Posted by Shaun Altman
Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:22:00 GMT
I've just had the absolute worst home rental experience of my Second Life, thanks to Ravenglass Rentals and its operator, Prokofy Neva. What happened was so nasty that I felt a need to write up a quick blog post on the topic, so that hopefully my readers will not fall victim as I did. I hope this saves some people from being taken to the cleaners by Ravenglass Rentals.
I decided yesterday to rent an e-home in Second Life, so I could make use of many domestic objects which had been sitting idle in my inventory for some time. Since Ravenglass Rentals was known to me in the past for having nice lands and controlled views, I thought I would check out a few homes in the Ravenglass region. Once there, I found the home pictured above, and immediately fell in love with it. The price was very excessive, but since I liked it so much, I paid the rental box one week's rent.
In exchange for my one week's rent, I received roughly one minute of property usage. While I was in my inventory window looking for my living room set, the owner of Ravenglass Rentals, Prokofy Neva, teleported to my rented home, banned me from the land I had just rented from her and reset the rental box for a new "tenant" (read: sucker) to come along and give her ANOTHER week's rent. My instant messages requesting an explanation and/or refund were subsequently ignored.
This is a very popular land scam, but it is usually practiced on private islands rather than the mainland. What the scammers generally do is sell off a whole island, then boot all of the buyers and sell it off again (and again and again). Its a disgusting practice, and I was very sad to see that it had seemingly become so mainstream that even an old hat such as Prokofy Neva might feel comfortable ripping off unsuspecting Second Life residents in this manner. Indeed, I could hardly believe my eyes.
Now it is true that I am an occasional critic of Prokofy Neva. With this in mind, I thought there may be some chance that she was stealing from me more out of a misplaced sense of spite and revenge than general business practice. Wanting to confirm which was the case, and noting that the e-home was once again available for rent within one minute of the time I had rented it, I asked someone that I know and trust to rent the same e-home from Prokofy Neva.
Again, the rental box was paid one week's worth of what seems like very excessive rent for this property. A sofa was rezed and 20 or 30 minutes passed. Then once again, Prokofy Neva teleported out of the ether, banned the tenant from the property and reset the rental box so it would potentially be able to capture a THIRD week's rent from a THIRD unsuspecting victim.
As with before, there was no refund and no response to IMs requesting an explanation and/or refund. It seems that indeed, this scheme must be a general business practice for Prokofy Neva and Ravenglass Rentals. It is a shame to see a once prominent land lord apparently having to resort to scamming and slum lording tactics to keep her business vibrant and her bills paid during Second Life's great depression. We can only hope that Prokofy Neva's Ravenglass Rentals will return to more ethical business practices as the depression ends.
Either way, after this experience, I'd advise anyone and everyone against renting property from Prokofy Neva, under the Ravenglass Rentals name or any other name. We were victims twice in under an hour, paying two weeks rent and receiving under one hour of property usage in return. It is my sincere hope, as I write this post, that YOU will not be the next victim of land seizure by Prokofy Neva at Ravenglass Rentals.
Posted in Community, Second Life, Business, Economy, Stuff That Makes Me Angry, People, Places | Tags land, neva, prokofy, ravenglass, rentals, scam, theft | 8 comments
Posted by Shaun Altman
Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:29:00 GMT
Linden Lab seems to have sent us another reminder recently that Second Life may have entered a whole new era. This is not the kind of era that we all hope for, such as for example, an era of economic rebound. Instead, it seems to be an era of, among other things, land seizure and account banning conducted by Linden Lab, based on what your powerful well-connected neighbor thinks of you and/or what you've built next-door.
Let me start this article off by saying that I'm not generally one to be critical of Linden Lab, especially in public. I love Second Life, and I truly believe that this type of technology holds a lot of promise for the future in a variety of areas. I also feel that generally speaking, there is no better qualified group of individuals on the planet to usher us into this new technological era than the folks at Linden Lab.
With that said, the events that I've seen occur recently leave me with a feeling of deep concern for what the future of Second Life may be like, and cause me to wonder if I'll even want to participate in that future. Let me share the most recent series of these events with you to the extent that I can recall them.
A couple of nights ago, someone sent me an instant message to tell me about a new build in the Furness region of Second Life. Furness is an un-zoned mainland region which the avatar Prokofy Neva owns a lot of land in and around. I learned that what seems to be a group of students belonging to a university, had begun construction of a tower on some land that one of them had purchased in the region. I knew that Prokofy Neva generally rented virtual houses in this area of the grid, and was curious about what effect a tower may have on the landscape, so I teleported over to Furness to check it out.
When I arrived, I found the avatar IntLibber Brautigan, the avatar Prokofy Neva, a few other avatars who's names I can't recall, and indeed, a partially constructed tower. It seemed to be shaping up to be a very nice tower, which while large, may have added a lot of value to the area. There was also signage present, facing a nearby road, which indicated that this land was to be the future home of Woodbury University in Second Life.
I was pretty busy at the time, so after having a look around the area, I wished the avatars good luck with their school project and teleported back to my home location. The next day, I received a teleport spam from Prokofy Neva, inviting me to the Furness region, with no accompanying instant message. I was still pretty busy, but being ever-curious about what someone as dynamic as Prokofy Neva is up to in Second Life, I decided to accept the teleport invitation.
