TO RSS READERS: This RSS Feed (or Atom) is (c) conclusionsbytarasia.wordpress.com and is for personal non-commercial use only. Commercial sites may only quote us as far as it only refers to copyright issues, but not in a way so that it has us endorsing the product. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator OR if your aggregator displays the text and pictures fully, the site you are looking at may be guilty of copyright infringement. Please IM Tarasia Ashbourne in-world indicating the direct feed URL to the re-chewed article and as many other details as possible. Thank you!
Dear Sir or Madame:
Welcome and thank you so much for your visit! This blog is not viewable by blog search engines or blog feeds yet, and so viewable to only you and select others. If you are here, you’ve either gotten my notecard or have heard of my humble project. If it’s the latter and if you’re a Designer, please do let me know and I’ll send you my proposal letter ASAP! I do not mean to exclude, but I only have so much time on my hands and there are thousands designers working and creating in Second Life ™. I am sorry if I missed you! :(
If you have already received my notecard letter, please excuse this introductory blog post, as it essentially repeats the information there.
As most of you may already know, this humble blog project is an endeavor to help bottle product piracy at its head by educating the general public about it, and how to avoid pirated products. More specifically, what it hopes to accomplish is to provide details on the work and creative side of each market available in Second Life ™ (i.e., Skins, Gowns, Eyes, Shapes, Landscaping, etc.) and to show how a Designer in each market can risk being copied (in other words where in their products could they risk being copied). It will also attempt the ambitious task, with hopefully the help of others, of keeping track of cheating software and tools like Copy Bots, and hopefully recognize the signs of such tools being developed and alert thus alert the community. A section on common business practices and techniques at marketing and visibility will also be included for the sake of public awareness, along with my commentary in these regards. The blog will not endorse griefing protesting or protestors, nor will it attempt to comprehensively list all Designers who do good, creative, legal work…as that alone can be a project of its own! :) I may, however, link to Designers that *I* personally shop at, and if I find relevant, legitimate links I will try to add it here.
But, as many of you may also know, this weekend I am working hard to reach out to as many designers as possible before I even dare to start writing such articles. As I write, I have about 200 notecards to send between now and Monday! Why? Because I am not perfect and do not know everything, and therefore wish to have as many peoples’ insights as is possible! I am also not a Designer and am not intending to open a business in the near future; I therefore lack the insider’s knowledge of everything. As disclosure, I am also very young and not yet finished with my first bachelor’s degree, and therefore would benefit from others’ experience and expertise. For these reasons, while at the same time maintaining a level of independence, I want other Designers to influence what I write here. I want this blog to be as useful to your fellow Designers as well as to my fellow Consumers. I want it to be the ultimate starting point for discussing and publicly tracking unfair and cheating business practices and tools, which I dream will help decrease the sales of pirated goods amongst new Residents and therefore ensure that you, the Designer, will have a more secure creative environment!
Please be assured, all articles will be written by me, and therefore your name will not be used or associated with any tip/insight you very generously provide. I hope merely to learn from you and base my posts on what I gain from you.
Some things that I am eager to understand from you are as follows: What makes a good texture in your industry? What tools do you use to sculpt, script, or build? Does your industry use open source scripts, and if so who are the scripters originating those scripts? What commonly will put any of your creations as created by “A.N.”, or just simply, well, blanked or greyed out? Your generous gift of a notecard, or perhaps a few more, sharing such valuable information, would greatly help any articles that I write.
I am very eager, once again, to receive your feedback before I write anything. To demonstrate how serious I am in connecting with Designers, I am spending this weekend sending out this letter to about 180 Designers individually…and everything for the past three weeks to the present, from discussing anti-piracy with others, creating this new account and preparing all pre- blog release information carefully – all this you read, and have read, hours alone – is there to show you how much I truly care and desire to serve this community in the capacity as an ethics blogger. I even more hope that, instead of myself alone, I would be collaborating with you, and others!
Thank you very much for your time! As a Consumer, I would like to thank you very much for your creative work and for the arduous hours of labor that you take to make each perfect, and to make our “second lives” a better one! Designers, I believe, cannot be appreciated enough. Please feel free to IM or drop a notecard on me if you have any questions regarding this project. Please also feel free to spread the word!
Most sincerely and gratefully,
Tarasia Ashbourne
