Category Archives: Second Life

Second Life Community: We REALLY Fear Change

It was good enough for me in 2004, it's good enough for me now, dammit.

Wagner James Au, one of the most relentless boosters for Second Life (he used to work for the maintainers, wrote a book on the subject and runs a long-running blog/news site) tells the collected user base of Second Life to dear god, just get over it already.

Virtual worlds the size and scope of Second Life need millions in annual revenue to survive, but Second Life’s existing revenue model, while currently successful, is not sustainable into the medium or long term. There are simply not enough people in the real world willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for virtual land, and those who do now will slowly but inevitably leave for many and various reasons, making Second Life a candidate for lingering death from a thousand cuts.

The reason for this is because Second Life users like Second Life just the way it is, thank you, and kindly stop putting your Facebook in our Farmvilles. In fact, recent mishaps by Linden Lab (Second Life’s owner/maintainer) which I documented here essentially have turned the Second Life community into a battered spouse. “Just *stop hitting us* already! Leave us alone and let us do our thing, OK?” It got to the point that a casual mention of Second Life users maybe possibly looking into this newfangled Facebook thingy on their community site caused a frothing mass of panic and tears.

There’s a few points of failure here.

  • Failure of community management. Community management is a key part of keeping the users you already have, if not happy, at least not rioting in the streets. Yet Linden has gone through several community managers and several reorganizations in the past year and there hasn’t been a lot of outreach, at all, to the opinion shapers. What little has been done has been to the comfortable commentariat – like, well, the linked-above W. James Au – and not to the more irascible, rougher – and sometimes more noteworthy – opinion shapers. Why is there no one from Linden Lab posting on SLUniverse? Why is there no one from Linden Lab talking to Prokofy Neva? Part of community management, inherently, is talking to your community via outreach. And that doesn’t seem to be happening, and in its stead the community is shaping its own opinion outside of any input by Linden – and that isn’t particularly pleasant for Linden’s future growth.
  • Failure of implementation. The initiatives Linden’s done in the past year have not gone well, to put it kindly. The highest-profile – the much-hyped Viewer 2 revamp – has still only been adopted by a minority of users by most metrics. Things such as web-based clients have been announced with great fanfare, prototyped quietly, and then faded away without much notice. Other engineering improvements (such as the ability to import 3D meshes into the grid) have languished. It’s a fair question to ask what, particularly, is planned next, and it’s also a fair question for SL users to *fear* what is planned next, given recent history. Which leads into…
  • Failure of vision. Simply put, Second Life has been devolving from the mass media’s poster child for virtuality into a footnote. Linden doesn’t seem to have a plan for turning this around. To its great good fortune, its potential competitors have done even less well, but “hoping no one else looks in our direction” isn’t a particularly sound business strategy.

To turn this around, Linden needs a two-pronged strategy – one based at keeping their current (and at this point at least profitable) customer base happy, and one based at capturing the imagination of the media and users who have previously left/not been interested in Second Life.

The first is easy – well, that’s not particularly the right way to express it. Knowing what to do first is easy, actually iterating on it less so. What Second Life’s current users need more than anything else are small, easily added quality of life improvements. Nothing that changes how they use the service on a daily basis, but fixing what they already do. Community outreach is key to this – don’t assume you know what your users want. You don’t. Go ask. This is something that has served many MMOs well in customer retention; it’s not particularly undiscovered territory.

The second involves leveraging what Second Life already does well – the ability to be a platform for sometimes unhinged creativity – and moving that to a more accessible place. Be that Facebook, or the greater web, or whatever – but Viewer 3 (or maybe Viewer Reboot or whatever) needs to be *different*. Easier, more accessible, able to run on netbooks/iOS/whatever. And most importantly, not forced on the current user base, but concurrent to/alongside the now-hard-core-by-necessity user base. The beauty of client/server architecture, after all, is that you can have multiple clients. (which SL has already due to the open source nature of the Viewer publishing cycle).

But whatever is done, it needs to be communicated, and it needs to be communicated well, and that communication will be hard, and uncomfortable. Because, Linden, as even your best friends are telling you – you’re dying.

Second Life To Remove Need For Client, Having Removed Need For Gameplay And Customer Service Long Before

Linden Lab is partnering with Gaikai, a cloud-based client system similar to OnLive, to deliver Second Life in a web browser. The current implementation, which launched today, is fairly beta and difficult to actually launch (no feedback is given for how a client session is ‘approved’ – presumably it involves latency to the Gaikai servers) but it’s an interesting turn. More on this at New World Notes.

