There was some weird stress yesterday with several people abuse reporting me. This is not uncommon and usually because I refuse to support some collar they bought elsewhere, or some product with my full perm creator name.

People get aggressive, say I made the script/prim and therefore it's my responsibility to support it, then they threaten with an abuse report or bad reviews on the updater or on less expensive products. You get the point.

I used to do SL projects as a full-time job for a living. Making enough in a month would require of me to be present 7 days a week, usually 10 hours or more, it shifted my social life to SL as well, needing of me to be here for that too. This resulted in a perpetual downward spiral and I wouldn't wish anyone having to lead such a life, especially not when passionate about some project they were emotionally invested in. You don't get out so easily anymore then.

Abuse reporting is more serious than most people realize because when it hits the Fraud department, I suppose they are obliged to check it, in my case that could have meant waiting 17 days or more for my money at times. That is money I earned in hard work in 60+ hour weeks spiked with extreme frustration due to the volatile technical nature of the SL platform and the constant negativity from free users and other people's customers.

I don't want this anymore in my life, and I'm sure if I do another beta test and big version release, it will continue this way, so I've changed my mind and won't manage the beta test, or participate in anymore development publically at all. I will assist Otto and my friends privately, they can all contact me outside of SL, I will release the AO and four more beautiful collar designs because others contributed to those as well. It would be unfair of me to hold this content back and I want that everyone gets the reward that they deserve and earned.

As far as I'm concerned, the SL world in its current form, is the most negative, toxic and hostile environment for young creatives, be it artistically talented people or technically. It is a venus trap for particularly those types. It took a third of my life from me with the end-result of not even being able to use my "Wendy Starfall" coder handle and pseudonyma because of the bullying. At least that's how it feels to me because when you do searches for me, you will inevitably learn that I'm damaged goods, and no company hires you then, not even a kink and fetish content publisher.

I came to realize that the only solution to solve my problems is to stay away from SL and start building a life somewhere else. It will be a hard life for a long time because when all my friends went to school, I learned how to be a content creator for VR, earned my money this way, and ultimately was bullied to a pulp by a bunch of retired folks like the Silkie Sabras of SL who have had their life behind them, or the Nireas of SL who have safe employment and nothing to ask for in their lives, who hang around on SL to pretend-play being something they are not, and destroy other people for some weird "game of thrones" and "open source company" role play, where they have nothing to lose when those who worked hard and build a life have everything to lose.

You need to understand that the SL-people, who are there for only messing around and fun, will be able to destroy everything you built, also for their own fun. They can do that without feeling any remorse and without having to deal with any repercussions. There is no balance and no protection at all, and if you aren't American, legal protection for your trademark and intellectual property is a pipe-dream. A small artist/coder like me won't even be able to afford the ticket to the USA for attending a court hearing, let alone the hotel room and attorney fees.

SL wasn't a fake role play for me. I loved this place. I lived here, created here and met people who I could relate to and who made me feel understood. This was my home and work place alike.

​Despite the bitter end, the many kind messages I received since after Christmas, and the friends I had the privilege to meet on SL, give me much comfort and make me not regret having been here. I worry about people though. I worry about the way many rely on SL for their money and for their love and social life. These thoughts give me a knot in my throat every time I think them. I know many laugh about this and think SL is a sex world and full of no-lives, when it really is a trap for artistic types and people with boatloads of beautiful fantasy in their minds. This is such a mess.

You all need to realize that when SL ever goes away, it is going to break a lot of people apart, and if you are reading this, and if you are one of those people who are "stuck there" right now, then follow my advice and try to emancipate yourself away from SL in time. Find different employment, sell your creations on creative stock market platforms, sell hands-on stuff on Etsy if you need to, work in a call center for 4 hours a day, play some MMO with a pay-wall (unlike SL) that keeps the trolls and children out.

If I can stop wasting mine, anyone can stop wasting their life.

Hm. My blog posts are becoming really depressing lately, huh? To be honest, at this point I'm happy I have a place to share this at all. Time for me to get some more work done and that AO and collars released. I will bury this post beneath an announcement for the new stuff when it is ready.

