Tiering Up

(A Tier In My Beer? Little Tierdrops? Tier-stained? I considered a bunch of tier / tear puns for the title, but none of them made quite the right kind of nonsense.)

Anyway! I decided to give myself a little present and tier up (again) to the quarter-sim (plus 512m2) level. I bought one little plot in the Rise adjacent to some of my land, that I’d had my eye on, and then found that there was no more land for sale in the sim. Natch!

There was significant abandoned land, so I went to the URL in the parcel descriptions, followed the instructions to open a ticket, and after a few days got a very nice reply from Dee Linden saying that she had put a set of abandoned Rise parcels for sale to me for the standard 1L/m2, that should just about max me out.

And they did! Here is the ownership map of Hughes Rise currently (green is me, red is Other, the couple of mysterious dots are some particles or something photobombing):

Note how nice and contiguous most of it is, and how I now have land on both sides of Wellington Road in the corner there. Fun!

(Note also that Up is East on that map, because for some reason that is always how I look at the Rise.)

I think I have like another 48m2 before my tier is full; maybe I will donate it to some worthy group (if that small amount wouldn’t be insulting and I can figure out how), or buy a tiny parcel in some totally random place just for grins…

I haven’t done anything with all the new land yet, nor do I have any specific plans, but sitting around looking at how many free prims I have and rubbing my hands together and cackling is nice. :)

The Gallery Has Moved!

Inspired partly by a gallery that Oura Scribe did for Calli Christensen (how do people get along without having weblogs?), I decided to build a new gallery for my own art collection, the Narrow Gallery being sort of, well, narrow, and not a very interesting build, with not enough space for very much art.

The first build that I started turned out to be a rather rectangular grey sort of quasi-adobe thing, made with megaprims and a bit Brobdingnagian. Attempting to shrink it down, I accidentally caused all of the megaprims to zip down to 10m or less, which left me with a sort of quasi-adobe doll house. I took that as a sign :) stuck it in inventory, and started over.

The second build went much better, so I moved all the art up, found some more art in inventory and put that up also, installed the inevitable Thingmaker, and make it official:

It’s moved, in particular, to a spot up above the Park proper, where it doesn’t have to fit in an odd narrow plot, leaving said plot free for prim-farm, with a few trees and a couple of pieces of art moved from elsewhere to unclutter things, and the “Moved” sign.

Here’s the build from the outside, in the twilight:

(I made the wall textures myself, he said proudly, in GIMP.)

And an interior shot, complete with an early patron:

It’s pretty well-stocked with art (and I have realized once again just how much of the art in my inventory is by Ms. Christensen!), some water, some particles, places to sit and zone out staring at the Thingmaker, and so on. I will probably gradually switch out some of these pieces and switch in other ones, unless I get lazy and entirely forget.

Oh also I need to update the notes available on the table by the entrance, which no doubt still talk about the Narrow Gallery and all. Hope I remember to do that…

Rise for Sale

I waited impatiently for land in Hughes Rise to go on sale for just days and days, and opened a ticket about getting the abandoned land freed up, and then finally and simultaneously found a nice piece of cheap land to complete my tier and also had an actual Linden come by and put the abandoned land up for auction.

So now I am finally all tiered up in the Rise, with lots of lovely available prims, and don’t have to constantly watch for for-sale land anymore.

And, of course, there is now tons of it. :)

(Green is mine, orange is for sale, red is Other.)

Cheap, too: some of it is under 2L per square meter, some of it is slightly over 4. Come and get it!

The Narrow Gallery, in Hughes Rise

So I used my newest acquisition in the Rise to bring down a little art gallery that I built awhile back from its current obscure location 2000m above the Park proper, down to ground level.

It was a challenge getting it to fit into a 16×32 plot (it was originally sized at 20×30, the idea being to fit into a 32×32 1024), and it got a bit narrow in the process, but I sitll kinda like it.

Currently exhibiting works by Miso Susanowa, Callipygian Christensen, Sabrinaa Nightfire, Phinn Boffin, and other admirable an’ nice SL artists.

