Reel Expression

Recently I’ve been having a lot of issues with permission bugs. As you know, all my poses are supposed to be set as mod/copy/no tran. A couple of days ago I recieved an IM saying that one of my vendors was sending a pose that was no mod/copy/tran. I first checked the item in my inventory to find it had the correct permissions. Then I checked the pack box that was correct. Then I checked the vendor and sure enough, it was set wrong. How in the hell could that be? Before I set out a single thing, I tripple check the permissions then relog to check again. I then set up the packs and again check the permissions. Finally, I throw them into the vendors.

Another problem I’ve had recently is reverting to the default permissions of no mod/no copy/tran when putting into any object or reloging. That’s the reason why I check them so often. Every single time I release something, the permission always change at one stage.

This is fucking absurd. We are supposed to have IP rights on all of the content that we work so hard to create. LL have a DMCA policy, but I have yet to hear anything actually happen with it. I’ve seen in the past that it doesn’t cover freebies that people resell. It also doesn’t cover the items that became freebies due to the permission bug a couple of years ago. According to LL, the only recourse we have is to file the complicated DMCA report, wait for them to check up on it, and hope they get the theives to stop. And yet they don’t do anything about it when the copy and transfer boxes are checked whether that was intentional, from a bug, an exploit, or even lag.

Lucky for me that I have yet to see or hear about someone reselling my work. Well that is execept for the people who have been copying my poses, but those are lower quality replicas. But that’s really not the same.

I’m not sure if you heard or not, but Stroker filed a lawsuit this week. From what I’ve gathered, someone got their hands on a full perm sexgen bed and is extremly undercutting Stroker with his own product, by L$8,000. The articles I’ve read are unclear if its a replica or stollen work but Stroker confirmed on the bile of the SC forums that it’s a full perm copy recieved by an exploit or permission bug. He also says that he submitted two DMCA reports but “Linden Lab could not substantiate that these articles were being sold inworld.” This will be an interesting thing to watch.

I found someone had already submitted this to the Jira here. Please go and vote.

With all the issues of Sl for the past 24 hours, many of us have had the time to reflect on all that is wrong. Generally whenever SL gets this bad, you end up with a large cat fight between LL fanbois and those of us who are past fed up. Since building and uploading today is out of the question, I trolled the forums and saw a lot of people talking about just waiting for something better to come along. In all honesty, that’s what I (and I think many others) have been doing for years.

In the forums today Pie Psaltery wrote:

Thing is, what do you want from an alternate platform? Because there really are a lot of options out there for most of what SL does, minus the customizable content.

Personally I think what every one really wants *IS* SL, just with a molecule of customer support and perhaps an ounce of stablity.

I think he answered his own question within the first sentance. The only reason why there hasn’t yet been a mass exodus from the pile of crap SL has become, is that there isn’t a single other place for content creation without extreme limitation. Therefore there isn’t actually a true alternate platform - yet. As it stands now, the new trend is “developer programs” that each new platform has varring degrees of difficulty to get into. The only thing that is remotly close is There but they have extreme limitations on what you can make, an approval system, and a wonky exchange. Those other platforms will get the users who have no desire to make anything and just want to play with shiny bland things that “professional” developers have made. Personally, if that’s all I wanted to do I’d just only play shiny MMOs and go back to just film editing. The only reason why SL as a platform has had any type of sucess over premade worlds IS the content creation. People want to express themselves and you can’t do that with only someone else’s objects. Don’t agree? Why then does myspace allow for custimization? It’d look a lot better if people could only use “professional” templates, but I doubt it’d be as popluar. Same goes for blogs and websites.

While I agree with the second line, many of us have lost hope. Instead of better customer support, they cut off lines of communication. Instead of better stability, they continue to fix 1 thing while breaking 2 unrelated working things. And lets really be honest with ourselves, things work a lot worse now then they did before. Until late last year, I’d never had a single person not recieve what they purchased. I never had an upload fail, espeically at 6am SLT. I never had textures snap back to where I have to almost always change them 10+ times on a new and empty sim. I used to be able to close group spam IMs. I’m not saying everything worked perfectly fine back then, we did have a lot of issues, but now there are more days I can’t work then I can. Programs are supposed to get better, not worse if they want to actually have paying customers. The fact is until something better comes along, LL can do whatever the fuck they want to and there is absolutly nothing we can do about it. That has always been the problem with monopolies.

