An Act From The Heart
Let me start this by saying that I offer my deepest sympathy to those who knew and loved Dahlia Eilde. I did not have the pleasure of getting to know her, or her partner Nicolas Sinatra, but I’ve seen many kind words said about both of them over the last couple of days and see how many lives she has touched. My thoughts, prayers and condolences are with her family and those who loved her.
In the hours after receiving the news of Dahlia’s passing, one well-known designer decided to create a tribute package including an outfit, a skin, earrings, and a candle vigil set, all in Dahlia’s favorite color of Lilac. Several other designers followed suit and made some items in her honor. These items are being sold with all proceeds going to Nicolas Sinatra, Dahlia’s partner.
There were no specifics about how Nicolas would appropriate the money he received but here are a few points to remember about something like this as the controversy swirls around us:
1. Nicolas didn’t ask for this to be done. He doesn’t have a hand out begging for money to accomplish some kind of task, or donations be given to help her family or even to donate to her favorite charity. The acts of these creators were done with simple purity of heart, without worrying about the who, what and where, because they know and trust Nicolas to not take advantage of the kindness of strangers and do something positive.
2. The intentions of the designers are pure. They are not taking a profit from this, they are not exploiting her by trying to gain extra attention, they are creating a tribute for a friend who they will miss.
3. Ultimately, where the money goes and how it is spent is of no concern of ours. If the designers were profiting, yes, I would have issue with that. We spend money frivolously every day not knowing how the creators will spend that money. There could be designers funding a child pornography ring or donating to NAMBLA for all we know, but we still reach into our pockets and spend without question. They have made it known that the money will go to Nicolas, and I have 100% faith that they will come through with that promise.
4. As I said before, I didn’t know Dahlia and Nicolas, but from what I understand, their love was strong, and it’s way too far out of my reach of comprehension to even begin to consider the idea that Nicolas will be spending this money on a new pair of shoes or an Xbox. And I honestly think that anyone to suggest otherwise must seriously have no soul.
While I do believe that if there was something specific that we knew Nicolas would use this money for, that it would potentially achieve greater results. But when you think about it, I highly doubt at this moment in time, amidst his grief over the loss of the love of his life, that the first thing on his mind is how to spend money received from those who are simply trying to help.
We are so helpless in SL when something like this happens. It’s impossible to try to make sense of it all as we are faced with the reality and the mortality of those who bring life to the pixels on our screen. It’s tragic and it’s painful, even if you don’t know the person who has passed, because it is a brutal reminder that those that we do love are susceptible to succumbing to the certainty of death.
These events remind me that my precious friends in SL that I never met in RL can be stripped from me before I ever have the chance to wrap my arms around them and hug them like I so desperately wish I could do. The thought of losing a friend, let alone a boyfriend or partner, leaves me with such a harsh feeling of helplessness.
Those who knew Dahlia are hurting and aching, and are feeling lost about what they can do. For the designers who have made these special items, this is all they can do, the only way to do something more than grieve silently and maybe make a difference and offer some kind of support for the one who is surely hurting the most over this untimely and senseless loss.
So before you start to judge these people, I want you to think of the person that you love the most in SL, and think about how you might handle this situation. What can you do? What would you do? Maybe nothing. Maybe silent grief is what works best for you to deal with it. But these people wanted to take that extra step to outwardly show their support and use whatever means they had to express how Dahlia and Nicolas have touched their lives.
For those who have created these items for Dahlia, I’m sure she is smiling down on you and is so very at peace knowing that you loved her enough to take time away from your work and your life to pay tribute to her. I know I would be. And I’m sure the last thing she wanted was her passing to illicit any feelings of negativity, crude comments, hateful blogs, and severed friendships. Please, take a step back and stop thinking the worst of people and take all of this for what it is; an expression of love and support.
I hope everyone will take a moment to pray for/send good thoughts to Dahlia and her loved ones during this time and will focus on the positive intentions of those trying to make sense of it all. Don’t blemish this time with negativity and gossip, reach into your own heart, step away from your thoughts of “logic”, and just let those trying to help, do it the best way they know how.