In a completely unrelated development, Walletin, a startup founded by Cory Ondrejka (former CTO of Linden Lab) and Bruce Rogers (former CTO of Cryptic) was acquired by Facebook today as well.

Today's Wacky Rumor: Microsoft In Talks To Acquire Linden Lab, Corner Vital "People Who Wear Cat Heads" Market

It all started, as most Second Life things do, with Woodbury University.

Specifically, with the dethroned Czarina of Woodbury, Jordan Bellino/”Tizzers Foxchase”, tweeting the following:

A little birdie told me that Microsoft may have silently offered to buy Linden Lab this week. #secondlife

At which point, the proper response is to shake your head and think “Oh, you kids!”

Then Tateru Nino weighed in. Ms. Nino, who recently was the Second Life reporter for Massively (but no longer no doubt to MASSIVE DRAMA or possibly a total lack of interest in Second Life drama amongst people looking for updates on the latest Free2Play title from Asia) posted the following on her blog:

People are talking about a rumour that Microsoft has made an offer on Linden Lab.

Funny as that might seem on the face of it, a small number of Linden Lab staff are today spreading the story that Linden Lab is now entertaining offers for sale, and that Microsoft has actually presented one.

For Microsoft’s part, I doubt that it could care less about Linden Lab, but might be willing to make an offer to stop certain competitors making that purchase.

As yet, there isn’t any confirmation from Linden Lab as to whether the information being given by its staff is correct.

Update: Linden Lab responded to my query, and has declined to proffer any confirmation or denial.

So, you know, given that Tateru Nino is actually something approaching a real reporter who asks people things, this could actually be happening, and we could have been told this first from someone whose chief claim to fame is stencilling “BAN PROK” in chalk on the walls of Linden Lab’s office. So, um, yeah. The only way this could get any weirder is if Derek Smart decides to toss in a bid. Which, you know, could still happen.

Update: ZDnet follows up on the Microsoft side (h/t Raevhen) with this nugget:

Microsoft isn’t commenting on the Linden Lab report, but I’ve been asking around and hear from my sources that Microsoft may have made overtures not only toward Linden Lab, but other social-gaming vendors lately. The word from my sources is the Softies are not simply talking partnerships; they’re talking outright purchase.

Well, then. Strange days.

The Client Is In The Compiler Of The Enemy

Beware gemstones bearing gifts.

Diary of a Second Life trainwreck:

Late 2006: Enterprising programmers begin trying to reverse engineer the Second Life client, with Linden Lab’s blessing. This work is promptly leveraged by equally enterprising and far less moral programmers to introduce content dupes which devastate the Second Life economy.

January 2007: Linden Lab releases the source code for the Second Life client, and encourages its community to help with further development.

“We feel we may already have a bigger group of people writing code than any shared project in history, including Linux,” says Rosedale. While this is often elementary code, it means, he says, that “we have an army of people waiting to work on this.” Adds CTO Cory Ondrejka: “Why wouldn’t we leverage our community and give them the opportunity to make Second Life what they want it to be?”

Over the next couple of years, a few projects move forward, including a client specifically designed for BDSM aficionados who want to give other people control over their freedom of movement and clients that are designed to connect to alternate servers or “grids”. Black-hat programmers also continue to release clients that are designed to copy content, crash servers, harass users, and other such charming uses.

May 2009: A new alternative client, called Greenlife Emerald, is released. It quickly becomes very popular due to a rich set of features which aren’t present in the official SL client or most of its derivatives.

October 2009: Greenlife Emerald adds a new feature: a simple physics model which causes the breasts of female avatars to ‘jiggle’ in a somewhat realistic manner when the avatar moves.

In a complete coincidence, Greenlife Emerald immediately becomes the most popular client in Second Life.

As Emerald (as it is renamed due to Linden Lab insisting its “Second Life” trademark be removed from most third-party applications) becomes ubiquitous, rumors begin to swirl of its maintainers’ roots in the darker side of the SL hacking community. Prokofy Neva, SL commentator/scourge, frequently rails against Emerald’s creators, beginning with those rumors of black-hat association, and moving rapidly into everything from showing how the client itself is evil to how the developers kill her chickens (this makes sense, really).

February 2010: Linden Lab releases the next iteration in the Second Life client, Viewer 2. It is generally seen by most as bloated and difficult to use. Most SL users continue to use Emerald.