Because no one actually reads the forums anymore, I’m going to paste what I wrote here. Maybe the 1509 of you who visted my little blog last month will find it mildly interesting. Who knows.

What do I want from an alternate platform?
- Unlimited content ceration. Not the developer programs that these newer platforms are doing. Yes SL has a lot of crap, but there is a lot of good stuff made by people who started out by making crap. Making content should not be limited to people who start out already knowing how to create. If you do, all you have is a squeaky clean world, where the residents have no stake, and little to no innovation. If SL closed content creation to just the developers group everything would look like the bland corporation isles. I’d rather wade through crap to find a dancing cow that makes me laugh then to log into a bland world.

- Ability to create animations. Well… that’s what I make and I have yet to see another platform offer this at all. I’m also pretty sure that LL has cornered the market on scripting. Where is the fun of making cool stuff if you can’t make it do cool things?

- Currency exchange.

- Stability. Or at the very least a company that understands that stability is more important in the scheme of things then whatever new shiny they feel like working on instead. I pay $195 a month for my isle and haven’t been able to do anything on it for over 24 hours now. That is more then just wrong.

- Updating that doesn’t break the few already working stuff. I’ve been here for 3 years now and LL still hasn’t figured out how to fix 1 thing without breaking 2. Most people give the excuse that it’s new technology and other BS, but the fact of the matter is is that they wrote the code and have been working with it for long enough to understand how it works.

SL is a lot more complicated (and not a game) but the closest I can compare it to is other MMOs. From my experience, during beta and the first part of release is pretty bad but usually within a few months they start working the kinks out and updates stop breaking already working stuff. Actually when this happens, I usually laugh and tell SL update horror stories.

SL has been out for 4 years and by now we shouldn’t still be living through this. Not to mention the fact that many times they wait months to fix what they broke.

- Scalibility. Or even at the very least a company who makes it scalible BEFORE they open the floodgates. I do not understand how the hell they didn’t know all this was going to happen before and during the massive PR rush to get millions of signups. I do not feel sorry for LL at all about the issues happening, as it was their own mistake.

- Customer Service. I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen worse customer service. Every single problem I’ve ever had, I’ve had to fight to get past the wall of “it’s your fault” support. I seriously spent months trying to get support for my laptop that SL wouldn’t read the video card drivers correctly. Every single issue I had was always closed for having an unsupported video card, even though it was supported. I had to sit through months of 40fps for 10min then drop to 1fps for 5min before someone actually believed me through proof of my dxdiag. Finally ended it with “it’s a bug” that still hasn’t been fixed a year later. You’d think that concierge would be better, but they just respond “it’s your fault” quicker. Brand new empty sim and textures keep snapping back? “It’s your connection.”

I want a company that doesn’t put all the fault on the user and will admit mistakes. Every single bad thing that happens LL pushes it off as they aren’t responsible and are actually the victims. With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder they make the same mistakes over and over again.

People who will respect their customer base, espeically those of us who have hung on for years. I’m tired of being talked down to by LL as if we all are a bunch of morons. I’m tired of all this bloody double speak and the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. I’m tired of never answering questions. I’m tired of LL touting content creators in the press then turing around and treating us like insignificant bugs to be ignored. This is not saying bow down to every single grievience, but listen to the customer base and take thoughtfull steps in order to keep us as customers.

I have seen an increasing amount of people over the past 3 years say the same thing: as soon as something better comes along, I will leave. Personally I see that as a partial threat and partial truth. I don’t really believe that most of us want to see SL fail, but just want a program that works more often then not. If LL doesn’t shape up prior to a real competitor coming out, there will be an eventual mass exodus. It will start as people trying out the new platform and most of those will be the disgruntled content creators. Next will be creating content in both platforms until the only presense they have in SL will just be a store they never update.

