Opinions, Please? Am I being too harsh?

I don't want any neighbor approaching me about my mainland build unless it is to either compliment it, or tell me the build is encroaching on their parcel.

No one wants to be bothered by some uppity neighbor who is trying to in their opinion beautify the sim in the way they see fit since they own so much land.

Anshe did the same crap to people back in 2004, wasn't cool then, it isn't cool now.

That's pretty much it in my opinion. Unless someone's stuff is encroaching on your space or is otherwise impeding your use and enjoyment of you land,...MYOB. While I'm sure there a lot of people who would love to be the aesthetics police, the job hasn't been posted yet. Chill.

I miss owning on mainland. It was a joy to walk about a small radius, and see everything imaginable, and see everyone doing their own thing, from one end of the spectrum to the other.

If I were a garish store owner (and I might be - depends on your style)....I would complain, too. And it's not really about the aesthetics of you putting up the wall....it's kind of about your Tude. I would consider it rude, and offending the way that I want to experience SL. Most of us are here to do our own thing, without judgments and hassles. If you were to tell me that I must adjust my creation, to please you.....then you are crossing a line. At this point, I would most certainly adjust my creation....the redneck trailer comes out, and I go into Full Garish mode.....and that includes my choice of house guests that will be visiting. You will be in for a treat.

Doesn't matter whether they sell anything or not....their dream might be to have a little shop in SL, to walk into a few times a week, and feel like a store owner.

Yes....you are being too harsh. And it's not just "harsh"....it's kind of like kicking someone in the gut, as they go about their SL adventure.

I reckon the OP feels really crappy now everybody has put in their opinion - albeit as asked for by the OP. It sounds very much to me like the OP was just having a bit of a bad day, and today he will be feeling a whole lot different and wishing he hadn't even asked for anyone's opinions.

But for sure the opinion of Pussycat Catnap makes the most sense - what a truly diplomatic and thoughtful person you are, and I wish the mainland were full of people like you instead of all the ones who sound like they are ready to go into battle all of the time (perhaps a lot of people have sluggish bowels who write on these forums and just need a couple of bowls of bran flakes or something).

For me, looking at the photos of the parcel, with or without trees I really don't think its such a problem on the mainland, but I would be keeping a weather eye on the bots/campers.

I'm off to give my peptic ulcer some tlc now!

"Love Thy Neighbor" and all that (unless he/she covets thy wife or thy ox!!!!)

Ooooo this could start a whole new thread - the most interesting or unusual build seen in SL. Giant Shoe sounds fab. My husband lives in a house shaped like a guitar. I rezzed it there, because I wanted to keep in with the theme of the Def Leppard Photograph Arena, which is situated just behind his land.

And I acquired a rather groovy little mushroom house, which is bijou and compact, but has all mod cons (TV, plenty of seating, bathing area) free from XStreet.

I never did look at the 'offending' store but I just had a look. I have to say that I don't see anything wrong or negative with it. To me, it looks fine in the "Store Exposed" pic, along with the nearby house. A few trees and maybe a couple of rocks, not designed to particularly hide it, would bring it all together very nicely, imo.

LOL on the sluggish bowels, Marigold. Sounds like two bowls of bran flakes are in order, though....on both sides of the wall.

That's where I was.

Before seeing the pics I imagined something like the builds here:
http://whatnottorez.blogspot.com/
And that blogger stopped posting before putting up the ugliest build - one I sent him, pics here: (extremely NSFW)
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2477/3937611979_f873bbd21a_o.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2553/3937612065_b001713b6d_o.jpg
He cleaned it up a little later:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2570/4006448450_41057a87b0_o.jpg


While I don't like the look of the store over all, if it was what I ended up with as a stable neighbor for over a year, given what I've seen around SL, I'd be counting my lucky stars.

Some observations:

The store is not pretty, but then it's not all that ugly by mainland standards. It's a wooden box with glass sides. I wouldn't have gone with the texture choices they have, but hey, their land. It could be far worse. I used to have this next door to me...



Since the OP's photos were taken, it looks like the store has been flipped round so the entrance is on the unscreened side. That makes a lot of the screening unnecessary. It also looks like the OP has lowered the screens a little. The alpha textures still fight, which looks awful; far worse to my mind than the presence of the store.

To the south of the store is a waterfall built on a small rise in the land. This breaks up the view of the store far more effectively and aesthetically than flat screens. Maybe more like this would be a better solution?

Right across the road from the one of the OP's parcels is a gaudy black and neon nightclub about 3 times the height and much larger than the 'offending' store. He hasn't tried to screen that off, or mentioned trying to buy them out.

Hm. Walking around it today, my plants and screen do stand out rather too sharply from its surroundings. Although it doesn't show in the photos, the screen is rather translucent; you can see the outline of the store through it.

The pics are shot from a distance, but close up the store colors are very bright. And I'm just another person pursuing his dream in SL, and somebody came and dropped a gaudy mess in the middle of it.

So let's go at this from a different angle:

Imagine you are looking for a low-cost rental. You (for the sake of argument) like a tropical theme. You'd like to bring your own house and be in a quiet place. You stumble across my land. You look around, you like the swimming, the playground, the views (which are not guaranteed, I realize; you should have seen the 60-meter-high half-sim pachinko racetrack that was right up against the border of the neighboring sim until a couple months ago).