April 2010: The “Wrong Hands”, a group of “social engineers” associated with Woodbury University who previously engineered an infiltration and data dump of a group of users who roleplayed privacy-violating superheroes, release a Youtube video of members interrogating Fractured Crystal, leader of the Emerald project, who unashamedly admits to being involved in black-hat client projects.

The Wrong Hands then release files taken from Emerald’s web host which attempts to show that Emerald is trying to track IP addresses and geolocation data for Second Life users. Also included are emails between Emerald staff and Linden Lab, attempting to show a pattern of collusion.

Almost immediately afterwards, Woodbury University is banned from Second Life. Members of the Wrong Hands immediately claim a conspiracy involving Emerald and Linden Lab is responsible. Left unspoken is the assumption that thanks to most of Linden Lab’s customers using Emerald, Emerald has undue influence within Linden Lab by definition.

July 2010: Hazim Gazov, author of, by his own admission, a black-hat Second Life client, publishes proof that Emerald is encoding information about its users’ computers into textures that are uploaded into Second Life, which can then be harvested for further data mining purposes.

Karl Stiefvater, a well-known 3D programmer at Linden Lab (known as Qarl LInden) is laid off, and immediately joins the Emerald project, further blurring the lines between Linden and Emerald.

August 2010: Emerald uses a feature of the Second Life client – the initial welcome screen that is actually served from a web server – to embed dozens of hidden links in Emerald’s welcome screen to Hazim Gazov’s web server. Given that hundreds of thousands of people use Emerald on a daily basis, this is effectively a denial of service attack on Gazov. After initially claiming that this was simply a practical joke, the head of Emerald who was responsible for the attack resigns and turns over control of the Emerald project.

Today: Linden Lab removes Emerald from the list of approved third-party clients and sends an email to all users warning them not to use Emerald.

Late last week, we discovered a denial-of-service attack that was being served through the widely distributed Emerald third-party viewer. This is in direct violation of our third-party viewer policy (part 2, section d, paragraph iii).

We have removed Emerald from the list of third-party viewers, and are now in touch with the Emerald team to discuss what can happen next. We did this to do our best to protect the safety and security of Second Life users. We will not tolerate a viewer that includes malicious code, nor will we tolerate development teams with a history of violating users’ trust or disrupting their lives.

We take privacy, safety, and security very seriously, and we will act to the best of our abilities to protect it. We have not yet disabled logins via the Emerald viewer, but will do so if we feel the software and the team behind it is not able to meet the standards we’ve set. While Emerald is currently the focus of our attention because of what happened recently, all third-party viewers are held to the same standard, and must comply with the third-party viewer policy.

Wagner James Au, noted SL blogger and former Linden, estimates that now half of all traffic within Second Life uses the Emerald client.

Prokofy Neva, whose years of invective against Emerald was essentially proven correct, goes on to assert that the act of writing computer programs is corrupt by definition.

Can Second Life Be Saved?


Yes, this is an actual screenshot from Second Life.

Second Life is going through strange days.

Well, stranger than usual.

Second Life’s neo-Utopian post-hippie prefix-spawning founder, Philip Rosedale, apparently got tired of the grinding whining that accompanies pretty much every online game product ever, and stepped aside so that he could work on cool stuff and not have all those suits harsh his buzz, man. In his place, the Internet’s last best hope for Cybertopia was managed by Mark Kingdon, whose prior experience in online gaming and virtual communities involved… marketing.

Yeah, this’ll end well.

Mr Kingdon’s arrival at the company shows that the online world created by Linden Lab is growing up and getting real.

He began growing up and getting real by meeting the somewhat leery and only partially obscene residents of Second Life as “M Linden“, thus proving his mastery of digital marketing by refusing to take the time to actually type in a full name.

M’s master plan for saving Second Life? Simple – turn it into Facebook. No, wait, stop me if you’ve heard this before. Second Life’s users, only some of whom were overweight men pretending to be fashionista women, reacted about as strongly as you’d expect.

The first step in this cunning master plan was Linden Lab’s acquisition of Avatars United. With this strategic play, Second Life, a client/server application with its own virtual currency that allowed you to create avatars, now supported the ability to… create web-based avatars somewhere else, which may or may not be related to your Second Life identity, with its own virtual currency which had nothing to do with Second Life’s existing currency, with even less usability than Facebook, and in general was a poorly written hack job. After a few weeks, Linden’s response was essentially, “let us never speak of this again”.

