In contrast to Tom Boellstorff, whose engagement with SL was at one and the same time immersive and respectful (and non-interventionist), Sklar mocked SL, and was deliberately provocative and destructive in his approach to it: he saw SL as his personal test subject to be prodded, electrified, kicked, and vivisected so that he could write about it.
Sklar and his Herald were, in my opinion, part of one of the most shamefully unethical interventions of academia into virtual worlds ever. Tizzers Foxchase was part of that, and was also someone repeatedly banned. Among its more regular features was the Post 6 Girl (or, just occasionally, Boy) which, as you surmise, was modeled on British girls.Īside from being semi-literate and over-the-top sensationalist much of the time, the Herald was also an "academic project," which is actually where my real objections to it come in: it deliberately stirred things up so that Sklar could write about them as part of his work on "online culture." Sklar and his paper associated and sometimes worked closely with in-world trolls and griefers, including Woodbury University, one of the worst griefer groups in SL history (and banned from the platform at least twice that I can recall). The newspaper was a muck-raking bucket of bat droppings that occasionally had serious news to report, but that mostly made its name by dealing in the currency of gossip and scandal, frequently half made-up. When Sklar was banned from the Sims Online, he moved his operation over to Second Life, and it became, at least for a while, "The Second Life Herald." In a nutshell, The Alphaville Herald was a virtual "newspaper" started in about 2003 to "report" on the culture of the Sims Online by Urizenus Sklar, a relatively well known real life American academic whom I won't identify here, but he's easy to look up. Spherical fixed boobs that point north at all times definitely look just like. Post 6 looks like a pisstake, I mean rip off, of ? Didn't expect a British reference. ETA: I've done some Googling about the Herald and Tizzers and what I'm finding is only confusing me further.
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