lysana

One nitpick on an otherwise insanely cool article:

The Norse Eddas aren't medieval. They predate that by several centuries. They were transcribed from oral and other sources by monks who dinked with the material to get what they wanted out of it. So no, the gods Marvel turned into aliens from another dimension weren't made up by medieval drunks. They were honored as gods at a far earlier stage in human history.

That said, if people are going to get pissy about how those gods are depicted, let's start with how Thor is supposed to be a redhead and run the list from there. But that requires ragging on Marvel Comics instead of Kenneth Branagh, and is just as intelligent and appropriate an argument.

It's worse than that. You don't get to create your last name in Second Life. They provide a pool of last names when you create your account, and your first name is the part you have full control over barring prior usage of the same combination.

You might want to tell that to Sun Microsystems and many other businesses who use Second Life for training, meetings, and morale-building across international boundaries. They'd be surprised to hear they gain zero benefit from using SL.

Considering the amount of FUD that gets thrown around SL, the "it was only suspensions" rumor doesn't surprise me. I've been chewed out by someone for calmly debunking false claims about bots that fake being long-established users that strip your land bare of everything when you friend them. Nevermind pointing out that the application/server link cannot be exploited by a calling card. It has to be real, someone else said so.

Bri, there wouldn't be all that many abandoning SL over that. The arguments over the age verification happened months back when it was first rolled out to estate owners for beta testing and were referred to frequently in the intervening timespan.

As for the botting, Sorcefire, SL has many shops within it. It also ranks places in Search based on traffic numbers. So a less than scrupulous shop owner could create a set of alt accounts and park them somewhere on his/her property to drive up their traffic numbers because each alt would count as a steady presence on the land. Camping for Lindens would lead to people creating a batch of alt accounts and commandeering camping chairs or pads to build up their inworld income.