Blog Spammers....grrrrrr

Location: Expression Engine Home Page

It's sad that the spammers of the world cannot be dragged through the streets and then beaten with chains.

At most blogs you can filter comments. Not at Expression Engine, where the Times Dispatch keeps the scrubbe-up version of this blog. Anyone can comment, and writers cannot delete commentary! Our only option has been to repost spammed posts without the stupid remarks. Here are some from the ever-more-desperate blog-spammers.

Anyway, here we are:

I certainly appreciate the write-up about this topic. This is something that weighs on my mind constantly, and I am looking for any alternative choices to product and touring. Thanks for the awesome post man, Posted by Bizz

Really a educative and informative post, the post is good in all regards,I am glad to read this post. Posted by Michel-Alaska Personal Injury Lawyer

Who on earth would consult a personal-injury lawyer to posts his services as spam to a blog about SL? He will need a personal-injury lawyer, if I ever get my way with his sort.

You can help me by contacting "Bizz," at http://www.drdraininc.com/, with your kind words about spamming blogs. They are plumbing contractor in Raleigh, NC.

Pappy Enoch has already left them some kind words. Use the contact form at their site to share with them what you think about blog-spammers.

Substantive Stories about Second Life: Turning Point for Mainstream Media?

Location: Ahern/Morris Welcome Area

There was a Linden Lab employee at the welcome area the other day. Doing his best in a Federation uniform, he was batting about quips with the sharp-tongued loungers who congregate there, even as he helped the occasional newcomer. It seemed odd to see a Linden in this place; I understand that at one time, company employees regularly mingled with residents.

Perhaps Linden Lab is getting ready for something new.

In the past two weeks, PBS, NPR and the New York Times have all run substantive pieces about business, art, and education in Second Life. The NY Times story of artist Jeff Lipsky’s rise to fame as SL artist Filthy Fluno shows clearly how virtual worlds have an astounding ability to alter how we live and work.

For those of us who endured a lot of misinformed worry-mongering and doomsaying about the virtual world, these stories come as pure vindication. Whatever happens to our particular world of choice, the media are starting to “get it” and do a better job of treating a story as a story. We are getting beyond the sort of knee-jerk, and ironic, responses of some students, who worry that we’ll all soon “live inside a computer” even as they frantically text each other, check their Facebook profiles, and tweet about the banal events of their day.

For a long time, stories about SL have resembled a naïve foreign correspondent’s story from, say, Kirgizstan. The audience would not get “ohhh…look at that unusual hat!” or “Those wild and crazy Kirgiz. They still have shamans there!”

For too long, that was the approach to SL, and I see the trend away from “gee whiz” or “what a bunch of goons” to “there is a real story here, something important to those of us without avatars.”

Slowly and surely, stories like Filthy Fluno’s success in the real-life art market are being told. And the Lindens are at the welcome areas again. When I messaged the fellow, wishing him luck with the unruly crowd, he said “I come here to have fun and a few laughs.”

If the media pay more serious attention to SL again, Linden Lab may have reason to laugh…all the way to the bank.

Dispatch from a Vampire-Hunter

Location: Undisclosed
By Skye Wolf, Vampire-Hunter, Guest Writer

Iggy's Note: We here begin what I hope to be a series of dramatic posts from one part of the in-world roleplaying community...or is it only a game?

I’ll just say it. Monsters are real.

I’m not talking symbolically either, like how serial killers or politicians or someone’s mother in-law is a monster. I mean the kind of monster with claws and fangs, horns and leathery wings. Yes, you heard me. They are real. Now, for those of you who are still reading this, you fall into two categories. The first category is made up of people who think this is a joke, or a piece of fiction, or just some nonsense from someone who likes talking bullshit to pass the time. You’re not going to take any of this seriously. It’s going to be purely entertainment for you, nothing else. I’m fine with that. Have a nice life, for however long that may be. The second category is made up of people who know exactly what the fuck I am talking about.

You know. You have seen them.