Drop by! Maybe I’ll even have an opening party or something there sometime… :)

Update: The Gallery has Moved!

Guy Linden stopped by (land changes in the Rise)

As reported previously, I tiered up and have been looking for more land in Hughes Rise. I also opened a ticket about all the abandoned land in the Rise, including one small parcel with a spinning (and false) FOR SALE sign on it.

Well today (it’s been awhile; I suspect they are ehem sort of shorthanded) I got a note that Guy Linden had added a comment to my ticket, and also had an IM from him inworld, saying that he’d turned on autoreturn on the parcel where the sign was (and lo the sign was gone!), and that he’d gladly swap me a 512 of mine for an abandoned 512 that would make the Park more compact.

So I IM’d him back, and he was still on and he answered me (including very helpfully and clearly telling me how to avoid bumping up my tier and/or having objects returned as we did the swap), and we swapped parcels. I said that my real concern was what would happen in general to all of the abandoned land, and he said that he’d put some of it up for auction, and that in general that’s what they do with abandoned land, but it happens sooner if someone actually says something in a ticket about it.

Then I noticed that there was a 512 actually for sale, and for less than 1L/m2, in the Rise just a little ways from the Park, so I abandoned a bit of the parcel I’d just picked up from Guy, enough that I had 512 space left in my tier, and I bought that cheap 512. So now my tier is full, and I have even more prims to play with in the Rise. Yay! :)

And Guy did indeed put some Big pieces up for auction, so here’s the colormap of the place now:

Green bits are of course my holdings: the main Park in the center, the annex butting up against Mooter at the bottom left (the blue bits are FAB holdings in Mooter; they are blue because I belong to the FAB patron group), and that little piece to the upper right that I bought for a song today. Then red is normal land belonging to other people (or abandoned, or Linden land), and the purple is the newly-up-for-auction land.

Woot!

So I may be getting some new neighbors. :) And anyone who knows how these auction things work is encouraged to go bid on these parcels. It’s a great neighborhood!

Giant Ghost Robot Captured On Film!

News Flash: the mysterious fleeting rushing-about giant robot mentioned here recently has been captured in a snapshot by a vigilant Resident (me).

The exciting detail:

Although I’ve seen it only fleetingly, my impression is that it looks just like the robot that joey is riding in, but it shows up on the minimap as a small clump of prims with no associated AV (a few dark pixels moving, with no green dot), and (most bizarrely of all) it seems to originate from roughly where joey is, rush rapidly outward, and go out of sight in under a second.

Spooky, eh?

Hughes Rise Haunted By Giant (Spinning) Robot!

The other day there was this giant robot in the Rise, just (ummmmm) west of the Park, with the front of it sort of embedded in some banlines, and I thought “Poor robot, I bet it is stuck in those banlines!’.

But, quite a few days later, it is still there!

And, stranger still, there is a person inside! A person named joey!

(joey is indicated by the red arrow in the picture above, in which we have turned off prim rendering in order to see him.)

Here is joey seen close-up:

Grey, isn’t he? Is he a prisoner? A passenger? Might he be the actual operator of the robot?

We sent him an IM, asking if he was there on purpose. Oddly, we got the “User is offline” message, even though he was right there at the time. Later, we got an offline reply from him, helpfully saying “who are you?”.

Here is a robot-centric view of the Rise, with helpful labels:

(1) is the new roadside extension of the Park, with Welcome sign.

(2) is some of the Park proper, visible over the ugly-built arcane-stuff store. (Just beyond the park and the Dreamliner is visible the ugly-built costume shop.)

(3) is the giant (spinning) robot, with joey inside.

(The robot wasn’t originally spinning, it was just hovering there. Then Violet an’ Michele an’ me went over and sat on it for awhile out of curiosity, and when we stood up it began spinning around. It’s been spinning ever since.)

