Tuesday, 28 May 2024

Trust: Why do people reveal secrets?

The other day, a friend was talking about a scandalous fantasy she has. She's lived the fantasy in SL but has talked about living it in RL and said, I either find someone who's really kinky or I find a secret on someone so they won't tell on me.

I responded by noting her or I find a secret on someone so they won't tell on me and chuckling about building a solid relationship on a foundation of blackmail. I thought of the story of a married couple who said they would never get a divorce because they both knew the secrets of the other and both could blackmail the other. Ha, ha!

But all this reminded me of how some people have a tendency to reveal secrets. Why do they do it? Does it make them feel important as they know something somebody else doesn't? Do they feel superior to the person who has the secret?

Trust is hard-earned, easily lost, and difficult to reestablish.

Years ago, I read a story in a newspaper about a repairman who, for whatever reason, didn't have access to a bathroom and he had to go really, really bad. He couldn't go in a nearby sink as it was too high, so he went into a mug, poured it out into the sink, then rinsed everything off. Fine. I've been stuck without access to a toilet and I've done a few creative things over the years to relieve myself. No big deal.

Unbeknownst to the man, there was a security camera. The person who discovered the video and what the man did, posted the video on social media. Needless to say, this caused a scandal. The man was ridiculed and may have been fired from his job. I forget that detail.

I had to ask: What purpose was served by posting the video on social media? If it were me, I would have gone to the man and told him privately about the security camera. I would have assisted him in finding a washroom for any future emergencies.

I still think of this story and numerous other stories where somebody has revealed a secret and gotten another into trouble. But why do people do that? I did some research with Google

'Did you hear what he did?' Why people divulge other people's secrets -ASU News, Feb 23/2022 (Arizona State University)
According to a new study by researchers at Arizona State University and Columbia University, the divulging of a secret has a direct correlation to a person’s morals. It seems that when someone learns another person’s secret that breaks their own moral code, the person who was confided in is willing to divulge that secret to “punish” the secret holder, according to Jessica Salerno, an associate professor of psychology in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at ASU.

I've written elsewhere on this blog that some people, maybe far too many, bring all their RL baggage into SL and end up living SL like RL. Hiding, lying, cheating, jealousy, possessiveness, all sorts of bad things about RL are carried out in SL with the same disastrous results. It strikes me that people are not ready to live a different life, to embrace a new way of living. That said, referring to the above breaking one's moral code, I can see those who do not live a polyamorous, open, and honest relationship feel justified in ratting out those who do.

In these turbulent political times, I see morality as a big issue. It's not a question of the next guy being wrong; they are morally wrong. Anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ, anti-transgender, anti-anything which isn't exactly like me. I'm right; everybody else is wrong. Elsewhere, I wrote about the curious story of Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old Canadian student who flashed her tits to a stranger on the Internet, a stranger who subsequently outed her by reposting pics. She then was cyberbullied, that is, all sorts of people on the Internet jumped on the moral bandwagon and hounded her to death. She committed suicide. While the man who outed her was brought to justice, the thing about the story which startled me were the total strangers on social media or in real life (classmates, people in the community) who badgered her, criticising, condemning, and humiliating her as if flashing your tits was the ultimate in bad behaviour. This is an example of the danger which await all of us in real life. RL has no mercy. Well, people have no mercy, thinking they have the moral duty to hound us to death. Piss in a cup, flash your tits, you will pay, and you will pay in spades!

Final Word
In my time in Second Life, I have thoroughly enjoyed the wonder of anonymity where people can be themselves, unafraid of criticism or condemnation, at ease in being who they truly are. And that many times manifests itself as being more sexual than in RL. But I have never felt any desire to reveal secrets. I value the trust I have with these people too much. Besides, I do enjoy this SL version of the RL mind, unfettered by RL constraints, and I find it unfortunate we all return to RL and have to tuck away our deep dark secrets, never to see the light of day out of fear of those who would betray us possibly by posting on social media.

Over and over again, I've run across Second Life profiles declaring quite clearly No RL going on to explain they would never do that again, suggesting they had done it once and got outed. I think SL is a wonderful place to explore your fantasies and would never think of destroying this unique opportunity. I gain absolutely nothing by outing someone and can't help feeling doxing another SLer is tantamount to evil. If your moral superiority entails cancelling somebody, you need a new morality!


References

my blog: Doxing: What the f*ck do you think you're doing? (700 words, 3-minute read) - May 22/2022
doxing (n): search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.

Over and over again, I have run across entries in profiles describing personal experience about getting into trouble for revealing personal information and/or RL pictures. Who can you trust? There may only be one bad apple in the barrel but that's enough to get up your defenses. Once bitten, twice shy.


2024-05-28

Tuesday, 7 May 2024

The Feed, My Second Life, and a corner of SL I think many don't know exists

There's a whole other part of Second Life I knew nothing about. Am I the only one?

