Burning questions

This year’s Burning Life wasn’t going to happen. The Lindens seemed to have abandoned it as an idea altogther. Then Vicero Lambert popped up and put pressure on them to donate the sims as usual, offering to do the work of organising the festival.

For the uninitiated, Burning Life was based upon the Burning Man festival  held annually in the US. It wasn’t something I even knew about before I came to Second Life, and I don’t know a lot more about it now, except that it seems to be a fairly free-form arts festival in which everyone does their own thing.

The SL version was a lot like that — in previous years you have had to apply for a plot, and then having claimed it you were free to build whatever you wanted. Last year I built a desert house on an oasis, and Oclee built a panoramic view with an orange tree in the middle. The builds are variable from the professional to the frankly amateurish, some detailed and compelte, others half-built. It’s always been interesting mooching around the sims, watching people build, and seeing the productions.

This year a rumble of disquiet has grown to a tumult of protest, because the avatar put in charge of the project has taken charge in what seems like a rather heavy-handed way. People who have temporarily moved builds over the building line have had them returned, reportedly, and some people’s builds have been deleted because they didn’t accord with the theme.

Art installations have been censored because the sims have been set PG. People have been told not to hold events on the sims. People are talking about running an alternative burning life which is more in keeping with the spirit of the original festival.