Sunday, May 18, 2014

Miss Bulmer is Positively Fuming

People who have nothing better to do, and also good memories, may remember that a while back I acquired a little pied-a-terre on the "Adult" continent of Zindra.  I found a 512 lot going cheap, put together a simple cave dwelling that was vaguely in-theme with a much larger neighbouring parcel, and prepared to enjoy a little creativity and/or naughtiness.

Well, that was then and this is now... during my period of Not Getting Into SL Very Much, a land baron type started buying up the sim my little parcel is in.  And as this person's tendrils spread across the sim, the friendly lesbian vampire dominatrices all fled away, to be replaced by - quite frankly - distinctly mean-looking rental units.

You can tell where this is going, can't you?  Finally, it reached the point where there was this guy, and there was my little parcel, entirely surrounded by the new development.

Well, obviously, overtures were made on both sides regarding me selling off the parcel... however, from my point of view, they didn't go well.  The way I see it, I want a small plot in Zindra; if I sell the one I've got, I'll have to buy a new one.  And Land Baron's best offer never got anywhere near the price of a new one.

So, I figured, my options were to sell at a loss - not very appealing - or to play a long game: hunker down and wait for Land Baron's development to dry up and blow away in the wind.  Annoying, but that's not why I'm cross right now.

I have, from time to time, been keeping an eye on the place, you see.  Up until my last visit, things stayed more or less constant, Land Baron having considerately plonked massive landscaping prims around my little plot and put a barbed wire fence around it.  However, last night, teleporting in, I found myself stuck in something, and contemplating a fountain and a tree directly over my head.  Yes, folks, Land Baron had stuck a chunk of landscape prim right on top of my little parcel.

And, yes, that is why I am fuming.

I submitted an immediate AR for encroachment, of course... then I remembered that landowners can return encroaching objects, these days.  So I sent them winging their way back to Land Baron, along with a notecard of liquid-nitrogen politeness raising my objections to his little scheme.  What effect, if any, either of these things will have, remains to be seen.

Obviously, there are two sides to every story, and Land Baron presumably sees me as an obstreperous dog-in-the-manger obstructing the Grand Commercial Design for the sim.  Which is, actually, fine by me.  Just so long as Land Baron realizes that he is, in fact, a Walt Disney villain.  Specifically, he's Keenan Wynn's character in Herbie Rides Again, the arrogant developer riding roughshod over the rights of the small property owner.  Does anyone have a white Volkswagen Beetle I could borrow?

2 comments:

  1. I hate that too and I really feel for your plight! This sort of thing really stems from the manufactured shortage of land, when if they wanted, they could let anyone make a sim with open sim and pay 10 dollars a month to connect, our server expenses, their revenue. Or charge us the same per Sim that it costs for a business website- about 30 dollars a month, instead of their crazy fees and we keep what we create instead of them!

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    1. As with a lot of things in SL - sim pricing keeps going the way it does because of an enormous amount of inertia in the system! It'd be interesting to think about the way SL might go if they tried opening it up like that, though...

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