Happy Birthday, billy Madison

I just spotted the little fella in an Edward Sissorhands alt on Mt. Jaffee. Kinda sad.

It was at the very spot where one of his other alts harassed me last September (a joke played out to test someone else, apparently) in the early days of his Jaffee quick start project (free land for residential/non-commercial builds). My Tibetan hermitage was the first build on that project and the first to leave: I sensed a credibility/stability issue at hand and pulled my build ASAP.

What is fascinating about all of this (Billy's hoax and the ensuing flame threads, now mostly closed) is how it mimics reality television, where people willingly court public humiliation and punishment for mass attention and, sometimes, sympathy. Where's Dr. Phil when you need him?

And I wonder about the very closure of threads on Billy and other topics, which is, in one sense, an edit of SL's collective memory. Instead of closing off forum discussions on this bizzare chapter in SL history, why not let people rant and rave? This is how RL communities debate ethics and morals and, yes, it does get messy. Instead, we get summary closure, reminiscent of single-party state media: "This forum thread has outlived its useful discussion period...."

I can see why our Linden cousins might want to minimize the PR impact of, say, a journalist doing a story on SL's low, tawdry moments (we're all supposed to be brilliant, bleeding edge electronic consumers, right?), but the creeping Soviet-style adjudication of acceptible content diminishes the credibility of SL's in-house forums.

You're darn right this is off-topic. I would have posted this in the correct spot, but the most relevant threads (on Billy and his antics) were already closed. Maybe these forums are already dead, as some (like Prokofy Neva, I believe) have argued elsewhere: still haunted by Second Lifers who linger around long after the conversation has ended, much like sad Billy on his lonely mountain in Jaffee.