Two For The ‘Roll

Aside from being “information straight from the firehose” about SL and a variety of unrelated topics, Tateru‘s office hours have afforded me the opportunity to encounter a number of other folks with blogs in-world. I’ve already mentioned Hamlet Au and his New World Notes, but I have a couple more to give a shout-out to now.

First up is Patchouli Woollahra, most often seen as either a blue cat or someone who looks elfin to my eyes. She’s another Aussie, and her involvement in SL runs the gamut from mentorin to building and scripting to instruction to just having fun. Her tagline shall, hence, be “The Fun-Loving Kitten.” (I know a lot of fun-loving kittens these days…including Danielle herself. She has different ideas about “fun,” though. 🙂 )

Second is moo Money, one of the other bloggers on Second Life Insider, who is noted for her involvement in machinima, as Community Manager of Alt-Zoom Studios. (That’s a fascinating field…if I weren’t so busy with other stuff, I might look into that, too.) This led to an obvious choice of tagline for her, which was, of course, inspired by Gloria Swanson’s famous line from the end of Sunset Boulevard. I knew that Film Studies course I took in college would come in handy someday! She’s also one of the few adults who has access to the Teen Grid, after having passed LL’s background check (only slightly less rigorous than “Yankee White“), and she gave us the “inside scoop” on what it’s like over there. Without getting into details, let’s just say it brought the Star Trek Original Series episode “Miri” to mind. Or perhaps the “Wacky Molestation Adventure” episode of South Park…

And thus does the mighty Evans Avenue Exit blogroll become even more complete.

Our Most Persuasive Argument

With the SLelections coming very soon now, it’s time to bring out the really persuasive argument….

Thanks to Danielle Ferguson, Campaign Manager, for the pose. Guns by Desert Eagle. Car by Dominus. Attitude is 100% Danielle. 🙂

UPDATE: Danielle clarifies that this message is no idle threat…while Tyffany Flintoff accuses us of stealing her ideas.  Hogwash!  We had no a priori knowledge of her poster design prior to releasing ours.

Oh, And Before I Forget…

The other night, as I was kicking back on the lawn at Mars Japanese Gardens, at the feet of the incomparable Tateru Nino (who, incidentally, is being incredibly generous with her time in holding “office hours”), who should show up but Hamlet Au, her sometime boss/supervising editor and a top SL blogger in his own right.  By my admittedly-somewhat-eccentric rules (documented here, incidentally), I can now add his blog, New World Notes, to the Evans Avenue Exit blogroll.

There is little I could say about Hamlet–indeed, little that I would feel myself even qualified to say–that hasn’t already been said about him, and can’t easily be found out through NWN itself.  But it’s not stretching the truth to say that his writings were one of the things that helped draw me into SL.  So were Tateru’s, for that matter.  However, I believe that it was NWN that originally pointed me to Dwell On It.  The sequence, as I recall, led me from the SL website itself, to NWN, to Dwell On It, and thence to blogs such as MeraTalk and An Engine Fit For My Proceeding.  (And I suppose, from there, to Newegg.com for hardware and OS upgrades. 🙂 )

Yes, I know that NWN is a semi-group blog these days, with contributions from other people, such as Tateru.  But I tend to file those blogs under the name of the person that seems to be their “primary owner,” which, in this case, is Hamlet.  (Similarly, I generally file Boing Boing under “Cory Doctorow” and Eternity Road under “Francis W. Porretto.”  Only in cases where a blog has no primary owner, or more than one, will I simply omit the author name, as is the case with Discarded Lies, and, for that matter, the Grand Unified Linden Blog.)

Not-A-Meme #18: Manners

Rose Farina has posted the latest N-A-M challenge over on her site, asking the question:

How important to you are good manners in Second Life? I don’t mean the hold your pinkie up type of manners either.

When you tell someone you will do something or be somewhere for something do you show up? Are you generally polite to other players you don’t know? (Heaven knows I pick on the ones I do know hehe). Do you feel free to blast others because of the anonymity factor? Do you belong to the group who says if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all group? Feel free to rant, vent or rave about your view on this subject.

To quote Queen Clarice of Genovia (in The Princess Diaries): “Manners matter.”   No one knows that more than the successful businessperson of SL.  When I make a commitment, I do my damnedest to honor it, and both Danielle and I expect the people we hire, and pay good money to, to do the same.  Those that can’t do so can expect to be summarily ejected from the employees group.  (Of course, exceptions are often granted for good cause.  We know things happen, particularly RL things.)

