Ready for a SecondLife horror story, boys and girls? Yes? Well then, read on!
Warning: This story contains an extremely creep-tastic story about SL ‘stalking.’
I have a bad habit of using GIMP , Plurk, and SL at the same time. Quite often, I don’t pay attention to all three very well. Last night was one of those nights. Well, at this particular time, I was focused on Plurk and GIMP. I was laughing it up with some friends on a plurk about God-knows-what and I saw a small box pop up in the corner of my monitor’s screen. An e-mail. Strange since I don’t use my Yahoo e-mail address for anything other than Flickr. But this was from someone specific: Alisa Menna. Out of curiosity, I clicked on it to open it up in Firefox. At which point, pictures of me in my private skybox on my residential land explode onto my screen as well as, and I quote, “and one can also expect to see a video of your interestingly decorated home here sometime in the near future” with a link to her youtube account.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I figured that turning off flying and rezzing, and placing my box at 1800m would be enough security from sim visitors and that residents would have enough respect to not cam around.
I was wrong.
I immediately returned to my idle SL window to look frantically for this person, frightened to no end. Who was this Alisa person? How did she get pictures of me? In my home? And how did she get my RL e-mail address?
I looked around my box quickly. No one. I cammed outside (benefit of having a draw distance of 512m) and didn’t see anyone floating around my box via someone else’s nearby parcel. However, by chance, I saw ‘Alisa Menna’ sitting 20m above me on my boyfriend’s building platform, next to his TARDIS. This freaked me out. How did she get up there? When? How long had she been there? I didn’t know. I shot an IM at her with a barrage of questions. What did I get in response?
“*** IM blocked by sender’s viewer”
What? Great. No IM. At this point, when I’m about to respond to her e-mail and demand to know answers…SHE DROPS INTO MY HOME! Ok, so first you take pictures of me while I’m in my home without my permission, then you come into my home without my permission? What are you thinking?!
Angrily I respond to her e-mail, feeling completely violated, asking her all sorts of questions. Her excuse as to why she did this? She has a draw distance of 1024m, she was bored, and she saw that I was a photographer.
Again: what?!
Ok, so you profile creeped me, too. That’s nice.
But my dear readers, it gets worse! Read on!
In the game of e-mail tag that she and I began to engage in, she began sending me pictures of Batman (all of which I ignored, finding them rather irritating, to be frank). All the while, I noticed that she was growing arrogant, as if she had a right to do what she did.
While awaiting her responses, I went back to her pictures of me and I noticed something odd: my house was empty.
I had finished decorating it and even had the builder over within hours of purchasing it. How was my house empty? Even stranger yet: I had changed since I had decorated my house. Green shirt to red shirt. I was in a red shirt in her pictures meaning they had to be taken AFTER I had decorated. Also, I’d like to point out that I was wearing sculpty sunglasses and have sculpty stairs behind me. Had these pictures been taken from Alisa’s home on the sim adjacent to mine? If so, the sculpties would not have loaded perfectly while the rest of the house, as seen in her pictures, remained barren. How long had she been camming me for? It’d been a few days since my house had been empty like in her pictures…had she been watching me since I moved to the sim? I don’t know.
Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure. The first is my picture showing some friends what the house looked like as soon as I finished decorating. The second is my picture showing the house as it is and out I am in when I recieve the e-mail from Alisa. The third is Alisa’s picture of me that she sent to my RL e-mail address.
See what’s missing?
So. Next time you decide to live on a public sim–make sure you don’t have happyfuntime or run around n00d.
You never know who’s watching you, my dear readers.