I would like to share the saddest IM I think I have ever recieved.

[20:18] Lillie Yifu: good bye

I think it is useless for me to mention how outraged most of the SecondLife community is at the moment, regarding Linden Lab’s latest decision to give us an in-your-face price hike on OpenSpace sims with no grandfathering clause. Neither on what exact incentives are behind this decision but pure greed and profits.

You may know I’m not the kind to call on a lynch mob. I like to try and be rational, analyze the facts coldly, and try to be reasonable. But yes, I am pissed. Because of the resident side of the things. Linden Labs still misses one major main point about their own community of supporters. We are citizens. We are investors. We are customers. We LIVE in there. We love our Second life.

But now, this latest decision seems to be totally crossing the line for many residents and can easily be described as nearly fraudulent, especially regarding the non-grandfathering clause. It will have major impacts on how each of us residents, content creators, and business people will see Linden Labs from now on, as a company that cannot keep it’s word.

And this, my friends, is a bad thing.

I certainly see how it will impact strongly on the educational, business, creative, social and artistic aspects we happened to reach nowadays, thanks to OS sims. They saved us from ugly, ad filled mainland. Allowed small private ownership of a large nice piece of land with coastlines, so we could place our little house and enjoy our lives.

And one of the biggest spit in our faces is the calling on abuse of technical resources. What of a company that oversells it’s resources like doubling prims on OS sims and then complain of overuse because of their own decisions, penalizing the whole community of people that uses those sims correctly? How is it the resident’s problem if LL cannot QoS or regulate sim usage or network/asset resources? How unreliable asset servers were BEFORE Linden Labs sold massive amounts of OS sims? Those are all questions we should ask them.

OS sims are 16 per quad core machine. They bring 4 times more income to LL (i stand corrected, they make about the same amount). Apart sucking more assets from the asset servers, the only impact an overcrowded OS sim has is to press on it’s virtual neighbours. Nothing LL ever bothered with for mainland. So why the sudden interest?

So, no. Little stores with 2 visitors an hour, like Nimil Blackflag/Lucas Gerard’s LuNi and Autumn Hykova’s Pixel Dust are NOT something I would consider abusive considering their tiers. Not much more than having 16 little stores on a crowded mainland sim. This is all pure bullshit IMOHO and it is an attempt to divide our communities by starting a blame game. Divide and conquer, but we won’t be fooled.

We all know the underlying reason for that is simple.

Maximize profits.

Complain on service abuse on a massive scale and hit your customers with a non-grandfathering clause on a borderline affordable monthly tiers, so lots of people drop their OS sims and they get recycled in new products like mainland or their Nautilus thing.

We don’t really need to dig deeper on the problem to find a solution.

Lindens must know we are citizens.

We create here, we foster here, we provide their content, that makes this place enjoyable.

Putting our tiers on jeopardy, since it’s a steep tiers raise, will affect many talented and emerging content makers, scenic creators, photography artists, sailing and resident communities from everywhere. The raise alone is one thing, but it’s the non-grandfathering clause that will hurt all of the actual owners, pushing them to abandon their land to be recycled.

Attacking our spaces is attacking our content. We are now all stuck to move it, merge it into Class 5 sims, lose hours of work relocating and redoing everything. This is just a big lack of respect for their best and most faithful customer base.

It is a blind business decision, not a very strategically intelligent one. Without all the quality and innovative content created by it’s very involved resident base, SL would be a very unattractive place both for residents and for businesses.

Linden Labs has made many bad moves, but attacking it’s most faithful user base may be the last straw.

We already saw a few very alarmed people, selling and quitting, and our economy is not only undermined but sabotaged deliberately, in such times, I would say it is more than time for public outcry.

You already know what to do. Do it. It’s not true the Lindens don’t listen. They must keep enough of us happy to keep their business viable. Vote the MISC-1776 JIRA issue. Write in the Linden Forums how it affects you and your friends businesses and lives. Make some noise. Pass the word.

We must remain the positive and resourceful community we are. Suggest. Protest. Be inventive. Remember Linden employees just follows their management. But they must hear us all at united saying: fuck NO.

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I won’t do a resource list here, but check on VintFalken.Com she does good recap work.

To the risk of sounding melodramatic, I’m confronted for the first time in my superstar life to a situation I would rather have avoided all over. You know, it always sounds easy to be the cool, fun loving sex symbol of the grid, but it comes with the social pressure of everyone expecting you to jump in every bandwagon that passes by, no matter if I want to participate or not.