I tend to be known as “the diplomat” of the BLM/Gin Rummy operation, because I’m usually better at talking to people without getting annoyed at them.  An example of this happened at yesterday’s Gin Rummy Job Fair,  when a fairly-new newbie from the Netherlands entered the club.  He wasn’t really a suitable employee for our events, due to the time difference, but I was patient and cheerful with him, explaining a little about how the world works to him, even as Danielle was preparing to eject him for insulting her sub (which I do think was unintentional on his part).  In the end, he was not ejected; he left on his own, but not before I’d given him a landmark to the Shelter and encouraged him to visit there.  I reasoned thusly: By leaving him with a favorable impression of us, I’ve ensured, perhaps, that he’ll come back sometime down the road, when he’s a little more seasoned, and become, if not an employee, perhaps a customer–and perhaps one who’ll tell his friends and draw more people to the club.  “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” as I explained afterwards.

Mostly, good manners should be a byproduct of remembering that there are real human beings behind the avatars we see on screen…something which, sadly, is all too often forgotten in SL.

“You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you’re trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you…There are plenty of people who say, ‘We don’t care about etiquette, but we can’t stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don’t want him around!’ Etiquette doesn’t have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable.”   — Judith Martin (aka “Miss Manners”), 1995

A Clear Indication

Since there has already been some confusion on this issue, we at SLGOP thought we would remind everyone:

Disclaimer: Yeah, the standard stuff at this point. And I had to “borrow” a few snipped images for this one…

Happy Rezday, Danielle!

A year ago today, Danielle first ventured into Second Life. And thus began her quest for total Grid domination. 🙂

Ever since I’ve known Danielle, she’s been a real pleasure for me to know. I’ve seen her evolve from her initial, whitebread-redhead look to her present style, which is both true to her RL self and as unique as you’d expect of a sophisticated Resident. I’ve seen, and helped, her business venture, the Gin Rummy, withstand every challenge and grow from a tiny club nestled in the mountaintops of Perizoma to the huge, ornate building it occupies today in Joie sim. I’ve done my best to help her through crises in both Second Life and First Life. And I’m very glad to have her as a friend.

Happy rezday, Danielle. You deserve only the best!

. . . .

On a side note, I’d also like to welcome Vint Falken to the elite Evans Avenue Exit blogroll. Earlier today, she fulfilled the “in-world meeting” requirement for the listing when she visited the Evans Family Compound for a conference regading the SLelections. She’s a photographer, a socialite, and a driving force behind the SL Bloggers group (of which your humble reporter is now a member). She’s also a neko, like Danielle (I seem to be running into a bunch of them recently!), which suggested the title I have given her: “The Social Feline.”

Radio, Radio

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: SLGOP/Erbo Evans for Governor 2007 Campaign, Aphrodisia, Fantasyland, Second Life

June 16, 2007

EVANS CAMPAIGN RELEASES SECOND RADIO SPOT, PLEDGING “CLEAR, EASY-TO-FOLLOW CONTENT GUIDELINES”

The Evans for Governor 2007 campaign today released its second radio spot of the campaign, following up on the message conveyed by its recent “Is She, Or Isn’t She?” poster.  The spot also uses the Evans campaign’s second major tagline: “It’s time for clarity.”

“Are you being ‘broadly offensive’?” asks the narrator, after a short introduction in which a proposition is heard in a club.  “How do you know?  The Lindens won’t tell you…until it’s too late.”

“Under an Evans Administration,” the spot continues, “you’ll have clear, easy-to-follow content guidelines–so you won’t need to worry about breaking rules you don’t know about.”

Rebroadcast rights for the radio spot may be secured by contacting the SLGOP, which also advises that the download link for the spot above may be slightly unstable, due to a DNS issue with the service provider, so please try again later if you can’t download it right away.

– 30 –

Disclaimer: Yeah, yeah, satire, yeah yeah.  And that DNS error doesn’t make me real happy either.

Fresh Face

The latest advertisement from SLGOP headquarters…

Thanks to Fiona Torricelli, SLGOP Spokeswoman (and, apparently, now, spokesmodel), for her appearance in this ad.