Anyway, you look around, you see the surroundings, you see the bright store with its bright signs. Would you be willing to pay to live next door to it, or in close proximity to it? Forget about the other issues for a moment. Would you live there?

That's what this is about; making the place attractive to renters. You'll notice that the store is much more visible from my own back yard, and even moreso from my front yard, than it is from the rental parcel areas. It's not so much about protecting my own eyes. Please don't suggest that I buy a full sim; I can't afford that kind of tier on spec. This is what I've got, this is where I have to make my stand. Would you live next to that place and pay me for the privilege?

Well - imagining for a moment I wanted to rent a place - and a tropical themed place on mainland - it would not matter to me one bit who your neighbors were, unless there were giant porn pix (not allowed since Zindra anyway) or something that spun or glowed or shot particles out its backside 24/7. But that's just me. Others might love it.

No one (reasonable) on mainland expects the illusion to continue forever or to not see neighbors.

The real problem is finding any renter, under any circumstance, in today's RL/SL economy, in my opinion (which is hardly expert.)

Have to say what others have said. We have a new Neighbor who put up Mega prims and he was very nice to make our side transparent. It now looks like a green field very nice actually. He even made the ends transparanet so we didnt have like white sticks here and there.

And if I was looking for a place to rent. No it wouldnt bother me. I have learned to not look at stuff lol.

The person doesnt have any screamers or what ever they are called that do the green text in chat right?

I might, realizing that you don't have control over parcels you don't own. It's a chance a renter takes in a situation like that. I'd rather have him already there, next to a parcel I rent from you, rather than move in and THEN something crazy pops up. (again, 'crazy' is relative, eh, and a matter of opinion). So unless you owned the whole sim and were allowing that, it wouldn't stop me from renting from you if I liked what you'd done with the parcels you DO own, and the neighborhood/community that you'd made. I'd realize that stuff you don't own is out of your control. Seems a no brainer?

The presence of the club across the road, its giant, full-bright rotating sign with pink dancing-girl silhouette and its multiple, moving and overlapping light-sources would put me off. After seeing that, I'd be gone before I even noticed the small, single-storey and relatively unobtrusive store.

as he said, also.... get a private sim then you wont have no worries.

Yeah, I can relate. Through some improbable horse-trading, I've come to own a stretch of (quite nice) sandy beach on Zindra. I confess that I even had a momentary tiki twitch, but it passed without event. I can't bring myself to rez a palm tree there, but I'm really not finding vegetation that seems plausible. I plunked down some cypress and a olive tree well up from the shoreline, and ran out of ideas for the moment.

Incidentally, the giant shoe *might* be in Suffugium. Even if it's not, there are many creative and wonderfully unrelated builds there, all somehow perfectly situated in respectful irrelevance to their neighbors.

Not every Mainland sim can be Suffugium, of course, and tropical beach houses would look so bizarrely out of place there that screening them out just might be appropriate.

:: actually reads the thread now that I'm not on my way to bed ::

damn... what a waste... +1 policy confirmation, if you have to ask if something you did was bad or too much, it is.

The beach here does tropical without resorting to palms trees: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pacifico%20Central/217/59/22.

As noted, the store owner graciously rotated the store 180 degrees. I've removed the screen, added a low hedge, and pulled out most of the plants. I posted the results here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46810578@N02/

On some of the other points raised:

I don't like the big club on the other side of the road either. But I've always considered the "money view" to be the ocean view; I've thought of the roadside as the "back" of the place and figured most other people would too. I have a small dance hangout/club of my own near the road, and though, in my opinion, it fits better with the surroundings than the pink and black place, it's still somewhat commercial and therefore belongs at the roadside. I didn't put it on the water even though the views would be better there for that reason.

As for tiki-tropical. I live in the northeast USA, out in the woods. I get all the hilly farmland/hemlock-beech forest I want--and more snow and dead dried-up autumn stuff than I want. In SL I want a different environment. I love Hawaii. That's my dream.

As for creativity: Playing with giant shoes and so forth is great, but also a very personal endeavor. One person's playful quirkiness is another's ridiculous tomfoolery. I'm trying to attract renters. Just as when staging a house for sale, one sticks to neutral colors and patterns, so when renting to the public I presume it's a better strategy to go with things that have broad appeal.

Of course, at one end of this spectrum is deliberate confrontational contrarianism; at the other is a difference of opinion about aesthetics. My situation is much closer to the latter end of the spectrum than to the former. I realize that.

The reason I waited so long to deal with this is that I'm just now doing a complete makeover of all the parcels I've acquired over the past year. I agree that I should have spoken to the store owner first. All I can say in my defense about that is that I've had no luck talking to neighbors around here at all. I'm always very friendly when approaching people. Most of these folks are far from my time zone; they aren't online when I am. In most cases I've gotten no response at all to my messages. In the one case where I did get a response--to a polite request to set back the banlines on the empty water parcel in front of my house a few meters so I could get access to the Linden ocean--I got a very rude and peremptory refusal. It has not been my experience that it is possible to negotiate with my neighbors in SL and I have largely given up trying. I realize other people's mileage varies.

I asked for opinions because I needed them. I wasn't sure about what I had done. It was very, very helpful to get perspectives other than my own, not only on what I had done, but on my build in general. Thank you all very much.

If that sign really is as you describe, its a ToS violation.

Get some folks out there and AR party it.