Philip Linden on Zoning

That might be true in most cases, blaze, but I was responding regardng my opinion.

For me, the only issue is in the delivery. ...and the extended versions, at times.

Yes yes yes. Sometimes talking about bad ideas helps everyone understand good ideas, I don't mean you shouldn't post an idea unless it will turn out to have merit in the end. There are lots of counterintuitive situations where seemingly good ideas turn out to be bad, or seemingly bad ideas turn out to be good.

What I mean is that you won't pursuade other people to your way of thinking just by being polite. Flattery works on the shallow, intimidation works on the meek. But if you want to convince a thinking person, you need need reasoning.

ah, whups missed that.

it really freaks me out when someone around here tries to look at it from both sides.

stop that! you might ruin my finely tuned sl forum cynicism

See.. this is exactly what I'm talking about. Totally unecessary. "screaming", "sobbing"... sigh. so belittling


Blaze... what can I say?


Although I'd like to add, that I do think the Lindens are paying attention to Prok. Perhaps now he can be a little happier, a little less aggressive, a little more respectful of other players. And a little less anti FIC.

Yup, it's a personality quirk alright! I've learned to speed read over that stuff though. I guess that's why it doesn't effect me anymore.

I suspect he'll get over it eventually.

Unless he suffers from brain cancer or something.

I actually knew a person who everyone thought was the meanest person in the world and everyone constantly complained about them, but then we found out they had a type of brain cancer that makes you kinda nasty.

Some people felt guilty (I did) for not being more understanding, other people said this person deserved all that they got.

I think it says a lot about a person which side of that they come down on.

No blaze, you have it wrong. Prok is no messenger, Prok is zealous, alarmist, odious and a fink. Most of Prok's issues are ill concieved and biased. Sure Prok has ideas, tenacity and articulation, but it saddens me to the point of anger, that it's wasted by his contempt for other's criticism. Prok is successful at hijacking any number of these threads, every single day to bring attention to himself. If everyone in SL posted like blaze and Prok, these threads would be a clusterfuck. Not that they are already laughable.

It's not sugar coating that people want, blaze. People want genuine discussion with civil tones. Prok does not qualify that. I don't diminish Prok's right to post here, but I just think Prok need's to learn a little respect by accepting criticism with a grain of salt, rather than a pound of flesh. Several times, I've seen Prok alienate his own supporters by his rude responses to others.


Heaven forbid you would hear Prok say "I disagree, but thank you for your comment."

Good point.

Sigh.

Well, look at it from this perspective if you have a hard time being the bigger person.

The more you launch into diatribes like this, the more you're going to fuel him. And the more you attack him, the more you define the culture of this community as SL vrs Prok, to the point is that the community literaly becomes that conflict. It's raison d'etre, so to speak.

Is that what you think SecondLife is about? Attacking Prok?

C'mon blaze.

No, it's not everyone's dream to attack Prok, blaze. Sheesh. Are you that narrow minded?

Do really think people say "I want to join SL because there is someone I can bash in the forums."?

The question was rhetorical.

Obviously you don't think that, however if the community continues to obsessively follow up every post with an attack, it will start to define its character by that activity.

For example, the whole FIC phenomenom. I thought it was amusing and evocative catchphrase, yet somehow it has become ingrained in the culture to the point people are creating websites, LL is doing april fools pranks, the Herald is writing articles about it, SL residents are configuring their parcels and spending hours in Photoshop coming up with complex graphics of it.

Trust me, this is not healthy.

Healthy would be thinking about the elitism and trying to patiently encourage Prok to debate in a positive way.

But what is happening here is not healthy. What is happening here is bordering on full-blown mass insanity.

Let me clear this up before responding further. This is about the community attacking Prok, and not the reverse? Unable to see the middle ground perhaps?

The FIC does not exist blaze. It's purely a phenomenom of some people and their perceptions and little else.

Secondly, alot of people HAVE tried to talk to Prok in a positive way, but he derails himself time and time again.

I'm getting a good laugh at it all.

People don't get what satire is.

They make satire themselves, kinda, because they thought they got it.

The Bolshevik-type posters in the 1920s Soviet art style are especially funny.

But...their continued thin-skinned replies and angry posturing shows they cannot look at themselves.

What are the zoning tools proposition numbers? Anyone have them all? I need to go vote on something.

