I’m so weak. I did it. Yes, I did auction myself, and you know what? I pretty much enjoyed it. It was a really fun event even if I really didn’t expect to have fun.

Why did I do it? Because at some point I stopped feeling the pressure, and could take a decision by myself, on my own will. Because most of the people there are my friends. Because I love them. Because many of my lovers were actually on the auction block, and Mistress Codie wanted to support them.

And you know what? I don’t regret it at all. Well, not yet at least.

So, let’s resume a few interesting highlights:

• Yours truely and Gabby Panacek got on the block together and went for 50K late in the auction to adorable Botgirl Questi. We got 37500 from the sale. Half of 12500 went to Locks of Love. And myself and Gabby donated 10K to Rosie’s cancer charity. We kept the rest and splitted it, for ourselves to decide what to do with it. We are dizzy in anticipation about what Botgirl will want from us, but it may be educative. I feel a bit like a sexy lab rat, but I guess we surely won’t be bored with what she has in store for us.
• We apparently got the highest bid apart lovely blog superstar Zoe Connolly that went for 50K too.
• I won the bid on my very admired queen of bloggers, ultimate neko and fellow FIC honcho, Vint Falken for a little 17K and I must say this is probably the best spent money in my SL. You should know I am worshipping Vint since I know her, over one year and a half now. I always admired her greatly, and now I totally pwn her for a whooping 24h, I could not be more thrilled! Since her requirement was no sex (bummer) I will make her do a couple of work related things for me, including helping me to promote my new sim Rouge and other related tasks.
• I won the bid on lovely TheDiva Rockin coupled with Kat Glimmer. Gawd only knows what I have in store for them! *grins devilishly*
• I won the bid on my own girlfriend Nadine Nozaki for around 5K (Crap Mariner you cheap bastard!)
• Vint Falken actually won the bid on my own submissive lover Rheta Shan… and offered her to me! <3
• Rheta then won the bid on Zoe Connolly… and offered her to me too! XD
• And Zoe Connolly won the bid on… yes, Botgirl Questi! Making it the most interesting Domme/Sub autority chain in history!
• I lost the bid on Veyron (it went up to more than 30K) but I cut a deal with Jene that I could borrow Vey for a couple of hours, which honestly delights me.

In conclusion, I can only retain the positive aspects. It was ages I didn’t spend quality time with either Rheta, Zoe, Nadine and Vint. Yes, It will eat up dozens of hours of my time, but you know what? I never have enough for my real good friends. Maybe this will help me set my priorities straight and spend some time with the people I truely love and admire.

Thanks to everyone for morally supporting me, commenting on Plurk and my last blog post, and all of those who IMed me inworld, you put a big bright smile on my face. Thanks to Alidar, Jessyka, Gabby, Marx and everyone that were there with me at the auction, seriously, I wouldn’t have had the guts if you weren’t there for me.

And what about me and Gabby’s hard time with our new Mistress Botgirl? Stay tuned for more.

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.

The inworld weekly event is an official event hosted by Second Life Wikia administrator CodeBastard Redgrave, in which Second Life Wikia improvements and current matters are discussed. It is an open event, which anyone could attend.

On 25/05/08 at 9:00AM SLT I will host the first SL History Wikia meetup at Code Red Lounge in Strata.

SLURL Code Red Lounge

Please come and chat with us!

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.

This is a really interesting concept. Simple, clean, efficient way to read all your favorite news in a single mouseover. Alltop aggregates the last 5 entries of all interesting blogs/news outlets for a single subject. In the case that is of interest to me it’s called http://virtual.alltop.com.

A few things makes it different. It comes with all interesting feeds, mostly selected by AllTop.Com staff themselves. Then you can remove the feeds that are no interest to you. With what remains, a simple mouseover lets you overview the news quite nicely. Click it and you get the news directly from the blogger’s mouth.
Thanks to Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist of AllTop.Com, and avid Twiteroo, my feed is now on this website. It now replaced my default page on my SL dedicated machine.

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.

My sweet friend Ana Lutetia was working a lot on her new blog lately, so she finally got her own domain name and started the real deal. Congrats to you, Ana.

I would like to add that Ana worked on an insanely good weblinks and SLURL lists pointing to a huge amount of very useful resources. Be sure to scour it and enjoy.

Secondlife URL List: http://analutetia.com/links/

Secondlife SLURL List: http://analutetia.com/slurl-in-world-stores-locations/

I’m very glad and honored that I was invited to participate to Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon. One of most very interesting person I met recently in SecondLife, Sophrosyne Stenvaag, is the immersionist behind the Extropia Sim, which I visited lately. She released this communique which I’m copying here.
Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon: Art, Machinima & Immersion in SL

Come rock the house with the Red Queen!

I’m very glad to have the occasion to present my work at Extropia Core, this is going to be one awesome experience. Thank you Soph!

I am so honored that you guys chose me as the Avastar of the Year 2007. I was already honored of sitting in that list with some of the most extraordinary newcomers, including people I admire greatly including RightAsRain Rimbeault, Ana Lutetia and Nicholaz Beresford among others. I’m still a bit under the shock that you guys chose me.

Now I’m getting more feedbacks about how that could happen because honestly I couldn’t believe it. Many people sent me emails and letters to tell me they encouraged my candidacy for that title through their mailing-lists, forums, groups, blogs, even Flickr threads. You people just proven me you can be sweet to the core. That just flatters me to an unimaginable level that I could influence your Second Life, be it just a tiny little bit. For me it’s a world of difference. It means that sometime, somewhere, I have tried my best to be good to people around, that all my efforts to contribute to the community in a positive way have been acknowledge. And acknowledged by you people.

I want to thank each and everyone of you. If I could do it personally, I would. I want to thanks the Avastar for nominating me with all those marvelous people. I want to thanks everyone that voted on that poll and that supported me through that stressful but enlightening process. I want to thank all the candidates for being such good sports. I want to congratulate Ana Lutetia as a Second winner and RightAsRain Rimbeault as the Third winner.

This has been my honor and pleasure to serving this amazing community in my first year. I will try to make my second year even better. I love you all to bits.

Sincerely,

Codie

(Myself and 2nd winner Ana Lutetia. Credits: All pictures by Ana Lutetia. Thank you for your permission to use them.)

Before vacations I got some news about the Avastar making a poll about which newbie did the biggest impact on SL in 2007. Turns out this poll is going online today.

Well of course, when I see names like Nicholaz Beresford and Ana Lutetia, i’m just honored to be cited beside them.

Anyways, here’s the link: Class of 2007