Alpha Point / Omega Point

I am not organized enough to have figured out the relationship between these two sims, but they are (currently) right next to each other, and both gorgeous. I’d read about Omega Point in various places, but it was Ava’s Omega Point Slideshow that got me to visit (see also her Alpha Point slideshow). See also the creators weblog (in Japanese), the Omega Point flickr group, the Alpha Point entry in the SL Destination Guide, Honour on Alpha Point, Honour on Omega Point, and so on and so on.

But mostly, I took some pictures there! Here are a few of them! Click through to flickr for some more, or for huger versions of these, or even watch the pretty slideshow!

It’s really astounding.

Over Land and Sea with the City Sanitation Department

One of the (numerous) clever ideas that I’ve had that were then stolen by telepaths with time-machines and implemented before I got around to it (and often even before I had the idea!), is to make some scripted automatic vehicles that would drive around on the Linden roads, cleverly detecting turns and intersections and stuff, and roaming around autonomously offering people rides and generally being useful and clever.

This is hard, because of sim crossings and script limitations and the wonkiness of physics and stuff, but AnnMarie Otoole (who is probably also AnnMarie Oleander, but who is not Ann Otoole) has figured it out, and her vehicles of various kinds can be found all around the Linden road system.

I hopped onto one of them, a City Sanitation Department truck, today; it was fun!

I got on as the truck was passing my Darkmere plot in Clearwing (on land!), but it passed quickly through a couple of sims and then rather surprisingly headed out onto the water…

AnnMarie’s vehicles are generous, in that they offer you copies of themselves for free (and, for 100L more, the script that powers them). They are very clever about getting themselves out of jams, and even dealing with collisions…

That’s an AnnMarie farm truck that my garbage truck is having an altercation with there.

My truck drove in a wide arc around the inside of the outer ring of the Heterocera Atoll; being very old land, and right on the water, it’s mostly a pretty classy neighborhood…

… but even ritzy folk need to have their trashed picked up I guess.

I enjoyed the ride, but eventually the smell gets to one; I popped off of the truck and onto land, and found myself by a sort of thatched inn called the Traveler’s Rest.

It’s good to sit and get warm by the fire.

I do love the mainland… :)

Sightings

That is, a bunch of random recent pictures.

Wandering about near my place in Vallone, in wild and wooly Zindra, it turns out that the Liqueur Club, which vanished awhile back, has returned with a new name and motif, but I think the same owner:

Hope they prosper!

The plot between my place and the road was originally a pawnshop, then a strip club (that never actually opened, as far as I know), then a Naughty Hospital (woot!), and now is again for sale:

Come by and take a look!

(That is of course my platform in the background; and I don’t know why that species of Linden tree wasn’t rezzing just then. But the cherries are pretty!)

On the other side, further down the road, a neighbor has an art gallery featuring very attractive nude photographs (mostly of herself, I believe).

I do love Zindra. :)

Back home on the subadult mainland, there’s still considerable land for sale in the Rise. There was a big mafia mansion between the Park and the Narrow Gallery for a bit (complete with limos, pool, and machine-gun nests), now replaced by a big vampire-mafia castle (stone, coffins, helipad). Just up the road from the Park Welcome annex, someone was putting up a nice little house, and I said Hi and we chatted a little.

And then aways further along the road, there’s Azadi Donuts:

which is, and contains, various references to Iranian political movements, that I don’t know enough about to know whether it’s pro or con, straight-up or satire, or why there are all those vehicles like suspended in midair.

Speaking of not knowing things:

Look, d00d, I leave my land open and my furniture unlocked because I am a Nice Person, but please try to clean up after yourself!

What were you doing that resulted in having eight invisible male bits scattered around the Dreamliner, anyway?

On second thought, I don’t think I want to know…

:)

And finally, our burning question of the day: is the grid read for such beauty?

Just askin’… :)

(This skin, which is so amazing I’m sort of afraid to wear it, is from ROCKBERRY; I think it’s a Kalista. The gorgeous armband and hair jewels are from Nizam (they were gifts, thank you thank you!), and the bracelets from Dark Eden. The clothing is random mix an’ match; I think that’s a “Simone!” top.)

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. :)

Darn those sim-boundary crossings…

Sitting pensively on my favorite motorbike, askew in the surf after a bad (although non-fatal for a change!) crossing from one sim to another, yet again in the south-coast stretch of Route 7 that I wrote about the other day.