But that’s not the weird thing! The weird thing is that, when just sitting around in the Rise, every once in awhile I see, out of the corner of my eye, a giant robot zoom past! I don’t know if it’s joey, or a ghost of joey, or perhaps some other giant robots, maybe relatives of joey, looking for him. (Although if they were looking for him you’d think they would have found him by now, him being rather hard to miss.)

And that’s very strange. So far I have not been able to snap any pictures of these zooming phantom giant robots, but I may someday! The Truth Is Out There!

In the meantime joey makes a scenic (if somewhat dizzying, with the spinning) place to watch the sunset…

The Growth of Empire

I’ve tiered up! Which means I’m now paying (I think it is) US$40/month to Linden Lab, and I can now own up to (I think it is) 512+8192 square meters of land, rather than the 512+4096 that I had before.

The first thing I bought in expanding my empire was 512 m2 in the Duchy of Darkmere, where many of the neighbors are fellow participants in the interestingly twisted Second Citizen II forums.

Picture:

The trees and platform and “Welcome” sign are all mine. The whatever-that-is in the background isn’t. This is right on a Linden road (just visible, lower-right), which is fun, as I can sit and watch the carts rumbling by on their way to market and whatnot.

Then I looked around Hughes Rise, where my park is, and found very little for sale. One tiny (48m2 I think it was) and wildly overpriced plot that I guess someone is hoping someone will buy just to host a server prim or something, and one slightly overpriced 512 diagonally touching the current Park land. I bought the latter, despite it’s being slightly overpriced.

That was day before yesterday. Then yesterday I looked around the Rise again, and found a very nice flat 1088 near the edge of the sim, reasonably cheap. After I snapped it up, I discovered that (A) it’s right on the Linden road that goes through the corner of the sim, and (B) sometime since my last roadtrip, that road has been paved!

Well, cobbled. And it’s had bridges built, and decorative stones and trees and rez zones installed along it, and it’s named “Wellington Road”, and all sorts of good stuff.

V good friend Michele and I went exploring out along the road, and found various fun things. Here we are being incongruous in the secret basement of a local castle:

And here is the little Welcome area that I built on the new 1088 (I bought it mostly with primmage in mind, but couldn’t resist a little build when it turned out to be so perfectly located):

The road and bridge in the foreground are Linden-owned and Mole-wrought, as is the leftmost tree. The other trees, the sitting area, and the Welcome sign are all mine, as is the little toy car you can barely see among the tree branches to the right, and the slightly npirl light-beam streetlamps (more visible in the larger size). I have great plans for that little toy car :) but for the moment it is just sitting there unscripted.

Here’s the Map of my current Hughes Rise Empire (my holdings are in green):

Click through to the flickr version, which has fascinating explanatory notes and stuff. Thanks to the new land, I currently have over 300 prims to play with in the Rise; woot! (Hm, hafta see if Darkmere is anywhere near the Rise; it would be fun if they turned out to be on the same continent and even the same road-system…)

So, like everyone, I am sorry for the many Lindens laid off the other day, and I don’t think it’s a wonderful sign for SL or VWs in general. But on the other hand I don’t think it’s The End of SL, and certainly not The End of Virtual Worlds.

I think, most likely, the Lab just hired on the expectation of continued exponential growth, and when that didn’t happen they found they were paying far too many people. And if SL were to close down (or become a Flash app on Facebook, which would amount to the same thing), I would still be convinced that virtual worlds are a pretty important Next Big Thing, and I would be hanging around Inworldz, or Reaction Grid, or (most likely) some nice interoperable cloud of same.

And in the meantime, growing my SL empire is still great fun. :)

(Edit: oh and P.S. the small plot with the traditional red “FOR SALE” sign on it on the left of the Hughes Rise Welcome picture is in fact abandoned, not for sale. Is there some way to prod the Lindens into putting up abandoned land for sale, or whatever?)

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!

Region Mapper Update

My last post on this subject caused a bit of confusion and amusement, of the “what the heck are all those numbers and things?” and “upside down and sideways hahaha” variety. So here is an update!

