I think I can finally compile a list of tactics one can use that will help you survive the savage, hostile environment of the college football fan forum, such as can be found at Yahoo’s Rivals.com or ESPN.com.

Here’s the quick and dirty thing to do. Kind of mentally pitch into the round file any post that contains any of the following:

• The words joke, choke, loser, or pathetic.
• Any form of laughter (i.e. “HAHAHAHAHAHA”, “LOL”, “ROTFLMAO”)

Those things are the mark of the troll. Trolls love college football forums, not for the enlightening discussion of what Team X should do to beat Team Y, or who ought to be ranked higher than whom, but because they’re not going to have better opportunity anywhere else of calling another human being a pathetic loser. Trolls are, however, finding an abundance of big game in Christian sims in Second Life.

My expertise on trolls comes from the wrong end of being trolled. Truth to be told, there’s a little troll in me, and I would call myself pathetic. The only two things keeping me out of my mother’s basement is having neither a basement nor a living mother.

It is well said that conflict is essential to good drama. I am here to put before you the claim that conflict also makes for the best comedy.

Inspiration has truly struck. I was thinking back on last Thursday’s griefer attack on the Vine Christian Prayer Center, and I’m sure that with the proper attention given to plot and characterization, I know I can turn this into stand-up comedy gold.

In this comedy skit, I play the role of  a pastor of a virtual church on Second Life that is all too gung-ho about making newcomers feel welcome in his place of ministry. The newcomers he deals with today are a gang of griefers looking to lay waste to all he has painstakingly worked to build. And if they can get him rattled enough to make him abandon turning the other cheek and do something that can be spun as hateful, like banning them, so much the better.

Our pastor smilingly welcomes a new female avatar into his Christian encounter group. Little does he know that this girl plays the pivotal Trojan Horse role in a griefer attack. Her mission, once the meeting has begun, is to send teleport invitations to all the other griefers, so they can pop in and begin setting off particle bombs and noisy gestures.

His associate pastor tries to warn him of the questionable mostly-Goth groups the newcomer has on her profile, but the pastor dismisses that out of hand as being overly paranoid. His cyber-chapel is open to all who wish to come.

The griefers begin to pop in one by one to wreak their havoc, and the fun begins. This is going to be the most satisfying piece of comedy writing I’ve done in a long time.

At the Vine Christian Prayer Center on Second Life, we are being tested very severely. By trolls.

What I cannot fathom is why. I’m sure there must be some immutable law written somewhere on the Internet of how Christians are going to be hypocrites down to the last man, woman, and child, not so much as one exception. And according to Rule 34, there will also be a pornographic variation of that law. (Please don’t ask for a hyperlink for Rule 34.)

So why waste their own time conducting their rigged tests for hypocrisy?

Here’s my take on it: The trolls know going in that we Christians are going to be judgmental hypocrites. The only question to be settled is how fast they can get us to act that way. All troll tests are along the lines of how much taunting and harrassment we can withstand, and almost all guarantee failure.

You may as well drop a bowling ball to see if the Law of Gravity is still in effect.

Last Thursday, a group of griefers pulled off a Trojan Horse style attack in which one of their number comes to the Vine Prayer Center posing as a curious onlooker, which we of course cannot resist allowing to come into our midst. Once the meeting begins, the Horse sends teleport invitations to all the other attackers, who upon their arrival set off particle bombs and noisy gestures. Bedlam supreme.

The test? How quickly, amid rapidly losing control of the meeting, will our moderator, Grace Cuthbertsson, forget all she was ever taught of turning the other cheek, and resort to the judgmental, hypocritical measure of banning the attackers?

She must ban people or she has no meeting. She has no choice. It’s not a question of if, but when, she flunks this test. It’s a very unfair test.

Lord, are these the people to whom You’d send us with the Gospel? How are we going to win them? All we can do is fail their tests!

Let me share a bit about how potential vaccination patients preregister themselves for an H1N1 vaccine.

At the bottom of the form where the individual enters his information, there is a button labeled Print Patient Form. This prints a copy of the demographic information he entered, and he can take this to his vaccine provider. Preregistering ahead of time greases the wheels considerably by getting information about the potential patient into our computers where it can be called up at the time of the vaccination.

Realizing that not everybody is going to have a computer and Internet service, our official position here at the state health department is that it’s not mandatory to produce this Patient Form to receive the H1N1 vaccine. However, if a smaller agency such as a doctor, hospital, city or county health department, school district, or the caller’s employer wants to make it mandatory, we don’t challenge that. We step aside and let them run their own show.