I've been sitting here playing with my viewer, looking up official documentation, and reading user groups, but I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about is adequately and clearly explained in any one place. I now suspect a lot of people, maybe the majority of people, have no idea this part of Second Life even exists. I'm still not sure you can see this in-world as I discovered it going through the SL website.

First off, I have the SL website bookmarked in my browser as I visit it on a regular basis to see a list of my friends currently online. Oooo, there's Alice and Fred. I should jump online and say hello!

Secondly, I can easily visit My Second Life, which is SL relating to me: my profile, a list of all friends, settings, and finally, The Feed, although, I'm not sure that is the right term to use to describe it.

In a profile, there is a tab labelled Feed which you can find entries relating to certain activities: pictures you post to your feed, other people's entries you liked, your name changes, etc. Under security, you have the option of hiding this tab from the rest of the world. Other people can open your profile and look at your Feed to see what you've been up to, that is, in-world pictures you've posted.

But let's now talk about My Feed and what part it plays in the bigger picture.

My feed (the tab labelled Following) shows entries from the people I follow. When you become friends, you automatically follow the person. However, you can follow non-friends. My feed is mainly about pictures posted, but people can also make text-only postings. It's quirk, I guess, in the system that you can only post pictures in-world, but you can post text from the SL website.

In my picture example. you see a picture by Iris Okiddo, a person I follow; we are not friends. You see text entries from the SL blogger Inara Pey, also a person I follow; we are not friends.

You will notice there are two tabs: Following and Trending.

Trending comes from anybody on SL. According to my research, once a posting gets two Loves (Like on other social media), it becomes eligible for Trending, a SL-wide feed which is available to everybody. It's curious. My research has shown that SL apparently has around eight hundred thousand active monthly users, and yet, there are only a limited number of names I see in Trending. From this, I have conjectured that only a small number of people are aware of The Feed. And let me repeat I discovered Trending via the SL website. I'm still not sure if you can see this in-world which may go a long way of explaining how The Feed or Your Feed remains an underexploited part of Second Life.

Just this morning, I posted several pictures to My Feed. About an hour later, I discovered that two of my friends had loved (liked) my postings. A short time later, I noticed my pictures were now part of Trending, that is, visible to the rest of the world.

Note the following link which is the URL for my profile on Second Life:

https://my.secondlife.com/hughtoussaint

Now notice this variation of that URL:

https://my.secondlife.com/hughtoussaint/snapshots

This gives you a gallery-like presentation of pictures I've posted in my Feed. You can add snapshots to the URL of any profile and see the gallery. It's surprising. Many people go to Flickr or DeviantART to publish their pictures but Second Life itself already has its own picture system. We can argue about its quality and its organization but it is there.

Final Word
I found it odd but delightful to discover what I think is an underutilized feature of Second Life. In reading an article by Inara Pey from 2015, it would seem that My Secondlife is a sort of half-hearted attempt to add social media features to the SL world. Danger Linden is quoted as saying its usage rate is on the low side and judging by the names I see posting on a regular basis, a very small percentage of the supposed six to eight hundred thousand monthly users, this corner of SL seems all but forgotten except to a select few.

A number of people including myself have supplemented their SL experience by using other platforms like Flickr, DeviantART, and Facebook, to name a few, which offer a more picture-friendly gallery-like display for photographers. While the SL web profile interface does offer "snapshots", there may be merit in looking elsewhere depending on your goals.

Nevertheless, The Feed offers an interesting glimpse into the world of Second Life, allowing you to see other fellow travelers in this virtual fantasyland.


References

Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld: No more improvements planned for my.secondlife.com - June 26/2015
During the Meet the Lindens conversation held at SL12B on Thursday, June 25th which featured Danger Linden, Senior Director, Product, Virtual Worlds and Troy Linden, Senior Producer, a question was asked about the SL feeds – also referred to as my.secondlife.com – and whether they would continue to be developed or enhanced.

Danger Linden was direct and honest in his reply: "That’s a tough one, because I don’t think anyone’s going to like the answer … The short answer is no."


2024-05-07

Monday, 6 May 2024

Gyazo: a permanent alternative to Tumblr and Imgur?

A picture is worth a thousand words. From time to time over the years, I've interjected an image, a GIF, or a meme to supplement my Second Life chats. I created a catalog long ago and classified them for easy access depending on the circumstances of my interactions with others. However the permanence of the URLs to those images has been fraught with difficulties.

Like many people, I relied on Tumblr to be a permanent storage for images. But then, in December 2018, the company banned all pornographic images. Old saying: One man's pornography is another man's erotica. All of my good work disappeared. Like the rest of the world, I hunted for other options and discovered newTumbl, vowing to publish my own version of images so as to not rely on whatever platform somebody else night have been using.

