Tbux.com: blah blah rant

After my blog post on May 8th, which was mirrored on the There Voice, I was happy to see KittenKat publish a response there. It really shows how there are two sides to every story, and although the whole thing may come off as airing dirty laundry in public, the alternative of gossip and rumors seems worse to me.

I don't want to make a big deal out of it and publish anything else on the matter in the There Voice, but since this is my blog, and blogs are by nature somewhat self-indulgent, I thought I would make some sort of response here to Kittenkat's response. So if you are actually here reading my blog, indulge me for a minute...

First, kittenkat says I completely stopped responding to emails from her. This is true...she says I glosses over that fact, but I don't think I did. She sent me an email saying "if you're using a bot, stop. If you aren't using a bot, then leave some sales request for others". I wasn't prepared to do that, so I simply didn't answer her emails. It was only a couple of emails! By responding, all I would do is give myself less time to get my own system up and running. KittenKat also implies that it hurt her personally that I didn't respond...and I don't think she is making that up or anything, but at the same time...well, kittenkat and I used to IM sometimes or email, but I've always felt that the only time she would ever contact me was to ask me a question about how to do something in 3ds Max or gmax or to quiz me about how my imvu credits selling site worked and how to use the IMVU payment gateway. Not that she wasn't nice and chatty, and I'm sure she's busy and all, but it doesn't really feel like friendship or a warm, personal relationship when she only contacts me to ask me for information to help her set up her competing business(es). I feel a little bad saying that but...I can't help how I feel.

Kittenkat also says that sellers complained that they wanted to claim sales requests but couldn't because of my bot. They may have had a hard time claiming sales requests, but it was actually easier for them with the bot then against jinx the human being! The thing that made it harder wasn't the bot, but the fact that email was broken so nobody was getting notified that there was a request. Otherwise, anyone sitting right there at their computer would have had a very good chance of getting the request before the bot did. I even turned the bot off at times and watched requests sit there for hours without being claimed. Actually, for a long time there were hundreds of unclaimed requests, because nobody wanted to claim the smaller transactions.

People say a bot is unfair, but just what is and is not unfair? There was no rule against a bot. Before I claimed most of the requests, Viv did. I don't think Viv had a bot, but somehow she was faster than me EVEN IF I was right there at the computer with the proper web page open. How did she do that??? Was that fair? If someone had a boyfriend that was a night owl and claimed requests on their behalf while they were sleeping, would that be fair? Is using your boyfriend to claim requests somehow more "fair" than using a bot?

But ultimately, is it fair to the people trying to sell their ThereBucks TO tbux.com? For years, people asked to join tbux.com as a seller and were denied. Instead, to sell their ThereBucks through tbux.com they would have to go through the "submit a request and wait for someone to claim it and email you" process. There were many more sellers than there were members of tbux.com. Is it fair to THEM to try to make things as fair as possible for the much smaller number of people who are actually allowed to be members, when it inconveniences them to have to wait to be contacted, sometimes for hours? (Or never, as was the case with the smaller transactions for so long.) And who wants a version of "fair" that involves everyone wasting more of their time?

Kittenkat says people were forced, because of me, to sit up until all hours of the night trying to claim sales requests and they couldn't because of my bot. First of all, this is simply not true. My bot would check for sales an average of every ten minutes. Anyone sitting at their computer and checking for requests say...every five minutes...would have had a better chance of getting a request than the bot. And anyway...for TWO YEARS I was sitting at my computer trying to do exactly what she says these people were "forced" to do. Tbux.com has something like 20 sellers now...are they all "forced" to sit up late at night trying to claim requests against each other now???? I think their odds with the bot were better! "Fair" is just completely stupid when it involves everyone wasting their time equally, and then the people selling to the site wasting their time as well.

Kittenkat says she wanted to claim some requests and couldn't,but she just let it go until others complained. BUT...for almost the entire time I was using a bot, there were smaller requests just sitting there. Hundreds of them that no-one claimed! Let's be honest here...people were complaining that they couldn't get the "good" requests, because there were loads and loads of the smaller ones that aren't worth as much, just waiting to be claimed. (Note: kittenkat also recently made a rule that sales requests must be claimed in order, so you aren't allowed to skip over a smaller request, so this doesn't happen any more. That rule should have been made long before, although you can always just ignore the smaller request hoping someone else will claim it until you are "forced" to claim it by an arrival of a larger request.)