That being said, smaller agencies do require the Patient Form, and I get calls from people with no computers or Internet who are freaking out because their kids came home from school with a note that said 1) they are required to be vaccinated at the school clinic coming up tomorrow, and 2) they are required to produce the Patient Form from our web site to be vaccinated. The red tape unfairly ensnares the Internet-impaired.

So, who should have the responsibility of getting the required Patient Form to the obstinate asses who required it? Me? They never gave us at the call center an option to register the caller over the phone and mail them the Patient Form. And the “not mandatory” spiel will not be enough. Something of a more concrete nature needs to be done.

That brings up the subject of another thing we are not given here—a suggestion box!

You know Mr. Cheetah Guy in Hawaiian Shorts I wrote about yesterday? He’s not a cheetah. He’s a serval, as he would tell me last night.

Leave it to a furry to know much more about animals than the TV news reporter who interviews him.

I looked closely at the news footage, and I found that the serval’s name is Darrien Lightworker. Once I had his name, I searched him up, and looked on his profile for the groups to which he belongs. He belongs to the Vine Christian Prayer Group, just like me, and he also belongs to several Green Lantern groups that protect residents on Second Life from criminals much like the Guardian Angels Safety Patrols do in real life.

I’ve seen him before! I know it!

Picture what Sonic the Hedgehog would be like had he joined the Green Lantern Corps. The green and black tights, the power ring, the “In brightest day, in blackest night” GL Oath, the whole nine yards. That is what Darrien looked like to me several weeks ago at a discussion group hosted by Grace Cuthbertsson.

I decided to IM Darrien, who happened to be online last night, and asked if he’s going to be at tonight’s Vine meeting. He says he still has the serval avatar. Maybe it will show up.

NBC Nightly News: “Religious Experience”

In my search for articles about Second Life and how it made news on the big television networks, I stumbled upon this interesting article:

Now that I’ve sampled churches in both Second Life and “meatspace”, I’m still convinced that there is no adequate substitute for a body of believers that meet in a brick and mortar building. I still go to Christian Assembly, in spite of the fact that it’s still a music/dancing church with very little to do for the writing/drawing member. I’d love for them to promote their web site, at least once.

As for the new congregation I’ve found, Vine Community Christian Church in Second Life, I’m highly curious about that church, too. We’re still trying to feel our way around, and invent ways to worship our Lord. I’m finding it a very fascinating exercise for my God-given problem solving skills. I can’t wait to see what will happen tonight.

I’d like to meet Mr. Cheetah Guy in Hawaiian Shorts, and try to find out from him why he thinks his SL church is the only one that seems to be accepting of him. I can’t help but wonder if there’s some brick ‘n’ mortar church out there that really dropped the ball in how they treated him.

There’s so much more to this story than the sound bites tell us.

Family Dollar is offering a digital still camera for $10 and a small digital video camera for $40.

Should I bite? After all, I do fancy myself a citizen journalist. Such gadgets would be a boon for my blogging.

I got my pay for the week, and bought myself earbuds and a supply of AAA batteries for my MP3 player. And a 10-pack of socks. I don’t feel right unless I have a strong supply of AAA batteries for both my Palm IIIxe and my MP3.

Scratch that. I need a strong supply of everything. If you were to look at my apartment, you would notice an oversupply of paper, both plain copier and college-ruled notebook. In the bathroom, I usually have more than one bottle each of  shampoo and body wash. What I’m not oversupplied on is toilet paper and dishwasher detergent, and I’m thinking seriously about getting such tomorrow morning. I have an extra cartridge of black ink for my printer, even though I don’t use it that much, and I’m starting to feel a strong cry toward getting more colored ink.

And I feel the need to pay the Internet bill off early, too. God forbid I should run low on that. Oh well. Pay the bills when I get home.

I don’t have a whole lot of life before and after each work shift at the Department of Health. At best an hour after I get up and begin that pivotal Final Hour Before Leaving and four hours after I get home, during which I do some Second Life. I leave for the Northern Lights Shopping center 15 minutes earlier now, to have more time to go to a thrift store and peruse its wares. Earlier, before catching the bus to work, I bought a sling messenger bag and a Beethoven CD.

The things I’m doing on SL nowadays are Bible studies and discussion groups at 8:00 PM SLT (translates to 11:00 PM Eastern). Helps me to feel spiritual, but I honestly don’t think I’m putting enough into it. Of SL and this blog, I’d have to say it’s Big Skye’s Country that is my biggest outreach. Here I can speak my piece for God and get away from the keyboard before anything in the way of negative feedback comes.