I just want to close this out by telling those that I love that you all mean the world to me. The only reason my SL is worth anything is because of you, you feed my soul, you fill my heart… you are more real than the keyboard I type this on, even if not as tangible. My whole heart would shatter if I lost any one of you and I’m grateful for every moment we share. <3
*I intentionally left out designer names and item photos because this blog isn’t about promotions, even for those items being sold for a good cause. Not because I don’t believe in them, but because I wanted to focus on the hearts behind it, not the brand names or the items involved. If you are unaware of how to find these items and you wish to support Nicolas, please do let me know and I will be happy to direct you to the right place.*
Ivey’s Sn@tch
According to a recent Plurk post (yes that IS my main source of news updates), Ivey Deschanel, designer for Sn@tch, had her account suspended due to “Indecency” for having a rather *ahem* powerful *chuckles* image that, well… reflects the name of her store.
But come on, are you kidding me? I’m sorry Linden Labs, but last time I checked, Second Life is meant for people 18 years of age and older. Now I’m sorry if the conservative right wing activists for a purified SL are offended by Miss Deschanel’s profile photo, but I do believe the slogan for Second Life is “Your World, Your Imagination.” It baffles me that a company who claims to promote freedom for us to do and be who we want are such dictators about how we express ourselves in the way of simple things like nudity. But yet, when someone in SL told me that he hopes I get raped in RL and regularly harasses women and spams groups, Linden Labs does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. When 100 people report that someone has stolen content from a creator, the thief gets to walk free and continue to do damage to our beloved community. Oh oh, but let’s make sure we suspend one of the people who actually contributes positively to Second Life by suspending her account for a “naughty” photo.
So let me make sure I can understand this properly.
Nudity = Bad.
Sex = Bad.
Rape = Acceptable.
Content Theft = Acceptable.
Right. Got it. Hey, I have an idea. How about you folks over at Linden Labs take a break from the Hacky Sack tournament, stop dicking around with profiles and take some time to take care of the content creators and residents of Second Life who are the driving force to your success. Take some action against content theft, focus on your servers to resolve the endless performance issues you get complaints about daily, upgrade your features so that you can actually compete with viewers like Emerald and Imprudent rather than use scare tactics to get us to stop using them, and if censorship is so important to you dear American-based-company-that-should-be-upholding-the-standards-of-freedom-of-expression, why don’t you take a few hours to introduce a profile filter so we can start marking our profiles as adult, mature, or PG… just like our land. I know it’s a far fetched concept for you people to actually try to find a solution to a problem, but give it a shot, it just might work.
So now that I have your attention, go take a trip to Sn@tch for some naughty and nice goods and show your support for Ivey, our little rule breaker. You rebel you.
Darlin’ You Give Contests… A Bad Name, Bad Name
Some people know that I am the driving force behind a few of the contests in Second Life, including The Phoenix Rising Model of the Month Contest and Bliss Couture’s “Miss Bliss” competition. I LOVE contests. I love developing them, planning them, implementing them, and once upon a time I loved entering them. In my modeling days I was one of the girls standing on the JCNY runway and my passion for fashion started when I first discovered this industry as an aspiring contestant for Miss Virtual World 2009 before being employed by The Best of SL.
I see a lot of controversy over contests saying that they are fixed or rigged and that the winners are the friends of the people judging. Well, firstly, for the record, I assure you that’s not true in all cases. I am the pre-screener for The Phoenix Rising Model of the Month contest and I don’t personally know any of the people who win. In fact, for the old Einstein Model of the Month Contest, it pained me to be forced to name someone I LOATHED as a 2nd place winner.
But I digress. There is currently a model contest that has been out for awhile now, but I’ve never fully read the notecard because it’s horribly written, in all caps, poor grammar, and just unprofessional all around. If you know me, you know I have very little patience for stupidity so I’ve never been bothered to read all the details. However, today, it was brought to my attention on Plurk that this contest not only requires you to wear items from the designer (which is standard and obvious), but requires you to buy something new EVERY week that you enter the contest, and PROVE it by showing transaction records in your entry notecard.
No, wait… let me read that again to make sure it’s correct. Yes, that’s correct. This “designer” (and I use the term loosely), demands that girls submitting entries buy a new outfit (ranging in price from about $650L-$1000L each) for each week they enter, and her justification in this is that because she pays $15L an hour to stand on her runway (if you are one of the lucky 20-25 selected that week), you can EARN that money back.
So here’s the gist of it really:
“You buy one of my dresses. Send me a photo of you. If I pick you, then you get to camp at my store on my runway and build my traffic and I’ll pay you the equivalent of about 5 Cents per hour to do so. If you bought a $650L dress, you can regain your money by camping for FORTY-THREE hours that week. Then if you win the monthly contest, you get a big fancy prize.”