To say that what I did was unfair is to discount the much greater number of people who benefited from what I did. My bot allowed faster service for hundreds of people, while maybe two tbuxers lost out on a few larger transactions because they weren't willing to dedicate as much time to it as I had.

There wasn't any rule against using a bot. I've had one person say to me "there was a rule and you just disregarded it", but actually there was no such rule until my last few days on the site.

Oh and finally...Kittenkat says that adding more members to the tbux.com site doesn't add more competition as I "suggest" in my original posting/article, because everyone is able to sell all of their ThereBucks. That's true...the economy of There is strong and so resellers are always able to sell out...however adding more sellers makes the flow of ThereBucks less even, and so sometimes you could end up with 10 sellers selling at once, which makes things harder for the sellers. If you are competing against 9 other people to sell your ThereBucks, it is going to take you that much longer to sell out, and so you are going to have to worry about whether you have any transactions to fill or not for that much longer of a time period. If all the ThereBucks flow through a smaller number of people, it really smooths things out. Trust me, I sold more ThereBucks than anyone through tbux.com for years. It can make the difference between selling out in a couple of hours, or a couple of days.

Wow! A secret message from your teeth!

About a month or so ago, after eating at the Tonga Room and playing the "...in bed" game with the usual end-of-meal fortune cookies (read your fortune cookie out loud and then add "...in bed" to the end of whatever it says) I decided it would be a Really Great Idea to have fortune cookies after every meal.

Only eating at restaurants that serve fortune cookies would have been one way to do this, but I don't think my bf would have liked being restricted to eating at chinese takeout joints and cheesy tiki bars, so instead I ordered a case of fortune cookies on amazon. Soon we were tormenting restaurant and bar staff up and down the peninsula with our silly reindeer games.

We had a lot of fun and I highly recommend to anyone that they try fortune cookies after every meal...they go great with italian food, spanish, french...why should asian cuisine get all the fortune-telling goodness? Then I had the brilliant idea to dip the cookies in chocolate. OMG...not only do fortune cookies go great with every kind of cuisine, they are to-die-for when dipped in chocolate! Really, once you try one dipped in chocolate, a non-chocolate-dipped cookie will just seem naked. I tried white chocolate, milk chocolate and dark chocolate, and I'd recommend you stick with just dark chocolate. It definitely has the best taste/contrast with the delicately orange-flavored cookie, and besides...it has more anti-oxidants.

Usually the "...in bed" game works great and is pretty hysterical after some wine or a few cocktails. Check these out...

"Today is a great day for learning something new...in bed"

"Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change...in bed."

"You are almost there...in bed."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year...in bed."

"You are careful and systematic in your business arrangements...in bed."

Sometimes they can seem a little more disturbing, like...

"Working with children has a miraculous effect on your spirits...in bed."

And occasionally they are just plain weird (even if you don't add "in bed" on the end such as...

"Wow! A secret message from your teeth!"

I want to know what opiate someone was smoking when they wrote that one. And...can I have some?

And another question: What do I do once I've gone through all 400 fortune cookies in the case?
I think in the name of progress, I will have to start making my own cookies from scratch. Just think, I can even write my own fortunes that way. That should add a new level of interest to the "...in bed" game!

Once again an IMVU VIP

Okay, I am a VIP, I'm not, now I am...I can't keep track. I emailed the *exclusive VIP only* email address to enquire about why I lost my VIP status and it was four days until someone got back to me. I can once again be all snobby with "VIP" on my homepage and by my forum posts. Maybe I will get some hatemail or some more people begging for credits because of it!

I received a very nice email from a "Lisa" at IMVU who gave me my status back until June 21, so all is right with the world again, but I have to wonder what the big deal is with having an *exclusive VIP only* email address to contact IMVU at if it takes four days for someone to get back to you. I guess it could take even longer using a different contact address???

Pig Worship

Totally cute pic, eh? A few months ago an ex-bf of mine was writing me a letter and drinking some wine. Halfway through the letter and the wine, he decided calling would be better. What followed was a phone conversation basically about how he regretted pushing me away and not wanting to possibly restart our relationship until he found out I was dating someone else, plus he had a dream about me, which made him feel he definitely DID want to explore any possibility that might have still been between us. In other words, typical guy stuff.

