Reel Expression

I try not to read the feeds very often because every single time I just get annoyed. I look at them to find new shit to buy, but It seems that every day there is a huge drama mess. So and so did this. So and so said this. Why the fuck is the SL industry so bloody catty?

I come from a smallish creative industry (film) where it was beaten into our heads a number of times of the rule “don’t talk shit.” The basis of this is probably one of the most logical ideas I’ve heard in a long time. In the basic form its if you talk shit about people, you are shooting yourself in the foot for future projects. In a small community, everyone knows someone that you know. You say something shitty about 1 person, you’ll probably not get to work with them or their mates again. If I work for a producer who is an absolute moron and I spout off about how badly I think of him. He’ll still continue to get more work even if he uses a fucking dissolve between each cut and ruin the project, him and his mates will not hire me again. And more then likely, it’d be more then just his mates since no one wants the option of being slandered.

Working in SL is a whole nother beast and it seems that many people have thrown out the idea of actually working together on projects. So yeah, there is really is no reason why animators should ever work together, but you don’t see me calling out names. You don’t see Torrid calling me a cunt. You don’t see Dove (LAP) writing out long posts about how any other animators suck.

However, fashion creators are thrown together in fashion shows. I’ve heard stories about some organizers have actually feigned technical difficulties at the exact moment certain competitors took the stage. I’ve read certain “fashion reviewers” (and I use that term loosely) who are content creators themselves and have said some really nasty things about others. Including but not limited to, calling out content theft based purely on rumour and no research at all. I’ve seen blogs that are for stores bitching about specific people. And frankly, I think its fucking stupid.

There is really nothing I can say here that will ever curb this childish poop throwing behaviour. The only thing I will say is that it does you absolutely no good to do such things. For one thing, it does give more exposure to whomever you are calling out, especially those of us who randomly find your blog and may actually like the other persons stuff and attitude better. Then you have the fact that there are many people like me who refuses to ever buy anything from a creator who behaves like this. When I buy something it’s just as much about whether a I like it as is wanting to support the creator who made it.

Is there a point to resellers in SL other than making money off creators work? There has been a lot of buzz about this sort of thing and I’ve recieved an annoyingly high amount IMs from these people. I’m not talking about the people stealing but the “legit” kinds. Where they want to buy (at a discount) in bulk then resell at a mark up.

In RL the point of a reseller is so people who can not get to your area can buy the items you make. They buy in bulk, with a discount, then mark up the items. With that markup they cover the costs of advertising, property, and running the store. RL stores cost a lot more money and time to run then those in SL. They have to hire all sorts of people like managers, cashiers, sales reps, security, customer service, ect depending on how large of a store it is. Running a shop in SL is quite simple. Get some land, build a store, place out your items, possibly hire some customer service people, and then advertise. It is nothing near the commintment of time and resources it takes to run a RL store.

For instance, you make a film. You look for a distributer who gets a cut of the profit. Then they pay for the prints to be made and advertising, sell the prints at a mark up to cinemas who then advertise a bit more and mark up the tickets + sell overly priced snacks and drinks. Then the distrubuters make DvDs and sell them at a mark up to rental stores and shops. The stores then mark it up even further. While there are people making a lot more money off the constant mark ups then I’d personally like, at least it makes sense. In SL it just doesn’t.

In a place where the proximity of location doesn’t matter what’s really the point? When things are working correctly, if I want new hair I just pop over to ETD. There is no need to worry that Elika’s sim and my sim are technically far apart on the grid map.

The problem is and always has been, is that the advertising in SL is shit and more importantly finding anything in SL that is what you are looking for is probably one of the most frustrating experiences ever. Too many stores, too many people making crap, too much to choose from without much direction of where to go. How the bloody hell is resellers helping that?

Logic says that if you have 2 locations, you have 2x the chance for people to find you, but my experience counters it. In my almost 4 years of SL the only additional shop that has done any amount of good is the animation warehouse. Because that place makes bloody sense and works. Laggy for sure but has the largest selection of animators in SL.

But why would Joe Reseller’s location be of any more use than your permanant main store? Advertising in SL is still 90% via word of mouth or blog because of the crap shoot that is the quality of items.

Maybe I’m just jaded and lucky enough to have been noticed by enough people, but this make just no sense. Anyone have an opinion?

