There was a time...

...when I was a regular at New London. I spoke with Kat frequently and I even DJ'd at quite a few weekend parties.

This, however, is a bygone era. There is an increasing atmosphere of hostility between New London and Doctor Who Exposition, at which I am now a staff member. So the question is, what the hell happened? How did things get so bad?

Only about two years ago, New London was just as much of a member of the big happy family of Doctor Who community on SL, but now they're more akin to the proverbial black sheep; like some third world dictatorship who look for anything and everything to get offended by that people say and use it to fuel their own fire against the rest of the community. Yes, I do say rest; although NL has never attacked other sims like Who Island, there is the fact to consider that every other sim gets along with DWE fine except them.


Did Kellman start it? When DWE hosted the first Podshock party, Victor1st Mornington's promotional youtube video failed to mention the fact that SL was, at least at the time, for users 18 years and older only; as a result, out of the good 70 or so attendees at the party, about half were underage. With the help of the Podshock forums, he and the Podshock staff collected a list of all the avatars present who were underage, and submitted the list to Linden Labs. However, since this information was collected outside Second Life, LL would do jack all about it so they moved on to the next best thing; submit the list to all the major sim owners so they could at least ban those avatars themselves.

Everyone cooperated. Except Timelord Kellman, who at least at the time was a co-owner of New London.

Now, I am only reciting Victor's recollection of the events, so all this is only as reliable as he is, but Kellman basically told him to fuck off - and then proceeded to try and convince all the other Doctor Who sim owners that Victor was trying to destroy the community. Of course, everyone laughed him off, and it's been downward spiral for New London ever since.

There are just so many particular events that have stuck to me regarding the manu misadventures of New London. Should I mention the story of how Hands of Omega was "banned" from New London?

New London hosts an annual "Tardis Expo", where people can showcase their exteriors. I myself submitted an exterior or two back when I used to go there. However, one year, Sen Pixie, the "leader" of the Hands of Omega team, fell ill at the time of the expo, leaving HoO absent from it. How did Kat Kassner interpret this? Well, she thought it was some kind of a personal attack, from someone who so far had stayed happily neutral on the increasing animosity between New London and Doctor Who Expo, and proceeded to "ban" the company from the sim, meaning the removal of their affiliate vendors.

The latest course of events had New London, attending the International Federation of Trekkers and putting up signs saying that 15% of all proceeds will go to the Relay For Life foundation, a cancer charity basically. A nice gesture, but the RFL guidelines dictate that 100% of the proceeds will have to go to RFL's coffers, otherwise the merchant is not allowed to advertise them with RFL's name.

Victor responded to this by contacting both the IFT and RFL representatives on SL. To any outsider, the question is probably "Why didn't he just take it up with the New London staff directly?", and the answer to that is simply the fact that they haven't exactly been welcoming of him in the past.

So naturally New London's reaction to all this is to interpret it as yet another personal attack; cue Victor's blog being spammed by New London yes-men (Yes, I said yes-men; not one of the replies is from an actual staff member there).

So in the end, as far as I'm concerned, both parties reacted poorly, but considering their common past, I can't say I'm surprised in the slightest.

It is said that the first victim of war is innocence. I believe it is also said that the first victim of war is the truth, and I stand here, asking you all; what IS the truth?

I know Kat is out there. She has a blog on blogspot, meaning she can reply to this blog if she so desires. I'm personally asking you to tell me, in your own words, the course of events as YOU saw them. For once, I want to hear BOTH sides of the story, and hopefully put the pieces together. For example, this whole sorry mess with Archangel Mortenwold. When the rest of the Katrina staff were positive about him being a copybotter, my questions about whether the sculpty texture is the same or even has the same UUID went unanswered.

Please, could someone just fill in the gaps for me? Above all else, I want to find out what the truth is, the REAL truth - and hope that some day, we can just pretend the past two years never happened and we could all be one great big happy community once more.