WTF is up with Burning Life?

Whoever is running it seems to miss the concept of Burning Man/Burning Life.

http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=18341

Having one "burner" kicked out for what was obviously personal reasons should be proof enough that the event should not have been so blithely handed over to someone who previously broke the TOS for being underage on the main grid.

The whole thing is a farce.

I concur. :\ Doesn't feel like the Burning Life I came to know and love... it's damn depressing.

Hooray for community-led events!!!!!!

Hard to be much worse than BL 2005 where LL sorta forgot to give ownership of parcels to the artists.

It did accidentally allow players (e.g. me) to plunk down guerilla installation pieces on ungranted land, which was probably more Burning Man-ish than they could have done intentionally.

'Twas also the year of the phallic fountain which despite serious artistic merit would likely be "broadly offensive" today.

One big difference between the real life event and Burning Life is the fact the builders in the RL event have provide their own materials and that usually limits what gets built. With Burning Life, LL is footing the bill and even at LL's cost, bandwidth is not free. Dealing with all the various problems connected with it like petty disputes like this run up the cost in labor to unreasonable levels real quick. Dealing with the putz who thinks his advertising display of fluorescent didoes is art or the artist who sees nothing wrong in a towering penis waterfall. It is enough to make you want to grab a gun and shoot people in the face.. a lot.

Burning Life isn't a free for all, never has been. There have been rules in place since the first one, this is nothing new. Prims have always been a problem. Content has always been a problem. People saying they are big shots in SL and should get special privileges has been a huge problem as well. Burning Life has finite resources so everyone can't build whatever they want The TOS also means they can't build whatever either. Trying to divvy up the resources fairly becomes a nightmare.

So I'm guessing that a crucifix submerged in urine would be right out.

I always wonder - who tested the liquid to be sure it was urine - it might have just been beer!

No, it was urine. It was titled "Crucifix in Urine" and if you read up on the artist you would know that was his gig, making beauty from the profane. It is, no matter how you feel about it, a pretty picture.

I think it would make a great Burning Life display if it included a bio of the artist and a breakdown on the controversy surrounding it. It was, in my opinion, unfairly lumped in with the thinly veiled homo-erotica that the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe made and created such an uproar when it was discovered the US government was paying him to make them (in a round about way through the national endowment for the arts which was subsequently gutted). Americans were manipulated by the media into thinking they were paying tax dollars for desecrating the cross and gay porn, which wasn't true but it served its purpose, it made headlines and helped sell commercial airtime for the networks. It also allowed politicians to garner votes by crusading against the waste of money the NEA represented even though it was tiny and produced far more good than bad.

Rather than "reward" this immature control freak with such responsibility, seems like he should have been banned. Thanks to dolts like him, we all have to deal with age verification now. Woohoo, LL.

That's the problem with art, many think they are privileged to define that which escapes definition.

Serrano's "Piss Christ" (are we talking about the same thing?) isn't much of a photograph exclusive of its explanation. Contrariwise, to claim Mapplethorpe was a pornographer shows a rather narrow view of a very influential 20th Century photographer. Throw away all his images that you couldn't show on US television and you still have a significant corpus of art.

My, but we have strayed. IBTL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Piss_Christ_by_Serrano_Andres_%281987%29.jpg
http://www.mapplethorpe.org/portraits.html

It wasn't really a community run event, not at first, there's the problem.

However, things seem to be improving. I think everyone's getting a better idea of how to operate under the new, less Lindeny conditions.

I give a Yay for everyone trying to make this work.

Did anyone else volunteer to run BL and secure the sims?

I'm not clear on how this years leadership got their approval, it does sound like ___ submitted a proposal and was given approval to run the event and sims -- might it be better for the Lindens to set something up so that various proposals can be submitted, and then viewed and voted on by the residents of SL?

If I've understood the nature of your question, the answer would probably be no. At the time, there was only early chatter in the BL06 group about revamping it for this year, and questions about whether LL would even be having BL this year.


This is pretty much the way BL07's Linden attaché presented it at Wednesday's meeting, noting that LL had intended to get Burning Life started soon, but they were impressed by the scope and passion of ___'s proposal and decided to give him the chance.

The current resident director of BL07 moved swiftly and early - something I might actually find commendable in light of BL06's feeling like something of an afterthought on LL's part and being woefully under-promoted -- if only ___ had displayed the same level of people skills as he's displayed organisational skills. There's a glibness and disrespect in almost all communications from him that's like getting shot in the eyes with lemon spray and being told how fresh everything smells now.

Despite the current level of discord I still have hopes that BL07 can be salvaged, with or without a change in directorship, and it's encouraging to hear the Linden attaché making note of all this for next year's Burning Life to-do list. The Burners themselves are determined not to let it get taken over and misshapen beyond all recognition, at least not without a struggle.


I concur, it's been a swift and disorienting adjustment for most of us, having LL hand the reins over so easily. We're only now realizing we CAN make Burning Life what we want it to be, not just what one of us wants it to be. That's why I'm still optimistic.

Egad... I think so but what I remember was a lighter color and had a lot of bubbles in it. Of course it's been 20 years or so and my memory isn't that great. I must be misremembering the title too, I did remember it had a name that said what was in it.





No, no... sorry, I must have been drunk or something when I wrote this. The pictures presented during the NEA controversy were, with out doubt, homo-erotic and included young boys in some of them. Homo-erotic is not pornography by the way, just as Giorgione's Venus Sleeping is erotic but not pornographic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Giorgione_Venus_sleeping.jpg Yes, Mapplethorpe was a really good photographer and not all his work was erotic, hetero or homo but the ones that were singled out as a waste of taxpayer dollars were.

D'accord. Thanks.

We now return you to a less esoteric discussion already in progress.

non-stop burning man in every public sandbox 24 7

And now the website for distributing plots (burninglife.org) is down?

{edit}
Ah, reorg meetings on Sunday the 2nd, at 2pm.
{/edit}

Hello the land is put on hold till further notice because of some database issues.

Even if Burning life was run on a single sim and people were only given 512 prim basic plots..it would be better than the egotistical control freaks' 'official' burning life.

I too am trying to keep my head up. When I came in, I was a bit taken aback by the censorship of sexual things being on people's camps/art installations. I guess having just got back from the freedom of expression at the real festival this year, I was confuzzled by such restrictions.

Anyhow, the drama continues. As Events lead I am doing the best I can to meet the deadlines and continue to give people hope that something can come out of this event...despite that the wiki is down down until further notice while the drama gets sorted out.

Next year, maybe there wont be drama. Then again, will there be a next year?

wandering around this year's BL i felt more like i was in the public sandbox zone, rather then any kind of artist event. i had even gone so far as to build a rather large, and somewhat interesting exibit, but after seeing the mess that was thrown down early on, i decided against it.. nothing was organized at all, and im not sure half the "artists" spent much time on the work. BM is supposed to be an expression of creativity and freedom, why did BL become an expression of psudo-greifing, and bad advertising?

What Mordred said.