In this case, we’re talking of putting yours truly through a slave auction, for my pixelated body to be sold to anybody for a whole 24h. Well that last detail is really a bummer for me. I may seem to be online loosing my time and procrastinating, but I already have very limited online time to take care of my lovers, do my art, take care of my sims, among every other social or creative activities I attend to. I may be the only one in SL with no alts to play around with multiple viewer instance, and after all, there’s only one Codie.

Also, it may sound weird coming from me, I know. But I have very little personal interest in doing such thing.

On the pro side, seeing people fighting to bid on myself may be good for my ego as some say I may reach a very high price, and the money would go on charity, which is my only real point of interest.

On the con side, it’s 24h of precious time slipping out of my fingers, it’s something I have no thrill or appeal of doing, it seriously bruises my Domme ego, and already causes some drama because I’m not exactly excited about this type of party fun.

The thing with this type of social pressure is, I’m damned if I do, and I’m damned if I don’t. In all honesty, I would have rather totally dodged it, and just do what I do, go online, have fun, make love to my sweeties, and do constructive stuff. Why not just have party with no pressure or social obligations? Not only I already lost my weekend on it, but I may have to deal with another 24h to distribute it in chunks to whatever who “buys me”.

Popularity is a double edge sword. I’m not there to amuse you. I’m there to do my work and be happy. And I currently am not happy to be put in such situation. Know that if I finally crack under the pressure, it’s not to please myself.

So I’m confronted to a choice I don’t want to take, to the risk of sounding uncool and selfish and dodge the party and the auction all over, or swallow the load and deal with something I have no interest of doing in order to please the crowds. Both of them leaving a very bitter after taste in my mouth…

I’m doing some serious rethinking about my role in the Secondlife community, it may be time I get a few alts and pull Codie back a little, next time I may be better prepared to deal with such cases.

…Codie is way too busy and tired to blog efficiently lately. I like being calm and rational, alert, and well rested while I post something, unless it is a rant. A long, ferocious tirade that ends on no constructive conclusion.

But this is not one of those posts. You around me all knows how crazy hectic it is for me lately. So many things happening in a short time, in both lives. I will spare you the RL crap apart to say im getting help for my lack of sleep and plan to rest more. And my SL is always more and more amazing as it goes, the love, the people, the fire of creativity burning holes into my soul… I am one fuckin lucky betch to have you all in my life, supporting me in such a caring way it leaves me weeping with bliss. I am humbled, honored, and devoid of words to tell how grateful I am to everyone around me. Thank you all, so much.

I’m rushing to finish the Boudoir Rouge series, about 25 left to do, and started scrambling again with the MachinimaCam codebase. We are in the last days of organizing the art exhibits at SL5B, task made maybe a little bit more heavy on my heart with all the surrounding drama. I will refrain of commenting furthermore until this event is done, not by fear or even by ethics, but because it drained me so fucking much I decided to go with the “Let’s do this and get on with it” attitude. Which is not exactly what I expected by volunteering for what is supposedly a resident ran event. Through all of this I managed to setup the Boudoir Rouge kiosk, and the China Red kiosk on the Asian Culture sim. Despite that little sadness in my heart, I will try and focus on the positive, the art, the people, and making sweet new friends.

In much more exciting new, something BIG is coming on my friends, read more in the next post.

I have rezzed in a time of sorrows
Deprecated soul at zero
Errands in quest for bliss
Toxic shock by poisoned kisses

So sick and tired of getting leeched
Harassed by the ill intent
Increasing the daily burden
Until my rage exploded indeed

I just wanted to go away
Just wanted to find myself again
And then I want to find my way
Until I can loose myself again

Lost in the metaverse…

And from vectors I am born again
Clash of cultures so deep it burns
Rebaked from another world
May it all be in vain

Submerged sorrows of sweetness
Clock timer beats binary
Social standards may subgress
Humankind redefined, supersized identity

The more I dig, the more I plunge
Losing my identity on itself
With the rage of despair I grudge
Into remaining myself

Fucking lost in the metaverse…

I never thought it would make me blind
Mesmerized with all the beauty
To meet so many of the same kind
Makes me want to drift to eternity

It is the passion in my eyes
That redefines my reality
Before what’s left of my time flies
I must achieve my destiny

Spray that ugly world with a speck of red dust
Trying to feel human again
Until my other reality fades into loss
I shall rise alive in love again

Faded away in the metaverse…

Yes. Prepare for a long rant. I’m getting really sick with Twitter being screwed up and not improving at upgrades and time goes. Before I go berserk and close my totally useless account, let me state a few things about how BAD Twitter has became in the last weeks. You think SL is hopelessly borked? Well just let me do a little list of Twitter irks and twitches to give you an idea of what borked really means.

