Unforgivable Curses

Let me tell you about my sister Sylvie. When we were tiny, our Mummy had to weigh everything on a scale down the the last gram, or else Sylvie would pitch a fit if I got more than she did. I was all right with equal, but Sylvie would always have to have a tiny bit more. More ice cream. More pudding. More.

Everything we had had to be identical because otherwise there would be some sort of difference, and that meant that one thing would be arbitrarily better than the other. Sylvie always won because I didn’t bloody care.

I forgave that. I forgave that time she insisted on taking the lead in the theatre spot we both wanted.

I even fucking forgave that time where she told me that my fiance Dirk had been cheating on me, and I asked her to find out and she did so by shagging him.

After that I still lived with her. Because blood is thicker than water. Because I couldn’t believe that she had done it for a reason other than her stated wish to protect me.

Fuck me, I took her side.

I don’t know why. I can’t – still can’t — believe that she would be so jealous of my having anything as to intentionally want to systematically destroy my Second Life: to hack my account, go through my Second Life friends list and pick fights, and have me ejected and banned from my groups, all the while pretending to be me.

And then the pictures. As if I had been virtually raped, and can’t even remember it but the pictures are on the internet. I know that picture folder was transferred to other people. I have no idea how many times it’s been passed around.

My Own Sister

hacked my SL account. It’s Sylvie. I can’t even believe it myself.

Last night at dinner she was cooking, and I started telling her about the hack. And then she asks, with this little pleased smile on her face, “But you’re so photogenic.”

And I hadn’t even told her about the pictures. I hadn’t told anyone about the pictures.

That’s what the sign on my hand said. “Look in your snapshots.”

I found a hundred and sixty-two pictures (all of the money remaining in the account at L$ 1620 = $6) of me naked in compromising positions doing awful things with…I don’t even want to talk about it. This is the least-humiliating of them.

I know my avatar isn’t me. But I still feel violated.

I walked out, crying, and somehow I made my way over to Lisa’s without falling off my bike, and I slept on her air mattress last night, because I can’t live with her any more.

Hacked, Again

Oh god, this is just too fucked for words. All my money’s gone and there was a new sign attached to my hand and it took me five minutes to realize that I was naked in a BDSM area and when I tried to teleport back to my home location it had been reset to a public Linden area, and then I got my account suspended for a day.

Someone hacked my account again. After I changed all my passwords. I can’t even breathe.

First Life Is Better

Ok, I changed all my passwords, I went out for coffee and spent some time in the sun, just chilling out. I don’t think the hacker got to any of my other accounts, and no money was missing from the account, and none of my stuff was gone.

It’s just a game. It’ll be ok. Second Life is a fantastic playground, but I think about my First Life and everything there’s is going well. I have an awesome boyfriend, and that’s official now.

OMG My Account’s Been Hacked

Overnight my account was completely hacked. A bunch of guys with dodgy profiles are now my friends, a bunch of people who were my friends are gone, and I don’t even know what’s happening or who would do this to me!

One of my best friends and shopping partners just told me in an IM conversation that I was a terrible person, defriended me, and then set me to mute when I tried to ask her what was going on. I tried to talk to one of her friends but I just got ejected and banned.

OMG I thought it was nothing, and Lisa thought it was nothing but bugs, but this is someone screwing with me. Pretending to be me. Being a complete and utter twat.

I’m changing my password now. God, I hope they haven’t used that password anywhere else.

What’s Wrong?

Something’s weird. And I don’t know what it is.

I logged in Saturday afternoon into Second Life, and usually when I log in there are a couple of IMs from my friends sent while I was offline. And there weren’t any. I think there is something really buggy going on, because I lost half my groups since Thursday. They’re gone, and I can’t rejoin them.

And for the groups that are still there, I notice people talking on the chat who are my friends, but it looks like they’re not online.

And when I teleported into a club, people I’d enjoyed talking to just Friday afternoon avoided me.

I don’t understand?

How Strange – I Don’t Remember Coming Here

I logged into Second Life earlier tonight and was in some completely different place from where I started. (I was at Armidi, windowshopping, and I appeared in some entirely different Asia-themed island.)

Lisa tells me that it’s normal for Second Life to bounce you to another location if your previous location was temporarily offline. So I figure I’ll just chalk it up to SL being odd.

My Mac is working again. Yay! I don’t know what made it so slow, but I’ve mostly fixed it now.

Busy Busy Busy

All right, we’re going to Brussels!

We can’t do the challenge this week because the train fare is 42 Euros, a hotel is 35 per person, and we do need to eat. Back later.

Radio silence commences. We might be able to locate an internet cafe, but consider this an early Easter holiday.

I haven’t been able to log in to Second Life recently. My little Mac laptop has been having problems for a few weeks (I don’t quite understand why, but the little cursor widget keeps spinning and it never recovers until I shut down my computer and restart everything).

I crash every other time I save pictures to disk. So I apologize, and will be back later.

Sometimes I Wish I Weren’t Such a Romantic

Sometimes I wish I weren’t such a romantic. Seriously. Romance is something of a fantasy that real life can never quite match, and I know that yet I just can’t stop myself.

There are stacks of paperback romance and fantasy novels in my bedroom from when I was 12.

I always fall really hard for people really fast, and the conscious part of my brain is always trying to put the brakes on, because I don’t want to be hurt again.

Love is a chemical reaction. You can fake it by going to a horror movie or a roller coaster ride, and manipulate the adrenaline rush. It’s an all-consuming high.

I know this. Everyone in love knows this. But that feeling is such an amazing ride, you can’t not take it. It pushes every other thought: all the rational parts, all the bad memories, everything out of your mind and replaces it with the wild hope that it might be reciprocated and the horrifying fear that it isn’t. It becomes a singular obsession.

I have another date tonight.

What’s My Damage?

One of the things that Gijs asked me last week was how long had I been single, and why? I mean, that’s what everyone is thinking on a first date anyway, it’s just not usually asked directly.

And really, everyone’s damaged in some way. I’m mostly honest about my damage.

Five things about me:

1. I was bulimic for three years right up until I was 17. I was a heavy kid, and I would rather read fantasy novels and watch romance movies than anything else. Sometimes I suspect that every swan out there still thinks of themselves as the ugly duckling they used to be.

I have made peace with my luscious derriere. But not with the kids who used to pick on me, which was most of grade school.

2. I have a codependent relationship with my twin sister.

3. My last relationship was three years long, two years ago, with a chap in London who proposed to me. We would have been married last June, and I am still messed up from that breakup, and I lost most of my friends who were also Dirk’s friends in the fallout.

4. I am easily upset, and am incredibly emotionally sensitive. I have mood swings but am not clinically depressive or manic-depressive. I’m also not schizoid, borderline, or psychotic.

But hey, who isn’t a bit neurotic?

5. I really like smoking pot. I’m not addicted, and it’s not a huge part of my personality, but it’s fun. And sometimes that’s a deal breaker for some people.

All right. That’s five things. And Gijs, you may regret saying, “I’m attracted to complicated women.”