When I arrived, Prokofy asked me if I remembered what was on the lot we were next to. Indeed, next to us was an empty lot where the tower belonging to the university students stood the night before, but it was no longer there. A closer examination revealed the land to now be owned by Governor Linden.
Prokofy Neva went on to inform me that the avatar who purchased this land had been banned from Second Life, after the seizure of the avatar's property (land) by Linden Lab. He then asked me a very chilling question. I didn't log it, so I can't quote it verbatim, but it was directly along the lines of, "Do you see what I can get done if I want to?".
This event is alarming mostly because when I viewed the build prior to it, there didn't seem to be anything present which violated the rules of Second Life. Prokofy Neva often theorizes about the existence of a secretive and elite cabal of Second Life residents, known as the "Feted Inner Core", or "FIC" for short. According to Prokofy Neva, this is a group of residents who are well-connected with Linden Lab, and receive special favors and/or special treatment within Second Life as a result of those connections.
Prokofy Neva also speculates often in public about which Second Life residents may or may not be members of this shadowy organization. I know a lot of people on this list, and because I've never witnessed an event related to one of them that I could describe beyond a reasonable doubt as special treatment, I've never really bought into the notion of "a FIC" controlling the destiny of Second Life. My eyes have been opened on this issue in a most surprising way though.
If these events took place as I understand them, it seems to me that in fact "a FIC" may be very much alive and well within the grid, and Prokofy Neva may be its chairman. I don't know about you, but personally, I know of no other avatar who can summon some friends with the last name of Linden, and say to them, "I don't like this build. Snatch the land from the person who paid for it, remove the build, and ban the land owner from the game".
In my view, these events serve to highlight a concern that I've felt building in the community for quite a while. I joined Second Life in 2004, which makes me a fairly old avatar by today's standards. Back then, Linden Lab often told us that we were building a world. In fact, the vision that they sold to me, which has kept me so passionately engaged through both good and bad times, was "Your world, your imagination".
Alarming events like these, which are happening often in Second Life's more recent history, seem to indicate that Linden Lab may have lost its way somewhere along the road. I worry that they may have forgotten about why we're all here and why we all invest so much time, emotion, money and expertise into building this brave new world, which they once proudly told us was forged by our imaginations. It appears that Linden Lab may have begun paving a NEW road, comprised of censorship, corporate sanitization, and pandering to the whimsical desires of special interests such as real-world mega-corps and very large land holders like Prokofy Neva, at the expense of the community as a whole.
This is a road that doesn't hold much interest for me as a resident of Second Life. It is my sincere hope that Linden Lab will find its way once again, and return to its roots as true innovators in the fields of communication, collaboration, experimentation and free expression, rather than continuing to evolve into just another sad reminder of the power that the status quo holds over all of us.
Posted in Second Life, Stuff That Makes Me Angry, Places | 7 comments
Posted by Shaun Altman
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 09:38:00 GMT
Let me warn you up front: this is a bit of a rant. It isn't even a Second Life related rant. I hope that it is okay with all of you if I digress a little from time to time. :)
I snapped this picture in a grocery store parking lot a couple of hours ago. This is an all-too-common sight in parking lots across the country. There are cart return queues not even a TEN SECOND WALK from the parking spots in this photo, but these five people are apparently too important to bother using them.
I bet you're asking by now, "Is this seriously a blog post about SHOPPING CARTS?". Well, yes and no. :) More importantly, I'd like to drill down into the underlying social issue that is represented by the cart-litter in this photo: an attitude of entitlement.
What causes this attitude of entitlement amongst people? I would have liked to park in the spaces at the foreground of this photo. My inability to do so caused me to have to waste at least one minute of my life today; a minute that I can NEVER reclaim!
I'd be willing to wager that at least twenty other people who would have liked to park in one of these spaces wasted a minute right along with me before these carts were picked up. And how about the poor soul who's job it is to pick these carts up? I wonder how much productivity that person loses when he has to spend an extra 30 seconds per cart running around the parking lot picking these up. There's two minutes and thirty seconds of that poor person's day wasted JUST from the small amount of cart-litter in this lot that I could fit into a single picture frame.
So here are my questions: What makes these people so special? Why do they feel that they are entitled to waste 23.5 minutes of other peoples' lives, simply so they can leave a parking lot 20 seconds sooner? What gives them a right to make 22 peoples' day a little worse, just so they can shave 20 seconds off of their own? I'll bet that there are 1001 other examples of such a pervasive attitude of entitlement out there every day. This is just the one I happened to spot and photograph this afternoon. What examples can you think of?
In conclusion, I'd like to extend two great big middle fingers to the people who left these carts here, and to everyone else who does rude and inconsiderate things like this on a daily basis. NEWSFLASH! You are NOT entitled to waste the time and energy of countless others, simply to get your groceries home 20 seconds sooner. This is one, of no doubt a great many small examples, of how the world could be a slightly better place, if we were to all dedicate ONLY TWENTY SECONDS each day to considering the needs and desires of our fellow citizens.
Posted in Stuff That Makes Me Angry, etc, People | 14 comments | no trackbacks