As many of you know I’ve been mostly out of SL for over a month now due to a holiday in Rome and illness. While some IMs I did recieve, many I did not. Also while I was in Rome I was getting IMs to email which have mostly disappeared from my webmail account. You’d think using a PSP for checking mail wouldn’t mess things up, but I’m not really sure what happened. To make it even worse, my customer service rep - Sara Primrose - had all of her notecards eaten by SL. If you need help and you haven’t heard back please send me a notecard or another IM.

I will be leaving for the States (again) on Wed but I’ll have more access to SL then the last trips. Except for a scattered couple of days I should be able to log in once a day to answer IMs.

My deepest appologies for any frustration this has caused.

Tomorrow I will be closing down the sim for repricing and then I’ll put up some new stuff before I go. I’ll post here again when that’s finished.

Cheers
Luth

Yesterday I was having a chat with Sara - my super nice customer service person - who told me that Zach Wolfe of Outrider Animations had contacted her. Comes to find out that someone is using our names to sell his animation business in a box.

BUSINESS IN A BOX ANIMATION

500+ ANIMATIONS.

gestures, dances, animation overriders,dance animations, poses, dance machines, - Animations and Poses
Dances & Synced Couples Dances
Animations & Dances for tinies
Couples Walks, Animations & Attachments
Resell, Reseller, Full Perms, Business in the Box, Permissions, Permission, Yor own Business, Transfer, Start, Wholesale, full permissions HUDDLES, ZHAO, Outrider, Abranimations, Reel Movement, Syncamation, Motion Merchant, Rickymations, Hammer, gestures
urnitures,sleep,lesbian,les,fuck,sexbed,gentec,sexgen,sexbed,menu,animated,MLP,multilove pose,multilovepose,Xcite,Xcite!,x cite,poses, ,menu driven, sex beds, sex bed, heart shaped bed w/ menu Valentines sex bed, heart shaped sex bed, Sex Rugs, Sex Hot Tubs fine furniture,fine art granite marble fireplaces rugs, ,cuddle, rugs, leather sofas ,sofa, rug ,CG Design, sex rug, fuck ,animation, furniture, dragon beds,

When I read all that mess of a classified, I ported over there to see if some of my work from any number of permissions bugged poses fell into the wrong hands. Saddly, he’s selling a box within a box so I can’t look inside to see. The entire set is L$2k which I normally wouldn’t have a problem paying but I don’t want to give this jackass any money.

Even if he isn’t selling my poses, it’s still a trademark violation. It’s implying that my work is in that box. LL does nothing about those sorts of things. I’ve worked my ass off for the past 3 years for name recongnition, mainly due to the high quality of work, and this moron is trying to make money off that work.

Another problem I have with it is associating my name with all those sex keywords. I’m not a moron, I’ve always known that I’d make a lot more money making sex animations, but that just doesn’t interest me. I’m no prude nor am I against sex in SL, I just wanted to make something artistic and origional. Itegrity may be part of it, but spending hours animating avies fucking just doesn’t sound like fun. The problem is that I don’t want to be associated with sex animations. Just like some chic fashion designer wouldn’t want to be associated with stripper clothes. It’s partially an image thing and it’s partially that I’m bloody sick of the at least 1 IM a day asking for sex animations. Times that by 3 years and its atleast 1,095 IMs asking for sex animations. I don’t make them. I don’t want some random classified associating me with them.

The last issue is reselling. I fucking hate this new reselling trend in SL. Some have even tried to do reselling contracts with me as if I can’t market my own stuff. The only person making money off my hard work in SL, is going to be me. No one new coming into SL will be able to market my products so much better that it would be worth more then my 3 years of an established presense. Not to mention that I’m very very picky on the ads and the buildings my stuff is in. I get countless notecard mall invites spam that very rarely is anything worth looking into. All of them say it’s the “best place” or have the “best content” in SL and it’s always incorrect. If you have to tell people you are the best, then you really aren’t.

While there are legit reselling going on, these business in a box crap has proven time and time again to not be. Most are filled with freebies while others are stollen items. I do not want my name associated with that at all.

Technically, I shouldn’t have to worry about this sort of thing. I should be able to file a report with LL stating that someone is using my name who is not authorized. LL then should make them take it down. Just like how the DMCA reports are supposed to go. But because of LL’s policy of not getting involved, there is nothing we can do about it. Zach told me today that 1 person has filed trademark violations about it.

How it stands now is that we are going to stand together and make a stink about it. 1 voice isn’t going to do much about it, and knowing LL all of us isn’t going to make a difference. But who knows?

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.