As luck would have it, I met and welcomed Anshe on her first day in SL, as shown in the picture, when I had a castle in Darkwood/Dore, and she came over with the Brits in SL group. Is she a Brit? Nooooo, and I think it is interesting that my first contact with her involved a little vagueness about nationality. She had once lived in the UK, and that was her reason for joining the Brits in SL group, although she was living in Germany of Chinese origin.
There is a little vagueness in everything to do with Anshe, a difficulty in pinning down even the most basic of the facts. How old is she? Well...she says she was born in 1973, but her passport makes her a year older. Which she says was a mistake in China. See what I mean?
I was astonished that having taken her first steps in SL Anshe was within a couple of weeks offering sex lessons as classes on the events list - classes that she was charging for. At that time I didn't realise that she already had extensive experience of online worlds, and had indulged in similar activities elsewhere -- I was just astonished at the speed with which she had progressed. In almost every story about Anshe a little vagueness about the detail. It was said that she obtained land in one of the sims for her activities, and later it was claimed in the forums that having been given the land for free when she had nothing, she refused to sell it back to the donor at market price when she had made enough money to move on.
She next crossed my consciousness as an escort working out of Cannabis Cathedral. At that time, I may have been a little naive, and I wasn't sure what an escort could provide. You must remember that I was only in my early months in SL, and custom animation had not yet arrived in SL. Most avatar sex in SL involved quite a lot of preparation, use of the standard poses (especially the motorbike riding pose) and attachable boxes. The card which Anshe produced seemed to promise something special, especially if she was given a gift, although I have never met anyone who admitted using her services, to find out what these were. A copy of the card recently resurfaced, and although friends of Anshe denied it was genuine, it was.
Soon, with the introduction of 1.4, custom animations arrived, and I believe -- though I am quite ready to be told I am wrong -- that Anshe made her first substantial money, selling animations, most of which were actually poses. The arrival of custom animations brought with it an explosion of possibilities, and residents who didn't have poser, were confused about the differences between poses (which are static) and animations (which are moving). Again, that slight vagueness ... was the ambiguous nature of what she was selling an accident or deliberate?
Quickly, Anshe moved way out of my league, and into the big-time land owners, buying up property and selling it. Anshe Chung land sale markers began to appear. My next contact with her was when she walked into my snow palace to complain that it was big and ugly and putting people off buying her land parcels nearby. This is something that many people have experienced, and was reported again and again in the forums. As I had had nothing but compliments on the build, and Anshe wasn't planning to live on her land in the vicinity, I declined to change it at her request.
A few weeks passed by, when I started to see huge ugly islands of land, terraformed to within an inch of their lives. It took me a while to realise that one business girl, while complaining that my pretty and universally-praised build was ugly, had taken to raising the parcels of land to the max. This was most noticeable in Natoma, which is a nice, natural sim. Not only had the terraforming made a very ugly scar on the land, with the texture stretched to the max, it had raised the land of the neighbouring parcels too.
I negatively rated Anshe for building, on the basis of that ugly scar ... and found myself negatively rated multiply on all three categories, with threats that a friend would also be neg rated if I didn't remove the neg rating to her account.
What surprised me most, was not that Anshe and her merry band of alts had retaliated with ratings, but that she could have had the cheek to call my lovely ice palace ugly and then do something like that in a beautiful sim, and not understand it was ugly ... but that was what Anshe claimed in the forums. She didn't know it was ugly. What?! There again, a sort of confused vagueness, as though it would be possible to have an ounce of aesthetic feeling and not realise that parcels raised far above the surrounding land were ugly.
I watched, as reported in the other posting on this blog, as unsellable land was "sold" on Anshe's private islands. The argument on the forums about that went on and on. Was buying a plot with an upfront cost and paying tier to Anshe "buying" the land? Renting? Leasing? It was hard to tell, for the customers and for the other land barons at the time. It all seemed rather vague. Linden Lab confirmed land couldn't be sold ... clients confirmed they were "buying" it. The relationship between Anshe and Linden Lab still seemed friendly, so they couldn't have had too much of a problem with what Anshe was doing ... could they? I found it frustrating that there weren't clear definitive answers, as I felt it was unfair for Linden Labs to be discouraging other Land Barons from charging upfront fees for parcels of land on Private Island sims, while condoning this elsewhere.