A few fanbois will stay and uninformed new residents will join, but the damage will be done. Without something better, the few who do leave are rarely missed as someone new is always there waiting to step into the spotlight. There are only a very small amount (Starax for example) who really are irreplaceable. The difference being is that a new platform will be a lot easier for those salavating for greatness to compete at the starting line. While we will see those try to take the place of those who left, if the competition is that much better, they will only be shooting themselves in the foot.

A year or so ago there was a lot of buzz around about competitors. Saddly that never panned out, but I do remember LL’s (Philip actually) smug response of being able to “out update any new company.” I think many will agree that they will take working updates that happen fewer then weekly broken ones. This not even remotly understanding the userbase and the “we can do no wrong” attitude will be the eventual downfall. Sometimes I want a good competitor to come out only to knock LL off their high horse to see the laggy and bugged filled mess they’ve made.

I *really* want to jump on the beta grid to play with them. I mean really. But all I’ve been hearing so far is that everyone keeps crashing. I guess there is an issue whenever someone comes near you with flexi prims. Not to mention with voice everyone is screaming and yelling or something.

It really sucks that the lame devs made an exporter for Maya and the list of soon to be exporters left out Houdini. But.. on the plus side I can always build it in houdini, export to maya, then export to SL. That is until someone finds a better way :) I hate maya.

*grumbles back to making stupid animation overrides*

Interesting thing to have to read when my eyes are swollen and itchy.

From what I’ve read, people generally fall into the following catagories:
1. love the sheep and think they can do no wrong.
2. honestly do find the search a good idea.
3. hate the sheep and everything they do.
4. think the data mining is catagorically bad/ an invasion of privacy.
5. believe the implimentation of the search was bad.
6. unsure
7. haven’t heard about it yet.

As always since the world is full of greys, of course people can and do fall into multiple catagories.

My opinions:
1. Opt-in vs Opt-out
The sheep decided on opt-out. Big mistake in my opinion. See, not everyone uses SL to sell things. Actually according to LL, a higher percentage of people don’t. People use it in many different ways.

The spin they are giving this decision is that a search with everything would be better then a search with only 1/2 the things. Ok, the IW search places has probably every store in SL yet that is opt-in. If this search is the next best thing since toast, the sheep would have people lining up to be scanned. From where I’m sitting it just looks cheeky to scan first, inform later. Just like email spam opt-out.

At the very least they should have made an annoucement stating what they plan to do and let us opt-out before the first scan. Now it’s become a PR nightmare which may (hopefully) hurt them.

2. Myth: It only searches content set for sale.
Incorrect. According to the site, if you “opt-in” it will list every single object on your parcel. Now, does the bot scan everything on each parcel or just those who do “opt-in”? I’m going to bet you that it scans everything - sends to a sheep database somewhere - then posted depending on permissions.

3. What other data are they mining?
From what I’ve read, this bot was made from a joint effort between libsl (copybot creators) and the sheep. Neither of which do I feel comfortable with using a program to gather information from my land. On one hand you have a group of people who openly attacked content creators for our “greed.” Then started the copybot hysteria by talking with us as a group saying none of our content/IP is “safe,” releasing a product to prove it, only to find out later that it really didn’t. On the other you have a group of people whoring SL and its residents out to corporate interests for $ and whose egos have grown so big they probably do believe that they can’t be thrown off their high horse.

For all I know, they could have good intentions. But from past experience, anyone who has to tell me something that many times, it probably isn’t true. They may not be publishing all data and who knows what they would do with it, but knowing they have it doesn’t settle right with me.

So libsl has something against content creators and our “greed” called IP. Could they have sneaked in something that grabs all the paramaters of the prims? Ok, yeah bit of a stretch I know.

4. You can ban “grid shepherd” to not be scanned.
Odd thoughts on that. When it was first announced, I jumped on and did a search for poses. My name, oddly, didn’t come up. Anything that would help my business would attribute me to poses right? Ok.. so I did a search for my name. It came up with Lalique: *under construction* then about 1/2 of the objects I have for sale. So the tags are just the lame limited amount we get for the IW parcel description. Now, what worries me is that the *under construction* part of the sim - everyone not in the group is auto banned. Obviously it scanned the banned section enough to get and list the parcel description.

