Everything is Borked ™

Most of you know this already.

If you have purchased something and haven't gotten it due to the borkedness™ please send another note card. You aren't the only one who is losing inventory, not getting delivered items, etc etc.

At this point, I believe to be caught up on all customer issues. So if you're expecting something and haven't gotten it, give me a holler and let me know. I'll need all the usual information again, transaction number, date, item, destination.

Please note! If the destination is Haedon Quine send the note card to her. I cannot verify purchases that went to her, and vice versa. Please contact whichever of us is listed as the destination on your transaction information. That will expedite things for you.

Customer issues aside, I have a confession. I've had zero desire to create anything for a while. I've played with the Eloh skins, and have some that you might actually be seeing sometime soon. I've spent months trying to figure out sculpties and how to make something that wasn't a phallic stand-in. I think, maybe, finally, I've got it figured out to a large degree, and I picked up some sculpt maps on SLX (who knew branches made good hair?) which also helps supplement my less than fabulous sculptistry.

I know most of you are aware of the IP rights campaign.



The content theft has really been a wet blanket to my creativity. It's really hard to want to create something when the fear of it being stolen is ever-looming. And honestly it's taken me this long to come to grips with it. Just when I think I'm okay, someone else close to me has something copied and I take a few steps back. It's really discouraging and sometimes down right depressing.

And this post has now been sitting unpublished a few days (so I'm likely behind again, lol!) because I found one of my styles stolen again. It's been duplicated and mirrored. So far I've only been able to find pictures on ads for said hair, the hair itself doesn't appear to be in the boxes. Which is strange, and maybe someone else got to them first and has filed a DMCA for their own style resulting in removal of all of them at that location. I don't know. But I've spent a fair amount of time trying to track it down so I can file DMCAs.

See what I mean? Just when you start to think "Okay, I can do this," and reach down to grab your bootstraps, someone kicks you in the behind and shoves you face first in the mud.

Anyway, I'm hopefully back to the grindstone now. I just wanted to let you guys know I hadn't been eaten by the asset server, too.

We need your voice!

Please, if you haven't yet, go here:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-676

And VOTE! Make your voice heard! The votes are only at 600 this morning. Haedon sent out a notice to our group, which consists of nearly 3000 users. There are lots more who aren't in our group, so that number should be considerably higher than 600! The jira always runs slow (at least for me anyway) so be patient. If everyone hits the page at once, it's going to be even slower. Please, please make it a priority to go and vote on this issue!

The process is extremely easy, and here's what you should see:



Now you need to login to the jira with your Second Life username and password. This is a Linden Labs site, so your information is safe. It's no different than logging into the SL website.



Once you're logged in, on the left hand side of the page you will see this:



This is where you click Vote for it. The page will reload, and you get this:



Content theft effects all of us. In this situation skins are being mentioned specifically, but there is so much theft grid-wide. This impacts the creators the hardest, and first. When our work is taken out from under us, and given for free or next to nothing, we're 1) losing sales and 2) forced to lower our prices to get sales back that *should* have been ours in the first place.

I read a blog entry by dandellion Kimban this morning, and would like to quote parts of it here. Her original post was regarding free skins, but it so applies to this situation of all content being stolen. I found it a really thought provoking article if you have the time to read it. (emphasis added is mine)

"On the other side, there is just one item that keeps its price stable: land. And may I say, compared to anything else, land is too fucking expensive. And, it is very important, land tier is paid in US$, not in lindens. Even if you are living on an estate and pay your landlord/lady in lindens, they pay US$ to Linden Lab. All of a sudden, we are not talking microcurrency linden peanuts, we are talking hard green cash recognizable in any bank on planet Earth. What does that mean?

That means that content creators are working for third world wages while land barons are doing serious biz here. And, mind yu, making skins, hairs, scripts and all the rest of lovely things we use takes a bit more knowledge, skills, creativity and time than buying an island, placing prefab houses and renting all that. All of a sudden there is an ethical problem of giving those skins for free! Dropping prices is not a good idea anymore. Dropping prices is taking money from content creators. And content creators need money. They need to be payed for their work and they need to cover their expenses. They need to pay for the land their shop is on. And that price won't drop with everything else."

Those two paragraphs tell more than anyone could explain in a whole dissertation. When we lose sales because we've lost the content that we spent time, effort, heartache, and money to create, we lose the ability to pay for the land we sit on. If we can't afford our rent, or our tier, they kick us out. We can't keep an island for free, believe it or not! (The Lindens frown on that for some reason.) If we can't pay the rent, they're going to kick us out to find someone who can.

This effects every single person on the grid. When the content creators are not protected, when we can't make enough sales to cover our business expenses, there's not going to be anything for the rest of the grid to buy. Which effects the economy. Which effects Linden Labs. Which means they're not making money to cover their business expenses (servers are expensive!) and will either sell out, or close down.

This is not a minor situation! As Ming-Ming would say: "This is sewious!"

Here is a poignant video from Minnu that sums it up nicely.

And if you've gotten this far, for the love of all that is created on the grid, go VOTE already!!!