Second Life Sketches
August 24th, 2006 | researchmaterial
No-entry fields are beginning to piss me off. If you own a plot on Second Life, you have the option of only allowing selected people to enter it. Everyone else bounces off a no-entry field thrown up around your parcel’s borders. If you have a little money, you can even buy a piece of code that forcibly ejects people who attempt to enter the parcel.
I sold some beachfront land because I couldn’t travel around it. It was boxed in by no-entry fields. I like flying around and looking at things. Bouncing off invisible shit every ten seconds got old fast.
While waiting for a download to finish a few nights back, I took a vehicle up from Integral Castle to look at some of the high-altitude construction in the area. Flew over one of those ejection fields, couldn’t get off the parcel (which was seven hundred meters below me) quickly enough, got ejected clean out of the vehicle and landed about 18 acres away. The vehicle returned to my Lost And Found folder next time I logged in. Pain in the arse.
Was there actually anyone in any of the no-entry areas? Of course not. Was anyone going to run around in their houses IMing the owner with “im in ur r00m im touching ur stuff”? Of course not. Is it people not wanting strangers to see that their house is equipped with apparatus for the robo-yiffing of giant rabbits? Well, maybe.
But mostly it’s the worst side of property rights — not only can you not come near my house, but I’m also going to make it really fucking difficult for you to even move around it. When people start doing this en masse, it makes a joke of the commons and the right to travel freely. I may not have the inalienable right to come in and use your toilet, but if I don’t have the right to cross the fucking road or fly over your house while a few hundred meters in the air, you have some serious issues, and so does the system.
When the grid comes back up today, I will probably be found and and around Integral Castle, Rogla (174, 120, 124)/ http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rogla/174/120/124/ — trying to work out how to join land parcels together. I still have the Apparat Programme playing in the castle, and have put a radio in the centre of the grounds outside. There’s temporary seating on the first floor of the castle, as I work towards eventually doing scheduled appearances there.
is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as 
Ah, you see… I don’t know about this new obsession of yours with SL. Don’t know if I should take the plunge and start creating wacked out 3D avatars to hump other polygonal weirdos, or take the whole affair as another sign of the impending flu-rabiit-mesopotamian-’pocalypse.
Can you show us ths thing inside there that clinched it for you.
note to self: don’t post drunk again.
Hey, Warren… I’m a fan of yours from the Lazarus Churchyard days. I hadn’t realized that you’re a resident of SL until I read your post about it the other day. I subsequently posted about it on Second Life Insider. Would you be willing to do an interview with me for the site? We can either do it in-world (preferable, as I can get screenshots), or I can send you questions to answer. I’m also available on IM: Yahoo, AIM, and MSN, if you prefer.
You can reach me at akelatal@gmail.com if you’ve any interest in this. I know that our blog has a growing readership, including a few Lindens, so anything you’d like to talk about that you want to see implemented has a good chance of being seen by the right people. Thanks for your consideration, and thank you for Transmet!
That’s one of the first new things I noticed, when I got back on SL last week. And yes, it’s very damn annoying.
My friend Sab lined someone’s property with singing bananaphones because they were blocking her from the other side of her own building…
Scheduled appearances?
Holy shit!
i joined for a short while, couldn’t stop masterbating over my own avatar. beats the real world anyday in that regard.
[…] Warren Ellis: SL is a gated community […]
[…] 1 - Second Life Sketches Warren Ellis is roaming the metaverse again…or at least he is when invisible forcefields don’t stop him. (tags: frustration ejection fields no-entry metaverse Life Second Ellis Warren) […]
Well, let me tell you what I think this GULAG ‘YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO CLEAR THE AREA’ crap is all about in Second Life (btw, I don’t allow security orbs or the red no-access lines in my rentals). It’s not even about *the property* as such, i.e. “get the hell off my property”. It’s merely about people being really really precious about their cybering and their sex pose balls. The hatehatehate the idea of any stranger coming in and *going on* their sex balls. It’s like those sex balls are their genitals, and they want them to be their “privates” literally and they HATE the idea that some other fuckwad could come in and soil them. Even though, who’s to know, who’s to care, you are offline, and it’s not like you’re going to get crabs in a virtual world, duh. But people hate this more than anything — and that is at the *center* of the entire idiocy in SL.
And of course they hate the idea of you bursting in on them while they’re ON their poseballs live. They think that if they keep you from physical entry, they also keep you from being a peeping tom, but of course, anybody can zoom in a camera if they feel like it. But having the unmolested protected space around them while they’re on the poseballs is vital to people — they get hugely, irrationally angry about it — and I think this could be some kind of biological thing coded into people by Nature, that they instinctively get aggressive about any other animal disturbing their sex act, so they can complete it and reproduce.
The ferocity with which people deal with this in SL can only be explained by such biological coding. They want absolute, airtight, locked-down, maximum-security space to have sex in without ANYBODY coming near them. You’d think, ok, after they have their sex 3-4 times a day max, well, can’t they open up their land the rest of the time? No, because they’re either watching pron, or they’re in intimate poses, or not dressed, or whatever, talking to their friends, and they just don’t want ANYBODY in there. Either you learn to provide this option to them to make this possible, or you don’t do rentals or sales in SL. It may seem insane, but it’s a fact of life.
SOOO I have advocated making the avatar the center of the security and have him be able to have a forcefield around him of 20 meters so that you can forcefield yourself instead of houses/properties. I’ve also advocated outlawing security orbs as weapons and make it a bannable offense to TP people home without warning. The Lindens skirt around this issue.
Fortunately, there are still whole swathes of people, mainly on the mainland, who don’t run their lives this way. That is, they either make a skybox to have sex in, or they figure, who’s to care? so somebody barges in, big deal, I’ll log off and come back later or whatever. AND there are quite a few people who do not chose to have sex in SL and care more about thinking, discussing, building, creating so you network around with them, and you don’t get the red bans in your face.
I guess the question for me is whether you can screenshot and caption graphic novels in SL. I’ve done some comics and such — it’s hard work. They don’t make it easy for you. TO have them inworld is damn expensive too at $10 a pop for the uploads of the pages/textures.
[…]  Although it’s not in Teen Second Life, Warren Ellis, has a lot of teen appeal. While probably best known for his Transmetropolitan series as a graphic novel author, he is also a writer of videogames, animation, books, screenplays, and tv. Starting January 9, he will be writing a weekly SL column for Reuters on “Second Life Sketches.” He started these on his blog in August 2006 here. […]
[…] Although he won’t be in Teen Second Life, Warren Ellis has a lot of teen appeal. While probably best known for his Transmetropolitan series, as a graphic novel author, he is also a writer of videogames, animation, books, screenplays, and tv. Starting January, 9 he will be writing a weekly SL column for Reuters on “Second Life Sketches.” He started these on his blog in August 2006 here. […]