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Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Ukraine vs Russia, Settled The Old Fashioned Way - Stacey Cardalines Reporting

 


"You can't do that, it is an act of depravity!"


"'Controversy creates cash.'"


You are a fly on the wall at a meeting of Show Managers for Divas Wrestling sim. In the interest of full disclosure, this reporter is a "Spokesmodel" at this sim. One of the managers, who may be a Spokesmodel with a newspaper job on the side, is proposing a particularly brutal main event for one of the Divas shows. Before we go further, we must explain a few things about wrestling on SL.

There are two kinds of SL wrestling. One is done with a hud, and is a sport/game. Two wrestlers use a hud to have an actual competition against each other. The Virtual Wrestling Alliance, who advertise with this paper, are this sort of league. While they may use some sort of plot contrivance, they are selling the sport more than the spectacle. I do not know if the wrestlers are paid by the league, paid by tips from the audience at shows, or not paid at all.

The other sort of wrestling is poseball wrestling, which is more of a Performance Art. The matches, while not fixed, are contrived, and the opponents cooperate rather than compete. There is a heavy emphasis on personality, conflict, good/bad girls and just making a scene. The wrestlers live off the tip money from the crowd, so whatever they do to draw attention to themselves is fair game. Divas Wrestling is this sort of wrestling.

Pro Wrestling in general is a sketchy business. Her roots lay in barnstorming carnival shows, the anything-that-draws-attention motif was in full effect as far back as when Grover Cleveland was the President and elements of it stretch back to the Dark Ages. When your show is two people fighting, you don't really need to waste as much money/time/effort on developing scripts or hiring gifted writers. You can be very ham-handed with the presentation.



Thusly, wrestling tends to have broad, easily understood storylines. The dastardly Mean Girl is fighting the adorable All American girl, stuff like that. Wrestlers can be cowboys, European royalty, cheerleaders, bikers, musclemen, axe murderers, surfers, college boys, cannibals, karate guys, etc... pretty much anything that can be painted with a broad stroke and understood by children.

One easy way to perform this task is the Ripped From The Headlines motif, where your storyline reflects some current news event. This motif is good because FOX or CNN or NBC News do the backstory for you, all you need to do after is provide the militia guy or the evil comic book heroine ripoff and your story pretty much writes itself. 

With that in mind, it was almost inevitable that, at some point in 2022, this (see below) meeting among wrestling show producers was going to happen:


"We need a main event that gets people riled up."

"I have one."

"Do tell..."

"It's ripped from the headlines."

"Aren't they all?"

"We get a Russian girl and a Ukrainian girl to fight."

"Huh?"

"It'll rule."

"You can't do that, it is an act of depravity."

"Controversy creates cash."

"Thousands of people are dying over there, we can't make light of it."

"The crowd will love it."

"Where would you even FIND a girl from Russia or the Ukraine?"

"I have a Ukraine t-shirt and shorts."

"You're French."

"Close enough."

"Where do you plan to get the Russian?"

"My friend Courtney, she does some model work for me with the SL Enquirer."

"She's from the Ukraine?"

"Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA."

(pause)

"We'll get her a Soviet Union gymnast outfit I saw at a store."

(second pause)

"She's blonde... she'll look Slavic."

"The idea that someone might be offended by this never popped into your head."

"I have a filter which blocks things like that."

"This idea has been terminated with extreme prejudice."



The road to the castle gates is not always the high road, and one has to step on a lot of nice people as they claw their way to the top. The person proposing the fight wasn't a monster. She was just ahead of the curve.


Friday, March 4, 2022

Stacey Visits The STOP WAR Sim - Stacey Cardalines Reporting

 


War is very unpleasant to think about, and many would view SL as a means of temporary escape. One can't actually do anything about those tanks, but one can get away from it for a while on SL. In a broad sense, it is sort of what SL is for.

However, what if you don't want to escape? What if you want to talk to other people about what is going on? SL is good for that, too. Many sims on SL get Ripped From The Headlines, and after a while it rebounds back to someone like me and what is Ripped From The Headlines becomes the actual headline. I visited one of those sims today.

The world watched in outrage as Russian armies attacked the Ukraine. It is a horrible thing to watch, and it has catastrophic potential implications if other players become involved. You'd think "worldwide plague" would be enough, but we just upped the ante. Russians have reasons for acting as they do, and "obscure SL sportswriter column" is most likely not where those reasons need to be debated.

Russia's invasion of the Ukraine is not fun stuff to play out at a sim. I'd greatly question the integrity of someone who made a first-person shooter Russia vs the Ukraine war game sim... right after I played it for a few hours, of course. Just kidding, I don't think I could perform the moral gymnastics needed to play something for laughs as people are dying for real in the Ukraine. I do some hardcore RP too, so my bar is pretty high, and my refusal to war-game the Ukraine horror is thusly notable.


STOP WAR is a sim which just went into effect last Friday. It is not a grand sim in any design way, it is in fact very simple. There are a few pictures, a chart showing NATO countries, a dispenser where you can get a free Ukraine flag and a game table. Nothing there that will stop a war, and at this point it is important to remember that wars aren't going to be stopped by video games, and in fact often resemble video games when you see someone guiding in a missile and so forth. 

Pela, who runs the STIP WAR sim, is no fool, and her sim title is more Idealistic than an aspect of a mission statement. I spoke with her a while while visiting her sim in the early US morning. She put the sim up Friday, and will leave it up as long as it is active and stays relatively positive.

Pela recognizes that, in times of war, people get traumatized, or even just upset, or even just intrigued. They need somewhere to go where they can discuss it. It may not be polite to take over someone's nightclub and turn it into a NATO discussion format. However, at STOP WAR, you can chat about the war all you like. 



Human nature being what it is, people sometimes choose Battle over Reason. However, there are places for both, and this sim falls into the camp of the latter. Anyone getting too close to the former will be asked to leave. This sim is meant to allow people to seek some comfort.

They are getting some good traffic for a sim that started Friday, so there is definitely interest in the topic among those who play the Linden way. Pela is running the sim for all the right reasons, and hopefully good beats evil. Pela told me that some Russian themed sims were having some problems with people arguing, and hopefully that doesn't go down at STOP WAR. 


I got some Ukraine gear from the SL Marketplace, not the STOP WAR sim. Pela- who seems pretty nice, and dresses cooler than I do- isn't running that sim to make a profit, and the only gear they had there was a free flag. I may wear my Ukraine outfit at my dancer job, although it might cost me Russian tips. I've had no luck finding Belarus gear. I do have a USSR gymnast leotard, which I saw at a store and I thought looked cool. I can switch between outfits from different nations, depending on the political affiliations of my customers. I never imagined that I'd have to think geopolitically when I accepted the dancer job at the wrestling sim, but that's how things shake out sometime.



Yes, that's my ass in that picture. Never let it be said that Stacey Cardalines shirks from the horrors of war. Spasibo.


Saturday, September 10, 2011

Russian Hockey Tribute

Stacey is A) the short one or B) the one without pants.

 
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