But then, ministering through SL … on second thought, I really must stop calling it “ministering”, because that’s speaking Christianese. It makes what I do sound more mystical than it really is. It’s a code talk understandable only by those on the inside and dismissed as fakery by those on the outside.

I want to be understood. When I start talking in some kind of hokey insider language of any kind, I ask you, dear reader, to have the courage to call me on the carpet for it. It’s a bad thing indeed.

Whatever it is I end up calling it, it’s a new thing. It’s very hard to measure the effectiveness of what I do. It’s very hard to decide what I should be doing more of and what I should be doing less of. The stand-up comedy I was doing I was doing out of being an attention slut and perhaps God is putting a merciful end to that misbehavior by closing down all the available comedy clubs.

I need to sleep on this and pray over this.

Work at the polling place

I bought me one of those digital photo frames at lunch yesterday. You know, one of those newfangled LCD screen things for showing everybody photos of the grandkids. Only I don’t have real photos in mind for this one. I’ve been meaning to use it as a kind of digital billboard.

You see, for several months now, I’ve known how you can export presentation slides from OpenOffice Impress into JPEG files and upload them into Second Life for use in presentations there, but it wasn’t until about about two or three days back that I would want a digital photo frame for slide presentations in real life.

I was pondering getting me another one of those electronic scrolling message badges and then thought better of it. What a ripoff! This is something that can only show four alphanumeric characters at a time, and takes God knows how long to go through my badge name, hotel room number, and cell phone number! Why not something that can show presentation slides, charts, graphs, graphics, the works?!

So I picked up a Philips Digital Photo Frame at Wal*Mart for some $85. Trouble is, now I can hear the Employment Gods whispering into my brain, “You know, after a ‘hanging the queen’ purchase like that, after throwing away all that food and clothing money, you realize we’re going to have to fire you from your job, right?”

I’d show you a photo of it doing its thing, but I had to plug into it the memory card and USB cable that came with my camera, and now I don’t have memory for my camera.

My 13 hour work day at the polling precinct went by pretty fast, and it was busy, even busier than the presidential election one year ago. We didn’t have much in the way of dead time; there was almost always somebody at at least one of our six iVotronic machines. I guess the voter mobilization battle going on between the pro-casino AFL-CIO and the anti-casino United Methodist Church brought all these people to our door. While I was voting machine judge again at this election the three teenage ladies from Youth at the Booth handled the bulk of showing voters to the iVotronics.

The technical problems we had to deal with in the morning were one machine that couldn’t detect its tape printer that prints out the paper record of each ballot, and a bad electrical outlet in the back corner.

While Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the fat cats at Penn National Gaming are probably lighting up the first of many big cigars now that the business plan of their new casinos are chiseled into the marble of the Ohio Constitution (nothing the state legislature can do about it now), and they can start exacting their terrible toll on people who are poor at math, I’d like to point out that Issue 3 got spanked in our two little precincts by 110 to 50 something. I don’t remember the exact numbers. At least my neighborhood is not beaten and bloodied enough by the economy to accept a questionable source of jobs and revenue.

Apartment in Saralis

I think the Lord has given me the gift of tech support. And I think He’s found me a way to use it directly for His work.

This morning, I wrote a notecard which will hopefully be distributed with worship animations that gives some tips on how to use the Second Life avatar in one’s worship.

Pastor Grace Cuthbertsson preached live through Voice Chat and made her sermon notes available through a notecard distributor, which I think gives the Lord’s Chapel a leg up on such other churches as ALM Cyberchurch and Calvary Chapel of SL, which play pre-recorded sermons.

Elsewhere on the grid, there is the strong possibility I could be moving to a new spacious two-room apartment in Saralis Village in Irutsk in another week, for not much more Linden than I’m paying for the two-room cabin in Upper Peaks.

I love the new digs. It promises to be a delightful new headquarters for this angel bear. And when you get right down to it, that’s all you can ask from an apartment in Second Life, a personal HQ. A storage place for news and information.

Gadget supply

I should hopefully get a small bunch of CR2032 button batteries that I can use in my electronic scrolling message belt buckle. I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting myself another one of those scrolling message badges,  but I think that for the amount of info that I would want to display on my person, I’d be much better off getting an 8″ digital picture frame. I know how to export slides from OpenOffice Impress as JPEG images, so it’s a piece of cake to turn it into a $30.00 digital sign.

Assuming the bid I just made on eBay holds up for the next 5 hours.