As will be obvious, I have switched from the nontraditional “as seen from below, with north to the right” view to the more familiar “as seen from above, with north upward” view.


00: Hughes Rise (25,224) Mature 1600m:
01: Protected Land: Protected Land
02: Hughes Rise :
03: Workshop Prim Farm: Workshop Prim Farm
04: Heavenly Bodies Tattoos & Shapes: Tattoo, Tattoos, Shapes, Shape,
05: AI WorkShop: AI Skybox Workshop
06: Ad-Vatar and The Question Center: Dr. Destiny
07: Jilly and om's Japanese tryst:
08: Sweetwater Retreat (240,232) Mature 1536m:
09: Sadie's Dyke Bar & Butch Store: Quiet hangout. Dressing room, butch
10: Hughes Rise - First Land: Land For The Landless
11: Hughes Rise: Hughes Rise
12: Galaxy Design real estate - Hughes Rise 6: Flat green land available for
13: Galaxy Design: Primland
14: Himmis Kleines Eckchen ;):
15: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Cricket Zipper on 31-Dec-2008
16: My Secret Hideaway: Sometimes you want to go, where nobody knows
17: DAT LAND:
18: Workshop Annex: Workshop Annex
19: A Garden : Murasaki Suisei
20: : My first house
21: The Camel's Prim Farm:
22: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Errol Bazar on 09-Oct-2008
23: oms studio 2:
24: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Ash Alecto on 14-Dec-2008
25: La's Tipi: Keep Out
26: oms studio 1:
27: Gray Estates Part Deux:
28: Hughes Rise (216,145) Mature 512m:
29: Marqs Gettaway:
30: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by bWhittl Kips on 08-Jan-2009
31: Microparadise: Some Land! Woooot!
32: Dale Inis random Hughes Rise land:
33: Computer Land:
34: Land ID:21089 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
35: Hughes Rise Park, upper section:
36: Workshop More Prim Farm:
37: Land ID:21085 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
38: Land ID:21088 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
39: Land ID:21086 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
40: Bippie's Home: Bippie and Halo's home. Friends welcome. IM one of us
41: AVATARS AVATARS,Batman,Pooh Bear,Star Wars,Betty Boop,Lalinda:
42: Workshop: Wherever you go etc.
43: Land ID:21087 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
44: free resell freebie store full perm: somethings are free , such as shoes ,
45: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by My World! (group) on 28-Jan-2009
46: MeadowSide: Portal to Happiness
47: Scott's Seat: Land in the Mist
48: =Hughes Rise=: objects included
49: Julie's Place: Julie's Place
50: Scott's Seat lowlands:


(I’ve put up the map itself as an image even though it’s ASCII-art, because I gave up on getting WordPress to display it from text in a way that looked decent. The script just says it in chat for one to copy-and-paste elsewhere.)

Much more maplike, eh? The Park is obvious (heh heh) in the center, there, as parcels numbered 31, 32, and 35.

A couple of notes on the map:

You may notice a few un-numbered areas (like the big one just south of 31). They are unnumbered because they have the same name and description as some numbered area that they aren’t contiguous with (the big one just south of 31 has the same name and description, and may actually be part of the same parcel as, the area numbered 36, I think it is). I may update the program to be more liberal in its number-displaying, so as to pick up these at the cost of the occasional unneeded second number on a contiguous, but oddly-shaped, parcel.

The algorithm only looks at, and therefore the map only reflects, the center point of each aligned 16-by-16 meter piece of the region. This usually gives a pretty accurate picture of what’s going on, but in fact parcels can have boundaries at a finer granularity than that (4-by-4 maybe I think?), and so the map will not reflect the entire truth, and may in some cases have significant errors. I don’t know of any significant errors on this Hughes Rise map, but for instance the situation in the region of Sadie’s (parcel 09) is considerably more split up and complex in reality than it appears on this map.

I hope this one makes a bit more sense to those readers who are not me. :)

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. :)