Is it a fluke? If I let them scan the sim, but not the corner my house will be on, does it really know the difference? What about people who don’t own the entire sim? If you ban the bot but your neighbour doesn’t can it still scan you?

I’m almost tempted to rope off a part of Lalique that lets the bot on, put a box for L$1 and test to see if it picks up my store.

5. 2 Different ways to opt-out
Ok.. so if you go to sheep isle, find the hidden box to opt-out your information will not be posted. But your things will still be scanned.

If you ban the bot, you may or may not be scanned (see #4).

That is completly unacceptable. This just proves once again the blatent disreguard they have for the rest of us. There is no way to spin this into remotly looking ok. They must, in no uncertain terms, find a way for each person to completly opt-out of this.

6. Incorrect parcel descriptions.
If you do a search for me, some of the items I sell at the animation warehouse shows up on the description:
Disco dance2Live T V and more…, club,hot,music,djs,dancers,jazz,Disco,Counrty,rap, R&B,rock,house,camping,video,bar,xxx,lights,dance (no)

This makes it look like I’m renting at a camping infested adult dance club. I do NOT rent at places like that and it really pisses me off to be listed as such. Yes I know it’s buggy cause it’s a beta, but they should have at the very least gotton permission for the beta because of this type of slander.

7. Incomplete search
This only shows objects for sale. It doesn’t include boxed items or vendors. What about things that have split scripts? Not listed. Thats a lot of items for sale missing from their search.

The tags are then based on the limited space we have for the parcel description, avatar, and the name of the object itself. That’s all well and good if the places search is down, you know the avie, or whatever name they gave it. What if I’m looking for clothes of a certain look? Say female vintage clothes. Is the fault now on the creator because they don’t put that in the description field or would a search with a human tagging system work better?

Then the search brings up a long list of objects. I’m sorry but how is that going to help me? With the IW classifieds and places I at least get see the image they are trying to project. Its a fact that if the ad sucks, the product sucks. I have purchased many different things in the almost 3 years I’ve been in SL and never once have I found something good at a place where I thought the ad was absolute shit. SL is great that anyone can make content, I’m sorry to say it but not everyone has the eye, talent or skill. I’m not saying they should be left out, but the consumer needs the ability to decifer for themselves.

8. Myth: It’s just like google.
Incorrect. With google I can make the robots.txt file disallow bots/spiders to search the images folder. With websites I can put different parts of the site in different folders where it still looks like it’s on the same page. I can’t do that with different parts of my build. It doesn’t seem likely that I can allow the sheep to post my objects for sale while not grabbing the build info or anything in my studio.

9. Myth: Public domain
Yes and no. Eventhough we have no real sense of privacy, people do some very private things in SL. I do consider my studio a private space. I expect people to either stay away out of decency or leave after an explination. Odd thing is is that I have only had to ban 1 person from it in almost 3 years of SL. Believe it or not, people are for the most part decent.

The thing is is that groups (companies) as an entity in general are not. It is not surpizing that the idea of privacy probably didn’t even dawn on them in their rush of “furthering (corporate) SL.” The sheep have proven time and again that they can not see us as individual human beings. It is how they sleep at night. Just like the traders at Enron overlooked the devistation of the rolling black outs and skyrocketing electric bills. It’s the group think of “it doesn’t touch me so it’s ok.”

While the information posted is downloaded to everyone’s client when they tp to the location, not all of it is easily accessible. While you can cross ban lines, doing so is against the ToS.

10. Using a backdoor to gather information.
This bot, copybot, and landbots use a back door to gather information in SL. It’s the same as using GLintercept to steal textures. Its gathering information in a way not intended by the program itself. Doing this is shady no matter which way you spin it.

11. Lag
They have done sim tests and say that the apparant lag is no worse then when any avatar tps in. But what I’m curious about is the database lag generated. Thats the biggest issue right now and the reason why everything is just well.. broken. There are many times being a content creator is just unbearable when it comes to the database lag. I can’t upload animations or images, rez objects, retexture my build, ect. How many times per day do I get an IM saying they didn’t recieve the pose they bought from the vendor?

