I have not updated since the Coup d’Réseau.

I also have not been spending much time inworld.  The reasons are personal, and they don’t involve any one person, or group, or any drama.  I’ve been in need of some quiet time, and I’ve been finding it in RL.  I haven’t been able to find that same quiet space in Second Life, and I’m not exactly sure how to resolve the problem.  Alts provide solace – at the cost of self-identity and, more importantly, inventory considerations.

I am pleased to hear Phillip Linden voicing a return to basics, acknowledging that Second Life is not a competitor to Facebook, turning back the rush to a browser-based viewer, and making the grid work for the number of active residents that it has now.  It is nice to feel as though the things that we’ve been screaming about for what seems forever are possibly falling on listening ears.  It has also been refreshing to hear someone at the top admit that things aren’t working, and that mistakes have been made.  Most of all, the candid admission that residents have not been happy with all of the changes that have been forced on them.  Some have said, “Yes, well, they’ve said all of this before and nothing was changed then.”  And this is true, and a reason why my optimism is guarded.  But I do believe that things are genuinely different now – this is a make-or-break time for Second Life and Linden Lab.  Alternatives to SL are popping up all over, and some people have been so disenfranchised under the reign of M that they have been willing to put up with the burps and glitches of the reverse-engineered OpenSimulator systems, simply to regain some of the sense of genuine community that Second Life once promised.

I’m late in responding to this, and I’m not particularly sure that my opinion is all that important … but here it is.

“Huh.”

It’s not often that you will find me actually agreeing with the likes of Prokofy Neva on a subject.  On the subject of “censorship” at SL7B, we do agree – well, at least up to the point where he wanders off into another rambling rant about communism.

SL7B is, at its core, a public-relations event.  We volunteer, of our own choosing and free of charge, to fill several Linden sims with art and creativity – but most of us do not lose sight of the fact that we are participating in a corporate event.  The celebration of our various and diverse communities comes in second at The Lab – hopefully a close second, but second nonetheless.  And everyone who signed up for this corporate event agreed to the terms set by Linden Lab – including the one that stated that this was a PG event on a PG/General sim, and that nudity is not permitted at the event or in any of the exhibits.

The Susa Bubble exhibit was clearly in violation.  The nudity depicted is that of a child avatar, and while I am not accusing Rose Borchovski of sexualizing children in any way, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why Linden Lab had a problem with it.

One word: “Wonderland.”

Slightly longer version: “Something to bring back allegations of ageplay in the press – at an official Linden Lab event – at a time when the residents of the SL community are already jittery in the wake of a 30% staff reduction?  Not just no – but hell no.”

Rose, contrary to your statement, nobody is “disappearing” you for your art.  Your inworld exhibits are not in any danger of being removed – you’re just not allowed to display a naked Susa Bubble at an event where nudity is prohibited.  None of us have any right or entitlement to exhibit at SL7B – it is an invitation.  And with any invitation comes the rules set forth by the host.

You have displayed Susa in clothing before – you could have easily done it again.

I’m sorry, but as an artist, as an adult-content creator in Second Life, and as a Zindra merchant, I must defend Linden Lab’s decision.  If you dance topless at the company picnic, don’t be surprised when you’re escorted off of the property.

As pen-in-hand as I’ve been lately, I didn’t want you to think that I had necessarily fallen into writer’s slump yet again.

The truth is that this past week in RL has been exceptionally chaotic, and has left me little time for anything other than putting out fires and vacuuming up flood waters – figuratively and literally.  This week has exemplified the cliched proverb, “When it rains, it pours.”

My life will be turned mostly upside-down for the next two weeks.  I will write if I have the time and the inspiration.  Mostly, however, I will be packing and unpacking boxes and moving furniture.  Life moves quickly and abruptly, and it takes all of my strength just to catch up – and keep up – with it.

(The text below is my Artist Statement for “MonoKroma” – the exhibit that my partner Ella and I have been collaborating on for SL7B.)

“Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.” – Maya Angelou

Seven years ago, visionaries envisioned a world – a skeleton on which would be sewn the capillaries, vessels, tissues and skin of a new universe.  In this vision, only the tools would be given – those who came would use those tools to shape and mold and create this new universe – a place in which anything was virtually probable, and virtually anything was possible.

Seven years have passed.  In that time, the media came and left.  In that time, the corporations came and left.  In that time, the pundits of the tech world embraced this world, and just as quickly, dismissed it in the pursuit of the next New Shiny – Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Plurk each in turn became the new social-networking darling.

But in those seven years, this world we know as Second Life has been waging a quiet revolution.  A revolution of minds, of souls, and hearts.  A revolution of people who saw what Philip Rosedale saw – a vast, living, breathing interactive canvas – in which art and commerce, politics and religion, fantasy and reality, friendship, sex and …

…  love …

… could paint their vibrant brushstrokes.  And while our world did not win the approval of the masses – something tells me that this is exactly how it was meant to be.