Was having a really hard time at sim edges; maybe because both me and the bike were pretty primmy, and scripted, maybe because of some gremlins in the Lab network that day.

But I got a nice picture out of it. :)

The Classic Dungeonmaster

Another WoW posting; feel free to complain. :)

In the relatively recent Word of Warcraft achievement system, there’s an achievement called Classic Dungeonmaster, which involves getting nineteen sub-achievements, each of which requires defealting the last boss of (or otherwise completing) some classic (i.e. included in WoW even before the first expansion came out) dungeon.

Spennix has been taking a break recently, since I’ve been having fun leveling lower-level characters like Deminestia, and since Spennix is mostly a soloer and so isn’t all that enthusiastic about the new easier group-forming stuff in the latest patch. But it occurred to me / her / us that it might be fun to go for this achievement, since as a moderate-geared 80 she can probably solo each of these dungeons, it will give me a little experience with them so I will be better prepared when Deminestia or someone gets to them, and if we are going to do it ever it would be good to do it before the older parts of the world are torn apart by Cataclysm.

At the moment we have just a few left to do! Here is Spennix doing a victory dance over the temporarily dead body of evil Archmage Arugal:

She is modelling a female-gnome-sized copy of his robes, which for some reason he was carrying on him when she defeated him. :)

Here she is during the cleansing of the Scholomance, temporarily turned into a skeleton by some rude bad guy:

And here she is at home in K3, showing off the Bad Mojo Mask that she got from the boss of Zul’Farrak:

Pretty silly, eh? :)

The next one on her list is Sunken Temple (actually the Temple of Atal’Hakkar, but no one remembers how to spell that). The final boss of that place is a big phantom dragon, but he’s asleep and you can’t defeat him until he wakes up. He doesn’t wake up until the big High Priest guy is defeated. And you can’t get to the big High Priest guy until you bring down the glowing green barrier, which you do by defeating five or six little sub-priest guys who are scattered around the instance. And the instance is a flippin’ maze and we are always getting lost.

So here is Spennix taking a little nap with the sleeping final boss, getting up the energy to take care of all of that:

Zzzzzzz…

The main reason I’ll never be a Serious WoW Player is that I like having fun doing silly easy stuff like this at least as much as I like going on Big Serious Raids for Awesome Gear, which is what the Serious Players do.

(Click on each picture for the flickr page for a larger version.)

Random pictures of me doing things in places

Hanging around the big Falln store for no particular reason the other day, and camming around like I always do everywhere, I came upon a nice Asian / Oriental furnishings place, embedded in but quite different from Falln, called I think “Little Boy Blue”. The products were very nice, and some were very nicely priced :) and I bought some.

Then wanting to actually put some of them out somewhere rather than just leave them in inventory forever, I decided to redecorate the Extropia pod a bit. Here’s part of the result:

The tatami mats and the bamboo decoration in the corner and the little cabinet and the incense burner on the table and the Buddha and Ganesh on the wall are all from LBB. The table itself and the kneeling pads for it were a gift awhile back, and came from somewhere else. The table and lamp to the right are from RELIC I think. Other things are from other places. :)

Has kind of a nice open feeling to it I think…

Vaguely relatedly, a Zazen Coffee House:

Just a lovely tiny build (SLURL). Came across it through some complicated serendipitous path involving searching for the Philosophy House group to join it again after having to temporarily drop it ’cause I needed a group slot. Or something. :)

Later on, skating in the nice flat empty lot (empty except for skating devices :) ) out behind Snook’s Garden Centre in Caledon Morgaine:

(And yes, those are Christmas lights I’m wearing. :) A free gift from hoorenbeek.)

Then I flew my Barney Boomslang hoverpod up to the mysterious island that looms in the sky above Caledon Morgaine, and found an enigmatic fenced mushroom garden to relax in:

(The music stream was playing When You’re Evil; somehow it was just perfect…)

And then, sometimes it’s good to get down to ground level and just sit…

(Click through to flickr for mostly the same words, comment boxes, etc…)

Fourth of July at the Odd Ball

After the dress-up fun on Friday, what I mostly did on the day itself was randomly TP around from Search / Events watching fireworks displays, and go to parties at PIER (the main sim is gone, but Carys has recreated the club in its old parcel location) and at the Odd Ball. Pictures from the latter are always worth posting. :) And really require no commentary…

(Click through for the larger sizes.)

