HOW 12 MILLION SL ACCOUNTS EQUALS 2 MILLION SECOND LIFERS...OR...SHOCKING SL ALTERNATIVES

by Marcophoto Upshaw
(AKA: Mark E. Lodge, USA)

Recently, I wrote a blog called "Why Second Life ® is like the 1908 auto transportation system." This blog is not a continuation of that. However, I touched on a topic there that I want to comment on again, today. The subject is alts. The term "Alts" is Second Life ® slang for "Alternative Accounts." It succinctly explains how 12 million equals 2 million.

My grammar school teacher carefully explained the concept to me of how 2 + 2 = 4. It was a tough lesson, as I never was any good at math. But it is nice to know that there is someone out there that is even worse at math than I. That person of course is Governor Linden. Because somehow he thinks that 12 million accounts actually means 12 million people are using sl! In promoting Second Life ® on the web, the gods of LL continually speak of how 12 mil people use Second Life ®. Sounds great! But it is an illusion. There really are only 2 million, and each has--on average--6 accounts. Of course many only have 1, so you know that some have 112. But it works out to an average of 6 each.

And that works for me too. I have let's see....*Marco starts counting on his fingers....and toes*....8 accounts. One primary avie and 7 alts. HA! I bet I threw you with the fingers and toes thing. But you didn't know that I lost 12 digits in a fight with a Cardassian Sand Devil. However, I digress.

"Why on earth would anyone need 8 accounts?" you may ask. Good question. I certainly did not start with that goal in mind. I did not wake up one day and think...."Hmmmm what should I put on my 'To-Do' list for today, I only have 44 things on it now and I need one more....hmmm OH I KNOW, I NEED TO ADD 7 ALT ACCOUNTS ON SL!" No, as with all bad habits, it starts slowly, you add an alt here, one there, and before you know it you are hip deep in the little peckers... just like having children.

My personal foray into the world of Alts came about for a number of reasons. One of the first arrived because I decided to become a male escort. I didn't want the world to know that the great Marco was now a slimeball escort, so I created my younger "half-brother" Ricophoto Caproni....same father, two different mothers, (they never married).

Amazingly, we looked very much alike! At the time, I really liked the skin and hair I was using for Marcophoto, it attracted scads of scantily clothed ladies, so I thought, "If it ain't broke don't fix it." So I bought the identical skins and outfits for Rico. I explained to my gal pals that Rico was the bad-boy "black sheep" of the family, and told them they better stay away from him. Naturally this meant they HAD to have him. And that is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, no one wanted to pay for "it." Rico spent something like 15 K on romantic and sexy poseballs for his new freelance escorting venture. But the poor boy just did not have the heart to ask for payment for "it." One gal paid him with a cheap, garish, freebie piece of jewelry. Escort Rico lasted just two days. This explains why my home is now filled with approximately 25,000 sex balls.....and no furniture.

Soooo I put Rico to sleep. No, I did not euthanize him...I did not "put him to sleep" like you do a cat or dog. Though, some say that denying the poor fellow sex for months on end is a fate worse than death. Rather, I stripped him of most of his "essential elements" including his cash allowance....shipped them back to Marco....and let him go to sleep. He still exists, I trot him out every now and then. I let him walk around the yard and stretch his muscles. We have a little chat together and laugh about that goofy freebie cross that gal "paid" him with. I get him to help me move some furniture around the house and adjust pose balls. Then I give him a playful punch in the shoulder like men everywhere do, and send him back to his room.

My next foray into the weird world of alts came about because of a job change. I had worked for months as a Security officer at a large dance club. One of the advertisement signs in the room was for a well-known private investigation firm in SL. That sounded soooo romantic: Marco the sleuth....Marco the spy....Marco the dick. Well I already WAS a dick some would say, so this sounded like a natural thing for me to explore. And explore it I did. As usual with all my new ventures, I pursued it with gusto.

But one of the oddities about SL is that while the gods here approve of anyone busting crime in sl, they consider it a violation of the TOS "Terms of Service" to stalk another avie. So though my official mission was to trail cheaters and thieves, I had to be careful lest one of them file a complaint against ME for breaking the TOS. How quickly the lines between "good guy" and "bad guy" become blurred on sl.....just like the Gestapo Security I wrote about in another blog. The point is that, in the pursuit of a "bad guy" the Lindens could in fact shut down my account. Hence the need for more Alts.

In the end, I created two other accounts to circumvent that problem: A boy alt and a girl alt. Yes, a FEMALE ALT. And oooooh boy, did THAT turn into an adventure, let me tell you. I'll tell you more about that in a different blog. So I created the guy, Robertoman, and the girl, Jennygurrrl to use for my private investigations. And they worked very well. I worked a number of cases and learned a lot of neat tricks of the trade. In the end though, I found I despised the private eye business. It is not nearly so romantic as it sounds. Basically it involves trying to seduce another person, while you take pictures of them for their spouse....."See, she really IS a jerk." I felt terrible. I love women, and I could not live with myself trying to seduce them with false motives. So I only lasted a couple of months in that profession. But that is a discussion for another day, perhaps when I write a blog about strange SL jobs.

