DisemNobodied

Nobody, as very few of you would have noticed, has not been around. The real life story associated with this involves drama, intrigue and a lack of a solid internet connection - the latter which may be corrected next week, but the drama and intrigue will remain for some time to come.

I had to move from my previous abode and am now in new digs - along the way, a month ago, I had issues with PayPal which put people on the island of Sentience at risk of losing their land. I normally held tier in PayPal, making a few cents on PayPal's money market, and paid tier to Linden Lab when needed. This could not happen with my PayPal account at limited access, and tier day was rolling around. With a negative balance and the knowledge that Linden Lab giveth and Linden Lab taketh away, I asked a few key people as to whether they wanted the island. This was not an easy decision - I wanted to hold onto the island, but I could not in good conscience allow Sentience to be taken away by Linden Lab. That would have been unfair to the people there.

Sarah Nerd played the heroine that night, and the transfer of Sentience as well as the Open Simulator began. But it ended up being something of a problem because my annual membership hit automatically, creating a negative balance and... I couldn't transfer the islands. The whole reason I used PayPal in the first place was because my own credit card information had stopped working with Linden Lab sometime last year - PayPal was the workaround. Patch Linden, however, helped me navigate that year old mess and even explained to me why there was a problem: Before all the authentication, I had used the same credit card information for my alt.

Why yes, of course I have an alt. Don't you?

It ends up that clearing the alternate account payment information cleared my credit card which then could be used again... had I known all of that months ago, I probably wouldn't have been in the position I was in the first place... but then, I imagine that it was a new system then and Linden Lab didn't have the fast answers that Patch was able to give.

So it all cleared, and as of earlier this week, Sarah Nerd took custody of the islands.

While I await an internet connection that my desktop can use - the laptop doesn't run the Second Life client - I've been trying out SLeek which allows me to log in to Second Life without graphics. It works fairly well, too, and I'll be writing a bit more about that as I use it more. At least now I can log in, and no one has lost anything... except me, really.

Thanks, PayPal. Not.