This painting, showing the Madonna and child surrounded by Saints Dominic and Thomas Aquinas, cannot be part of the SL5B builds.I've been looking around the SL5B sims. I'm impressed by what I see there, but the brouhaha over child avatars is strange.
According to Shoshana Epsilon, LL has decreed that in art in SL5B, "you can't have a picture of a child and an adult in the same picture." ([sic], as Shoshana could have written, as it's text she quoted) So if there's a church or museum in SL5B, they'd better not have a Nativity scene or a stained glass window of Madonna and child? I'm reminded of the punch line of a Bertrand Russell essay: In a word, nice people are those who have nasty minds.
UPDATE: From the comments in this photo on flickr, confirmation, in the form of email from Dusty Linden. The pertinent section:
Our main concern throughout this has been images that can be misinterpreted or misrepresented by people are not used to looking at images of avatars in virtual worlds. We need to imagine what outsiders would "see" in an image if it appeared in the RL Press, out of context and with sensationalist captions. The images that are the most likely candidates for this are images of kid avatars and adult avatars together.
2 comments:
Here's how I interpret the Linden's actions, such as what you quote in your blog - they are not really acting; they are REacting.
However, they could be leading.
They could be actually at the cutting edge of not only what we can do with technology, but also how that impacts our humanity and culture. On one hand they use a slogan "Your World. Your Imagination" but on the other hand they don't support the rights of adults to actually express imagination if they are afraid the press/reactions of some "nice people" as you quote B.R. putting it, or "sad, poison, nice guys; more poison than nice" as William S. Burroughs calls them.
At issue here is the legitimacy of adult's own imaginations and the tolerance we need to have in all worlds. At issue is freedom from judgementalism, especially in a world like SL that is designed for adult play and exploration.
The Lindens could point out the hypocrisy of the those who pretend to know what good and bad expressions of imagination are. The Lindens could defend the freedom of Second Life.
Instead, they have chosen to weasel in a fear spiral that smells like lawyers circling over a roadkill on the imagination superhighway.
For me, the issue of youth avatars and SL5B is a tip of this iceberg, and I hope that the separate Kids5B sims and celebration have demonstrated that fears and accusations are as ridiculous as creating rules that would prevent exhibition of images such as you show in your blog.
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