Please read my "retraction" of sorts.
In my apparent quest to become Joshua X, Noted Internet Terrorist (at least as far as Second Life goes) I've recently decided to go head-to-head with its most famous of residents. Anshe Chung.
My beef with Anshe goes way back. If you've heard of Second Life, chances are you've heard of her, because she (instead of, for obvious reasons, the rampant gay furry porn) is one of the things the developers, Linden Lab, holds up on their shoulders as a "hai guys! look at what we did!" type of accomplishment. Recently she even patted herself on the back with the lofty announcement that she'd made a million dollars through her in-world business of buying, selling and renting virtual land.
Which would be all fine and lovely if not for the fact that Anshe Chung is a huge cunt.
Yep, I used the C Word.
Though she's been (wisely) out of the spotlight for some months now, Anshe was once notorious for her anti-social in-world behavior and bizarre forum rantings. I can't link to them, unfortunately, because the SL forum requires account registration to read, but one choice gem is her promise to a resident who complained at the way Anshe treated him that she would send the ghost of her dead uncle to hunt him down and stab him in the eye. Then there's the more horrible complaints; as a landlord Anshe has actively deleted the content of people who had items on land that they rented from her. She rented out a sim to a group and later demanded that it be rezoned for commercial development by a certain deadline and then deleted said content well before that deadline was reached. Then there's the story of how she deleted an artist installation on an island she bought from someone else. She was sold the island and removed all of the content on it without contacting the current occupants, all to rezone it for "residential" purposes. And the accusations (but read here verified complaints that the Lindens refused to punish her for) that she has repeatedly extorted residents into selling their land to her by making it inaccessible through terraforming the surrounding plots to great heights, surrounding it with ugly objects to ruin the view, or outright banning them from all adjacent parcels until they agreed to sell, often at rates much lower than market value. I can go on, and on, and on with more of these things, but this entry's already too long.
But you can understand now, I'm sure, why I bristle every time I see her on the cover of magazines as if we should be proud of her for figuring out the worst ways to treat people and exploiting her lack of a soul or conscience. I've been accused of "just being jealous" for my attitude towards her, and while I certainly do wish I'd made a bazillion virtual dollars myself, I'm more proud of the fact that the few hundred odd I've amassed in the months I've been running a "business" came through my own creations and not me bullying people.
Oh yeah, and Anshe originally was a prostitute in SL. That's another detail the newspapers don't seem to catch. 
So as I said, recently she held her self-congratulatory press conference. It didn't exactly go the way she planned. A few minutes in, it was "attacked" by anonymous people using penises. Yes, penises, and lots of them. They bombarded the conference for fifteen minutes until she was forced to move, and once she did they successfully managed to crash the sim entirely. I can't say I didn't feel a certain amount of schadenfreude at her misfortune and the fact that her "Go me!" conference was hijacked and turned into one big dick joke.
So I decided to get involved on my own. Her Wikipedia article has been, historically, a matter of great controversy, simply because anything bad about her is deleted right away. Being no stranger to edit wars, I said fuck that and rewrote the entire page from scratch. An interesting side-note to the story is that "noted" journalist (chortle) and SL resident Urizenus Sklar (since their DNS is apparently programmed by monkeys, you may or may not be able to read this website. It doesn't like daylight or something. Suffice it to say that as a SL "news-source" it's basically The National Enquirer meets Scientology manifestos, but with less journalistic integrity) has been actively trying to delete the criticism on the page with his own hands. Why would a supposed unbiased reporter do something like this? Because An$he pays him massively in advertising revenue for a website that only works if you do a nude dance around your modem.
But I digress.
The funny bit of drama to wrap the week up is the fact that, following the penis attack, Anshe and her husband went about filing frivolous DMCA notices against any and all media sources that covered the attack and managed to get a recording released by the griefers pulled from YouTube. What was her reasoning? The articles referenced copywritten material, specifically screenshots of her avatar, without written consent from Anshe Chung Studios, LLC. This is an important point to highlight. She's saying, essentially, that despite holding a public press conference out in public as a public "SLebrity," she owns the copyright on her presence, basically. If that wasn't absurd enough, her husband called the attack "cyber rape porn." I'm sure all victims of violent crime agree with this; getting bombarded with flying virtual penises is easily the same as being raped. Though her argument has absolutely no legal standing the turn of events is causing me to gigglemadly.
5 January 2007 at 9:55 pm | 4 Comments »
bitching, virtual worlds
I'm sure you'll all appreciate that. Also under the sitemap link up in the above menu, I listed the (ridiculously numerous) ways to get in touch with me if email ain't your thang.
