I don't have any pictures to illustrate what this posting is about, but I remember it just like it was yesterday, which it was. It was fun, funny, frustrating, insulting, and enlightening, all at the same time, and then some!
Last Friday night, House of the Rising Sun was rocking to my tunes. We were having a blast at our Nakie Friday dance. No, there's not gifts, prizes or cash prizes. There's just a bunch of us who get together and like to party. This Nakie Friday dance was exceptionally short on an audience. starie speculated that because the day before was Valentine's Day and it was on a work/school night that everyone waited to go out wining and dining on Friday night. It would seem that she was correct in her assumption. But toward the end of my two hour set, I get an Instant Message (IM) from my girl kaz, who I have under my protection. This concept will be covered in a future posting. Anyway, she sends me an IM with a copy of some guys IM in it stating something similar to, "you and me fuck now?". She replied with something like, "didn't you check my profile first? You have to contact Otto Turbo for permission to play with me." So I asked her if she wanted to play with this guy and she replied with something like, "oh hell no!" So I told her I'd be finishing up my set in 10 minutes and that I'd be there to cock-block the guy. Yeah, yet another future posting subject.
Anyway, DJ anniecakes was taking the stream from me so I gave her a countdown of my final song times and she grabbed the stream and I excused myself from the party due to a "land issue". So I teleported (TPd) home. kaz sent me another IM telling me that he's flying around the sim, trying to find her platform she was on. He tried flying this way and that and finally found her direction and location and flew toward her platform to land next to her. She then asked him, "did you contact Otto Turbo about fucking me?" He replied that he had. She relayed this information to me and I told her that he did not contact me. So she wisely TPd me to her platform. Sure enough, there she was and there he was. She had placed me nearly on top of him. I said hi to her and graciously said hello to odonnell Rewell. Write that name down, "odonnell Rewell". He managed to say "hi otto" to me before he went gray in color and my computer locked up.
What a terrible time for my computer to crash! But I was not too surprised. Earlier in the evening, I had been using Photoshop and even though I closed that down, the program actually stays in Windows for whatever reason Microsoft sees fit. But I also had my music streaming software, two different browsers and of course my resource hogging Firestorm SL viewer running. So I figured if I was going to crash, I was not only going to restart the SL viewer, but I was also going to reboot Windows to clear everything out of the memory that might have had something to do with my crashing.
So it was an agonizing 8 minutes later before I was able to run Firestorm. In this time I'm worried what might be happeninig to kaz with this lying dick-head "odonnell Rewell". I finally logon to Last Location. You can select that option with Firestorm just in case you do crash, which I did. Sure enough, kaz was still there and in IM pleading with me to leash her. This "odonnell Rewell" was still there and he was still gray to me. His avatar was not rezzing in and kaz's wasn't rezzing very well either, but I did manage to type in the command to attach my leash to her before, you guessed it, I crashed again! Locked right up? What the hell is going on?
So this time I'm determined to not repeat my first mistake and tried using a completely different viewer and log into home instead of my last location. Sure enough, it worked. Things were rezzing in fast! Now wait just a minute. Why is this? The first thing that came to mind was kaz's well being. She IMd me and said her graphics card on her computer kept locking up. Okay, she's still up there trying to rez into her platform. So I quickly call up my mini map and locate this "odonnell Rewell" on it. First of all, she informed me earlier that he was trying to find her by flying through the air until he finally located her. Secondly, I show up and that was the last thing he wanted because he lied to kaz about asking my permissions. Thirdly, I was no longer anywhere near him and things were working quite well. I quickly realized he was doing something to overload our video cards. Something his avatar was wearing was too much for our computers to process, hence his grey appearance. We were under attack. What a dick-with-ears this "odonnell Rewell" must be. And to think I thought the whole encounter was quite amusing. Poor kaz.
So I quickly got his name from the mini map, called up the parcel owners screen and banned him. A few seconds later, his avatar was pinned to coordinates 0, 0, 0, on our sim. Less than a minute after that, he had "died" and was automatically sent home. He was probably laughing the whole time he was attacking us, but we had the very last laugh. I TP'd kaz to me and unleashed her then told her I was relogging to my main viewer just to make sure. Sure enough, everything was fine with it. I discussed what had happened with kaz and told her what I did. We then figured she was unable to eject people so I took a few minutes in our group and made sure she had that ability in the future.
The people such as this "odonnell Rewell" are commonly referred to as "griefers". I wrote an article about them sometime last year. The get their entertainment in SL by antagonizing others. Basically, he was out looking for trouble and he found it. Fortunately, we were able to figure out what he was doing and take the appropriate steps. Will I report him? No need to. I just did. To all you land owners in SL out there, be sure to add "odonnell Rewell", about a 2 year old avatar, to your parcel ban lists. Oh sure, he can easily create another griefing avatar, and once he uses that one to grief, we'll ban him too. But he wont' be using "odonnell Rewell" to pick on any other property owners again.