That didn't happen. I mean I'm dating a really amazing guy who lives right across the bay from me, why would I want to "explore the possibilities" with someone who lives 3000 miles away and isn't even really sure what they want and that I often have a hard time talking to without getting in a fight?

The letter that sparked that phonecall never arrived as promised, but today I received a small parcel in the mail that contained a note letting me know that he was cutting ties with his past and I wouldn't be hearing from him again but he hoped I'd have much happiness in life, and that he had destroyed all of the letter except for this drawing, which he thought summed up the spirit of the letter as he intended it better than the actual words ever could.

Admittedly, although I find this guy's behavior a bit flakey, the picture made tears well up in my eyes. The scan doesn't really capture it that well and some of the color is pretty inaccurate, but I think - like the original it is scanned from - it still conveys more meaning than a thousand words ever could. I think I'm going to have the original framed.

IMVU Headquarters: Sneak Attack!

Heheh...today is Friday and I knew if I emailed Matt at IMVU and said I was going to show up at IMVU today he'd be like "it's a bad day to do that, don't come." Fridays are never, ever good for Matt in my experience. BUT I had something that needed to be delivered asap, so I cancelled with my personal trainer and just showed up at IMVU. Surprise!!! ;)

IMVU has 45 employees now! I used to know everyone that worked there, at least until they had about 12 - 15 employees. Now it's just a sea of faces I don't know. Wow. I think I stole some of Will-the-CEO-with-the-charismatic-smile's face-time with Matt, but Will was really polite about it and said he liked my hair, then I said "hi" to Clare, who looked very harried and like she was afraid I was going to yell at her about something, then I pestered Dusty about Shoutouts and found out he's not even the person who wrote the code for them so I've been pestering the wrong person all these months and Dusty has just been soooo nice about it. I waived to the always-on-the-phone Ari, caught a few glimpses of the elusive Eric, moved out of the way of a bunch of people I've never seen before in my life, and got to see some reallllly cool stuff Marcus is working on. Marcus Rulez!!!! Well, he used some products of mine in the new registration pages without asking me, but other than that he rules.

Sadly, I forgot my camera. I guess I have to go back again soon. Any guesses ahead of time which employees will or won't actually let me post pics of them in my blog?

Excuse: Pruning IMBOOB

Ugghhh...this whole week has been putting out fires. I had all these creative plans but so far I've had to do all this stuff that isn't my idea of how I'd like to spend my time, like going through the imboob forums and removing thousands of threads, thousands of posts, and banning hundreds of accounts and dozens of IP addresses. Now imboob seems to be pretty spam and pr0n free, but I'm not sure it's actually set to allow any new signups at this time.

In case you don't know, imboob is the forum that supports the Boobinator. The Boobinator is a program you run alongside the IMVU client which allows you to save outfits and change them with one click. If you've ever tried to put on a totally different outfit/look in IMVU without using the Boobinator...I'd be surprised if you weren't thinking to yourself "this is a royal pain in the arse." Well, you don't need to do that...just use the Boobinator. You can download it from the top of the forum. I don't link directly to it because the download link changes for every new version.

I'm NOT an IMVU VIP

Well, that was quick. After reading the IMVU forums VIP section I decided paying for "VIP" status was really not worth it, and I cancelled my subscription. I seem to be totally removed from the program now...Immediately. Shouldn't I have gotten 30 days or until the end of this month or something? Sheesh, that's not fair! This program is not-quite-ready-for-prime-time.

Bundles are a great value...it's like they have to entice you anew each time. But VIP? Once they have your subscription I guess they figure they can just sit back and rake in the automated payments from you each month. The worst part is that bundles and VIP bonuses overlap from what I have seen. So you might get something like "Britany's Barber Chair" with some credits as this great bundle, and then you get the barber chair with the VIP package as well. So you're paying for it twice, but it's not like you have an extra one to give away or something.

Hmmm...I wonder...VIPs get special animations...did they take my animations away now even though I paid for the month? Or...do I get to keep the animations I paid for? Or...what? I can't even post in the VIP forums to ask about that, because I don't have my status any more.