Bygone Picks VII: The Far Away

Unlike some others in this series, AM Radio’s lovely build hasn’t vanished, it’s still around and going strong, and still a little different every time I go back.

But I figure it’s probably one of the most-Picked builds on the grid :) so I’ll rotate it out for a bit.

Making room for what, you ask?

Fogbound Blues!

Best little Blues Club on th’ Grid…

Bygone Picks VI: Gypsy’s

So this entry in the Picks series has to be a bit melancholy. My Picks entry for Gypsy’s Midnight Mall and Club looked roughly like this:

My favorite dance club, and the first one to welcome me when I was a newborn. Lots of lovely dancers, many with advanced degrees. Good conversation, neat people. And of course Gypsy!

I don’t remember if I’ve ever told the whole story of that day, very early in my SL career, when I went to a gallery opening randomly from Events, and there joined the just-born Virtual Artists Alliance and met Lynn Innis (obviously a cousin) who turned out to be a dancer at Gypsy’s, where I soon become a regular. From that one little gallery event came at least half of the friendships of my noobhood.

Eventually Gypsy even did me the honor of inviting me to become a dancer. Here’s a snapshot from my stripping career.

(Hey, no snickering! Like you’ve never been a stripper.)

Gypsy’s was wonderful, back in the day. The girls and the regulars would dance about and exchange witty banter (the part about many of the dancers having advanced degrees was entirely true), tip each other, and play the ‘sploder, and show off ravesticks and silly gestures and Daleks and things, and then in the wee hours when the club closed up sometimes Veronica Quackenbush would take the stragglers out nude skydiving in one of her many vehicles.

Good time, good times…

Then there was the day that Gypsy IMd me saying that the club was gone! She’d tried to return some prim litter that someone’d left lying around, and somehow SL returned pretty much the entire club, walls and floors and all, to their original builder, who was still the owner and who hadn’t been in SL in like months.

Gypsy was pretty distraught, but I cheered her up by more or less rebuilding the club around her. :) Either I did a pretty good job, or people were just being kind, because no one who came to the events that night said anything about the place looking different. (Fortunately the DJ booth and the dancepoles and much of the art stayed, even if the walls didn’t.)

So there are too many fun stories to tell about Gypsy’s, and I won’t try to tell any more just now. Eventually the stress of running a club got to Gypsy, I think, and she started to be around less and less, and there were fewer and fewer events at the Club. (At some point Tammy started running events, and those continue in other venues, but that’s another story.)

These days the place is empty and the land is abandoned, sniff, although my prims are still there.

I made that scrolling “Welcome” sign (to replace one that got returned in the Big Return). And most of the walls and ceiling and walkways that you can see. I think everything that Gypsy owned has vanished now.

Sweet nostalgia!

So what have I replaced this Pick with?

Well, the other day I went exploring with a friend and after cycling down the road a bit and following a Sandbox sign and taking a random Stargate and a couple of TPs…

XOPH. Just one of those great random SL finds… :)

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!

Bygone Picks IV: Midnight Reflections

For the fourth in my series of Picks updates, I’m replacing a place that’s not actually gone. But it’s changed quite a bit since I first went there, and so have I, and I haven’t been there for ages, and probably people know about it already.

I remember Midnight Reflections as a complicated and mysterious place, all wooden walkways between steep cliffs, tumbling waterfalls, secret grottoes and hidden caverns, misty glowing places with darkness and enigmatic poseballs.

Of course, I was young then. :)

When I went back to it for the first time in ages to see if there was any reason to keep it in my Picks, I found a nice-enough sim, still with steep cliffs and waterfalls but somehow without the mystery, and with a big chunk of it now occupied by a remarkably uninteresting store.

The description as saved in my Pick was:

Midnight Reflections *Relax-Explore-Play*
BEAUTIFUL-PEACEFUL-NATURE-PARKLIKE SETTING with LOTS of WATER FALLS CAVES, Places to EXPLORE alone or with your lover.

fwiw, the description of the cliffs-and-waterfalls part now is:

Midnight Reflections:Love~Romance & Couples Dancing
Experience the softer side of Midnight Reflections. Gorgeous waterfalls,Slow jams, Love,Beauty,Romance, romantic couples dancing,Couples Club,Clubs,Slow jams,slow music,Propose,private balconies,couples cuddle blankets,secluded beach,romantic music

and the store part:

Midnight Reflections: Relax~Explore~Play~Dance & Shopping
Dance,Dancing,70s,80s,90s top 40s music,couples dancing,
beach,night club,clubs,events,djs,70’s,80’s,90’s,Image Reflections,romance, beach,clubs,affordable sexy Womens Clothing store,sculpted shoes,boots,gowns,outfits,Image, Womens hair, fashions

So has the place changed significantly, or is it just me? Who knows! But anyway, that’s a Pick slot freed up.

For now, until the end of Burn2, it’s being replaced with my build, Ten Thousand Things Camp:

My BURN2 Camp (Burn2: A Community of Fire, Art and Experience… In Second Life)

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.

