You are not invited to the party

If you are a child in Second Life now you are a second class resident… don’t you think is an irony? Second class resident in a Second Life?

Once i read someone defined irony as “a sadness that can’t cry so it smiles”. Sadly this time is difficult to smile. Linden Lab has decided to ban child avatars as culture from SL5B (Second Life 5th Birthday). As an example of Linden Lab communications (well they didn’t made an official comment about all this for the moment, just some Lindens commenting on blogs and forums)i’ll white what Everett Linden commented on Massively:

“Hey everyone…there’s a lot of misunderstanding here, so let me try to articulate our policy here. Child avatars are welcome at the celebration. However, we do respectfully decline the submissions we received to create exhibits for the event.Goreans, role-players, and members of the multitude of international communities are all welcome, and I hope you come.” and “The SL Birthday on Linden land is PG.”

Well, now i’m waiting Linden Lab to explain exactly their reasons, but i’m sure any thing they may say will be some like a “politically correct” version of what Jacek said so right in Jacek Lives blog: “But Linden Lab, it seems, doesn’t want its Residents anymore. It doesn’t want a free, open, creative world. It wants a sanitized, media-friendly world, that universities and big corps won’t think twice about making major investments in. LL’s message for Residents now is: Thanks for making us so popular, but go away now. You’re embarrassing us in front of the cool kids.”You can say it louder, but you can’t say it clearer, Jacek.

About all SL5B being PG, well, is not representative of what we have in Second Life but i can understand it as a way to make it opened to everybody, even i think it would be better to have a mix of Mature and PG regions. But the point here is not a question of PG vs. Mature, it is a question of discrimination. Sincerely, i think we should fill an Abuse Report against Linden Lab for all this. Discrimination is against TOS.

The question is: “What can I do about this?” Well, you can do some things:

• Vote for JIRA issue MISC-1231created by Vint Falken (if you want to vote remember you need to be logged, click “Log in” in the upper right corner of the window, user and password are the same as the Second Life ones, then, when back on the topic, you will see the word VOTE at left).
• Blog, say it in Twitter, post images in Flickr, Koinup, wherever, shout, protest in-world, go to Linden Village wearing a child avatar and poo over their gardens… the limit is your imagination (and the TOS, of course).
• Support Kids5B, children’s “own” birthday celebrations.

Don’t forget YOU can be the next, let’s help the kids now, they need us… we need them.

Vint Falken is trying to have a list of all the posts about all this, she is doing a great job(thanks, Vint *kiss*). So if you what to see an updated, you know, follow the link.

I don’t want to visit SL5B now, don’t want to see that “Lindeyland”, but, well, at the same time i feel like Ganymedes Costagravas, at the same time i want to go and see what Linden Lab did with all that. Anyway, if i go i should do it as a child avatar.