It’s really kind of funny. Parents used to prepare their children for that horrific moment when they came face to fanged face with a monster. They used fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk. I mean, the old, old stories, the ones that taught kids to observe, improvise, and act swiftly, before they got eaten alive by a werewolf, or a witch, or some other terrifying fucker. And then one by one, all of our storytellers started losing their balls and self-censored themselves. All of the old fairy tales got sterilized by uppity people who thought it would be a better idea to entertain kids with shiny, happy stories rather than save them from getting horribly killed.

And now? Now there isn’t anything to fear. Monsters aren’t real, right? Thank Jim Henson for that. Monsters don’t eat children anymore, they eat cookies and sing the alphabet song and laugh when we tickle their fucking bellies.

Even in the face of cold evidence, people don’t believe. We can upload shit to Youtube or Facebook and share movies and photos of whatever it is we experience. Even monsters. Even people dying because of monsters. And what do people say when they see reality in all its gory details?

FAKE. It’s not real. Photoshop. Digital trickery. The shadows are all wrong. Blood doesn’t splatter like that. That guy isn’t animated right, he doesn’t even look human.

Doesn’t look human? No shit.

People have somehow repressed the very thing that has kept the human race ahead of these ancient predators for the last millennia: Our survival instincts. People have become too reliant on science, too reliant on technology to notice the dark things that lurk in the shadows. That’s how the monsters are going to win, and feast on every last one of us.

Except for one thing: People like me. We bring the light of hope into the shadows. Also, we kill the fuck out of every monster we come across. But mostly it’s the hope thing.

It’s a thankless, lonely, and brutal job that we have. Most of us don’t live to see middle age simply because as we get older, and slower, and weaker, the monsters don’t. Sometimes it’s the very people we protect that get us killed—just because we know the malicious fucker we had just staked through the heart is a fanged beast, doesn’t mean the cops arriving on the scene of a witnessed “homicide” pointing their guns at me knows that. I’ve had one too many friends end up shot to death by police officers, or worse, end up in prison.

So, now you know the truth. The truth about the world, about the monsters, and about the people that live and die trying to keep the monsters from eating us. I’m not really sure why I felt like blogging this, except for maybe that I’ve lost a dear friend of mine last night. There are precious few times when someone like me affords themselves the weakness of loving someone else, but dammit, I couldn’t help it. And now that person is dead, and all I have left are my tears, my emptiness, and a burning rage to find the monster that killed my friend and fucking tear it to pieces.

I guess I’m hoping to spare whoever might be reading this the agony that I’m feeling right now. But I’m not going to beg and plead for you to believe what I’ve said. I’m tired of trying to convince you, so either listen to me or don’t. It’s your funeral.

I’m done talking. I’ve got some hunting to do.

Ask Di: Unfriending Someone

Location: Our Virtual Advice Desk

Dear Di:

What is the proper way to un-friend someone who has a fragile ego, without hurting him? There's a guy who I'm sure wants more than casual friendship with me. I'm not interested in SL romance.

Often when I log on, he invites me to events or wants me to "just hang out." Maybe he isn't after sex, but at least he wants a close friend and I'm not sure I can spare the time for that and still enjoy SL. He's always online and I don't want to log in as an ALT constantly.

I'm tired of making excuses.

Yours,

Ms. Popularity

Dear Ms. Popularity:

If you have truly exhausted the "I'm busy right now", "I won't be on for long" and have done the logging on as invisible, there are only 2 options I see. The one you pick depends on how blunt you are.

#1 (really blunt) - Just unfriend them and mute them. Don't tell them, don't say anything, just do it. They will not be able to contact you, and you move on with your SL. Chances are, unless they have few friends in SL, it will take them a while to notice you have dropped off of their list anyway. They will eventually get the hint tho. With this option there is no going back tho, even if they get thru to you somehow you have to ignore them and you can never be friends again.

#2 (not so blunt) - Tell them you are on SL to have fun, but you feel they are looking for more than that, and a SL romance is not on your agenda. Tell them you would like to still be friends and talk to them, but they can't be smothering you and pouncing on you the second you log on. If they can stick to that maybe you can keep them around, and if not, see #1 above.

P.S. Can you set them up with someone else?

XXOO
Di