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!

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!

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…

Throat Lozenges and Science Fiction

The other week I met SL artist Sabrinaa Nightfire while she was working on the Identity Circus with Botgirl Questi. We got on very well, and did the usual fun artist stuff of showing each other our favorite pieces and all (she’s got the coolest house!).

We were talking in IM the other day and I mentioned that I had a sore throat (and I still do, although it’s slowly slowly going away). A little while later I got some blue dropdowns informing me that she’d sent me a couple of objects called “Throat Lozenge”. They turned out to be a little large to swallow :) but they look good sitting as a temporary installation in the Hughes Rise Park.

I love the gifting culture! :)

And speaking of Sabrinaa, she pointed out one of her builds to me and a few days later I found the time to explore it. Here I am, as a tiny little dot near the center of the shot:

The lovely wild build here houses the Science Fiction Museum (direct teleport), with inneresting exhibits by Kueperpunk Korhonen. I close with some tantalizing text that a robot in one of those bubbles greeted me with

They are gone.
They have vanished.
They have been our fathers, and our mothers.
Our ancestors…well somehow.
They didn`t create us. But they made those who made those who made those who made those who made those who made those who made us…
It was many generations, before we came here.
Thousands of years after they dissapeared.
Humans…
Biological lifeforms, small, fragile, sensitive…
Agressiv, conquering, selfdestructive….
They are gone.
We want to know, what happened to them. May be, it was war, or disease, a catatsrophe or they just left the galaxy.
But one thing is unique about them : their imagination…
They could imagine things, befor they actually existed.
They called it Science Fiction.
And we think,the answer to the question what happened to them, can be found in their Science Fiction.
Come and see, what we found…

Soiree on the Rocks

Random happenings and IMs last night led to an impromptu soiree in the park at Hughes Rise, which eventually moved up to the Floating Rocks build above it. And for reasons too complex to explain we were mostly girls in lingerie. :)

It was one of those great times when you gather some friends who don’t already know each other, and they all get along fabulously.

We sat around talking about nothing and playing with the toys (a hangman, a flying vehicle rezzer, meditation and sitting and swooning poseballs, etc), getting to know each other. I’m sure at least a few new friendings resulted.

Yay us! And apologies to anyone who was around but didn’t get a TP; at seven or so folks we sort of ran out of places to sit, and I didn’t make any concerted effort to invite folks; it was all just random happening by.

I won’t identify the lovely ladies above, just in case they don’t want to be named as sitting around on rocks in their dainties. :) But they should feel free to identify themselves in comments if they feel moved to.

Click through to the flickr page for, well, another copy of exactly the same words above. Hee hee!

The Park at Hughes Rise

Here is a picture that I put up on Flickr. It’s set in Second Life! Whoa.

That’s boy-me, sitting in my then-new (still new, really) park in Hughes Rise. Click through to the Flickr page for details.