Musings at Haakon´s Bridge

I am not in the best of moods right now and don´t really know why. This shift in my state of mind came after the last weekend and has not eased off yet.

Following the New Years Day debacle I have found that I, more or less deliberately, have avoided mentioning Ars on my blog so as not to draw unfriendly attention to him again and that I have also raised barriers around my first life. This new found habit of self-censorship is a fundamental betrayal of myself and the reasons for the existence of this blog. It has to stop immediately!

I miss my Ars terribly and the big family I once had in my SecondLife. When I was talking with a friend the other evening and mentioned my SecondLife family he said "I have never really understood the concept of ´family´ in SecondLife." This comment made me start to think what it was all really about and I am not finished thinking about it yet, but when I am I will tell you all.

Yesterday I read a post on the Swedish blog Blanche´s Arena that "the avatar formerly known as Sven Idyll" has now shutdown yet another blog and started a new one instead.

In the new blog he tells us how he and his female "partner in crime" have been successfully researching the SecondLife blogs written by Swedes to find out the bloggers first life identity through compilation of the information they give about themselves in the blogs or elsewhere and by technical data. I am hoping that the collecting and compiling of this information has given them a sense of satisfaction, fulfillment and power so they can find more worthy causes to focus their talents on.

People who feel powerless and frustrated can get dangerous as we have seen many times before and are now witnessing in a trial in Oslo, Norway. I am doing all I can to avoid the radio and television coverage of that trial, it gets too close, and am instead sticking to the reports in the printed media (not the tabloids).

Rewriting History

"Now you see me, now you don´t" Trotsky is wiped out from history

Denialism is the irrational refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality, i.e. when you choose to deny what really has happened as a way to avoid an uncomfortable truth. It is a variation of the negative historical revisionism that sometimes happen when the real past is no longer "suitable" or "appropriate".

On the grander - and of course more important - scale of events this is exemplified by "Holocaust denialism" meaning the denial that death camps ever existed in Nazi Germany or the historical fact that many millions were killed in the concentration camps during the Nazi rule. Another example is the wiping out of Leon Trotsky from history books and photographs of historical events that took place in the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin had risen to power.

On the opposite side of the scale, the much smaller, very petulant and totally banal side, it means rewriting history about what has actually happened between individuals or sometimes groups of individuals. 

For some reason I started thinking about these things after having read the latest posts on the blog anonymously written by "the avatar formerly known as Sven Idyll". It is truly fascinating and gives great insights into the workings of the human psyche.

A Blogs Demise

It was not without some pleasure and great satisfaction that I late last night noticed that the Swedish virtual worlds blog Netlott, previously named Prim Team, declared that it was closing down after only 20 days (February 21 - March 11, 2012).

I have informed you about this blog earlier in my posts "Ich Bin Ein Prim Teamer" and Bukowski & Witches.

The blog started by declaring that the bloggers were a group of people with technical interests and that they together had amassed more than 25 years of experience in virtual worlds. They also declared that they were going to remain anonymous but gave no specific reason for this decision.

I am sure the blog would have been welcomed in the Swedish SecondLife community despite the fact that the bloggers wished to remain anonymous if the blog had settled for their proclaimed field of expertise, the technical aspects of virtual worlds. Such a blog written by people with keen insight and knowledge on the workings of the viewers and a willingness to share and educate the rest of us is sorely needed and would fill a vacuum.

However, the Prim Team and Netlott blog (Netlott is by the way a word play on the English word "net" and the Swedish word "nitlott" which means "drawing a blank"), instead chose to start delving in social issues and unearthing dirty linen and rusty battle axes from the close or distant past. This caused the Swedish community in SecondLife to erupt and the tentative armed peace that had been established over the past two-three months evaporated. Ghouls from the past that had relished in the previous unrest reappeared and the favorite object of hate was yet again reviled.

Once the blog started declaring who was not a member of the blogging team I declared myself to be one of them to see how they would handle that. This was never commented upon.

I am now completely certain that one of the team members is in fact "The avatar formerly known as Sven Idyll". I have come to this conclusion from the language used in some of the posts, some of the topics raised on the blog, a question directed at me by one of the anonymous bloggers which was exactly the same as one Sven Idyll previously had posed to me and now - finally - the way in which the blog was closed.

The blog was shutdown in exactly the same way as Sven Idyll´s previous three (3) blogs. with some choice words of recrimination, "no one understands me", "you have all misinterpreted me" and "you bore me" etc., and letting the blog stay online for a while after removing all the previous comments and assorted posts and not allowing any new comments.

I would be the first to welcome a new Swedish blog that focused on the technical aspects, but we do not need more trolls. We have enough of those already, thank you very much!

UPDATE (04:58 AM SLT): And now "The avatar formerly known as Sven Idyll" has read this post and has posted a not so subtle comeback at me. Hilarious! (No link to that waste of time will be supplied here, I am sure that others will be happy to help you.)

PROBABLY RELATED: My buddy NE0 Timeless over at Free Your Mind has found an interesting article from March 7, 2012, on a Swedish website that could have some connection to this matter. An IT-consultant of sorts is bashing SecondLife as a waste of time and claiming we now have drugs inworld, something called "Seclimine". 

Apparently it is something that messes with the shared inworld experience I gather, as he mentions something about a hazy viewer and sound distortions. I never heard about it though, but I am a sanctimonious prick so...