All the news that's fit to link

Probably my favorite source of SL news right now is Massively's, even if it is just a cog in the brand-violating Joystiq machine. And Joystiq in turn is owned by America Online, that hoary old relic from days gone by when we had to use Morse code and copper wires to get together for vampire bondage roleplay.

And AOL itself is but one part of the vast Time Warner conglomerate, which makes Massively's star reporter Tateru Nino a card-carrying member of the mainstream media conspiracy that is directly responsible for everything from NAFTA to the disappearance of bees.

Anyway, it's not like Massively has a lot of competition. Reuters won't write about SL anymore unless a giant corporation issues a press release announcing that they are entering the world, or six months later issues another to announce that they are leaving.

The Second Life Herald has become a venue for excruciating poetry and naked catgirls, which is a step up for them perhaps, but nothing you can't get anywhere else on the Internet.

And as far as I can tell, SLCN is focused primarily on curiously enthusiastic videos of snail races, while the SLNN is pioneering new trails of blandness and non-controversy on its Opinion pages, when it's not busy draining all life and humor out of an actual funny piece of John Stewart comedy.

Then we have the AvaStar, which is published as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, the most utterly useless inconvenient format imaginable from an online writer's point of view: unlinkable, unquotable, and unsearchable.

I appreciate their hard work in creating fonts and layouts, but I think they could be working a lot harder to make their content even more inaccessible, especially from within the world itself. Perhaps they could compress it, encrypt it, and hide it behind a firewall. Or perhaps dispense with the text altogether and focus on graphic design.

So Massively it is, despite their insistence on assigning me a World of Warcraft user icon and refusing to let me change it. Yeah, nice outfit you are wearing today, Tateru. Was it paid for with dirty money from Blizzard Entertainment!

Anyhoo, one of their features that I enjoy is the daily roundups of vital Second Life statistics. However -- and this is typical of the mainstream media, which is controlled by the New World Order foisted upon us by CIA handlers imposing the alien agenda -- these Massively roundups are heavily censored.

Fortunately we at Tiny Dancing are unafraid to shine our light into the darkness, for the truth shall set you free:


Second Life Daily News Uncensored
by Kanomi Pikajuna Apr 13th 2008
Filed under: Second Life, peoplehappy, peoplescared

Second Life daily news:

• 10,326 new Bots signed up bringing the total to 13,196,588 Bots signed up.
• A peak concurrency of 5,212 catgirls was achieved at 2:00PM, and a minimum concurrency of catgirls 3,154 at 1:25AM. Median concurrency for the day was 4,511 catgirls.
• The 'HOWL' gesture was played approximately 56,942 times. The 'HOWL' gesture server will be upgraded with the new Havoc 2.2 release to more efficiently serve up 'HOWL' gestures.
• Release candidate 1.20.13 was released. It will turn all of your buttons blue, randomly rearrange menu items, and crash like Icarus on a meth binge.
• Avatar Rocco1981 Glitterbuck won $200L in a "Best in Bling" contest at the Black Box Nightclub. He was AFK at the time.
• The Prokofy Neva Twitter Insult Index for the day was 47.78 (lower is better).
• Approximately 88 residents logged in to see sci-fi author David Brin type sentences about the future of technology into a chat window.
• Approximately 26,457 residents were welcomed to Bad Girls.
• Residents spent US $109,529 at an exchange rate of L$265 to US$1 on virtual fellatio.
• Phil Linden would like to see you in his office regarding Branding Violations. Uh oh!