How can anyone say, with a straight face, that scanning every bloody sim every 24 hours and uploading that data to a server isn’t hitting the database more then a single avatar? Well, for one I sure as hell don’t tp to each sim let alone repeating it once a day.

12. Opens a can of worms
This is only the beginning of what is to come with bots. If LL wants SL to be web 2.0 or what have you, there needs to be a general robots.txt file that can ban every single bot from our server space. This not only needs to be generally accepted but enforced.

13. Doesn’t bloody work
In the sheep’s overzealous release, they failed to make a search that worked as intended. That is unless the intentions were to even list no mod purchased items with the for sale box checked but greyed out so the owner can’t change it. So lamps in private bedrooms are being listed even though its not actually for sale.

In short:
You can call me a hater, paranoid, moron, whatever you want to. These are my opinions based on various information I’ve gathered from both sides of the issue. Not out of hatred, jealousy, or whatever some people come up with to discount opinions.

I don’t actually think that the sheep are out to steal anything I’ve created. But I do not for a second believe they are as altruistic as it’s being spun. They are as a group, in my opinon, corporate whores - who pedals SL and it’s residents to corporate interests. As individuals there are some I like, some I don’t, and a few I hold high respect for. But the entire situation of corporate interest in SL makes me feel exploited for all the work we have done to build “our world, our imagination.” Then the shame I feel that the ones who do it the most are the early innovators.

The plain and simple facts are that I do not know the extent of the information they are mining and everything they are using it for. The opt-out decision and the fact that you will still be scanned even if you do opt-out. I believe it do be a blatent disreguard for my privacy, and as such I have estate banned grid shepard from the Lalique and Cappiello.

As with any controversial subject in SL there are the fanbois, haters, bandwagoners, and the rest of us inbetween. The serious problem that stems from this is the severe disreguarding opinions because of the all too common “for us or against us” crap. As always, it’s easier to find a new reason to blame people for disagreeing with you than it is to find out what they actually disagree with in the first place. This type of mob mentality has just plainly gotton old. When will these people leave high school?

As an example: Lordfly stated in his blog:

The people complaining about privacy and whatnot are missing the mark. Either they’re reselling freebies or they don’t grasp basic marketing principles….In short: Search good, technophobia bad.

I am against the sheep search. So I obviously don’t grasp basic marketing principles, sell freebies, and/or am technophobic. Real smart there. Wouldn’t a person who understands basic marketing principles want a search that will show their objects in a way that they decide? Or to show all their wares (animation vendors)? Or maybe even to not have to find them listed at a XXX place? Or know that consumers don’t want to dig through thousands of random objects to find ours? Even with sheep search talked about everywhere, my sales at the locations that are listed haven’t increased.

Advancement for the sake of advancement is not always good. Not liking certain “advancements” does not a technophobe make. Humans do have the ability to decifer for themselves on which are good or bad for themselves. Just like you say “just because it’s new doesn’t mean its bad,” I say just cause it’s new doesn’t mean it’s good. Including all land owners (without permission) in the experiments is rather daft especially given the large amount of kinks still needing to be fixed.

It is not a question of do we need a new/better/offline search. Fucking hell we do, everyone knows that. Sorry to burst your bubble but the sheep search isn’t that wonderful new thing.

My dream search:
1. Opt-in
2. The owner decides on the tags. Even with handy checkboxes for the basic tags. Then more indepth tags which can be typed out. IE - typical tags: poses, aos, dances, animations, furniture, vintage. Indepth tags: cuddle poses, cuddle furniture, belly dance, swing dance, deco furniture, ect.
3. Different ways to search. Say I want to find that all the stores that have at least 1 female vintage outfit. So I check those boxes and it searches all the listings that have it. For the indepth tags I can type it into the search box - belly dance - then click the animations box and it’ll list all the different stores that sell belly dancing animations.
4. A way to differenciate between mall and nonmall. I hate doing a places search looking for new hair creators only to find myself in a camping filled mall. Or a search for non XXX bars/clubs would be nice. Then a search for services like landscapers or builders would be nice.
5. People can have multiple listings/locations. For Lalique I can have it listed as my main store with the slur landing you inside, then as a shopping area landinging you in the middle of the square, then as a club landing you inside my eventual speakeasy, then maybe as a park landing you in the park. Now that’s better marketing.
6. The owner can then upload a 512×512 photo ad that will apear as a thumbnail on the listings.
7. You then click on Reel Expression and you get the full size picture ad, a listing of all my tags, all the slurs for the different locations, and even *gasp* a url to my website.
8. A way in which to report bad listings. Such as a hair store landing you in the middle of a casino.

