Goodbye Cruel world 1

I posted the following to SL universe this morning. I don't have much time for blogging at the moment, and so although it is probably cheating and will get me expelled from the Good Bloggers' group, I am going to repost here.

And it's goodbye cruel world - forever!
Except, it rarely is, in Second Life. I am sorry I came late to this thread, what can I say, I have been busy, I missed the blog from Ordinal although it is linked and displayed on my blog, and so I only discovered the news this week.

I can understand all of the pressures and frustrations that Ordinal talks about, and I recognise that last straw thing. Also, my avatar seems to be a lot more volatile than I am in real life, and has done a fair bit of flouncing out, deleting builds, and deleting friends from lists... in real life I am lazy and I procrastinate and if friendships fail there it tends to be from lack of picking up the phone rather than a dramatic storming out or throwing of plates.

But... I have become increasingly irritated by the public door slamming. What's it for? If you leave and *don't* delete everything we won't take you seriously? If you leave and do delete everything, we just assume that if you change your mind and want to come back, you'll come back in another body (cf Starax). The mass deletion of stuff doesn't affect LL, it just affects the people left behind... and what is it for, really? I think of it like an artist having a bonfire...such a waste. Why not simply set everything free and put it out in a box? I'm sure Caledon could have found somewhere for *that*.

Maybe people of an aspergery type of mind like to draw a line in the sand and kill it all and have done with it. But many of the "goodbye cruel world" notecards and messages I've had over the past six years have been from the Drama Queens and game players... the ones who might easily approach you in an alt and ask what you think of their main, on the offchance that you won't recognise the batshit insane from the run of the mill....

I'm not accusing Ordinal of Drama Queendom, but it's one of those things you learn not to do over the course of your Second Life: just as you should never actually send that drunken email to your boss telling him he's an idiot, or lickable, or defrauding the company, while drunk... you should always sleep on the decision to delete and leave. Even the geekiest of emotion-free geeks can be seized by the SL deletion madness when angry and frustrated. It has happened to me a couple of times, and now I try to sleep on anything irrevocable, SL or RL.

I understand the frustrations, the perms thing is a real killer, particularly if you have been working away to solve a problem with a complex object, but I do not feel so depressed about the prospects for SL. Since I arrived six years ago it seems to me that SL has been through a large number of incarnations, and it is the constant change and challenge that keeps me interested, keeps me logging on, keeps me learning. I started making animations this week, having tried on numerous occasions before and finding it too hard, I suddenly find I can do it, and understand what I am doing so much better than I did before. SL has opened my eyes to architecture and design in a way that makes me feel I slept through my first 45 years on the planet. I've learned so many skills, I've met so many people and have had fun doing that.

My teenage schooldays impressed me with the horridness and selfishness of other people. I carried on thinking girls were bitchy to all and was a loner until I discovered the marvellous companionship and support of women, once I had children and met a lot of them. SL rehabilitated strangers for me, impressing me with the kindness and generosity of random people helping each other out. I bump into some of those same people here from time to time - Khamon was one.

Despite the sky falling in drama that happens every time there is a change or a bug or an exploit or a dramatic departure, I don't see the sky falling - I see a lot of creative, inspiring people, helping each other still. I passed on the care I'd received to the people I met, and they have passed it on again. People are still more open and honest and generous in SL than I ever expected, and it taught me that, despite a lot of time and attention having been lavished upon the IP theft and scamming side of things, in general people aren't dishonest and horrible... there's just a few of those and we let them make the news all the time. I liked Jeremy Clarkson's recent column for the Times, where he suggested we should simply accept that 5% of all known people are bonkers, and stop making rules for everyone based on what they do... he said it much more elegantly and amusingly than that, here:
What a daft way to stop your spaniel eating the milkman | Jeremy Clarkson - Times Online

I'm really very sorry to see Ordinal go, and I hope she will calm down, throw out any tasks that were on her to do list that don't inspire or amuse her, and stick to the fun and engaging projects which produced so many unique and memorable products.