Showing the colors

So I have this friend Steph, and ‘though we don’t see each other all that much, when she says “I’ve got an idea!” I know it’s going to be fun. :)

Seems that Twisted and Spoiled (isn’t that a great name? I don’t have an LM or URL any better that you can find yourself with Google or inworld search) had a nice Red White and Blue freebie outfit out for the Fourth, and she TPd me over and I got a copy, and we both put them on and they were deliciously over the top. And I remembered the “Capital Hill” builds that went up with some fanfare the other month / year / whatever, and we went over to take pictures.

Do I look a little dubious? :) Well, for one thing it looks like it’s about to rain; fortunately the storm passed over, though. (I also forgot to take off the bikini top I was wearing before, in most of the pictures. Fortunately it doesn’t show much.)

We had fun looking through inventory for poses, and looking around the island for Patriotic Imagery and so on. Here’s one of my favorites of the snaps we got (note that Steph is tall, an’ I am short!), posing in front of I think a big transparent Washington Monument and some patriotic symbology of some sort:

There’s the Spirit of America for ya! :)

The Red and The Wild

Okay, so everyone is posting and putting up pictures about and from AM Radio’s latest amazingly wonderful and enigmatic and lovely and intriguing build “The Red and The Wild”, so here I am doing it also. I’m just posting a few here (all of which are better viewed larger), but on flickr I have a whole set (and see also the relevant flickr image pool).

A jaunt northward

So v good friend Chestnut put up a weblog entry about her an’ Zha’s new mainland land, and I thought I’d pop over and look at it, being a big mainland fan myself.

I’d heard somewhere that it was now possible to get from the southern continent (Jeogeot, where my Hughes Rise park is) to the northern continent (Sansara, the original core of Second Life, where’s Ches an’ Zha’s new place is). So having a few minutes free in the middle of the day, I thought I’d give it a shot.

There I am, hovering over Hughes Rise on my Personal Flying Saucer, ready to set out. (The saucer was a Hunt prize at SENRIES ; I expect they probably sell them too.)

To start the jaunt, I went overland on the Rise, up to the Linden protected-land right-of-way in the northwest corner (parcel 01 on my map from the other day). Here I am on the right-of-way, passing by Sadie’s Dyke Bar.

There’s a nice long strip of Linden protected land cutting SW to NE through this part of the continent; maybe the Moles will put in an actual road!

Continuing roughly northeast along the right-of-way, here I am passing over a racetrack or… something in Bulgogi.

I was in a bit of a hurry, so couldn’t stop to look at all of the interesting things (or even wait for them to finish rezzing completely).

Here’s a nicely-designed office park or something in Muk, with the moon shining over the ocean visible between its levels.

Some slightly more chaotic mainland, along the Linden right of way, with big yellow LAND FOR SALE signs, a castle, and a hot-air balloon:

There were various hot-air balloons drifting majestically about in this area, between the Rise and the northern tip of Jeogeot. I got off my saucer and floated briefly around on one. It was relaxing. Here I’m passing over some construction sites (or possibly buildings that haven’t finished rezzing!) in a vaguely urban area.

(I actually detached the saucer rather than getting off of it. One nice thing about it is that it’s actually an attachment and not a vehicle, which means it’s pretty easy to steer, and I never get knocked off by banlines. A clever idea!)

Shortly after this, back on my saucer, I happened to notice a familiar-looking parcel name go by in the parcel-name bar, and looking down I saw that I was flying over a friend’s house, where I’d been visiting just the other day! I didn’t take a picture of that because, I dunno, I guess because it’s a friend’s house :) but these coincidences are always fun. Huge as the grid is, it’s still a small world.

At the northernmost tip* of Jeogeot, I came to a nice beach area with inlets and rocks and dunes and cattails and poseballs. Here I am gazing northward, out to sea, talking with a woman who was out there sorting inventory.

Flatteringly, she asked me for the numbers for my shape! I gave her everything but my face; that’s mine. :)

I scrolled around on the map enough to convince me that there is in fact no navigable bridge between Jeogeot and Sansara (it’s a long distance!), or at least none I was going to find that day. Time was getting very short, so I said bye to my flattering new acquaintance, and teleported directly off to Marawa.

Ches an’ Zha’s new land is in a lovely area, lots of water, and it looks like a quality neighborhood. I look forward to memorable land-warming parties. :)

Having done some part of what I intended, I TPd home and put the flying saucer away, and relaxed in my giant chocolate donut to get back to RL. There’s no place like home!

