Word is spreading among Second Lifers that Linden Lab is quietly cracking down on the (mis)use of so-called MegaPrims and those people who sell them. A MegaPrim is a prim that is larger than Second Life would normally allow to be created, but for a while users could create them through libsecondlife, as the Second Life servers failed to validate the object sizes that were passed to them in all cases.

While a regular prim - the Second Life equivalent of a building block - cannot exceed ten metres on any axis, MegaPrims can be many times that size, even hundreds of metres.

MegaPrims are rumored to cause degenerate behavior in the Second Life simulator code, and cause unusual problems for regions, though only Linden Lab knows the specifics of any difficulties that MegaPrims cause.

One of the more colorful and contentious figures in SL's three and a half year history is Plastic Duck, later known as Gene Replacement. While it took a little doing, I was able to sit down with him and have a bit of a talk about himself and about Second Life.

He took the third-place prize of Avatar of the Year (2005), bestowed by the Second Life Herald. He's been flamboyant, artistic and edgy. He and some 59 others were famously purged from SL. Some consider him to be a rampaging rakehell, some a leader of a griefing army, some a sort of renaissance technojester, a dark god of ornithophobia.

Truly a lot has been said, done, understood and misunderstood, rumored and misconstrued. So...I didn't ask him about any of that sensationalist nonsense directly. Instead, I wanted to find out more about the man behind the duck.