Instead, Kingdon and Linden moved, full speed ahead, towards producing a new client for Second Life. The goal of course, was to produce an interface that was accessible beyond Second Life’s current hardcore niche of users who absolutely are not overweight men pretending to be fashionista women. Now, if you gave me, a designer of hardcore games aimed at a niche group of users who pretty much completely are overweight men pretending to be blood elf dancers, this task to spec out, I’d give you the following list of requirements:

  • Web-based, using Flash, Java or some other ubiquitous platform to minimize installation headaches
  • Very, very low system requirements, running comfortably on netbooks and older machines
  • Minimal download times
  • A very, very simple user interface that passes the “Mac user/grandmother” test
  • Searching and directory features that guide new users quickly and easily into Second Life’s already extant vast economy
  • Ability to opt into embedding into/connecting with Facebook and future social networks

So, Linden Lab, who clearly knows far more than me about this metaverse reality stuff, rolled out Viewer 2! Which featured:

  • A large client, identical to Second Life’s already existing client
  • Punishing system requirements, identical to Second Life’s already existing client
  • Essentially requiring a fast broadband connection, identical to Second Life’s already existing client
  • No ability to connect with any social network at all, including the one Linden Lab bought for some odd reason a few months earlier
  • A user interface which most users found more difficult to use and more intimidating than Second Life’s already existing client
  • A new search engine which didn’t actually list most of Second Life’s already existing event listings and advertisings, killing Second Life’s already extant vast economy. Or… it would have if anyone actually used Viewer 2.

Shortly thereafter, Linden Lab lost most of Linden Lab and Mark Kingdom lost his M, replaced by Philip “Aw man, do I have to do this stuff AGAIN” Rosedale.

So, that’s the background. The ship of Linden state is listing pretty heavily to starboard.

Wagner James Au today weighs in with his take on how to save Second Life. Most of his suggestions are fairly apt, if not obvious (and if Linden is actually looking for MMO veterans, Austin is still a smoking crater of lost dreams and forlorn hopes!). But he does miss a couple of important points.

First off, Linden Lab doesn’t appear to know what its core business is. Hint: it’s server hosting.

Second Life is, essentially, a protocol. Everything content-related – game-y things, world-y things, people-with-cat-heads-meowing-things-you-really-don’t-want-to-hear things – all of them come from the users themselves. Linden Lab just puts up the servers, and people pay Linden money to  run them. They then presumably make that money back from other users, or run them as an odd hobby, or whatever. Linden doesn’t care – and Linden shouldn’t care. Their business is as Pakleds. They make things. That make us go.

Second, after the server hosting is there and done, the second neglected feature that is killing Second Life – customer service. Or rather, the lack thereof. I’m sure it will surprise few MMO watchers that much of Linden Lab’s recent bloodletting was in customer service. After all, CS doesn’t make you money. You just pay for CS agents and they sit there and talk to users and don’t make any money and what the hell, we got new Facebook clients to write!

Yet – Linden is a service provider. Service providers have to have good customer service. It’s a requirement. Without good customer service, everything else is irrelevant, because your new user experience will consist of your new users leaving your hermetically sealed new user zone and experiencing something akin to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but with slightly more overweight men pretending to be female fashionistas.  This is something that all successful online service providers eventually learn (Blizzard’s customer service team numbers in the thousands), and if Linden wishes to join their number, they need to learn that lesson.

Third, and most importantly, and what has apparently kept Linden Lab drowning in the ocean this past year – know your audience. I have it on reasonably good authority that Linden Lab’s perception of its current customer base is, roughly, overweight men pretending to be hot fashionista women. Guess what – that’s your audience. You don’t get a redo unless you make an entirely new product. You got lots of investor capital and media coverage based on all those overweight men pretending to be fashionistas. If you want to continue running a business that is profitable – you had best keep them happy. If they hate your new viewer and instead use an alternate third party viewer en masse – maybe this is a problem! If your business model consists of joining with a social network that emphasizes real identity as opposed to avatar anonymity, and a good portion of your user base is patronizing you specifically because they want that avatar anonymity – maybe this is a problem!

Sure, it makes you the laughing stock of Joel Stein, Something Awful and 4Chan. Gee. Given 1 million unique users a month, I’ll take a bunch of internet nerds laughing at me, too. Hint: some of them really, really want to be hot fashionistas.

Second Life Sued. Again. You Should Pay Attention This Time.

A lawsuit was filed yesterday against Linden Lab, Second Life developers, for essentially having poor customer service.