Although yeah the Rise is not strictly speaking home; that’s Extropia. But the Rise is my mainland home, and I love it there!

Lighthouse, Error

Beyond Blogging: Dancing!

The other evening I held a session at an unconference put on by some virtual-world-savvy IBM types.

The (un)conference was called "Seeking business value from investment in virtual worlds on the 3D internet", aka "Beyond Blogging". My session (the last on the first day) was "Field Trip: Social Aspects of Virtual Worlds". My original plan was to take a bunch of inexperienced AVs out and show them what fun Second Life can be (since, as the abstract says, this is an important part of understanding our potential customers).

But it turned out that most of the attendees were far from newborn, and already knew how to poke a danceball. So I just took everyone up to Indolence and we partied and danced and discussed business models and adult content and stuff. I was fun!

And not one person seemed to mind any of the pictures on the walls.

(That’s me in my red Mohawk again. I didn’t wear it to the main conference sessions, but it seemed appropriate for Indolence.)

More dancing:

Ahuva was too tired to dance (she was one of the clever people behind the (un)conference); so she just came along and rested on the rug and talked and I suspect dozed off a bit now and then. :)

A good time was, I think, had by all. And I got to see Indolence again (I just recently took it back out of my pocket after having it packed up for some time), which was very nice. I should have more parties there.

(Note that this was a conference session and not a party, so don’t be miffed that I didn’t call and invite you. :) )

Fishin’ and Cruisin’

Just a lil innocuous weblog post about having fun in SL.

Since Ahuva taught me to fish, I’ve kept half an eye out for places to do it more (have to get a top to go with the bikini bottom that I caught that day!). So when I was walking around Edloe Island the other day (the domain of Crap Mariner, briefly noted in an old flickr snapshot) and noticed a barrel sitting by the water whose description text said something like “Allows fishing within 50 meters”, I sat down on the nearest object and cast out a line.

Didn’t catch much (just a couple of common fish, I think), but with the mist and the rainbow and the general relaxing, it didn’t really matter.

And speaking of generally relaxing :) I had a lovely two-level suite on the absolutely enormous cruise ship S. S. Galaxy (it takes up three entire Regions in SL, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was the largest “single thing” (whatever that means) on the Grid), for a week and a few days. (Why I had it is a long story, involving a coupon that I got a long time ago and decided to use and then misinterpreted the terms of, etc, etc, etc in painful detail.)

When the rental was about to run out, I spammed the group IM of my favorite shopping group with an announcement of an ad hoc open house and cruise party. Not alot of people came by (everyone was busy, like, shopping I think), but those that did were high quality.

From left to right, Phinn, an’ me, an’ Michele. A couple other ppl of obvious taste an’ discernment came by, too, but I didn’t get pictures of them. :)

And, as comes as no surprise anymore, lounging about on the deck of a simulated luxury cruise ship and talking with friends turns out to be huge amounts of fun, and soothing to the soul.

The Fire Next Door

V good friend Michele and I were wandering around the Hughes Rise Park, and went over to the mall next door to see how it was doing. It’s a relatively new mall, and it’s been mostly empty, with a few gambling machines for awhile, and now a place selling pretty neat-looking hoverboards. As we approached, I got an unsolicited group invite from a stranger, which I ignored by reflex. The mall was empty, except for a rather generic woman named Emma sitting behind a desk. She was a bot.

How do I know she was a bot? Well, she’s the one that sent me the group invite, and her profile says “I am the group Manager Only DO NOT TALK TO ME OR IM ME i will not ancer”, and she didn’t say anything when I asked her if she was a bot, and she didn’t say anything when Michele and I perched attractively on the back of her chair:

and she didn’t even say anything when her desk was suddenly engulfed in flames!

Fortunately Michele and I were wearing our protective goggles, and we went pfffff at the fire alot, and were able to extinguish it before any damage was done. Michele got a great shot of bot Emma sleeping through the whole thing.

Note that no actual AVs were griefed in the making of this weblog entry; don’t try this at home, kids!

More Art and the Park

It’s been suggested that I haven’t posted much in my weblog lately. Without admitting any wrongdoing, here I am posting to my weblog, in the form of some pictures with text describing them, about some stuff I’ve been doing.