I’m sorry, I know my last entry said that you can’t complain about how long it takes to get a free item, but considering this designer puts out 2-5 new releases every week, I think it’s safe to say she didn’t spend anywhere near 43 hours designing her dresses, and, if you have to put money out first and get reimbursed by camping, this is not what we define as a “freebie” or “gift”.
Phoenix Rising has very simple rules. Wear a PR outfit, take a photo, submit. If you win, we use that photo for magazine publicity, meaning we like how you represented the items, we like your style, and we wanna show that off. And we credit the model and the photographer. We do not require you to buy something new every month, let alone every week. Our only rule is that the outfit cannot be a retired item, which I think is obvious since we don’t wanna run a promo featuring an outfit that is no longer available.
I do realize that every contest has it’s controversy, and it’s impossible to please everyone’s definition of fairness, but I know a bullshit scam when I see one, and this contest is the definition of that.
Now, why don’t I name the designer and the contest? Two reasons. One is because I have a responsibility as an employee of ICON Lifestyle to not bash designers and other content creators, even though we’ve long refused to rent her a shop in the plaza. Two being that I refuse to give her press and publicity. You know what they say, all press is good press. So no thank you.
The bottom line is that nearly every contest has an element that people will claim to be unfair. Generally though, this is a matter of perspective, and the option to simply not participate is always there. And that’s certainly the case for this contest. If you don’t like the rules, don’t enter. But this peeves me beyond belief because it’s contests like this that are so blatantly distorted in regards to fairness that gives other contests, like the ones I develop, a bad name.
So my advice to models is this:
Read the rules to any contest carefully, and ask yourself if what you’re putting into the contest is really worth it. Compare it to other contests with a good reputation. Does JCNY require you to buy something new for each week you enter? Absolutely not. In fact, you can even wear her free items. The Bliss Couture’s contest actually gives dresses to the last 10 finalists for photo shoots (that the models don’t pay for) for judging. A good contest is to promote brand recognition overall, not to boost sales for the designer from their monthly model purchases. A good contest should allow you to wear the same exact dress, week after week, month after month (providing the dress is not retired), and the designer shouldn’t be using you as her primary means of sales success.
I do hope models continue to enter contests, and I hope designers continue to create contests. But please, be fair. Send the rules to your friends, to marketing professionals, to unbiased sources who can give you outside feedback on the details before you launch your contest so that you don’t end up looking like a jerk. The goal is to make a name for yourself, a good one, don’t ruin that with bad marketing sense.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Sunday’s Annoyance
in Annoyances, Flame, Really?!?, Stupidity
as Exodi, Ryker Beck
Nothing in life is free. No, that’s a lie. Nothing worth having comes easy. No, that’s a lie too. Hang on… here we go. Nothing worth having is 100% free. At least that’s the case of today’s annoyance.
Every day, thousands of creators in Second Life put out gifts. Some are free, some are $1L, some you have to spend some time at the store doing some kind of task before you receive your gift. We’re all familiar with this concept, it’s pretty common, and completely reasonable.
Let’s take the Exodi fishing hole for example. I go to Exodi by Ryker Beck, play a fishing game, spend some time at the store boosting traffic, and in exchange I’m gonna get some really nice free items, like, really nice . Oh wait, but I’ve been here for ages and I have 3 sets of the same pajamas, 2 sets of the same boy-shorts, and no socks!!! This is ridiculous!!! You expect me to spend ALL this time and not get SOCKS?!?
No… wait… did I just complain about getting things without having to pay for it? Gawd no. But someone did. That’s right. Today Ryker got a complaint from someone who felt she had to spend far too much time to get the items she received. So basically what this moron complaining is saying is this:
“I am not a paying customer, but for simply walking into your store, I demand that you bestow upon me free items that you spent hours working on, so that I can immediately walk out, go to another store and demand free items from them as well.”
What a distorted and disturbing sense of entitlement this is. Bottom line is that NO ONE is obligated to GIVE you anything. The world does not revolve around you, this society doesn’t function on charity, and you are not entitled to anything more than what has been guaranteed. Pretty sure last time I checked, the Exodi Fishing Hole does not have any such guarantee.
So here’s the lesson from today’s annoyance: Don’t complain about free items!! If your time is SOOOOO valuable that you can’t spare a couple of minutes or hours to fish or camp or wait for your letter on the lucky chair to get your desired freebie, THEN DON’T DO IT. Don’t insult the creator by basically shaming them for expecting that you earn the items you’re hungrily grabbing at.
Visit Exodi and see for yourself how much fun you can have fishing for freebies! Complaining strictly prohibited. :p