Bygone Picks V: Ten Thousand Things Camp

Well, obviously. :) Burn2 is over for the year, and so that pick no longer exists.

RL kept me from getting to a Man burn, but I got to one of the closing Temple burns, and got some nice pictures:

Lots of people have good writeups on the general closing; I’ll send you off to Honour again for both Man and Temple coverage.

Ten Thousand Things Camp was fun, and I think therefore a success. I expect lots of people passed by without it occurring to them to sit and look in the peepholes in the scruffy-looking wooden cube, but at least a few people stopped by. V good friend Michele did a posting all about it as well as her overall Burn2 coverage (she does these great video-photolog things that I’m going to have to figure out how to do someday when I have time again).

But anyway, now that Burn2 is over, and Ten Thousand Things Camp therefore no longer in my Picks, I have replaced it with the New Toulouse ArtWalk, because it is cool.

A proper little European town with an artsy Bohemian sort of feel to it, and lots of actual art. Pop over and look around!

Quite many more Burn2 pictures!

I have been having a great time working on my Burn2 build, pedaling around the playa looking at other peoples’s ones, and like that. Also taking pictures!

Here I am on my bike, returning from a notional quick trip back to civilization for more chocolate and apparently stuffed animals:

Entering along the road from the notional last outpost of civilization, there’s some nice monumental stuff as one comes onto the Playa, including the DMV.

The DMV folks seem to be working on some cool vehicles; but I like my classic Arcadia Asylum Hobo bicycle.

The Rangers are the best dug-in people on the playa so far; they got here first, after all.

Their dome is quite a landmark. And they have bunches of buildings!

I just hope us builders are rambunctious enough to give them something to do. :)

Finally there’s my box in the middle distance!

It’s a longish pedal. (I wonder if that is another ranger dome on the horizon there.)

Home at last:

That day I hung some cloth from the wooden awning there to keep the sun off, and made flags of my own with the Burn2 logo (and mine are Free To Copy, unlike Some People’s!), and met one of my next-camp neighbors.

Also sometime recently, an adorable little stoat or vole or sloth or something waddled through curiously:

and I’ve now pretty much finished off the place! The first draft, anyway. :) And I thought of a name.

So here is Ten Thousand Things Camp:

The Blue truck and Red building in the background are not mine (although the shadow cast on the ground by the red building is, heehee). Nor is the wooden platform and stuff across the road.

Nor is the streetsign, that’s infrastructure. Apparently I am at the corner of Seoul and 6:00. Okay!

The Big Box and the Round Striped Tent-thing and the Awning and Old Car and Comfy Seats and Infoboxes and Fire Swirls and Random Junk are all mine, though. :) Many will be Free To Copy when the place opens and you come by!

The way that can be trodden is not the eternal way.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the Ten Thousand Things.

And now there’s less than a month left until Opening Day.

Plenty of time to fiddle with the build and peddle around nosing into other people’s. :)

My Burn2 camp exists!

Just a quick picture for possible interest-whetting. :) The playa is open only to builders at the moment; public opening is mid-October.

I’m happy to see from the Burn2 site that Inner Child Camp and the Stilt Bitches are among the returning theme camps. And also happy to see Nish Mip (whose weblog I adore), and some names I don’t know who I expect will surprise and delight.

(Whispers: there are still some plots available, too; do you have one yet? It’s gonna be a fun time. :) )

Bumper Snails and other wonders

The official week of Burning Life is nearly over for the year, but I think the sims and many builds will be up for another week, so here’s some more pictures of fun stuff. This time it’s all about things to delight your inner child, courtesy of the SL Kids.

There is a ton of fun stuff to play with, and play in, in and around Inner Child Camp. I went there the other day totally at random from the BL event listing, and saw:

a wonderfully scary performance of a classic Japanese ghost story by folks from the Amatsu Shima Okiya school.

Then I wandered around finding other neat stuff (and you should, too!), including:

a wonderful house on elephant-back, full of stuff to delight the Inner Kid. (Creator Loki Eliot has a weblog.)

And finally (although it’s only a tiny fraction of the great stuff to find):

the Lightning Slime Ranch Proudly Presents: Bumper Snails!

Camp by Wolveli Kas (that’s her on the right), wonderful free snails by Flea Bussy of Grendel’s Children.

And there’s a great “Avatar Run” next door, also by Wolveli, with tubes and a maze and an elevator and prizes!

Woot! :)

Lighting the Lamps

I love the idea of the RL Burning Man. And when I dream about going to Burning Man, I often dream in particular of going and being a Lamplighter. I’m not sure why; I think it’s in my nature to want to be one of the people who bustles around making places work, rather than one of the creatives on the front-lines. :)

But anyway! So when a call came over the Burning Life Access group IM the other night saying that the Lamplighter Procession in Burning Life was about to start, I was delighted, and I zipped right over (well, eventually; I had alot of script editing windows to close and stuff). Nice friend Michele was hanging around being tolerant of my scripting at the time, and we zipped over together.

