Sour Grapes of Wrath

The Mean Girls’ blog has it right – just head over to Kinko’s or K-Mart and make your own damned calendar.

There is an overabundance of virtual beauty in Second Life. Which is probably why there were over 600 entries to a recent virtual girl calendar contest. And probably why people stooped to cheating to get votes.

I entered excitedly when I first heard about the contest. I had hoped that I’d get a cute picture and a modeling job or two out of the experience. (I mean, I do have SL rent to pay..)

I assumed that the pool of entrants would be narrowed to a reasonable size by the organizers…say, they might have a pool of 25–30 for people to vote on to get the final number they needed.

On the first day of voting, I went to see if I had been selected for the voting round. But I soon discovered that, ridiculously, every single entrant had been kept in the pool - [cattiness] no matter how fugly . [/cattiness] Oh. My. God.

At the voting location, there was no organization of the pictures, that I could discern. They weren’t alphabetical, there was no index or map that showed where to find specific people, etc. It was literally impossible to find my picture – it just wasn’t there.

But what I did find was someone buying votes. A Group Leader for (.. hmmm… I’ll call the store… hmmmm… let’s see… F.A.R.T.) F.A.R.T. was standing in front of his friends’ pics offering to give people $500L gift cards in exchange for voting for them. [cattiness] But, I was consoled to realize that if you need to pay for votes to win a “beauty pageant”, then perhaps that money would have been better spent on new shapes and skins. [/cattiness] Astonishingly, when I called the F.A.R.T.ers on it, I got booted from their update group. OK…well, I certainly do not have to spend anymore Linden’s at that shop anymore. Harrumph.

At first, I was a bit deflated since I am so new to SL and I realized that instead of a beauty contest it was turning out to be nothing more than a political campaign. Then, I got pissed. Even if my entry had actually made it into the voting, I had no chance at all against well connected, older players.

Ultimately, there would have been no need to campaign for votes if the contestant pool had been narrowed beforehand. And so much easier to vote, as well.

I’ll admit – I was excited when I first heard about the contest. And yes, I am a little bummed about how things turned out. But now, I realize that is not necessarily such a bad thing. I mean, I do have the $19.99 to make my own.

So…what do you think…May?

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