Here I am, still in that hair (recolored to my favorite darkish red), at the opening of the Evolution Gallery.

Congrats to Sabrinaa Nightfire and Alan801 Eclipse for a great opening event! This was like two and a half weeks ago :) but I expect the show is probably still going on if you want to stop by (and you should!).

I ran into Botgirl Questi at the opening, which was fun.

She was/is on hiatus from her usual full-on content creation, and seemed to be enjoying being inworld to just wander around.

A wider shot of the Evolution Gallery, showing the big scrolling logo sign and some of the huge colorful pieces of art:

I liked this show very much; unlike some recent openings where the art has been small and detailed and complex (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) the works here were more huge and simple and exuberant. I like exuberance. :)

And speaking of art, here’s a snapshot of the new back garden of the Hughes Rise Park (I think I’ve moved some stuff around since then, but it’s still basically the same).

The pink tree with green waving tentacles at left is from the aforementioned Sabrinaa Nightfire; to the right of that is a lovely armillary sphere by Honour McMillan (which she gave me in return for some time-related scripting). The orange fireball to the right of that is elros Tuominen’s "A kind of fireball I am building", on loan from Honour’s own collection. Nearly invisible in the center, there’s me standing by a lovely meditation station that was a holiday gift from Chestnut Rau. (I never did do a posting about all the cool stuff that arrived over Solstice, did I?) And in the background looming over everything (including the junkshop next door) is an Aetheric Flux Storage Tower (v2) by CoyoteAngel Dimsum, which I vaguely recall having found sitting around free-to-copy in Caledon or somewhere once. It’s large!

More recently I went to the opening of Phinn Boffin‘s “Changing Hues” show at Second Arts; it was a great time. (That’s me on slide 24; I can’t figure out how to link right to it.) I bought a framed copy of the gorgeous Maria Maria (and one of the more, erm, scantily-clad ones).

I take most of the credit for Phinn’s having this show, because the other week she was showing me yet another lovely picture, and I said “You ought to do a show!” and here in the very same year she did one. Of course Morris Vig and Second Arts get some credit, too, for actually putting it on. :)

So that’s that! I also have a number of Spennix pictures queued up, so you may get those before too long. (She’s level 75, yay!) I continue not to have any opinions about Pressing Issues of the Day in Second Life that are just bursting to get out, so you may be spared any of those for awhile longer…

Meanwhile, back in Second Life…

I’ve put up a couple of new signs in the Hughes Rise park (click through to flickr for access to larger sizes). On the right is the very nice (and magically self-updating) New Citizens Incorporated map of the Linden-owned continents of the Grid (available free, along with maps of I think the first two continents, at their Fisherman’s Wharf build (and likely elsewhere)). On the left is a lovely freebie region-map device, which can be set to display a map of whatever region you like (mine is of course set to Hughes Rise). I’ve stuck little “You are Here” prims on each one (the red arrow and green diamond), so people can see where they are.

Due in large part to early mentoring from the amazing Veronica Quackenbush, I’m a great believer in educating residents about the shape and geography of the world. We TP around so much that it’s all too easy to forget that the world has an underlying structure, and therefore to miss out on all the fun involved in, say, going from your house to a favorite club via road or helicopter rather than just zapping direct, and potentially seeing interesting things and meeting interesting people and having noteworthy adventures along the way.

Take a walk along a road today! You never know what you might run into. :)

More evidence of the target audience for WoW

Big guns:

and hot women:

(Spennix has a bit of a crush on the latter (well, on both really), and is considering a “Women of Voldrune” pinup calendar. The main challenges are that (a) the ladies would immediately attempt kill the photographer if they spotted her (part of their charm,really), and (b) I’m not sure there are actually 12 of them. And no, I don’t know why there’s an animal skeleton strapped to the gun, but doesn’t it look awesome?)

Among the Legends

A recent drama storm around the OpenSim-based Legend City Online (LCO) reminded me that I haven’t tried one of the public OpenSim virtual worlds for awhile, so when SL was being weird the other night I headed over (using the Second Life viewer, rather than their recommended Hippo, because I didn’t want to download a Whole Nother Thing).

Turns out I already had an account over there; here I am as Dale Mullins (in a pretty radically unattractive shot, now that I look at it), helping one of the Legends (roughly the equivalent of Lindens in SL, I gather) adjust a sit-ball on a park bench at the default landing space:

(That’s me on the right, the Legend on the left: a very nice woman, with an adorable shape and skin, and a million-watt facelight.)

