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.

———

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

…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.

Good news, SL5B registrations are re-opened until the end of May, so on the 31st. If you are an artist, RL or SL photography, or a building artist, hurry up and register now!

http://slbirthday.info/signup

There are only 5 days left to sign up. May 25th is your Last chance to Register.

Second Life will be celebrating its 5th birthday (SL5B) this year. The theme will be “cultures”. The event will be June 23rd - June 30th.

The team will be accepting exhibit applications until May 25th. You can expect to see the regions open for building on or shortly after June 1. The deadline for completing your builds is June 20. Gates open on June 23 and the event runs until June 30th.

Shoshana Epsilon is the art director this year, with help from CodeBastard Redgrave and Stephen Venkman. We are encouraging people to submit their art! 2D and 3D art will be accepted, and the source can be SL or RL. No pornography, no mega prims, all decisions are final.

There will 512 plots handed out with a max of 100 prims each lot. 3D sculptors need to ask for prims needed and we will see

This is a resident-run event. No selling stuff, please. To sign up, go to this page:

http://slbirthday.info/signup
If you are interested in the entire set of “cultures”, here they are:

Academia

In world educators
RL educators
Anthropomorphism

Furries
Neko
Tinies
Art

First Life artists
Second Life artists
Second Life sculptors
Fantasy

Elves
Fairies
General Fantasy
Geographic

Africa
Americas
Asia
Austrailasia
Europe
Gothic

General Gothic
Vampirism
Miscelaneous

Charity
Fashion
Machinima
Religion
Second Childhood
Volunteerism
Music

Club Scene
DJs
General Music
Live Performance
Science Fiction

Cyberpunk
Fandom
General SF
Steam punk
Sexuality

BDSM
General Sexuality
Gorean
Teledildonics

(NOTE: The list is constantly upgraded, please consider this a sample, and feel free to suggest new themes)

Yes, bloggers won round one. Not a huge victory but we got the much needed clarifications. As someone with a lifelong tradition of activism, having gone on several strikes (especially student ones), small victories are big victories when it comes to support our troops. Yes, we may not be happy about the content of those clarifications, but that’s what we asked for, and we got it. We can only congratulate ourselves, we did the impossible: make the Lindens listen to us. Now, forward to the next step in the battle.
As much as I’m a Linden fangirl, I’m also a very active SL socialite. I can see popular support for Linden Lab declining, following a few of their legal decisions in the last year.

I am still not going to comply to that policy until I get a letter from the Lindens. I’m not that much affected by the policy itself. But I still feel much for bloggers that must make their domain name comply.

One of the best roundup about the case IMOHO is by lurvely Cuddlefish Jacek Antonelli, speaking about it here. Many bloggers are rightfully angry about the Linden’s vague threat of banhammer for those who would ultimately not comply. As Jacek stated tho, they cannot substitute to the law.

I think to add to the ambient climate of anger is that since about 2 months, the grid is down not only everyday, but several times a day. We now have 3 waves of peak concurrency a day instead of 1, and the poor asset servers are suffering much strain.
Lindens, I love you guys. But you seriously need to get your game together, get better legal counseling and maybe stabilize this grid we love so much. You may be calling yourself a gaming company, but as Phil said, you guys are building a country. You are no ordinary service provider, despite what some thinks about it.

We create this world. We populate it. We are no ordinary customers, we are residents. More than that, we are citizens. We support you for making this world possible. But remember who makes you grow, and don’t bite the hands that feeds you. That means, us all.

For the next 3 days I won’t be publishing any blog post, in protest to the lack of clarity of new Linden Lab trademark enforcement policy (that is despite their actual last round of “clarifications”), and their reversal of decision toward their trademark policy in general, after promoting fan art and fair use of their trademarks for years. Enough has already be said on the subject. This strike is symbolic and there to raise awareness about how it would be without the same people that gave Linden Lab free promotion of Second Life through this huge network of fan websites.

I will not be hiding my actual content, but I will hold my breath until at least friday. Until then, write to Linden Lab asking them more clarification about their policies. Maybe if they get a couple thousand emails, their PR department may wake up and realize that this is another resident communication fiasco.

Read up their FAQ here for more info about their trademark policy and contact information.

Until then, love you sweeties, and sayonara!