Stop by. :)

Bygone Picks III: The Great Avatar Temple

The third of my Picks that I’m replacing (because it isn’t there anymore) is a place I don’t think I visited more than once or twice, but it was kinda neat. The Pick caption is “Great Avatar Temple (The Temple Without Walls) Avatarian HQ”, the location “No Parcel, Rieul (197, 107, 88)” and the text:

“Avatarian Oracle, drum circle and conference area. Svargan sky dome. Built in the ruins of LogicArtist’s futurist temple.”

Although the land is currently abandoned, I’ll bet it’s one of the prettier abandoned areas in the grid! :)

I don’t find anything significant relating to the Avatarian Church / Movement in Search at present, so I don’t have anything to point you at instead along those lines. And I’m not sure what I’ll put in to replace it, either! Possibly Nemo, but it’s already had so much publicity…

Bygone Picks II: Corsair Peninsula

For the next expired Pick in my Picks, I have a number of vague memories of questionable accuracy. I remember hanging out in Warmouth Infohub (a place I hung out alot when new, back when it was still open for rezzing and gleefully chaotic), and a comparative oldbie appeared and offered a musical performance of some kind (playing some nice prim instrument, I think) up on the stage. Her (his?) home region was down, apparently, and she was going around giving random performances elsewhere.

I looked at her Picks, this memory continues, and in there I found Corsair Peninsula, in Dogfight Atoll.

The parcel text in this Pick says “The Crashed Hull of the Famed Battle Zepplin Pandora, As Well as Furrtune Hunter Nathan ZackFurry’s Fated Grave.”, to which I’ve added “(Awesome build in general.)”.

And it was. Again as I recall, I TPd in and walked around, down an airstrip and into some ruined retrotech structure, out again to find two Residents with one or more aircraft standing there talking, and I talked to them, complementing the build. The more striking one, as I remember, was an anthropomorphic cat, whose eyes were subtly shedding tears of blood.

(Nowadays a few clicks would have told me at least whether they were prim or particle; back then I was just amazed and baffled.)

I explored more of the sim, and ran into a King and Queen of Pirates (or something like that) up among some zeppelins and floating platforms. I came across the cat-person again, in a different fascinating build way up above the ground, and ended up seated at a table with the cat-person and various also-fascinating associates, talking about everything and nothing, and thinking (as I have frequently over the last few years in SL), oh wow, this is indeed the place.

Now my memory also says that the cat-person was Kriss Lehmann. The fact that that person, and the Kriss Lehmann that I interviewed for the VAA a few months later, and the Kriss Lehmann that is now the brains behind Straylight Botanical, are in some ways all very different from each other doesn’t mean that the memory is wrong. This is SL, after all! :)

The Pick, as it currently sits in my Picks, says “No Parcel, (Unknown Region) (192, 216, 28)”. The LM, acquired on 24 December 2006 (just a week after my first rezzing), says “Corsair Peninsula, Dogfight Atoll (240, 210, 616)”. I don’t know why one location name was lost and the other survived! But under either name it is now lost to the mists of time (unless someone can point me at it having moved somewhere else), replaced by all sortsa other fascinating stuff.

So what should I put in my Picks to replace it? Maybe Pteron. Assuming it’s still there… :)

Bygone Picks I: Clanger’s inventions

A friend pointed out to me today that some of the interesting-sounding places in my Picks no longer exist, at least not at the same places. And that’s true!

In a way it’s sad, that so many lovely and fascinating places vanish from the world, from the Grid. On the other hand everything is ephemeral, and as long as new lovely and fascinating places keep appearing, there is really nothing to mourn, and letting go is a good skill.

So I told the friend that I would weblogify on some of the vanished ones, and replace them with new ones. And here we are!

I think the very first Pick I ever put into my Picks was for “Clanger’s inventions”. (Punctuation and capitalization not mine.) The landmark for it in my inventory was acquired 15 Dec 2006, just about three weeks after I rezzed.

It occupied the entire region called (wait for it) “Clangers Inventions”, which no longer seems to exist. The parcel text says “Clames Clanger, Clanger’s inventions, Clangers Inventions (134, 133, 41)”; Clames Clanger, who I believe was the owner and creator, no longer seems to be in search. How time flies! How everything changes!

I remember the region being a bold riot of color and motion and secret hidden things. There was a rotating central pillar with a secret elevator under it that led down to a subterranean sea. There was some sort of ride that would push you through a series of push-points, from which you would ultimately tumble out of the sky. There was a circle of seats that, if touched in the right place, would rise into the sky where there was… something or other. I think, if I’m remembering right, that I came upon RacerX Gullwing there, and that he had maybe built some of it also. My comment in the Pick is just “Way cool place.”

On 17 December 2006, I put this picture on flickr, of me dancing in the sky above the sim:

Seeing that picture and thinking of the place reminds me how it was in my first weeks in Second Life, still amazed and dumbfounded by the wonderfulness of it all.

Not that I’ve stopped being. :)

But now I am going to remove that Pick from my Picks, so that (as my friend pointed out) I can add more things that Pick-followers can actually visit.

I think maybe for this first one I’ll put in pointer to the Hughes Rise park…

Update: While looking for the LM for Clanger’s inventions, I came across a notecard in inventory that reminded me that I wrote up Clanger’s inventions for the VAA weblog, ‘way back when. Apparently I found it in the first place by following picks! How very appropriate.