In June of 2022, newTumbl shut down. Wait? What? Oh, my God! Twice in my lifetime I lost access to an image platform! I looked around again and discovered various restrictions. Flickr, DeviantART, the latest version of Tumblr, etc., all presented in their TOS rules which could see images taken down. It's not like I'm selling the images or publishing them for the entire world to see, but rules are rules, and any platform seemed to represent a risk.

I discovered Gyazo. Was I set for life? Was I safe from the overzealous hand of the censor? This image repository seems to be founded on a simple rule: every image is private, invisible to anybody else in the entire world unless the poster (me) chooses to hand out the URL to the image. Unlike Tumblr or Flickr where the purpose of posting is to show the image to an audience, the purpose of Gyazo is to upload an image, then at the right moment to the right person, hand out the unique URL of that image. The image remains uploaded but unviewable by anybody else.


The website offers a free account. The main restriction is that you can only use their interface to retrieve the last ten images you've uploaded. I either bookmark images in my browser or record the URL to the image in a Word document I use to catalog the images I upload, and as a consequence, I do not rely on Gyazo itself to find images. From what I've seen their interface has cataloging features; it's just that I rely on my own method to do so. My reading of their operation is that once uploaded, my image is permanent. I do not run the risk of six months from now or two years from now, finding my image has disappeared. And more importantly, because they are an image repository as opposed to an image publisher, they don't seem to be scanning images for anything they deem inappropriate. It is up to me to police myself.

Within Second Life, we can share images using textures. However, sending the URL of an image seems easier and faster. Plus, the use of a URL works outside of Second Life, so Gyazo seems like a win-win. Yes, there are other such services, Lightshot comes to mind, but from what I've seen Gyazo does offer some interesting options. An installable program adds these features to your computer:
  • Right click on an image in your browser and upload it to Gyazo.
  • Right click on an image file in Windows Explorer and upload it to Gyazo.
  • Hit a hot key combination and use your mouse to outline a box on the screen to capture an image.
  • Hit a hot key combination and use your mouse to outline a box on the screen to capture a 7-second video with sound. (The pro account gives you 60 seconds.)

Alternative to Flickr or DeviantART?
I only have the free version of Gyazo. I have no idea what features a pro account offers. As is, Gyazo is an image respository, not an image gallery system like Flickr. You would need some other system to create a gallery. This article is on Google's Blogger platform. While Blogger is for blogging, I've wondered if there was any way of bending the system to make an image gallery. I don't know at the moment. Whatever the case, let's not forget Flickr and DeviantART, like Tumblr, are platforms dedicated to displaying images. If anybody is searching for an image platform, I would remind you that Flickr's annual cost is not exhorbitant. Oh, I know people want to do it for free, but Flickr did change their rules as they do have the right to make a profit to stay in business. It's a good image system and as I said, it's not expensive.

Final Word
I was prompted to write this because a friend sent me an IM with links to four images on the platform Imgur. I could see the first image but the second one came up with error 404 page not found. The third image prompted me, asking if I was over eighteen, while the fourth one also produced error 404 page not found. This very much reminded me of my experiences with Tumble and the other websites and the danger of a platform deciding, for whatever reason, the image violated their Terms of Service and taking the image down. There had to be a more reliable way of sharing pictures with other people.

When I run across a good image, GIF, or meme, I'll copy it to Gyazo with the idea (hope?) it will be permanent. If the original source ever disappears, I've still got the image. I don't hand out the URL of the source, but the URL of my Gyazo copy. I don't run the risk of the recipient clicking on one of my links and getting error 404 page not found.

I have free accounts with various services, Tumblr, Flickr, DeviantART, Instagram, etc., that I use to access the platforms and see the work of others. I do not do much, if any, of my own publishing. However, I like to, from time to time, share with others, mostly on a one on one basis, various things which require the URL to an image repository. Gyazo, so far, has fit the bill. The free account suits my needs but admittedly, even the pro account is inexpensive. It's worth a look.


References

Gyazo Terms of Service

To Blog Or Not To Blog - June 21/2023
For the past year or so, I've had a blog on newTumbl, dedicated to the more scandalous part of my psyche, where I've posted erotic photos (read: dirty pictures) with captioned thoughts on life, love, and pursuit of happiness. Why newTumbl? This Google blog (Blogger) is text-oriented — I write stuff — while the platform newTumbl, like Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest was image-oriented. I can post pictures here in Blogger, too, but newTumbl was dedicated to pictures, and, as I said, for more scandalous things.


This article's opening Gyazo logo is stored in the Google blogger image reponsitory.
The following image comes from Gyazo. You can't tell really the difference
but I can easily share this image with somebody else by giving them the Gyazo URL.


2024-05-07