I should state tho all of these problems appeared long ago, they are since about 2 weeks absolutely recurring and out of control.

1. Page cannot load, application errors, “Something is technically wrong”, Internal errors 500, blank page, incomplete page load; Yes, you know the kind. You know it because it fucking happens day in, day out. It’s not all to have load balanced web servers, fellas. It’s even better when you develop on application technologies that are PROVEN and TESTED to scale better. I will pass on what technologies Twitter is built on to avoid a flamewar, but let’s say I’m not very impressed.
2. Extremely slow page loading; Frustrating. Very much so. Why? First because you loose messages. And you twitterers knows that nothing can screw a first inspiration like having to write the same inspired tweet again. Secondly, because its just unacceptable from a user point of view. I know those engineers thinks they are pretty smart, but let them learn about the usage curve. If your damn service stops being responsive all the time, people will click and click and click out of sheer frustration, further loading your application servers, until it goes out for hours. Twitter, scale or die!
3. Timeline borkage, people not seeing followed people tweets, scrambled order of the messages; It goes on. I’m not sure how Twitter cache technology works, but it is total fail. Since replies are mostly screwed up, again, people starts using Tweetscan or similar things, furthermore increasing the pressure on those poor database servers. Again, good way for this database to jump in the next tarpit to stop suffering.
4. Failed SMS delivery, truncated SMS, and truncated parts that never gets through; Classic. What makes Twitter anything like useful is the ability to forward DMs or some people’s replies to your SMS phone, making it a mobile broadcast platform. If you ask me, without that feature, Twitter is pretty useless. Or greatly diminished and making it feel like any other micro blogging platform like Jaiku or Pownce. Well, Twitter is really good at failing doing this properly. Very often, SMS don’t get through at all. But most frustrating is getting part 2 of 2 of a message saying: “fuck” and not knowing if the sender meant “I need to fuck” or “You little fuck”. Yeah extreme but classic example. I can’t tell you how frustrating that is, being isolated on the road, and getting half baked messages because Twitter is not behaving again.
5. Failed email follow notifications; This is relatively recent, but very very annoying. Since a few weeks, I don’t receive half of the new follower notifications. Not only this is very annoying, this is dangerous. You cannot know if someone stalks you. How can someone control his list of followers if you don’t even get a notification? And should I mention how ridiculously unmanageable the Twitter follower list is when you have over 20 followers? If you cannot manage the users on your social network, well it’s no longer a social networking platform. It is just a platter of delicious fail, and you must eat it.
6. Twitter API failures; frequent and redundant. I don’t use any API enabled applications, thanks gawd. Most of my friends to, through Twitbin, Twhirl, and so on. Sometimes the API stops being responsive for hours. Again, people starts hammering Twitter’s web interface craving for their replies.

This state of borkage is getting worse and worse every week. Yeah, worse than SL is borked lately. That says a lot. Twitter does not have 1/100th of the complexity SecondLife has. So there’s no comparing to be done.

Seriously, Twitter, get your game together. Twitter is surely one of the coolest web applications I have ever used. When it works. I would be VERY sad seeing it fail as a socialnet platform, since I am probably one of your biggest fangirl and certainly an evangelist, having brought dozens of my friends to try and get hooked to the platform too.

Twitter is simple. Fix it, and now. You guys are surely cool, but you have venture capital and investors. Hire someone that knows about service scalability. Outsource it for all I fucking care about. But if you don’t do it, and soon enough, you will lose momentum and get eaten by people that actually knows what they are dealing with. Now Twitter, it is time to decide if, with your surge of popularity, will emerge into a real mature platform, or if you will stay at the stage of startup infancy.

Because I’m so sick of it, as much as I’m addicted to it, as much as I love and care for the marvelous people that follows me and I follow back, if that keeps up, I will stop loosing my time and I will drop Twitter like a rock.