The opening was a very great success and an absolute delight to me, despite the Lindens having DB issues, overall that was probably the best event I have ever thrown at Code Red. Everyone was delightful and so sweet. This is a party I will always remember. Thanks to everyone that made this event possible. The sim was jam packed full all the time of the event, for the first 4 hours it was very hard to get in, my sim being a Mainland sim, we had 40 avatars in most of the time. The contest went awesome too, apart asset servers not collaborating at the beginning and preventing me from wearing other props, for the remaining time it went okay.

I would love to thank Amanda for playing the insane tunes, you girl rawked! I would like to thank Anna Tretiak again for providing the Photostage system for the contest. I want to thank Tesla so much too for providing an extra 2000L I will give out to a 4th photo contest winner and she also gave a free pair of shooz to every invitee. I would also like to thanks Bettina Tizzy of NPIRL very warmly for featuring me on a very elogious article and for spamming her group.

Also, a very special thank you to Roxette Wise, who blew my mind by giving me a copy of a new lingerie set she made and named after my humble self! That totally blew my mind because not only she’s the first to design an outfit inspired of me and named after me, but it is also of an amazing detail and quality, it is outstanding. I saw that set and it’s an instant favourite, and it is so much me! She made it in 2 colors, Red/white and Red/black and you can get it SLURL here.

Here’s a back picture of the outfit, borrowed from Amanda’s submissions for the contest:

The contest is still accepting submissions to my Flickr fan group until tomorrow night at 9PM. Here is a lovely shot by Elease Graves that submitted this picture for the Boudoir Rouge photo contest:

Another key moment of my night was to have the rare occasion to see and chat with my dear Vint Falken, who was not in a very good mood to start with. But that filled my heart with joy when she told me that she was smiling before going to bed. I’m just so glad I could cheer her up a little, I felt really touched I could be helpful to her, her that is so dear to me. Vint, extra big huggles to you sweetheart. I’m always there if you need me. Much love to you.

That was so sweet, and heartwarming to see you all there, I’m speechless of the turnout, and of the honor you all made me. You people prove to me every time how deeply caring, admirable, and good friends you are. Thanks for supporting me and my work, especially in the worse times. I feel so deeply honored to know and be cared for by people of your quality. I highly appreciate, and humbly bow to your greatness. All of you talented and lovely friends, you mean everything to me. Forever, I shall cherish you all.

Love. Much love.
Codie

One of the most panicking idea about the new Linden Labs guidelines is that thousands of bloggers may now have to remove infringing contents from their blog. But if you own a Wordpress self-hosted blog (maybe even a Wordpress.Com blog), NO NOT PANIC! Ubernyms is a very slick way of mass rewriting your blog without sweat.

Legal things better left to lawyers as far as I’m concerned, this article is NOT about HOW to make your blog compliant to the new policy. IANAL and I have no idea yet of all the legal implications. This article will focus on the technical aspect of installing Ubernyms and not on the legal aspects. For that you will have to read Linden Lab’s policies throughly, personally I don’t even know how it will affect bloggers. LL ain’t very good at communicating important decisions like that anyways, but that is another subject completely.

NOTE: Ubernyms may not be compatible with all Wordpress plugins. I heard it conflicted with other plugins. I CANNOT offer support for any aspect of it, as I do not develop Ubernyms. Consider this a primer to the matter, no more.

STEP 1 : Installing Ubernyms

This is the most tricky part, since the installation can be different on one host or another. So I cannot explain all of it, but will try to give it a shot.

Basically installation consists of:

1. Download Ubernyms for the right version of Wordpress
2. Put that .ZIP file into your /wp-content/plugins directory and unzip it on the server OR unzip the file locally and put the folder and all of it’s content in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory through FTP
3. Activate the plugin in your Plugins section of your Wordpress blog administration panel
4. INSTALL SignpostMarv Ubernym patch that fixes a bug with the HTML characters and UTF-8/accented characters. Go there and download the ubernyms-2.7.php.txt file and rename it to ubernyms.php. Then upload it via FTP in the Ubernyms plugin directory, and overwrite the old one.

STEP 2 : Configuring Ubernyms

Once installed, Ubernyms is delicious cake. And you must eat it.