In many ways, I am all in favour of some of the things that Anshe is doing. I think zoning some land, allowing people to keep areas free from large malls or clubs is a great idea. Theming so that like-minded people can stay together. It is just that sometimes her methods seem a little off. Not allowing someone to buy a parcel next to a friend in a Dutch-themed sim because they weren't Dutch seems a little rich when one business girl was a member of Brits in SL, for example.
Over the months there have been various rumours about Anshe and it is always like trying to capture the sand in a sieve. Does she bid on all auctions and then default on the less profitable? Does she share her accounts with her husband and employees, and does this account for the variable quality of her English? Did she try to take the Linden dollar down in order to promote an alternative currency, widely known as the A$$?
A couple of new people came to an SL basics class and claimed that Anshe had told them that she only needed their first land to complete a parcel, and they had therefore sold it to her below market price, not recognising her as a Land Baron, being new. Anshe denies duping people out of their first land by saying that she needed those last parcels, or knowingly paying way below market price ... she tells me that this was a lie spread by her enemies. She says she is misunderstood and misinterpreted, that people are jealous of her success and knock her because she has more land/money/business acumen than them.
Well, there's business acumen and then there is business acumen. The forums were set alight on April 1, 2006, by a posting from one business girl and her alt that her main account had been suspended by SL for non-payment of tier. It appears that the forest of alts created by Anshe owned enough money to pay the tier, but the money wasn't in the right account at the time that the tier became due.
It seems inexplicable that Anshe's first instinct was to come onto the forum and complain about it, rather than talking to LL. She revealed far more than she could possibly have wanted anyone to know about her business's poor accounting practices, and expected that Linden Lab would compensate for that by "knowing" that one of her accounts was rich enough to pay the tier even if the right one wasn't. Some people were convinced it was a twisted April Fool's collaboration between the Lindens and Anshe, but Torley confirmed, while locking the thread, that it wasn't.
No-one can doubt that she has a successful business, which she has built up through hard work and dedication, but that does become more difficult to believe when her (or her husband's) emotions get the better of her and she sounds off.
There have been other controversies involving Anshe ... her campaign against Gingko, against point-to-point teleporting, against the Land Shop. But those really passed me by. Next for me came the poseball affair, in which I was involved in discussions. In this case it wasn't so much a question of morality or legality as common sense. She came across the poseballs that one of the animators in SL produces for creators like me, who make good furniture but poor animations. The balls are sold mod/copy/transfer, with the intention that they should be used in furniture and sold as no copy/trans or no trans/ copy. They cost 1000 dollars, and because the animations are fantastic, and this is such a useful service for creators, most are happy to pay that price.
Anshe bought a copy of every modable/copyable/transferable ball for 1000 dollars each, and then contacted the creator to tell him she planned to sell them on, as is, for 10 lindens per ball. After some discussion, she agreed not to do this -- but then went onto the forum to defend the thing she had decided not to do.
Now, OK, you can argue as she does, that it could be thought morally or legally allowable to do this, on the strength of SL's rather lax and confusing attitude to IP rights ... but what I couldn't understand was that one business girl seemed to be surprised that the animator could possibly have any objection to her doing what she threatened to do. Which I think even the least economically-savvy five year old with common sense would understand. You can read the argument for yourself, as it is still on the forum.
The setting up of a Chinese studio to assist in producing content has provoked some criticism from creators afraid that they will have to compete with masses of poorly-paid workers in a sweat-shop type operation. Thus far the offerings appear to be fairly mainstream and compete only in terms of price, but they are being watched with some trepidation.
Overall, I think it is a shame that Anshe admits that she doesn't have time to be a resident in SL. I think there is something lost when big dealers in SL change from residents to business people -- they lose the sense of community, the joy and pleasure of the world, and the priorities of the players. They become people who are in world, but not of it.I can't be sure whether Anshe's involvement with SL has been positive or negative for the world, on balance, it may be too early to tell. That she has had an impact is undeniable. She has become the lure for new residents to believe you too can start with nothing and build an empire, and the same story has been written and rewritten all over the net.
Many people speak highly of her. Others speak badly of her. It becomes hard to know who is on the ACS payroll, and who has an axe to grind. I have never felt animosity towards Anshe, or the jealousy which she assumes is behind any negative comments about her or her activities ... I'm happy to be where I am and for her to be where she is. I can readily admit to frustration, irritation, infuriation about some of her activities, and with her seeming inability to understand things which seem obvious to ordinary mortals like me.
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