I figured that not being in the actual Lamplighter group we could just sort of tag along on the outskirts, but the Lamplighters were extremely open and generous, and were handing out The Official Clothing to everyone that wanted it.

I love the outfit. :) The fire-fans I’m waving around there are from the standard BL Greeter box.

We played the drums and talked to the nice people, and eventually the procession started out, heading north from Lamplighter Camp to the Temple, lighting lights along the way. I got called out to RL somewhere in the middle (naturally!) and when I got back the procession had moved on (except for Michele, who was kind and stayed behind for me).

We started flying northward to catch up to everyone, and we passed all sorts of cool stuff on the way.

That group there is in Yoa Ogee’s amazing "Friends are Everywhere". And they are indeed!

A bit further along, we came to this:

First, notice the amazing colors and general breathtaking beauty of the Petal Stage. Then look a little closer, and notice the amazingly realistic statue of a naked female spirit of some kind that rotates in front of it (there are several similar figures around the build). Not AVs: really really well done sculpted and textured prims. Incredible!

We eventually got to the Temple :) and there was everyone, dancing around and drumming and having a great time:

I’m not entirely certain where I am in this picture. Probably flying and on fire and stuff! I can find myself much better in this image, where I’m the flying on fire one at center right; and I think Michele is on fire on the ground below me.

So that was an extremely fun spontaneous evening. And while it satisfies some tiny part of my dream of lighting some lamps at the RL Burning Man, it also makes me dream of it even harder…

In other news, here I am in a rocket, and I won a spot at Busy Ben’s Vehicle Lot in the lottery! Woot! :)

Burning Life 2009

As previously noted, I tend to avoid big Linden-run Grid-wide celebrations, on the theory that they are likely to be laggy and disappointing. Two years ago I helped out slightly at the VAA build in Burning Life 2007. Last year I apparently completely ignored Burning Life 2008.

But this year, maybe because I have a fast lag-busting machine, or because so many of my friends have builds, or whatever, I’ve been paying more attention to Burning Life, and have a few million pictures of it, a random subset of which I’ve saved to disk and uploaded to flickr. (See Chestnut Rau’s NWN posting for pointers to the Official BL Info stuffs.)

Here I am riding a unicycle beneath a couple of fire-juggling Stilt Bitches. (A camp based on one at the RL Burning Man.)

The Steel Racoonfish circling my head is from some earlier fishing. :)

Here I have found my own fire-sticks to juggle, and monocycled up to the top of a spiral ramp in a build adjacent to the Stilt Bitches.

Shortly after taking that picture, I fell scenically (is that a word?) to the gritty ground.

I love this next picture. Somewhere after the Stilt Bitches, I think while hanging around with Ava an’ Corwin, I changed shape and clothes, and then I went off and visited Sabrinaa Nightfire’s Peace and Love Oasis. She has a lovely area where you take a danceball and go swimming through a series of translucent hearts (and I did one of the scripts that powers it!).

The fish is a nice subtle touch in that shot, eh? :)

Somewhere in here friend Michele joined me and we went exploring about at random.

We’re somewhere down there, dancing around in your typical “dance club set in the clouds above a grungy urban vacant lot”. Very SL. :)

And here we are in another typical BL09 performance area, set on a giant’s table among the food:

(Somewhere in there I turned my hair bright green and added some glow. Note to Blue Mars: any virtual world in which I can’t do that kind of thing on a whim is just not in the running.)

With my draw distance turned up a bit, looking out over some of the odd and intriguing things scattered around the playa:

The camp to the right there is ArtCrash Exonar’s; great spikey sculptures. The one to the upper left I don’t think I ever got to. So much to see!

AM Radio’s camp is small but amazing. Not only can you get an on-fire version of AM’s classic bundle-of-sticks attachment (and a free wheatfield!), but you can also draw graffiti on the side of a train!

I drew that silly face there. :)

(I’m not completely sure how that works, but my drawing is also on flickr, whence one might find some clues as to the mechanism.)

This next picture, at Veronique Wellesley’s “Dream of Water in the Desert”, is out of sequence; I think it actually comes just after my visit to Sabrinaa’s camp. Or something.

Anyway, it’s lovely and soothing, a cool blue oasis in the desert, with original poetry and lots of running water.

(Rezago Kokorin has a nice oceanic build also, that I don’t seem to have downloaded any of my pictures of. I should!)

And then I took about a billion pictures at Poid Mahovlich’s “Cabaret of Flame” camp. I’ll only burden you with a few of them here :) but it was a lovely build, a great crowd, and a really fun time.

(That’s Michele to my right bein’ a scantily-clad fire worshipper. And the sky is, I think “[TOR] Commie Sky” from the Sky Settings Editor Thingie.)

Different part of the same camp, with a different sky preset, and draw distance set high enough to show another camp sizzling in the middle distance:

The central tower of the camp, seen from above in natural playa-light.

Really gorgeous! I’m always amazed by what visual types can do in SL.

And finally (for now), the camp’s dance area, natural light set to midnight:

I am just visible in center left due to my green glowing hair. :)