This exhibit is about art, and infatuation, and romance, and love.  Two individual lives that came to this world under very different circumstances and for very different reasons.  A chance encounter, brought about by the presence of a shipping crate on an otherwise empty parcel.  An offer – “Excuse me, is your land for sale?”

An exchange that could have begun and ended with a pleasantry, an offer, a polite refusal, and a “thank you for your time”.

An exchange that could have begun and ended that way, but didn’t.

Instead, I met someone who made me break my cardinal resolution never to partner in Second Life.

And I’m glad that I did.

The black-and-white spaces in our exhibit represent our invididual selves.  Complete in ourselves, lacking no detail, missing only the colour that flooded into our world as we grew into each other and found our lives intersecting and intertwining.

We have our own individual lives and pursuits.  We support each other, without crowding each other.  We are a part of each other’s daily ritual – she is part of my morning, and I am part of her afternoon.

Our lives leapt over the Fourth Wall in 2009, when we met each other in London.  It was a wonderful, memory-making week – as fulfilling as either of us could have hoped for.  And while our physical lives remain on opposite sides of the Atlantic, our virtual lives are infused daily with the artistry and genius and poetry that are “we” – more than we could have dreamed of when we first opened our eyes on this side of reality.

So yes, this exhibit is an indulgence.  And yet, it is a celebration of everyone who has been fortunate enough to find a soul in this world that resonates with their own.  One who compliments, but doesn’t complete.  One who augments, but doesn’t replace.  One who accepts the dark and the light, and embraces them both equally.  One who lives every day as a work of art.

One who brings the colour into our world.

Submitted respectfully,
Marx Dudek

I attended Codie Redgrave’s memorial installation at Rouge last night.  Botgirl said it so perfectly – you could not explain to anyone outside of our unique culture how a screenful of mostly-gray attendees attempting to walk through a molasses-murk of server lag to stand amongst row upon row of identical, digitally-engraved tombstones could tug at anyone’s heartstrings.  It was a moment unique to our culture as SL residents – a real culture, a native culture, and a culture just as vulnerable as any that has been set upon by well-meaning but ignorant Crusaders bent upon bringing Their Ways to bear upon the noble savages to “improve” their lives.

Of course, Second Life is by no means a homogenous culture.  However, there are rites of passage, rituals, and experiences which are common to all of us that are to any other culture – real or virtual.  There are those things that, regardless of our language or our surroundings, we all eventually learn to accept as norms of our shared experience.  Assimilating into Second Life is, admittedly, not easy – and insisting that it can be or should be is, quite simply, an insult to our cultural evolution.  Those who undertake the admittedly sharp learning curve and come out on the other side have completed a rite of passage – an experience common to all of us.  Grasping that Second Life has a genuine micro-economy, and thinking about purchases and sales and earnings in terms of the local L$, rather than mentally translating their value into our local RL currency is another.  Learning that work in SL is, most often, genuine hard work – and that you are about as likely to earn a RL living in Second Life as you are working in a third-world country to pay your bills back home in America, but you should be able to pay your virtual expenses.  Realizing that, no, Second Life is decidedly not an anything goes, clothing-optional environment, despite what a lazy media has been spewing for seven years – but rather one that is generally tolerant of diverse and divergent lifestyles and offers areas in which most of those lifestyles can be experienced, should one choose to do so.  Discovering that you are free to be whatever gender, color or species that you wish to be – and accepting that the right to be a glowing pink raver-leopard does not trump the right of a realistic 1920s-themed-speakeasy club to turn you away at the door.  Distinguishing and respecting the differences between immersionists and augmentationists, and so on.

And understanding that, for whatever reason, the disappearance of a familiar name and face from the grid can and may cause the same feelings of grief that we associate with death.

Of course, this barely scratches the surface.  But it underscores the trepidation that a good many of us feel when we are told that efforts are underway to dumb down our cultural experience, all in the name of population growth.  Second Life is not for everyone, and it’s not even for most people.  And while improving the “first hour experience” is essential, this is achieved most successfully through real person-to-person contact.  Making Second Life iPad-compatible is more likely to be adopted by existing residents than by new ones.  Having someone to meet new residents as they arrive on the orientation sim, determining whether they are new to SL, actually helping them with the basics, answering questions, handing out landmarks and information pertinent to their own interests, and clueing them in on the fact that, yes, they’re going to meet nice people and not-so-nice people, and here are the basic ways in which to respond to problematic residents and griefers.  Identify new people who may have a helping-teaching temperament and groom them for what could easily be an inworld-paid first SL-job as new-resident greeters.  You don’t need to outsource to RL companies, and the results will be so much better when you use someone who is truly excited about our world – not a call-center staffer.