-Luth

First off, I’m biased in the fact that I don’t like corporations. In RL or SL. It’s not because I’m some dirty hippie scared of capitalisim, it has to do with individuality and personal responsibility. Both of those huge parts of humanity seem to get lost when it comes to corporate america.

• The big 10 media companies decide the content in all your music, radio, tv, films, books, and newspapers.
• Enron’s involvement in California’s electricity crisis.
• Wal-Mart as low-wage no benifits employers - average employee makes less than $19,000 a year. They used to lobby against raising the minuim wage until they publically flipped. But still 42 out of the 49 people who voted against the last bill recieved contributions from Wal-Mart.
• Clothing companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, The Gap, Inc. (Banana Republic, Old Navy), J. Crew Group, The Limited, Liz Claiborne, Nordstrom, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sears, Tommy Hilfiger use(d) sweatshops in Saipan and still able to have the “made in the USA tag.”
• Blockbuster (viacom) has the pull and power to demand from the studios “legal” tamed down versions of films.

I don’t think its the fault of capitalisim itself, the problem stems from these untouchable corps having no one to answer to. It starts out as simple greed then stems into doing whatever possible to keep profits high and costs low. The greed itself isn’t what’s wrong as it’s a natural human instict. The issue really is that there are hardly any checks and balances for the evil things they do. One definate thing that needs to change is the role they play in american politics.

So of course the idea of corporations within SL is slightly worring. Luckily for now the impact is rather low and mostly used for marketing.

Imminent Walmartization of SL?
I’ve had a number of conversations with Alle on this one. Oddly, she’s a lot more worried then I am about this possibility. Would a clothing company be able to easily make a dent into the SL fashion industy? Sure why not? They have the money to throw at marketing, professional graphic designers, and builders. But would that dent be so big that everyone else just stops? I doubt it. Look at the history of the SL industry. When I started Pixel Dolls was the top store. Did that stop everyone else from trying? Nope. Many others have grown up since then and some have become quite large. But for every designer that does obtain sucess, it doesn’t mean that the older ones will go out of business.

The fact of the matter is is that it costs very little to create and sell things within SL. So, I think (and hope) that there will always be people dinking around making stuff and then setting it up for sale hoping that other people will like it too.

Another point of that is those big companies would have the marketing power, but isn’t SL like that anyways? With the help of blogs, smaller names are becoming larger names (myself included) where once it was only in who you know. While it may be a touch easier now then it was just last year, it still revolves a lot on who the bloggers know and like. Yes, it does suck, but that’s just how it goes. How will that change? It could really go either way. The larger blogs could report on both corp and individuals or not. But I like to think of it in the ways of indie music. There will always be an idie music scene - people making it, people buying it, and people reporting it. I think that no matter what happens, the same will hold true in SL.

Market Research
One thing that does worry me about something like this is what happens when you add market research to the current designers. Back in Jan, Second Style posted a story about a market research firm selling a survey of 105 residents’ opinion on women’s fashion. Now you’d think everyone would laugh it off as being 1. paid and 2. only 105 people. But one thing it revealed was a lack of business suits (untrue) - a month later most of the new released items were business related.

I hate market research. Why? Because I hate averages. I don’t like “normal.” They try to find normal in a world that is anything but. I really hate when people try to sell something that is the average opinion of a group of “normal” people. The individual opinion is therefore lost.

I like individuality. I like creativity. I like creative expression.

During film school I partisipated in a number of film market tests. You get to see an unfinished film for free and they give you a piece of paper with questions. Things like: which parts made you laugh, which didn’t make any sense, what did you like best, ect. I’d then see the finished movie and not a single one was better after the reedit. Not one.

I really do believe that something is lost when anything you create is catored to the masses instead of being an organic creative object.