Massively

"Due to abuse of the Partnership system by a few residents, the load on the grid by a rapid influx of perverted new users is causing severe performance and service issues. We'll have to increase the price of Partnerships by 66%."

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The surge is very amusing! I wonder if the old standbys like phone sex lines get surges when people divorce over *them*?

One of the SL communities I read has been amused over the tripe. Pretty much the reaction can be summed up as "why do people who can't communicate get married in the first place?"

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It's sad (but typical) that the press focuses on the divorce, but then the only paper that ever tried to print only good news didn't last long.
The other way to look at events is that two people otherwise perhaps less likely than most to find partners found each other through the use of a virtual world.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) they both continued playing in virtual worlds and, presumably by now somewhat more aware of the possibilities, both eventually found better partners. Sadly, one found a better partner before the other though.
Still, the final score as I see it is that they both found better partners the second time around which, in my personal experience at least, is no different to real-life with no help from any virtual worlds.

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Hah, great image!

I'm personally just about sick to death of all the big news outlets hyping up the same non-story. I'm hoping that it'll pass quickly -- that's "pass" in the same sense as "pass a kidney stone".

But it's nice to see a fresh angle presented in this article, at least.

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It's raining men. Nice screenshot :)

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Ironically, my past previous RL career involved studying and working for the late great P.T. Barnum (Kenneth Feld's ringling bros... clown stuff... but i digress) .... ...so point being, I have a Bachelors of Comedic Arts and know much about circus history.

P.T. Barnum's only true quote said by him is
"There's a sucker born every minute."

..... i have a feeling most other quotes probably came from Yogi Berra

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I beg to beg to differ lol. Because it's funny that this conversation came up in the class, and is usually a point that's brought up. History doesn't know who said it but it defintiely involved those two people.

I dunno really, but the tale involves the both of them standing outside the front of a freak show circus tent watching people fork over money to go in and see some weird circus show...

This is the guy that taught me circus history. Very awesome dude:

"LaVahn Hoh’s first encounter with the circus was momentous. “It made such an impression on me that I can still describe what I saw that day,” he recalls. Fifty years later, Hoh is as passionate about the circus as ever—but now he knows more about it than all but a handful of people.

Hoh, a professor of drama and an expert in technical theater and special effects, could never get the sawdust out of his veins. As an adult, he continued to go to circuses every chance he could, visiting such shrines for circus lovers as the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the Ringling Museum of the Circus in Sarasota, Florida."

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~fmj4f/web/circus_news.html

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Here's from wikipedia which goes with Tateru's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_minute

"There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase often credited to P.T. Barnum (1810 – 1891), an American showman. It is generally taken to mean that there are (and always will be) a lot of gullible people in the world.

However, when Barnum's biographer tried to track down when Barnum had uttered this phrase, all of Barnum's friends and acquaintances told him it was out of character. Barnum's credo was more along the lines of "there's a customer born every minute" — he wanted to find ways to draw new customers in all the time because competition was fierce and people could become bored easily.

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Actually those two (as Haizo pointed) had luck. But what interests me is what will happen with all those brainless noobs that floods us. And what's in their heads when they think that every girl will find them great lovers just because it's virtual world? And how all this will affect the world in the long term?
http://metaverse.acidzen.org/2008/flood-sex-obsession-second-life

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As one of the 100's of SL Mentors who rushed to the HIs to try and manage the hordes rezzing in, we were completely caught off guard for what was about to happen. The usually quiet HIs were packed, and the newbies continued to rez in 5, 6 and more at a time.We kept asking each other what was going on, why was this happening? Then the questions started..."what do you do here?'' "what can I do here?" "Are you real, can you strip for me?" "How do I have sex?" -the questions became more and more obscene. One mentor found two newbies trying to engage in sex acts in the Freebie House. I had 3 males trying to hump me. After refusing to explain how to engage in cyber sex, on newbie began taunting me with shouts of 'Mentor, You Suck".
The Lab knew about the BBC story and didn't fore warn us. The VTeam kept urging us to go to the HIs.
Many of these 'residents' are obviously underage. And all of these new residents are coming here with wrong ideas of how the majority of SL users interact.
What angers me also, is the bravado on the official SL Volunteer blog of what a great job we're doing welcoming the new residents. I know the 'new residents' have no idea what SL is truly about, I just didn't know some of our Mentors were also that out of it.

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Skate, you know how much some mentors don't know about SL, viewer, grid and the things one expects from somebody that is around more than six months? Sure you do, you seee questions on mentor channel.

I agree, we should have been warned. It's not only the amount of newbs, it's the idea that drove them in-world. It's not the same when somebody comes out of curiosity and tends to use SL as social media, when somebody comes as experienced gamer and will maybe build or script and when somebody comes with all the blood in their pants tripping about wild cybersex.

I don't mind if somebody comes because of cybersex. If asked politely, I'll talk about that and explain and show how to enable mature searches. But two guys were bloody close to orbiting last night.

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Jay, it's not about if people in SL have cybersex. We all know they do. But large part of the grid is free of rudeness we saw this weekend. Though, maybe you are right, I am not visiting some sims.

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Sex is everywhere in SL, yet eventually we settle down, get to work, and make something productive (and hopefully profitable).

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