So that is how alt accounts two and three came to be. Someday I will write a blog all about the adventures and misadventures of Jennygurrrl. It was a very odd feeling at first for this All-Male man to parade around as a lesbian female. But in the end, I became quite good at it, and had a great time....for awhile....until my conscience caught up with me. :(

My next set of alts came about during the great "group invites" fiasco from the early days of starting this blog. Josiegurrrrl and Ashton were created to send out thousands of group invitations for my blog every day. This was another gray area as far as the gods of SL are concerned. Initially, they told us it was OK to send out group invitations, provided we did not send out more than one invitation to each person. But I knew better than to totally trust the Lindens. Trusting them is like trusting your local bureaucrat who shows up at your door and says, "Hello, I'm from the Government and I am here to help you." Yeah right. And if you believe that, then I have a bridge I would like to sell to you.

Unfortunately the Lindens are well known for "the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing." One office of the Lindens will say, "sure, go ahead and send out your group invitations" Then, as you get cranked up and start sending them out, a different department of the Linden gods, will suddenly shut your account off for some vague "violation of the tos" crap. And puhleeeeeeze, don't IM me with a copy/paste of the TOS about spam. I have studied every word in the TOS about a zillion times. NOWHERE does it say that sending out group invitations is considered spam. I even bought a premium account just so I could have live chats with the Linden gods about this issue. And they assured me it was OK. ....just before they shut down Josiegurrrrl's acct for spamming with group invitations.

In the end the issue made its way up the ladder to one of the "Higher Gods" who told us sending out 5 or 6 thousand group invitations a day was "unacceptable" behavior and apologized for the "mixed signals" the lower echelon gods had sent out. Soooooo, along with Ricophoto, Jennygurrrl and Robertoman, I put Josiegurrrrl and Ashton to sleep.

The seventh and final alt is my good friend and blog business partner, MarcosSLhumor Baum. Strange name, isn't it? But he was created strictly for use in writing and promoting this blog. This is a very common practice in busy sims. Often, the sim builder has to fly around and maintain his/her sim, without being constantly interrupted by friends who want to chit chat or ask for help with problems. So the sim owner will create an alt. In fact, that reminds me, the very first alt I created was a furry fox named High Blinker.

High did all the photos for the tipjar system at Dance Island. Marco was supposed to do them, but he could not walk in the place without 20 people immediately wanting to chat with him. So High would go in, take the photos, and then work on uploading them to the tipjar. Nobody at Dance Island wanted to talk to the fox, so it worked out perfectly. Occasionally High would flirt with the girls, and tell them how much he wanted to curl up with them in his den. This always made them giggle....sometimes a nervous giggle when he suggested they hook up together and raise a litter of 20 kits.

Or, maybe the sim owner allows only the business alt to Create or Build in the sim. When other staff need to do some building, the sim owner will give them the password to the alt. It is common practice on sims for several staff members to use one alt...passing access to him/her back and forth among themselves. Talk about needing an exorcist.

And in the case of the blog, we use the Subscribe-O-Matic display system (which I highly recommend by-the-way) to set up display units for the blog all over sl. But when setting up the units in other sims, the sim owner needs to have the right to move them around. They need to have Modify rights. So that was why I created MarcosSLhumor Baum. He can grant Modify rights to sim owners, without me worrying that some nutball sim owner might show up and steal my house and belongings. I've already had to boot a couple of advertisers from the blog because they were manipulative jerks. It happens. Most of the business owners I've dealt with--99.95%--are wonderful people. But just like in real life, there is always that .05% who seem to think everybody else lives to make THEM happy. I didn't want those nutballs to have access to my personal belongings. Thus Mr. Baum was created.

Besides granting modify rights, Mr. Baum is in charge of purchasing crazie avies for our many photoshoots. Mr. Baum purchased Uncle Fester, and Morticia, and Jack & Sally, and the zombies, and the Big'Uns boob implants, and all the other crazie avies you see in my blog. And he handles the money that is sent in by our advertisers. So if your ad money get's screwed up, I didn't do it! You have to talk to Baum. But, he is pretty darn good.

So that is the not-so-brief story of how my little 7 little peckers--my "alts"--came to be...High Blinker, Ricophoto, Robertoman, Jennygurrrl, Josiegurrrrl, Ashton, and MarcosSLhumor Baum. Only Baum is awake right now, the rest are asleep.

Every now and then I wake them all up and we have a family cookout. Like any family, there is much squabbling. When the blog comes out for the next day, they all want to read it FIRST and fight for it. "It's MY turn to read it first!" says Josie. "NO josie, you poophead," yells Ashton, "you read it first on Monday! It's MY turn!" And while he and Josie are busy squabbling about it, Jennygurrrl slyly grabs it and tries to sneak out of the room. Immediately the others are all over her demanding to have it back. "Children, children STOP IT NOW!" I holler. "You can ALL read my blog, one by one. Now be NICE, or I will send you ALL to your rooms for a 'time out.'

Children. *Sigh* It's endless...the kids are always pulling on High's tail, the girls swipe each other's clothes, and "boys-will-be-boys": Rico and Roberto are always ganging up on their younger brother Ashton....pulling his underwear into a wedgie and that sort of thing. They all love each other I know, but shoot, I have work to do on the blog, I can't put up with their nonsense all day. THAT is why I put them all to sleep most of the time. It's tough being a single parent these days, but SOMEbody has to do it. I wish there was some Alternative. *grin!*

--Marco


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Wow, you gotta read the crazy, funny stuff this guy writes!
Read all about it today in Marco's SL Humor Blog at: http://marcosslhumorblog.blogspot.com/

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