Thanks for reading, my friend, whoever you are. 😊

It's true. I've been more salty and jaded than usual and it's no big secret that I'm pretty much done with Second Life. With all the bullying that was going on, my Wendy Starfall persona and creator handle have been destroyed, at least to the outside world.

Most stuff you find about me is extremely negative or just hateful and made up, usually with people creating fake accounts with the SL names of my friends, to hate on me in comment sections of blogs and whatever social networking. Even if there was great support from Fire Flower members, it's all been locked away in our cozy bubble on Second Life, and the only reason why I'm still here is because the Fire Flower community has been frankly amazing.

​I think Fire Flower is one of the best places left on Second Life, thanks to its many nice members.

I said that I was going to continue to maintain Peanut 9 and I very much intend to keep my word. When something breaks I'll fix it and there is enough on my todo list to keep me busy for quite a while when making a robust final version of the P9. However, when I look at the state of Second Life - the excessive geometry, the disproportional resolutions in textures, the lack of administrative tools, and the resulting laggy mess and strife among residents, then I am not sure if it is wise to innovate here much longer.

Second Life is no longer the sweet illusion and welcoming canvas it used to be, at least not for me.

​It was possible for others to destroy what I had built it in over 6 years, within only a couple months. It was possible to turn something genuinely positive that was shared within the community, into a disputed, negative and confusing mess, and no matter how hard I tried to disambiguate P9 from my old OC, every update warms this issue up again, as if I'm not allowed to move on. This is hell.

I believe what we are experiencing now is the sheer frustration of some supporters of the OpenCollar group, when putting into perspective what they probably expected to happen after the coup. It was supposed to put me in my place, but caused the opposite. It made me even more rebellious and obsessive, when I grimly recreated the wheel, and raised a community of more than 12,000 active individuals, gushing new features into the collar.

Peanut 9 empowered artists with little shops and role play groups to make their own collars once again, without being dependent on other people's help, which is an issue for the parties who supported the coup, who are only interested in making as much profit as possible, with as little competition as possible.

If you follow Second Life's economy, you probably noticed that there are fewer and fewer recognizable brands. This is so very bad. There can only be life and growth if there is enough variety, because variety causes healthy competition, which makes new and cool things show up.

In my case there is no healthy competition at all, innovation isn't responded by different innovation, but with destructiveness. In order to compete with me, all you need to do, is bomb my releases with negativity, attack me on a personal level, cause strife among guests at Arcadia and grief the sim. Which is exactly what has been happening.

There is no point to come up with new things. So when I talk about maintaining Peanut 9, it's not a nice and fun task for me. I have to make it more robust in aspect to how Second Life is now, and that means making it as responsive as possible under the extreme lag that is caused by all kind of other content. In order to do that, I have to make it architecturally a completely new thing, while keeping it as recognizable as possible on the surface, so there is no melodrama every update.

P9 is now half-way there.

The scripts that were written completely new are snappier and simply work under most lag situations. This is not my sole achievement anyway, it's Otto's engineering and fine-tuning that makes it possible to use features like "strippy" in a fully lagged down playground or residential sim. Strippy and other new features work well, but scripts that are still ticking the old way will be slow af.

That's how you end up with stuff like the new folders. I can easily justify having a fixed and flat structure with predefined categories because I know how bad the lag is now on Second life, and how futile it is trying to use legacy features under such conditions. I have to make sure that my product doesn't add to this lag, while making it work under the lag. This comes with lots of compromises and with new limits, such as the maximum of 54 folders per category.

I want a collar that is robust and that works. That's my simpleton philosophy on it. I don't care if I can rock 500 folders in my #RLV directory if my owner can't make use of it. The users who are just discovering #RLV folders, which is thanks to the changes in this feature type, are happy because they finally can make heads and tails of it. Structure and limits are not always a bad thing, especially when taking into consideration that a sim has only finite resources, and with all the AOs polling for states like crazy, and all those angel, demon and vampire combat HUDs spraying packets around like mushroom spores, I want the collars on people's necks unaffected and robust.

I want that when one day, when future civilizations discover the Aditi grid, and excavate a P9 collar, that the little beast will still be running in pristine condition, so that our grand-grand-grand-grand-children can say: "So that is what people used to do in the old age. Nerdgasm over virtual dog collar gadgets. I'm sure they had lots of fun!"

​Rant over.