The best ideas are going to come from those of us who live SL every day.  Yes, some are grouchy and will never be satisfied under any circumstances.  But some of us are simply grouchy because we feel our voices aren’t being heard and that our ideas don’t matter.  Existing SL residents could easily be the best advertising the Lab has at its disposal – word-of-mouth has always been the way that most people find our world.  Stop forcing new policies and procedures on us – involve us in them.  This is our world, too – it can’t exist without LL’s server farms and collocation facilities, but it also can’t exist with the wonderful, bright, talented, creative people who make themselves a part of it because they love it.  Without the residents, Second Life is nothing.  Without happy, involved residents who believe they genuinely matter, Second Life will fail – and no web-based client will save it.

To those who have been concerned about my physical well-being, I am happy to report to you that I am doing much better.

Well, that’s a bit of an understatement.

I am feeling better in the past few days than I have in the past two years.

Fingers crossed that this will continue!

Second Life™ has now been a part of our global internet for seven years.  It began in June 2003, and promised a new way for people to create, communicate and interact together – and for hundreds of thousands of people, it has delivered and continues to deliver on that promise.  Corporations entered, hoping to exploit the new medium, and left almost as quickly, unable to adapt their real-world ways to a virtual environment.  Old media outlets set up outposts and put reporters on the “SL beat” – but they, too, disappeared.  By the end of 2007, the Great Corporate Exodus was complete – and the media were falling all over each other to declare Second Life the Next Great Dot-Bust Failure.

Three years after that exodus, people are amazed that Second Life is still alive – and not merely alive, but humming along as a respectably-profitable business, even in the throes of a debilitating global recession.  No, Second Life did not change the world – at least not for everyone.  But for those who saw what was genuinely possible, for those who embraced the vision and made it their own – the world was indeed changed.  Seven years later, this grand experiment in life, love, sex, music, art, fantasy, community, education – and yes, commerce – continues to flourish and thrive.

But you wouldn’t know that by following the media.  Every few months or so, another barely-researched article gets written by one more bored freelance writer who most likely isn’t getting paid enough to care about his subject matter.  This week, the publication is Entrepreneur and the freelancer is Jason Daley.  Writing on the subject of Second Life Enterprise, Linden Lab’s behind-the-firewall Second Life standalone for business, Daley wastes no time in writing off Second Life as a failure, citing the sum total of his knowledge of Second Life’s extensive history in one sentence: “Well, the [Reuters] bureau closed early last year, and Linden Lab’s virtual utopia is full of malls selling nothing but pixilated genitalia.”

As a blogger, and not a journalist, or even a “freelance journalist” – or whatever the self-employed wage slaves writing generic 500-word articles on Mechanical Turk for two dollars each are calling themselves these days.  Let’s just say I’m not a lazy hack who can’t be bothered to research beyond creatively rearranging press releases.  I write because I enjoy writing, and I enjoy writing on subjects I’m passionate about.  Second Life is one of these things.  So when yet one more self-described “journalist” comes along to unzip and piss against our wall, I make no apologies for the snark and invective that may spill from my fingertips as I dress him down.

Oh, I know he’s reading this.  After all, he’s created a blog specifically for the purpose of self-promoting the articles he’s managed to get published.  I can guarantee he Googles himself on a regular basis – particularly when he’s managed to get something published.  Oh, did I happen to mention that Jason is not only a self-described “freelance journalist” but also a self-described “freelance editor”?  Just a little word of advice, Jason – if you edit as well as you write, then don’t ask your readers to point out your spelling errors and broken links.  I’m presuming your website acts as a portfolio of your work?

Stick to writing about things you have a genuine interest in, Jason – which is skiing, apparently.  You seem to be have no problem writing interestingly and at length about skiing.  Leave the writing about Second Life to people who have actually spent time in it – at least long enough to realize that SL is alive and vibrant and amazing and … yes, sexy and naughty at times.  As for your claims of ubiquitous malls pregnant with penile protrusions and press-on vaginas, Linden Lab has moved all explicitly-adult content to it’s own continent – which is something that you would have learned had you actually done even elementary-school level research on your subject or – god forbid! – actually visited Second Life recently.  And this is precisely the problem – the bland are leading the blind.  Rewriting PR blurbs and padding them with dismissive opinions based on complete ignorance of the subject matter is precisely why print journalism is dying.

And judging from the date on your website, this article is the first “journalism” work you’ve had published since February.  Congratulations.

Seriously, though, if you would ever like to actually see what Second Life is all about in 2010, sign up for an account and give me a shout.  I can show you a thing or two about Second Life – which, frankly, would be a start.

And I could keep going, but I’m already up on Mr. Daley by three-hundred words.

And now, I’m going to bed.

(EDIT: Oh, the bittersweet irony – both of my links were broken!  Thank you, Neko, for pointing that out.  If I were a journalist, I’d be really embarrassed right now.)

Congratulations to The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop for winning the 2010 Linden Prize!

Now we can stop talking about the damned chickens.  Again.

(No, seriously.)