What I am doing in "Ansheland" is mostly not rental. Less than 20% of residents chose the rental option, most bought into the project. It is like buying a condominion as opposed to renting one flat, with my business acting as the mangement company.



Where there is demand I will supply

Having read this thread I agree with blaze on one fundamental issue though:

The unlimited cheap supply of private island sims is one very very bad thing for Second Life land market and will ultimately ruin prices if Linden Lab won't include those sims in the land release formula!

Removing island land sales (and at least in my case we do talk about sale and not just rental) from FIND and such thing is no solution. The only proper solution to this problem is to limit release of island sims and include them in auction system!

That's interesting, thanks for that transparency, so few businesses ever tell you anything like that in SL.

When I say "your rental communities" I guess I am joining most of the community in the sense that "Ansheland" is a form of renting, not buying.

You could make the arguments that you're no different than LL. People pay tier to LL, and now they just pay tier to you (and get a much better deal, I might add because you can differentiate the tier levels and have less huge and harsh jumps).

But...there's something about it all that just doesn't feel like "buying" to people. I haven't yet had a chance to come in to Ak'sha tho I hope to in the near future to see what the system is like when you go through all the steps (no subsitute for experience, unlike all those sitting on the sidelines sniping). I'm not sure how extensive your building/zoning type rules are, maybe they are more than Midge, and maybe that's a good thing (like if you have dunes and sand, obviously you want someone to make an artificial pond, green trees and an RV trailer park like it's a national forest, disturbing the sim's look).

It doesn't bother me personally that your land isn't "really for sale" as some feel even with your restrictions, but in one sense we all know no land is "for sale". But as a person in the rentals business myself, I can see that while many players find renting a great option, for some a long-term option if they don't want to get into credit cards and having a tier payment to face every month with no flexibility, and others need rentals to save money for 4-6 weeks, what some people want to do is just hang in a rental maybe to socialize for awhile, but then they want their own place. It is touching to me to fly around and see my former tenants sometimes who lived in beautiful, architectural gems from the top SL architects in my communities, and saved money for a little while, then went and bought their own land. There, they sometimes pay more to LL in tier than what they paid me in rent, and they live in their own newbie boxes. Such is the desire of people to have their very own spot, with their very own creativity, and their very own house under their control to modify. We simply have to pay attention to that desire of people!

interesting.

I suppose a lot of what you write could be defined as satire, although it takes a bit of a mind reader to know when you are using satire and when you are just royally pissed off. Now, when you used your alts to poke fun at the new voting system, that was funny and perceptive at the same time.

There is talking with people, and there is talking *at* people.

TANGENT: I wonder if that's why some journalists feel threatened by the high-end, intelligent bloggers (i'm not referring to the rabid dogs), because there's a feedback loop rather than being able to make up facts and interpretations and have it accepted as gospel. Since journalistic fact checking and objectivity has been more of a myth than reality, with some notable and respectable exceptions, many of the claims of moral and journalistic superiority ring false.

You can dish it out but you can't take it.

If everybody is done with all their flames and insults and stuff now, perhaps we can focus on some of the points made here.

blaze has repeatedly praised Ingrid's leadership in Boardman. And I, too, repeatedly praise Ingrid's leadership in Boardman. I agree, that what a sim beautification project needs is a strong personality who is willing to busy themselves with all sorts of concerns, whether removing griefers and viewblockers, making sure people buy the properties who are committed to being residential, pooling tier, whatever.

Ingrid has made it clear to me that she is not supporting/running a tier-donation scheme. She is just buying enough land for herself and some of her friends to build on. A few of her friends have also built in Boardman. (If they made a tier-pooling arrangement I haven't heard of, tell me).

Boardman, where Maxx already lived, is attractive to Maxx, that's why he spent $242 US to get a lot there. And a few other artists live there apparently.

Maxx complained that SL was turning into "suburbia" and needed to have "an artists' enclave". But Boardman *is* suburbia and *is* an artists' enclave, and that maybe has something to do with the fact that basically, SL "artists" are suburbanites in other kinds of jobs by day, who like to play artist by night. And that's fine with me! I get to do other things by day, too, and then get to play real estate agent at night! Fun!

But let's try to parse out here what's going on, if you can do it without all the usual flames and snipes.

