First Weekend of January

So Second Life put up some stuff for sale on Amazon, which included a special freebie offer for just this weekend -- a hoverboard, and 1,000 lindens.  It said in big letters "ONE PER CUSTOMER ONLY", but in point of fact it didn't prevent you from doing it more than once.  It may have been limited to one per Second Life account, I didn't test that, but it clearly wasn't limited to one per Amazon account.  Far from it:  Amazon seemed to encourage people to link more than one account, and to buy the item more than once:

I have to admit that I did buy it more than once to see if  this really worked.  But I've heard from others that some people went on an SL alt-creating spree and may have done the deal as many as 70 times.  That's 70,000 lindens, which translates into something like $280.00 if I'm doing my math correctly.

Needless to say, the whole thing got shut down pretty quick.  I got home Friday evening, heard about it, did it a couple of times and went to exercise.  When I got back from my exercise it was all over -- up for about five hours total, I heard.

Some people have said that they hope the offer abusers get charged for it on their credit card, but I don't see Amazon doing anything like that.  It's really Linden's problem.  I suppose they could take the freebies back or ban accounts for TOS violations (you're not supposed to have multiple accounts, I believe, but lots of people do).  But it would be hard to take money back from the people that worked hard to abuse the offer, because I'm sure they were transferring the money immediately from their temp account to some other account.  You'd have to track the trail of money, I guess.

Anyway, other than that interesting bit of drama, I haven't done very much this weekend.  I wandered around a bit on Mint Rainbow -- I have a new lemur avatar and I tried to set up my lola mesh breasts to match it, and bought a new outfit from DE specifically for lolas.  And I wandered around some petite shops and sims on my Apricot fairy avatar -- but I'm not sure I see the point of getting a petite avatar and then dressing like you normally would anyway.  There's a lot of very nice outfits and it's amazing what people are able to do, but if I'm going to be fairy sized, I'm going to be a fairy, not just a little human.  So I guess I don't feel compelled to buy a lot of new outfits for Apricot, which is good, that could get expensive quickly.