It comes to that point in everyone’s Second Life that the subject of griefing and harassment rears its malformed head, sticks out its tongue at you and then does something so infantile that you fear not only for the sanity of the griefer, but also for the contents of their diaper.

After a couple of full-on sim-sinker attacks on the region where I used to run a club and now gracelessly live out my retirement, I’ve become a bit bored with the attention whores and even the low level discontent from imbeciles who prowl around using ancient viewers to spy on people from distant sims and issue their non-specific threats and truncated non-sequiturs to anyone who is waits in vain for their intrigue to amount to anything at all.

They wait in vain because the griefers live in the shadows. Not some noir-ish interesting ’dark place’ but a shadow in the sense of an absence of illumination, because that’s all they are, a patch of darkness coalesced around a victimhood, itself formed from gossamer threads of spite that string their over-arching vacuity together. They are not just malcontents, but anti-content, an absence of matter as well as light and it’s time the Lab did something about them.

People come on the grid for a variety of reasons - to listen to music, to simulate sex with one another, to fulfil an impossible meatworld fantasy, to write a narrative, to make cubes, experiment with 3-D. When they are here they might spend money and help the wheels turn for the Lab. Hardly anyone ever sees any of that money except the Lab so they are the ultimate financial beneficiaries of the whole thing. We don’t mind if we’re paying to have a bit of fun; SL is basically a cheap hobby for thousands of people all over the grid.

We build things, the griefers try to ruin them. We create environments and sometimes ambience, the griefers try to ruin them. Nihilists to the core, the griefers only like to swagger around pretending to be important, farting portentous guff from their mouths, so they knuckle at everything that isn’t all about them, anything they are not.

All this comes in the shape of harassment and hounding,attacks designed to crash our GPU, scripting and hackery with the deliberate purpose of bringing sims to their knees

s crash and handing over cash to a company that counts it while it looks the other way. It’s Abuse Reporting system is a one-way mirror, a deep pit of despair where we seem to throw our complaints in purely for catharsis. No feedback is ever given whether a complaint is even upheld and there is a suspicion that most griefing attacks are lightly punished by a minor suspension at best.

Governance Lindens will come and clear up the mess but won’t speak to anyone about the incident or canvass for information. I was recently the subject of a prolonged attack against the entire sim I happened to be on because I wouldn’t engage the griefer in conversation. The G Linden who attended on three occasions in all (the greifer came back as 2 alts to reprise exactly the same attack as soon as the Linden left) refused to communicate in local or IM with me
Somewhere along the line, Linden Lab stopped listening to its customers and let the griefers call the shots

Another day, another Hozier remix blaring out of the audio feed, bringing us one step closer to a kind of clubmageddon, where every last ounce of dynamism is bled out of music by the repetitive application of indiscriminate force to a kick drum. Sure, I like the thump-thump as much as the next girl, but there’s a reason why this song was played to death: it has a hook-line so massive, it’s not so much a song, more of a 12-tog opiate-laced butterfly net. Once it’s got you, it never lets go and you don’t care anyway.

Something terrible happened with Take Me To Church. After it had been played to death, the DJ mixes came along to repeatedly flog its warm carcass for long enough to ensure that even its aura was extinguished. It was played to death, then clubbed to death to make sure. You know those awful sparkly floor Saturday night shows? The ones that are so cynical, even TV execs refer to them as ’shiny floor shows’? The Hozier song has suffered the indignity they let the bovine masses inflict on the talent on those shows, in which absolutely everything must be smoothed out and robbed of all personality and quirks. Smearing such an ace, though admittedly over-played, song out over a quantised 4-4 is like asking the public to clap along to the Strictly bossanova - it works, but it completely ruins the music in the name of a desperate lurch at popularity.

It’s low standards like these that tells me that DJs may as well buy most club music by the pound. The only thing that much of it has in its favour, after all, is it’s very interchangeability. The constant measured bpm of an insistent kick drum, its crisp hi-hat and its say-nothing vocals at the hands of a vanilla voice that stretches all the way to mediocrity. Surely there are enough bad songs written specifically for bpms without inflicting your fascist beat-zeal over a perfectly good one? Homogenised chocolate pop, sweet-tasting and diverting, but ultimately bad for you. Why must we do this all the time?

As a sidebar - and something I’ll return to another time - this year marks the 30th Anniversary of the Breakfast Club, an iconic film with admittedly terrible montage sequences. In it, ‘basket case’ emo-goth Allison Reynolds (as played by Ally Sheedy) gets a makeover from ‘princess’ Molly Ringwald. It is celebrated as a triumph when it is the opposite, a defeat by the 4/4 forces of muchness and unswerving uniformity. It’s been 30 years and nothing much changes in popular culture. I’m frightened that it might be the very thing that makes it popular in the first place.

It’s hard sometimes to be a venue owner, even in SL where there is no heavy lifting and not even a cursory wipe of the bar is necessary after the punters have gone home. It’s the social aspects which can make it hard, the boundaries one must draw between work time and play time are a bit blurred because it’s often you that’s working when your friends are having fun. This is especially true if your friends come to your venue to have that fun and you are hosting your own set, responding to a personal IM, handing out a group tag, explaining how the dance ball works (here’s a clue: like every single other dance ball in SL) and fielding an inquiry about rescuing a Tuk Tuk from a ditch (don’t ask). And no I don’t do requests.

So I may take a few minutes to get back to you in the middle of all that. And while I’m on the subject, if I am in the middle of a mix, don’t expect me to respond to your IM about a song on YouTube. I’m not really going to be able to listen to it, am I? I am not in possession of four ears and an alternate cerebral cortex to process a third audio stream independently of the song that is playing and the one I am cueing up.

Away from the club, I might be regarded as socially normal. Well, perhaps. But one is never truly away from the club in SL, requests to ‘open up’ the Cakehole so that someone or other can have a dance there are regular - even during my RL work day, when IMs sometimes trickle through LL’s email gateway with a sense of urgency and impatience that only makes me want to blow up the club with virtual gelignite. If it’s not open, there’s a reason. It’s usually along the lines of working a real job so that I can pay tier.

So, for all of these reasons and a few others, if I want to get out and about without being hassled every half hour, I use an alt.

In case you think I’m some kind of alt-rebel - the idea is still surrounded by an aura of disgust generated by people who have difficulty managing their first lives - I’m really not. My alt is a sadsack extraordinaire; she has NO FRIENDS, she belongs to no groups and definitely never checks out any other clubs or DJs. She chatters endlessly to people at hangouts but never gets involved. She has fun roleplaying in that she plays me before I decided to develop a club. It seems ironic that you have to have a third life in order to fully enjoy Second Life but there it is. In fact, the lure of the alt is so strong I might make another, this time with friends and lots of groups, oh and a hangout and a nightclub… oh wait.