Socially|Mundane

I've been thinking about my favorite pet-peeves of Second Life for a while now. No, I don't mean all the Linden Lab SNAFUs or the Second Life Viewer bugs or the general wonky nature of the Second Life Grid.

I'm referring to those things in-world, usually the cause of which are residents themselves. So I am going to work my way through my top-ten pet-peeves list. But rather than just plop a bullet lists here, I'm hoping to elaborate on each, so you know why it's a pet-peeve. And that if any apply to you directly, you'll understand why it's a pet-peeve and so irritating not only to me, but likely many, many others who come into your presence.

Number ten my list are "lazy-assed, childish-looking net-speak".

r u rdy to knw wt I syng?

Hllo r u bsy? Wanna fck?

Okay, so this isn't necessarily an issue specific to second Life. It's been around for quite some time and doesn't stems primarily from cell phone texting as one might suspect.

Cell phone texting is where specific initials, (no, they are not acronyms,) are used to convey a message and communicate. Part of this has to do with the simpler method of typing on those funky number-pad keyboards and part of it has to do with the limited number of characters allowed in any SMS (Short Message System) text message.

Much of what is used in net-speak, not to be confused with leet-speak, (such as "u r fuxx0rz d00d!!".) Some net-speak does come from the SMS texting method. "U" meaning "you" and so on.

The first think it tells me when someone says in open chat "Hlo, r u bsy?" ...is how intellectually and perhaps physically lazy they are. I simply have no patience whatsoever for lazy people. srsly.

It's immature and, in my mind downright childish. In fact, if you speak this way in open chat - to me or not - my first impression is "is this person a legal adult in Second Life?"

Some of these texting shortcuts are okay and excepted on a global scale, such as "LOL" and it's variants. But when you are just way too damned lazy to actually are "are you" instead of "r u" - I'm sorry, but you are a dimwit of the highest magnitude.

Not only will I do my best to utterly embarrass your intellect level, but I will ignore you as well. No, it is not an excuse if English is not your first language. In these cases bad grammar is excused. Shortcutting proper words is not.

So the evil shortcuts include many different implementations, including the most common: R = are, U = you, TY = thank you, and so on. What makes it worse is when people are so damned lazy they don't even bother using upper-case versions of these.

Okay, so it's expected to see this in shopping locations as lazy-assed dimwits communicate about the color or style of the 521st style of hair they are deciding on to purchase, but when it is used in role playing environments, it is irritating exponentially to the 100th power.

It's okay to be a dumb-assed dimwit dip-shit. Just don't bring it to anywhere within my presence. it's one thing when I move into range of you lazy-ass. But if you come into my space and I was there first... I am really tempted to bounce your dimwittedness into orbit.

srsly.