1. Go into the Plugins section, and click on Ubernyms Configuration
2. Leave the upper configuration as is, it is usually defaulting a decent configuration
3. What is of utter interest for this case is the Replace Text option. Take a free slot under “Add new acronyms” and select Replace Text.
4. Enter a term in the Text field, and the replacement term in Definition

For example, let’s say that you want to replace the acronym “SL” for “SL ™”, you would have to put “SL” in the Text field and “SL ™” in the Description field (you should use the HTML code for the trademark sign in this case). SignpostMarv issued a patch fixing a problem with this, thanks to him for the leet patchage!

This plugin can replace any expression in your entire blog in a second, not only for replacements, you can link to internal or external URLs, replace acronyms by full length expressions, and so on. It’s the blogger’s best friend, you can take my word on that.

Hope this will calm down some lovely people I know that got very stressed up with their blog infringing on Linden Labs trademarks, thinking it would be required to correct every article posted by hand. This plugin removes much of the job. It still needs to be proven if it is really necessary. <3

Theres a lot of rambling going on about the Lindens enforcing their trademarks. I won’t get in the hype before having all the details, but let’s say it’s nearly impossible to enforce now that it’s spread everywhere. I won’t do like my crazy adorable GF Rheta Shan and purge my blog of every mention of the trademarks. Tho, that was insanely funny, I will wait for a Cease & Desist letter to put on my wall before I do that.

To add more humorous flavor to the debate, let me give you a tweaked up version of my favorite song, by Crass. The original is called “Do they owe us a living?” and my version is called “Do they owe us a SL?”. So put the pitchforks down and cheer up for a bit.

Original song here.

Original lyrics here.

DO THEY OWE US A SL?

Fuck the corporate minded, here’s something I want to say,
About the state of SL, the way it treats us today.
Inworld they give you shit, drop you in the pit,
You try, you try, you try to login, but you can’t because they’ve fucked you about.
Then you’re a prime example of how they must not be,
This is just a sample of what they’ve done to you and me.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

Don’t want me anymore, cos I threw it on the floor.
Used to call me sweet thing, I’m nobody’s plaything,
And now that I am different, ‘d love to bust my head,
You’d love to see me logout, ‘d love to see me dead.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

The SL that is owed to me I’m never going to get,
They’ve buggered this brave new world up, up to their necks in dept.
They’d give you a banhammer for something you ain’t done,
They’ll make you an epitomy of everything that’s wrong.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

Don’t take any notice of what the public think,
They’re so hyped up with WoW., they just don’t want to think.
They’ll use you as a target for demands and for advice,
When you don’t want to hear it they’ll say you’re broadly offensive.

Do they owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
Of course they do, of course they do.
Owe us a SL?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.

——————–

Sorry for that lame attempt at humor but I couldn’t resist. It does share a part of truth, toward the fact that LL may be a business, which I have nothing against, we still are investors and citizens of this brave new world. I have a very high level of tolerance usually and I especially feel for the Lindens, as I do practically the same job. But sometimes, the administrative decisions are taken without consideration of the backlash effects on our population. As much as I’m a Linden fangirl, some of those decisions are really hard to backup and swallow. Some of us, even the more moderate of SLitizens, will sometimes need to vent it out a little. And I prefer doing it the smart ass sarcastic way. *smiles*

Here are a few JIRA issues I have been checking out since last week, some of them linked to the latest Release Candidate.

MISC-975 Notable sim script perf decrease (FIX PENDING)

SVC-1760 Complex hollow on megaprims broken (Thanks Lillie Yifu)

VWR-2085 Linux viewer has CTRL-ALT-F1 borked under Linux. Quite useful for machinima. (Thank you Opensource Obscure!)

VWR-4471 “Copy selected” with “Rotate Copy” behaves incorrectly (Thank you cuddlefish!)

VWR-5538 Getting sculpty data from HTML-on-a-prim has odd results (Thank you Seifert Surface!)

VWR-4192 To add more options for hand positions in the animation upload menu. Cuddlefish seemed to say there was limitations but hey it’s worth the check. (Thanks Ana)
I’m still checking SVC-1764 but it’s fixed pending, and of course our beloved MISC-208 is still unassigned. We all know it’s a complex issue but hey, we can dream. *sights*