As I recently tweeted, I missed this little personnel change and only found out about it belatedly by reading an article on Inara Pey's blog (
Blondin Linden Goes). Yikes. It totally made me relive my own experience fighting the move to Zindra because Blondin was the key communicator for all things Adult Content related!
Just to clarify, I'm no prude but then I'm also not really a consumer of explicit content. However, the way Linden Lab handled the whole thing by forcing adult content to a new X-rated zone was just st00pid. They could have easily made a new, true G-rated area and simply kept Mature the way it was. Mature was already the anything goes zone.
My own little protest of the whole silly affair was to create a couple of really risque items, put them up in my skystore and then apply for a move to Zindra. Like stoopid magic, I got my wish and wound up with a waterfront double-prim 512. I stayed there for a month or so, then sold the land off for 10x what my old 512 was worth. I actually bought a mid-water 512 from the person who bought my Zindra land.
Anyway, to those who said "good riddance" to Blondin, I say you don't know half the story. Here's what I replied to Inara's blog post....
Somehow this doesn’t surprise me but then nothing that happens in and around Linden Lab surprises me any more. I actually had the chance to interact via email and back channels a bit with Blondin and he really was between a rock and a hard place. I sympathize fully. He got twisted internally by his superiors. He would try to do something the community wanted, say it was going to get done and then have the rug pulled out from underneath when the higher ups would backtrack.
Yes he acted as the corporate shill but then that’s what he was paid to do. From someone at his level, it’s pretty much ALL you can do. Which sux because employees like Blondin are the ones on the front lines with the community. Amanda and others often seem to see the community (aka customers) as annoyances who don’t “get” it — whatever their definition of “it” is at any given moment. Ick.
