as many of these are resident-created objects, I’m not sure whether he’s proposing to remove the objects, break the scripts or … do something else. Can something else be a possibility, scripters?
What makes this all the more sad is that, in his post, Rodvik acknowledges at some length the bonding created by last names, and the shared “frontier” spirit that older residents express. He talks of looking into ways of trying to bring these back … and there will be more discussion on this, he promises.
But the comments in response to his announcement are, at the moment, largely just disappointed and sad – in a few cases bitter. I must admit to feeling rather disappointed myself. And worried – because his current suggestions for bringing back the earlier spirit – new mainland, better mainland, new Linden Homes … these are all predicated on residents spending money. And at the moment, Second Life is not the shiny that people are spending money on. Will a revitalised community spirit reverse this? It could – but in order to do that, the Lab needs to find ways of engaging people without asking them to spend money (that can come later).
And the Lab has just blown off one way that could have given a greater degree of engagement and building community – without costing residents money.
The comments – and there are a lot of comments – are thoughtful, angry and – in some cases – desperately sad; people wo feel like second class citizens. People who find themselves burdened with improbable names that they never intended to be the name they would be known by.
Above all it’s filled with pleas for Second Names to come back.
If you haven’t registered already, now might be a good time to add your voice.
Second Names for Second Lives!
Or maybe not. Because although this is the second most popular issue on the Jira, and although it’s shot to that place in 90 days while the issues in first and third places have been running for nearly four years(good grief), there has been no Linden response to this clear concern at all.
Not a “We’re looking at doing this.” Not a “We understand your concern but we can’t change this because … ” Nothing.
This does not augur well for a system that is meant to be a gold standard of communication between the Lab and residents.