There are some very nice builds in the parts of LCO that I wandered through, and there are enough bits of free clothing and shapes and stuff that I was able to make myself more or less my familiar self without much trouble (although those glasses are Not Realy Me; I will have to make some myself).

The underlying server software, though, is pretty clearly still pre-beta. Things I noticed:

• Inter-sim teleports and sim boundary crossings were quite risky, relatively often resulting in disconnection, infinite uncontrollable flight into nowhere, and/or appearing at one’s destination but being unable to move,
• Even just standing around is somewhat risky; I got logged out a few times when I was doing nothing notable at all,
• Once one has crashed or been logged out, it typically takes two or three or more tries to get in again; lots of message about already being logged in, or having been disconnected from the region, or whatever,
• Scripted attachments are odd: I made myself a little invisible attachment with a hovertext title and some decorative particles just for fun, and found that if I went to a different sim it would be sort of half-off (the title would be in black, and I couldn’t see any particles although sometimes others could) until I detached it and re-attached it.

It’s possible of course that some of these problems were due to using an Unsupported Viewer; I ought to try Hippo next time if I’m not too lazy.

There weren’t a whole lot of people in the world, but the dozen or so that I saw seemed to be your typical early-adopter type and therefore above average conversationally; so that was nice. LaLa Legend herself, who I gather runs the place, was also hanging around at the entrypoint; something you don’t see in SL. I don’t know how positively she would have responded to challenging questions about the current drama of course. :) And the Legend in the picture up there (I apologize for not recalling her name; for some reason the viewer wasn’t logging chat while I was in LCO; I probably forgot to check the box) gave me 250 of the local currency so I could (for instance) upload the texture for my famous Noob Tee Shirt, which I then handed out randomly.

It’s fun to play around in such a young world, and to see how things are being worked out in them compared to mama Second Life. On the other hand the infrastructure is still wonky enough that I doubt I’ll be there regularly. It’s worse than my first week in SL (and that was pretty bad!). But it’s coming along…

Flying machines

Today’s picture is of me (if you can find me) up in the air above Shengri La somewhere, playing around with some of the more interesting flying machines I found in inventory:

(Details best viewed at larger sizes.)

Despite how important and wealthy this pictures might make me appear :) most of these were either free or very modestly priced. The survey:

Across the top, left to right: red balloon is very nice Cubey Terra Wind Rider (lotsa features; I bought it the other day when I realized all my Cubey Terra things were submarines rather than flyers), next three things are the two versions of Carrah Rossini’s lovely Steampunk Dreamliner, with the Phoebe (also Carrah Rossini) sitting between them (see previous post for where those came from). The two-balloon craft at top right is Barney Bloomslang’s Airship Bloomslang from Steam & Magic; I seem to have a full-perm version, so presumably it was a marketing freebie.

Just to the right of the red balloon is a flying teacup, an ancient freebie by one illume Skallagrimson; the cute stubby thing to the right of that is the tooterplane, from Tooter Claxton (don’t remember where I got that). The grey cylinder just below the Airship Boomslang is a decorative “Danger, Hazardous Chemicals” tank available free-to-copy at Terra Aeronautics Bay City.

The hi-tech thing at lower left is the C-Tech F2050 anti grav ship, that I got free somewhere (I think) a zillion years ago. Just to the right of that is a cute stubby Hoverpod I bought somewhere in New Babbage I think. More or less in the center is the semitransparent (and VERY fast) Mitt’s Airplane, by Mittandra Su, that I found sitting free-to-copy in a field once.

Below that is Hoverfan 17 by v talented friend Lightwave Valkyrie (that I think is given out at Lightwave’s airstrip), and finally to the right of that is Cubey Terra’s very sweet two-seater Futura hovercar (which I bought at the same time as the Wind Rider).

(That’s it for the vehicles; there are also two sitting-balls that I was adding some physics to for the creator, and a framed copy of Sysperia Poppy‘s “The Bridge of Man” that you can’t really see.)

And where am I? Oh, there I am, in the basket of the red balloon. Hi, me! :)

(Note that these are all flying things made by others, because they were selected partly for prettiness and partly because I wanted to play with them. My own things (the nonphysical one- and two-seater Hoverdiscs, the physical one-person Zoom, etc.) aren’t particularly pretty, and I already know all about them.)