An artists' enclave, even a suburban artists' enclave of suburbanites who are playing artist, is NOT the same thing as a residential community, broadly understood -- though they overlap. And while everyone will feel I've scorched them to a crisp by pointing out that they aren't RL artists (just like I'm not a RL real estate agent), isn't that the crux of why you are so thin-skinned in these forums? But try to get a little distance from yourselves and see what this is about! A game!

It is a "themed community" in the sense of something "special," like the themed communities the Lindens had in the past with a prim tax holiday. That's good! That's grand! Anshe has themed communities too like "French-speaking". But it isn't the same thing as zoned residential communities writ large.

Why? Because it can exist only due to very strong bonds of friendship, strong leadership, incredible dedication, artistic endeavors that give everyone a shared sense of purpose, and a sense of a common enemy (trust me, if I didn't exist, you'd have to invent me )

What you wouldn't want to be happening in Boardman is for someone just to drop down from the sky and set up either a spinning glowing griefer tower or a giant kitsch suburban Victorian textured dollhouse fantasy that would clash with your tongue-in-cheek satirized suburban primmed "look". And the Lindens share that desire because they've been putting plots of Boardman up on the auction.

Taber is like that too, as we've discussed elsewhere, a community of very intensely bonded people in a shared endeavor with strong leadership and community, special circumstances, a sense of a common enemy, etc.

So when the Lindens or you have discussions about "zoned communities" what I'm hearing is that it's about "how can we have little grouplets of really talented individuals with high octane art or architecture skills, a sense of shared endeavor, a strong leadership, and a common enemy". Really, that's what it boils down to. How can we make like 3 more Tabers and Boardmans? What does it take? Obviously, if you tried to make 30 more Tabers and Boardmans, they'd become so Trumanville and so cookie-cutter that they'd lose that special artist-enclave feel that drives up real-estate prices in RL places like Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

I'm interested in artists' enclaves, and I can see the value of a Boardman, which is kinda like a kewl little artists and designers wiki (rounding out the flavour of SL which before the SimArts people came in here and expanded the ranks of architects, often felt more like a lot of tekkies interested more in weird sci-fi builds, vehicles and weapons). Would a Boardman today *ever* have become possible without a Barnesworth Anubis -- and you deny the role of the individual in history, you determinists!

But we don't need 10 Lindens and a special program to make such a thing happen, a few artists can buy a few sims, put their money where their mouths are, and make artists' enclaves (which I hope you now see is a distinct subset of "residential communities). They've shown they can do it when subsidized, but my God, some of them coin money in RL, and should just get whole sims and show us what they can do under public scrutiny and stop trying to posture in front of game devs.

If we can make a distinction: "the project of making high-octane artists' enclaves" and "the project of making garden-variety residential zoned sims" then perhaps Ardith Mifflin can shut up about picket-fences. That is, she's not likely to shut up, but she can do her ranting from her 2048 in a Boadman or a Taber, with her draw distance down to 128. We won't wake you until we have a Bedazzle, Ardith, don't worry!

So what I'm interested in discovering is whether you can make both controlled residential sims, and voluntary residential sims, that are for NON-artists, the "what about the people who have no talent" majortity. I mean communities that have a tolerance for a mixture of newbies, Victorian kitsch, and grand architecture, just like the RL tolerance often exists even in a cookie-cutter suburban tract. I'd like to discover what the rules of success are for cooperation of complete strangers in a game on a sim. I guess I'm terribly concerned about this fake open society that some of the open-source people tout, which amounts to a lot of little grouplets and sects and high-minded pairing off or grouping off into tiny niches where they reign supreme, cut off from other grouplets except through networks of warring pack dogs either griefing, or fighting griefers and becoming griefers themselves. I find the prospect of this landscape truly horrifying.

That's why I think it is VERY important to figure out how you can get communities right in the early stages of this kind of world by establishing some kind of cultural norms that ensure freedom and diversity, not tyranny under one person or vision.

So far, the cultural norms in SL only belong to the FUCK YOU AND DIE school for the most part -- I get to do WTF I want to on my property, and my neighbours and their views be damned. In RL, you'd never be able to put up a glowing spinning box or sheets of plywood with political texts on them in your yard without having some pretty serious problems with neighbours and even the town fathers. I can remember a RL lady into wiccan and herbs with a disabled son who lived in a neon-pink shack near a suburban enclave I was familiar with who was run out of town on a rail eventually by vindictive picket-fence neighbours and a bourgeous village council. I'd like to think that SL has a place for that lady and her purple box with the herb gardens sprouting in riot all around it. On the other hand, if her unchained dogs range around the neighbourhood and bite everybody (something they were finally able to pin on her), she's responsible.