Specifically, two of the most well-known merchants within SL, Munchflower Zaius (Shannon Grei), who runs a boutique (pics within NSFW) that sells gothic-oriented skins and clothing, and Stroker Serpentine (Kevin Alderman), who sells, um, a lot of sex toys, complain that Linden Lab’s procedures for protecting merchants within SL against theft are failures, and it results in lost business. Which becomes srs bizness when you realize that Alderman has sold over $1 million worth of cybersex animations. Alderman’s view on the subject (as quoted by Massively):

stroker.jpg

When public service announcements and nudity both fail, bring in the lawyers

Our intent is not to take down Second Life, nor create a division amongst the community. It is apparent to many of us that our concerns have gone largely ignored. Copybot, Builderbot, CryoLife [content theft exploits] et al are but symptoms of an ambivalent approach towards IP theft on behalf of Linden Lab. For years we have been promised better tools, more metadata, sticky licenses, aggressive response, verification, watermarks … ad nauseum. Seven years later and all we are given is a ‘Roadmap’.

The pirates know full well how to hedge their bets and leverage the DMCA in their favor. We are virtually defenseless unless we have the financial means to pursue expensive litigation. We do not expect miracles. We understand the nature of our chosen environment. Unfortunately, there is little to no deterrence under the current regime.

The wording here is important, since this lawsuit is essentially a political act. Alderman and Grei, both well-known community leaders within SL, have said, in the most direct way possible, that the community they are a part of is run so badly, legal redress is needed. Alderman even refers to the “regime”, as if the current governance of Linden Lab is something that is temporary and replaceable.

Like many lawsuits involving MMOs, this essentially says “You didn’t pay attention to us. PAY ATTENTION NOW.” In this case, the real problem is that Linden Lab is essentially being targeted for not investing enough on a police force and effective governance. This traditionally is not something that MMOs worry about, save at the last minute and with the least expense. Yet in such an environment, content creators, feeling million-dollar markets at risk, are threatened that they will be put out of business by exploits they have no power to combat. Alderman in particular has been aggressive about responding to these via the legal system (Grei joining him in the second suit), and this suit is the ultimate expression of that. There is also the not insignificant matter of Linden Lab profiting from Grei and Alderman’s work directly, through server rentals and commissions on advertising and direct sales – while also profiting from pirates who then turn around and resell their work through the same tools that Grei and Alderman use. So from a simple customer service standpoint, the solution would seem obvious – spend more money on customer service dedicated to copyright theft (which will be a thankless task) and develop tools that automate already extant procedures to address theft complaints. Simple, though painful since both will involve investment in profit sinks, not profit centers (thusly, refer back to MMOs worrying about this at the last minute and the least expense).

Yet there is another problem, and that is the political, not merely the technological. Alderman and Grei, by insisting that Linden Lab benefited from theft of their work and should be held accountable, are denying Linden Lab’s status as a neutral host of content. Given Second Life’s status as the most freewheeling, open and libertarian virtual world, that seems a dangerous assertion to press. Holding Linden Lab legally responsible for all the various misdeeds of its denizens means that Linden Lab, if sane, will promptly cut back its liability as quickly as possible.

Which, not to put a fine a point on things, will mean that there will no longer be a $1 million market for cybersex animations.

Second Life Played More Than World Of Warcraft… No! Really! Sex May Be Involved. Oh Wait, We'll Take Care Of That.

Wagner James Au weighs in with the news: according to Nielsen, Second Life pwns World of Warcraft, biyotch.

Based on audience surveys regarding a hundred non-casual, pre-installed PC games, Second Life is the most played of all, registering average playtimes of 760 minutes a week per user, nearly a hundred more than World of Warcraft, and second in total player popularity only to WoW.

No, really, there is numbers and everything:

nielsen
You will also note that Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, a three-year-old middling-selling fantasy kick-em-up is more popular than Half-Life 2. You know, the engine for Counterstrike. You know, one of the most popular online games of all time. Yeah, that one. Clearly, everything you know about online gaming is wrong!

Or, more accurately, metrics are a dark art that can be easily abused, misreported (note the double entry for Civilization 4, which would place it as the second most popular game in the survey if properly collated) and gamed. Luckily, in this case, Linden Lab has always been fairly open with SL metrics and they have been tracked historically by third parties. With a peak concurrency of 75,000-80,000 users and an estimated 1.5 million active users (Mitch Wagner of Information Week quotes Linden Lab’s CEO as giving a figure of 600,000 for the latter), Second Life is pretty solidly in the top tier of Western MMOs in terms of popularity, but an order of magnitude less popular than World of Warcraft, or other free-to-play MMOs (which Second Life is properly classified as) for that matter (the ever-ignored Runescape has close to 8 million users).

