One Ten Linden Girl

There has been some furore over at SL Exchange in recent days, over the launch of a new Anshe Chung enterprise.  10Lindens is her new line in merchandise, all priced at 10Lindens.  Apparently it wasn’t enough for Ms Chung and her studios to undercut the creators of SL who do not have cheap Chinese labour at their disposal, and so she made it a triple whammy by initially including full perms versions of Craig Altman’s animations (I wonder if she bought copies for her employees, or simply passed on copies of her own?), AND hijacking the SL Exchange system to put her merchandise top of the searches.

Strangely enough, the ordinary creators who have used SL Exchange for selling their creations were not at all keen to be undercut by Ms Chung, were generally disdainful of her mistake in releasing the animations full perm, and derided the abuse of power that was indicated by the manipulation of search.

Within short order, Ms Chung had withdrawn the merchandise to fix the perms, and had issued a lecture on the way in which she is improving the world for us creators by undercutting us.  “Our plan for the end of this year is to have between 50 and 100 internal designers and scripters working on 10 LINDENS, plus a network of local partners we are currently training here. We plan to create a full range catalog of decent SL content.   I think this is definitely good news for the content creator community of SL, much the same way ACS entering the IMVU content market helped the content creator community as a whole to grow their business.”  So there. 

It seems that she is about to launch financial products, too, with investment from Gladwyne Partners (thanks, Aimee, via Second Citizen) the people who also invested in Electric Sheep.

The furore on the SL Exchange forums led first, to the withdrawal of the items, and then to Apotheus Silverman posting that the ranking of items would be repaired, and now to another posting by Guni Greenstein, who I believe is Anshe’s RL husband, about the background.  Given that he’s her husband, the distinction that he doesn’t own shares in SLX when she does seems odd.

Whether the constant controversy is a deliberate publicity stunt … ha ha, I think not, myself … or just blundering, I leave you to decide.  I wanted to be able to show that PR nous hasn’t been a feature before, with the notorious 2006 April Fool’s Day incident, but it seems to have vanished from the SL forum archive.  ACS failed to pay their tier by the due date, and expected Linden Lab to realise that other accounts in the same stables had the wherewithal but just hadn’t transferred it to the right account by the right time.  Of course.  Linden Lab should be doing their business accounting for them.  The thread, demonstrated no PR acumen whatsoever, in common with many threads in the forum.  However, it seems to have been pulled from the archive - at least, I can’t find it any more.

I have watched Anshe Chung’s rise to mega land baron from having met her on her first day in SL.   In that time she has not impressed me as trustworthy, and everything about her and her company is just a little bit hazy.  She joined the Brits in SL group, not because she is British, or lives in Britain, but because she once stayed there.  She started work as an escort out of Cannabis Cathedral, having begun giving sex lessons in SL within a week of arriving.  Only someone who was in SL at the time will realise what an achievement that was.  In this age of programmable rip-off sex beds and ubiquitous pose balls, it may be hard to imagine a time when custom animations were not available in SL.  Approximating avatar sex at that time involved memorising a list of standard animations, and utilising a system known as “box on/box off” which did indeed involve the attachment of boxes to avatars.  Sexy it wasn’t.

I have no problem with any adult pursuing whatever hobbies they may choose in Second Life, down to and including escort work, but there have been attempts to discredit people who publicised her infamous escort notecard, or those who claimed she worked as an escort.  When she angered the Sydney Morning Herald, they did a little digging to discover the truth.  Of course, it’s a way to offend those people who are offended by escorts and prostitution, so maybe that’s why she prefers not to remember it.

The next step in Ms Chung’s career involved selling poses dressed up to look like animations.  Having struggled with memorizing the default animations and attaching boxes here there and everywhere, the arrival of custom anims with 1.4 was a breath of fresh air.  Very few people knew how to use poser, and so a few custom dances and animations appeared in shops and clubs within a hours of the launch.  Among the shops selling these things, animations were relatively expensive and poses relatively cheap.  Many people were surprised to find that the relatively expensive boxes they had purchased actually contained poses and not animations.

I didn’t keep track of what the Chung empire was up to over the next few months, but kept tripping over Anshe anyway.  On several occasions she IM’d me to complain that my large and “ugly” builds were preventing her from selling land adjacent to me.  I’d have taken that a little more seriously if she hadn’t been using ultra terraforming to draw attention to her land for sale — bringing land up as high as possible, thus stretching and deforming the terrain textures, and sometimes returning neighbour’s possessions when the land was deformed on their side of the property line too.  She indulged in neg rating wars with a gang of alts.  She said that constant tales of her buying up first land for less than market value were lies spread by her detractors, and that people complaining about her defaulting on won auctions were wrong when they said she was using this as a tactic to prevent others from winning sim auctions.

When private islands arrived, Ms Chung was back in the news again.  At that time you could not sell land on a private island.  You could rent it out, but the title and possession of the land remained with the island owner.  Other land barons respected the rules, bought islands and carved them up for rental.  There were constant complaints that Ms Chung and her minions were advertising land for sale which was not, in fact, for sale, and argument over the interpretation of the rules from Linden Lab.

Over the time since then, there have been various complaints on the forums, about people having “bought” land which they have then been summarily ejected from, for infringing a local zoning rule, for non payment of tier, for putting up signs about “Banshee Dung”.

The issue over which I had the biggest fight with Anshe was, in the end, one which I thought was resolved before she posted on the SL forums: reselling animation balls full mods for a fraction of their cost.  She argued with me in world, agreed not to put the animation balls in her shops and then went on the forums to defend what she had already agreed not to do.  This slight sense of dual personality is said to come from the fact that both Anshe and he husband inhabit the Anshe Chung avatar.  I’m assuming that when she stoops to using “I cry now” in negotiations it is Anshe herself and not the husband, but I don’t know.  I thought it was just me that prompted tears when I called her to account for behaviour and she disliked it, but I hear from another land baron that “I cry now” is a ploy in land negotiations too.

She has campaigned tirelessly in her own self interest.  There was the campaign for a stable currency, widely known as the AS$, which didn’t endear her to people who had heavy investments — or reliable income — in Linden Dollars.  There was the campaign against point-to-point teleportation, mainly because she had purchased a lot of expensive land around telehubs (later reimbursed by Linden Lab).  A campaign boycotting the land store.

Now here comes the ACS 10Linden line, which is designed to put fear into the heart of any creator.  I don’t think it should.  There are already many free or almost-free places in SL, and they don’t appear to dent the business of the successful creators in SL.  Just like customers in pound or dollar stores in RL, the people buying ten linden goods will be those who can’t afford other things, or who really like or need the item offered.

For the majority of those with lindens to spare, they will be looking for the creativity or style that they associate with their favourite creators of goods in SL. I am slightly concerned that the  copying of creator descriptions on SLX means that they intend to make Far-Eastern knock-offs of current creators’ goods, but hope that the attempt for growing respectability will prevent them from doing that.  Mind you, some of their own descriptions seem to have lost something in the translation: “Nice buy, never miss this chance to blow!  Main color is gold, glorious to look.” Personally, I don’t think ACS ever misses a chance to blow….