Like many people, I want SL to have more freedom than RL but I don't want people to feel they can get away with checking their civility at the door without any consequences. Currently, they have absolutely no incentive to do anything other than that.

I think if I "couldn't take it" Ingrid, I wouldn't be here.

Hey, did I tell you your house rented!

Boardman, the City sims, Taber, Lusk are all examples of one or two people starting with an idea and everyone else jumping on board. The neighbours end up all knowing each other, and a community is formed.

I think It's really interesting to see whats happened in Grignano, where Salazar Jack started with a few Brownstones and the rest of the residents there decided to build the same way. That sim looks cohesive...sort of "old part of town". Same thing happened in Miramare.

In the case of Boardman and the city sims, this was just a voluntary process.. there wasn't any planning, it just happened. And as such, I don't think you can work it into some kind of a business model for other new sims. Or at least I can't see how you could.

I agree with you and blaze, though I think the phrase "strong personality" may be misleading.

The thing that is somewhat unique about Ingrid's "leadership" is that her actions speak louder than words. Many times you see grandiose pronouncements on these forums announcing someone's intentions to create a themed sim, a cooperative build, or other ambitious project, and nine times out of ten they come to nothing. What Ingrid does is to quietly go about her work and simply get things done (and of course Ingrid is not the only one of this kind...one of the pleasures of living in the city sims is I seem to be surrounded by these sort of actions-speak-louder-than-words types).

Leadership comes in many styles and colors; I think these forums often fail to take into account some of the subtler, less flashy ones.

wow prok, that post was actually pretty civil.

do you really believe that the "cultural norm" in SL is fuck you and die? Not here in the forums -- I am talking about person-to-person in world.

I am in multiple sims and have managed to have decent relations with neighbors and had them be decent to me. I have seen some people get nasty over land issues, but have found this to be the minority.

I HAVE had to move because of builds I didn't like (once even within a zoned environment!), but that is the reality of owning smaller plots and I accepted it. Perhaps that is why I haven't had huge conflicts -- because I haven't tried to fight someone else's rights, but the point is that I have met a lot of people who want to do their own thing, but where possible, do think about their neighbors.

Well, the "everyone else" isn't "everyone else" but their close personal friends in their circle or on their network. We saw from another thread that some people self-sorted -- they'd come to these communities, see it didnt' match with their "vision" and leave, knowing they had to take their vision elsewhere, because grouplets of close, personal friends with high skills like art and design and a shared sense of endeavor and intense bonding need a sense of exclusiveness and they'll drive away anybody who doesn't fit, either consciously, or unconsciously.

I don't know who "the rest of the residents" are in Grignano, or the mystery of how the people who tend to need the most prims to do their big building projects also happened to be the ones who got the double primmed sims It's ok. I moved out of Grignano last night. I used to support it because it looked kewl and I wanted to be with the kewl kids too. But I noticed that it was empty and that social life around the coffee cups that everybody kept talking about never actualy seemed visible IW. And I just got tired of supporting a clique. So now my space is free...and actually quite a few others were free when I flew around last night so if you want to be in a kewl artists' kinda clique, Grignano is the place to be!

Don't get me wrong. Grignano looks good! But I'd like a place to *feel* good too LOL.

I personally am not interested in finding a business model for replicating Tabers. They aren't as interesting to me because I know that when you get together 6 prima donna architects, support them out the wazoo with huge fees or sales agreements, buy all their houses, give them free land to put the houses on, etc. etc. you end up with....well....just a lot of architects who have a lot of your money, don't feel any sense of gratitude, and just go on being prima donnas Let someone else take on this necessary, but difficult philanthropic endeavor!

Boadman did not just happen. It was a Linden zoned sim. It had cheap land because it was PG. Like the Soho loft phenom or the East village tenements phenom, artists gravitate to cheap but played-out areas that they can revitalize. It's a cool thing. No, it's not a business model, without introducing artifice that would kill it, and no, it's not the same thing as "zoned residential communities."

I think Pathfinder needs to hold a new meeting at his house. The meeting will be called "Artists' Enclaves in SL". Ingrid will feel like she can come then. So will Maxx. And various other actual artists and opportunists. Don't worry, I'll be sure not to come, I'm not an artist!