But popularity figures are just that – a beauty contest. What matters is if a given virtual world/online game is profitable (well, to its publishers, anyway. What matters to its users is whether or not it’s fun, which is outside the scope of this discussion, though no doubt will be the subject of “SL is nothing but furries and phalluses” comments following this post!) And Second Life is profitable, largely because its profit isn’t dependent on maintaining the insane publicity bubble that Linden Lab managed to ride a year ago. There may be fewer articles in Time about helpful mentors giving Joel Stein a penis, but the users that remain are quite willing to give each other money – lots of money, over $350 million last year. Linden doesn’t see all of that, of course, or even most of it, but they do collect an arbitrage fees off of virtual currency conversion as well as fairly hefty server rental fees to store owners and power users. Lack of popularity isn’t going to hurt them.

Lack of community management, on the other hand, might. If you log into Second Life this month, what you’ll hear people talking about is “Adult Content”. Which is surprising if you consider both Second Life’s reputation as the Internet’s red light district and the fact that Second Life, um, is already rated 18+ only already. Yet in March, Linden announced an upcoming segregation of “adult content” (translation: everything you think goes on in SL) into its own virtual continent, called Ursula, or as named by some resident wags, “Pornadelphia”. This month, a new beta version of the SL client introduced with it content filtering, such as filtering out search terms such as “Gorean”, “bondage” and “bosom” unless your account was flagged for “Adult” (which, confusingly, is a content level above the already-existing “Mature”). Many users are fairly furious over this, less over an incipient uprooting (the move to Ursula only affects “mainland users”, or users who own land on servers, or “sims” managed by Linden Lab – users that rent their own sims are unaffected by this) then the fairly explicit scarlet lettering involved in entire adult-oriented lifestyles, which while no doubt snigger-worthy to outsiders, are an entirely valid reason for, you know, wanting to participate in a virtual world that was already labelled adult-only.

What you’re not seeing in all of this is, well, any community management whatsoever. There have been a couple of blog posts which while acknowledging the controversial nature of the subject, dismissed implicitly most of the user complaints. There is little to no interaction with community personnel on the main Linden forums, and absolutely zero interaction on third-party forums (which are far more popular, especially among the users most affected by this). For being one of the more utopian and libertarian virtual worlds, Linden has had a fairly antediluvian attitude towards community management. And in this case, it is costing them a good deal of user goodwill in the process of implementing what almost any reasonable person would see as regrettably necessary restrictions on sexually explicit content. A little more honest explanation of the why (“We can’t continue to position Second Life as a venue for remote education in a complete free-for-all environment”) along with some give and take on the how would go a long way. Yet most residents, correctly, are seeing this as a diktat from on high, with little recourse for protest or even negotiation. For a world that is explicitly owned in large part by its users as part of its terms of service, that is not a very good way to run a railroad.

If it continues, maybe next month, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic will overtake Second Life in the ratings!

Don't Sue Me, Bro

Just when you thought it was safe to read the web, Second Life is in the news again. This time they are being sued by Taser International (who make, you know, tasers) because SL users are creating tasers in game and using them in bizarre sadomasochistic rituals. Dear god in heaven, I am not making any of this up.

The kicker here is that Linden Lab, Second Life’s publisher, recently acquired the largest third-party item catalogue, XStreetSL, which thus means that you can purchase Taser-equipped chastity belts…

with textured particles sparks, electric shock sound, electrocution animation), for unruly/naughty subs/slaves…

directly from a Linden Lab affiliated company. Which, though XStreetSL is still a catalogue of user-generated content and not Linden-generated, still apparently convinced a laywer that Taser could sue damn near everyone. So that’ll show you. (Maybe it’s the “XStreetSL is now officially part of Second Life” line added to the logo after the Linden Lab purchase.) In particular, Taser seems to have popped a monocle at Taser-trademark copyright infringement and damage to the good name of Taser International in a SL roleplay area called “the Crack Den”, which is mainly for people who want to live a virtual life in GTA: San Andreas.

Wait… something looks familiar… let me go back to the Taser official web site:

mockriot09_top

Yeah, I can totally see where their corporate image is being besmirched here.

Just in case you haven’t read enough analysis about this totally justified and not frivolous at all lawsuit, here’s a couple more articles from the Intertubes.

I’d write more myself but I’m currently convulsing uncontrollably and wetting myself.