Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Not long ago, four 16k lots came available on the Forsaken sim.
My neighbor Leaf Shermer bought two. I bought the third as soon as I could scrape up the money, and I had hopes of buying the fourth.
But the fourth was purchased by someone who should have bought elsewhere.
And darn it, a check came in the mail today; it would have allowed me to buy that last lot.
I had to kick the new owner off my land in December because he was stomping all over Pele, refusing to speak to anyone. He claims WE wouldn’t speak to HIM, but I have the chat log of my attempts to talk to him. He ignored repeated hellos.
His group tag proclaimed that he had a social phobia, which pretty much said it all. Not that his Undead status wouldn’t have been enough of a clue by itself.
As for kicking him off the land, he can be as socially phobic as he pleases, but if he’s on my land, he has to play nice. And that includes responding when spoken to.
I took the ban off after a while. I usually do, unless someone is an absolute jerk.
Of all the properties on all the sims in Second Life, this undead antisocial guy chose a lot on Forsaken, right next to probably the only property in Second Life from which he was banned. What was he _thinking_? His tastes run to dead trees and hideous houses with refrigerators stocked with jars full of eyeballs. His ugly house has been up and down and up and down and is currently down. His land is pretty much empty, except for sky structures and an ugly prim statue of a furry, penis savant. Which is fine by me? I just put up a big rock to screen him from my view, and, because he had put up a prim statue of an ugly little man on the common border of our properties as a “screw you” to me. I put up a big pink blossom-dropping tree just to piss him off.
It did. He ran to Dreamland, trying to build a case that I was using Pele for commercial rather than residential purposes. Of course, that isn’t true. Pele is solely for the amusement of myself, and Sweetie, and my friends. And of course he knew that.
So I sent his socially phobic self a notecard that told him communication was important, even for the socially phobic, and that next time something was bugging him he might show me the courtesy of letting me know before running like a four-year-old to Dreamland and if he _couldn’t_ bring his socially phobic ass to talk to me, I had every right in the world to put up as many pink trees, Mickey Mouses, and smiley faces as I wanted.
Those are all things that drive people with a jar of eyeballs in their refrigerator berserk. And they are all absolutely appropriate for a residential area that is supposed to be pretty. No. 1: Pink trees that drop petals. No. 2: Smiley faces. No. 3: Mickey Mouse.
A year ago, my all-country-all-the-time neighbor went all-Dracula-all-the-time. On the land that is now the Pele Gardens he tore down his good old boy cabin and erected a horrid castle that topped Pele by a good 20 meters— not counting the pennants. I responded by making a billboard featuring our friend Mickey and positioning it so it was visible from every window in his castle. When he asked me why I did that, I told him I would be turning Pele into a Disney theme park.
That’s when he decided to sell.
Back in the here and now, I took down the pink tree and my neighbor removed the prim man. He did get over his social phobia enough to send a notecard in response to mine. It reminds me of getting a “deaf and dumb” card from some pretending to be non-hearing, but at least it’s a form of communication. So, things are at if not a truce a standoff between me and my sim neighbor, unless he reads this and gets all pissed off again.
But I have resolved to talk about my Second Life on these pages, the good experiences and the bad, and so I will risk it.
p.s. Turns out he didn’t remove the ugly little man after all. I just couldn’t see it at a distance because it’s scripted. But in the interest of détente, I am squelching my desire to put the pink tree back up.
Photos were taken on a low-power PC. It sucks not to be able to see Second Life.
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