Where Charity and Shaming meet, there is WANK!
There is this giant virtual world/video game named Second Life, and within it people like to do good deeds. For the last several years there have been various charity funds, including Fashion For Life (FFL, a donor to the Cancer Charity Relay for Life). Part of the fashion world in Second Life are various blogs, where people volunteer to blog about items specific to the event; sometimes they are given things to blog, and other times they purchase their own, but there's been increasing tension because of store owners who believe bloggers are taking advantage of free gifts and not blogging them.

In the wake of the 2012 Fashion for Life event, Fashion for Life recursively blogged about the bloggers, including call-outs to people who either didn't blog for the event (the original has been deleted but an image was saved by Shopping Cart Disco here). This spurred the so-called Second Life Associate Press (not associated with the Associated Press) to post a Hall of Shame targeting bloggers "who took advantage of Harper Bereford’s trust and got the goodies but couldn’t be bothered to do even one post and you all need to know who they are." One of the members of the SL Associated press, Quella Quan, was even kind enough to contact the bloggers in world, point them to the post, and in at least one case ask why the person hadn't blogged. Another blogger admitted her shame on Second Life's official forum and received a fascinating array of responses.

In a supreme fit of irony, one of the bloggers listed didn't blog because her cancer has re-occured. That's right - people associated with a Cancer Charity shamed a cancer patient for seeking treatment for her cancer instead of blogging for a Cancer Charity.

If that wasn't delicious enough, the Editor of SL Associated Press/Best of Second Life (don't ask me to tell them apart, I have important tv shows to watch) posted the best half-assed apology ever, wherein the claim was made that things shouldn't be deleted (even though they were) because CENSORSHIP and that really the tone was wrong, not the message - since we all know those damn cancer patients should just blog from their beds of pain if they want to not be "Tacky tacky tacky".

The final bout of irony - for the first several days of the wank, the writer for the SL Associated Press was too busy with offline things to deal with the fallout of his post.

For more details, check out the original Shopping Cart Disco post on this, and the charming follow up.


Notable Quotables:

"SL Fashion is such a nepotistic little clique it gives me the shits."

"What is also saddening is certain sanctimonious hypocrites crying they are so ‘dismayed’ by the words and behaviors of others when they are lying, thieving, fake, drama whores themselves and people fall for it. If you’re going to comment on this at least be honest with yourself bitch and take a good long look into the mirror!"

"Donation to this year’s FFL : about 11K spent shopping for a truly great cause Seeing Nave called out for the inexcusable idiot he is: PRICELESS"

"What Nave did was necessary so these people who were mentioned will never sign up for free items in a charity and then ignore the event again."

"I never had any drama until I started blogging. Since I joined the old blog I;ve had haters, stalkers and drama. I mean, really, is this supposed to go with the territory?"

And from the gentleman who helped to start it all - "I’ve returned from my weekend of RL adventure away from the internet and SL. I returned to a post-apocalyptic wasteland in SL...It’s interesting to me, in reading through that holocaust of derision, that few, if any, of the people pissing and moaning the loudest had anything to do with FFL 2012 in any form...I apologize to the ones I named who’d posted and somehow I missed seeing that there was an FFL item buried in one of the posts they made (although one of my evil friends suggested that it is as easy for them to edit a blog as it is for me. I won’t be following up on this idea though)."