Poof! LL’s Smoke and Mirrors Do Away With Starax Statosky

by Alphaville Herald on 08/08/06 at 12:25 am

Starax Statosky is no more! Linden Lab’s magic wand has apparently done away with him. The master scripter, whose own magic wand had become one of the most popular SL diversions over the last six months or so — even being featured by kingpin Philip Linden at a talk at Google — no longer appears in the in-world Search utility, and forum traffic has it that his land is now owned by Governor Linden. It was well known that LL’s last patch broke Starax’s wand, but it seems it broke his will as well. Which raises an important question: How big does your wand have to be to believe that the patchwork software that is SL isn’t still a beta product? It’s been more than three years since SL came out of beta and went “live,” but so far it has not even come close to resembling anything like a stable product. Claims that you can make a lot of money in SL — as Starax had — are all well and good. But the Lab isn’t exactly going out of its way to inform users that their source of income may be cut off at a whim. And with bigger and bigger projects coming in-world from the likes of radio stations, educational institutions and hit bands like Duran Duran, it’s only a matter of time before one of these undertakings crashes to the ground under the weight of LL’s “change anything anytime” development paradigm. Let’s just hope the lawsuits aren’t aimed at the residents who are providing all that content. Not to mention the fact that people build real lives in SL — only to have the ground shift beneath them just when they thought they’d found a safe place to get their fill-in-the-blank on. If they should be holding off, it’s up to LL to inform them. And just putting it into the ToS isn’t enough. Here’s hoping your project doesn’t go poof too.

4 Responses to “Poof! LL’s Smoke and Mirrors Do Away With Starax Statosky”

  1. Prokofy Neva

    Aug 8th, 2006

    >And with bigger and bigger projects coming in-world from the likes of radio stations, educational institutions and hit bands like Duran Duran, it’s only a matter of time before one of these undertakings crashes to the ground under the weight of LL’s “change anything anytime” development paradigm.

    It strikes me that radio stations, educational institutions, hit bands — and many other things like hotels and clothing stores — are actually less demanding than even lowly blingtards when it comes to “the Platform Long Live the Platform”. They don’t need much from it, Walker. They don’t live in the world. They don’t rely on the world. It’s not their world, their imagination — they have a world and an imagination out there, thank you very much, and SL is merely one extention of it, and possibly merely a replicative one.

    They come from outside the world. The world is nothing to them — it’s just a backdrop to their media campaign — and they might fold their tent and leave. The dog barks, the caravan moves on.

    If the world breaks down, they won’t feel it, anymore than they’d feel, oh, say, the breakdown of a computer for the day in the main office or the Xerox machine being down. They’ll just use something else for the day, because they’re RL companies with Internet presence and RL presence of all sorts across all kinds of media.

    None of them rely on any special new tricks — it’s just building and scripting of the basic sort — if there are no flexible prims for avatar tails, no puppetry, no HTML on a prim — what do they care? They aren’t avatars. They already have HTML on the *Internet* for God’s sake, why do they need it on a *prim*, Walker! That’s just for little tiny avatars trying to fill their time between jaunts on teh poseballz.

    That’s why these entities are ideal customers, and we’re not.

    Oh, sure, a Duran Duran might conceivably cook up some new creative primmy scripty thingie to interact with that breaks on a patch (I’ve never seen any of these companies come in do a thing like that, have you?). But what do Duran Duran care? They’re playing in Chicago, and New York, and London the next week, let’s say. So the stage lights didn’t work in Peoria, Second Life. Do you think they care?

    As Reuben Steiger has aptly pointed out, none of these companies or big acts need 500,000 avatars. 40 or 160 will do to get the media hits. The Lindens could even close the grid and just have themselves only log on in different avatar costumes in a pinch.

    The only embarrassing thing for the Lindens is that Google movie, where they are shown showing off Starax’ wand to a group of Google geeks, some of whom seem a bit unimpressed and skeptical. But do you think these Googlians, possibly interested in how you might link Sketch up and Google Map and such, are going to remember a wand for avatars to play with? They have the Eiffel Tower to play with and your backyard to play with and the San Diego Zoo to play with. That a thing that rains down cartoon hippos for an avatar matter to them?

    See, you platformniks are just as wedded to the w’or’au’ld as anybody, Walker, and you make all these assumptions that it matters as much to others. It doesn’t. That’s the cold truth.

  2. Dammit

    Aug 16th, 2006

    Goddamit Profky. This blog entry was about Starax. Take you lame and retarded politics elsewhere. No one cares one bit what you do with anything.

    Geezues. Why do the good people leave and we are left with lame retards.

  3. Random Writer

    Aug 19th, 2006

    Apparently I missed this column… oh well.

    Prok focused a whole rant on one sentence, then restated the same 2 sentences over and over 30 times, changing a word or two. So really dammit.. don’t worry, his politics only amounted to about 2 real sentence stances. :)

    It’s a shame what SL is doing to some scripters. I had scripted objects that needed to be replaced, redone or just trashed after the update of doom. (One was just horrific for scripts, and anyone who scripts knows which update that was.) Several friends of mine that scripted for fun have given up because of the unknown of scripting.

    What’s sad, is since the update after that one… stability is nil. I mean, we could generally figure on a few days here and there of play without crashes. They don’t do an update, but for 3 days they are forced to do rolling restarts… lovely.

    We might lose some great scripters in this cause I already have know some good ones that have given up with getting screwed over… and the list is growing.

  4. Angel

    Oct 13th, 2007

    Nothing much has changed has it?

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