Campaign Stop

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: SLGOP/Erbo Evans for Governor 2007 Campaign, Aphrodisia, Fantasyland, Second Life

June 11, 2007

CANDIDATE EVANS VISITS CLOSED-DOWN CLUB, CITES “DELIBERATE AMBIGUITY” IN CLOSING

The Evans campaign today visited the site of the now-closed Desire Gentlemen’s Club in Dryas on the mainland. The club, once home to some of Second Life’s top dancers and escorts, now stands, a hollow shell, walled up by plywood prims.

“This club once provided employment to three dozen young ladies, struggling to make a better future for themselves,” said Erbo Evans, Candidate for SL Governor, in a speech delivered onsite. “And now these poor young women have been thrown out of work. And why is that? We of the SLGOP believe that it was due to the deliberate ambiguity fostered by the statements made a week and a half ago by Administration spokesman Daniel Linden.”

“This Administration does not realize, in the making of its ivory-tower pronouncements, that it is toying with the very livelihoods of Residents,” continued Evans. “An arbitrary and capricious policy on the part of the government does not make for a stable business environment! We of the SLGOP are committed to open government, open justice, and open rules that are clear and easy to follow for everyone!”

In response to a shouted question from a reporter in the audience about whether he had patronized this establishment, Evans referred the question to his campaign manager, Danielle Ferguson. The reporter quickly muttered “never mind” and teleported away.

Persons interested in joining the SLGOP and the Evans campaign are invited to search for the in-world group “Second Life Grand Old Party,” which is free to join.

– 30 –

Odd Lots

I’m taking a breather from campaign-related posts for a minute to just talk about a couple of things on my mind.

First of all, congratulations to Chelle and Danielle for scoring a couple of the DJ slots at the Second Life Community Convention.  I don’t know whether these will be RL performances, SL performances, or both, but they should both be well-suited to the task.  Of course, my name’s not on the list…but that’s because I didn’t ask.  Due to one thing and another, my real life is going to be absolutely insane until at least mid-August, so I haven’t been particularly looking for DJ work anywhere, as I’ll be spread thin enough as it is.  (The campaign isn’t helping…but it doesn’t take up that much of my attention, and it should be over soon enough anyhow.)

Second, I was over at Mars Japanese Gardens with Tateru and others on Saturday night, and the talk had turned to whether SL culture was fragmenting.  She said, “How many newbies know who Anshe is? Or Prok? Or me? Or Erbo?”  Well, let me tell you, that was a bit surprising! I hardly expected to find myself in the same chat line with Anshe Chung, Prokofy Neva, and Tateru Nino…unless it was a sentence beginning something like “Erbo Evans, unlike major SL personalities such as Anshe Chung, Prokofy Neva, or Tateru Nino…” 🙂  I know who the little fish in that pond is, that’s for sure.  I mean, look:

• Anshe got to be where she is by getting in early, realizing the commercial potential of SL, and moving to exploit it, building up an empire over time in “Ben & Jerry’s” fashion.  It’s a feat that’s unlikely to be repeated.
• Prokofy’s “fame,” such as it is, is more like “notoriety,” whether that label is rightly or wrongly applied.  Yet, in a very real sense, “it doesn’t matter what [the press] say[s] about you, as long as they spell your name right,” and I am also reminded of the statement about Howard Stern, that his detractors actually spent more time listening to him on a daily basis than his fans did…and both groups cited the same reason most often: “to hear what he’ll say next.”
• You can ask Tateru why she’s so famous, and she’ll tell you that she doesn’t know.  However, one can’t argue with the evidence.  I’m forced to conclude that she must be doing something right, something that people like, regardless of what it actually is or whether she knows it.
• And me?  Whatever fame or notoriety I’ve garnered, I’ve had to work for.  No one promised me a bed of roses, and I never came in expecting one.  My previous community experience definitely comes in handy when attempting to grasp SL, but there’s really been no substitute for planting my virtual feet on the Grid and getting my avatar’s hands dirty actually doing things, seeing things, and living the Second Life lifestyle.  Again, I’m left to wonder how things would have turned out if I had been able to upgrade my computer system to be capable of running SL, say, a year earlier…

Perhaps, one day, I will deserve that pride of place…and people will be reading about me in the next edition of the Official SL Guide.  But I’m not concerned about that now.  Hell, just surviving the next couple of months will be daunting enough.