WaterMoon Breeze: stuff and scenery!

I haven’t done one of these Neat Things I Found In SL posts for awhile, both because I have been just hanging around the Rise and other familiar places a lot, and because when I do find new neat things, I am too lazy to organize about a post about them.  :)

The other night, though, I followed the usual SL chain of nice pointers and coincidences to WaterMoon Breeze, the sim and build and inworld store and probably also home of MenuBar Memorial, who (among many other things) made the wonderful crazy 50s-style Lucid Dream Together poster for Chasing a Butterfly, the machinima we posted about here the other week.

Turns out this MenuBar feller has some Mad Skillz, and his stores (inworld and marketplace) contain some Really Neat Stuff.  It’s Old SL stuff in the best way (crazy, fun, creative, offbeat, brightly colored), but also extremely polished. Not only can he script and do amazing things with particles (more on that below), but he also does graphic design like a person who does graphic design, so the offbeat brightly colored things actually look good!

 

See?  How brightly colored and well-done?  And there is a smart umbrella, and a Breedable Pet Rock, and Weather Devices, and all sorts of things!  Here are more of them:

Bird-things, and water-things, and all kinds of things! And if you aren’t careful, some things that sort of, well, explode…

(Hint: something about putting things into Coke…)

Spot the Pun in this one!

Witty, brightly-colored, and useful…

There is also a long swaying bridge up to a mysterious floating island…

with interesting things up top which might include, say, a zipline to get back down…

and at the bottom, naturally, a Hieronymus-Bosch-based merry-go-round.

In terms of buying things so far I have mostly bought this amazing Orb

which I have installed at one end of the Park in the Rise (as pictured) where I can sit and alternate between zoning out and wondering how the heck he does it.  (Just when I think I have a pretty good feeling for how particles work in SL…)

So that is that!  Another example of craziness and creativity in SL, for your consideration.

(Oh, and I still have a marketplace store myself, come to think of it!  But I never add anything to it, and no one ever buys from it, so that works out…)

Tiny beach shack! And non-tiny Garage! And stores!

So v talented friend Karima Hoisan saw the famous Beach Shack, and immediately said that there should be a tiny-sized version. After the customary long delay of being distracted by shiny things :) I scaled it down, and Karima very kindly is hosting the prototype version on her lovely LINC Island sim:

The copy pictured has some extra railings and underpilings because it is on the edge of a Huge Cliff, and also lots of pretty decorations an’ landscaping from the landlady :). The version that, um, I thought I had out for sale somewhere but apparently don’t yet (oops haha) is just the building itself, and is in fact just a smaller version of the usual Beach Shack.

One thing that I in fact have put up for sale is the White Wood Garage, which is a garage made of white wood, and which goes nicely with the other buildings which are also made of white wood, in a matching sort of way (see prior posting).

And while I am on the subject! I apparently have not one but two (2) tiny little stores in SL now where I sell a tiny handful of things, including some of these White Wood buildings. One is in Hughes Rise (in the bottom of one of the two-level White Wood Sheds; comfy residential quarters are above), and the other is in the little Surf Shack on the famous Rag Dollz Island (which is probably not the best venue for a little shop which mostly sells things that aren’t clothes, but I loved the location and the rental rate).

So thanks much to Ms. Hoisan for the idea of the tiny beach shack, and maybe I will remember to put it out for sale sometime! And maybe I will also remember to change the “50L weekend” thing in the Rag Dollz location, which has been the same thing for more than a couple of weekends now, also oops. :)

Meanwhile in Minecraft…

(Shout outs to the Burro who tends to use similar titles.)

Minecraft, and in particular Minecraft Portable Edition in single-player mode, which is what I do, is much lower-overhead than SL. Tiny computer that I always have with me, no noisy fans or tangly power cords to deal with, no other persons to worry about rudely ignoring or suddenly logging out on, usw.

Of course there’s also orders of magnitude less stuff to do, and no interesting people to interact with whilst doing it. :) But there we are. It fits nicely into the tiny slivers of time that I seem to have lately (in contrast to the richer but rarer larger chunks of time which favor SL).

Attentive readers who have read even postings that I may never have gotten around to writing may recall the problem we’ve always had in MCPE with animals going aquatic.

That’s an old picture of some sheep and cows swimming about in one of the seas, where they are hard to shear or milk, and look silly. (I suspect a bug or roundoff error or something in the animal-wandering code in MCPE, that causes them to tend to stay near the edges of the map, which is where my seas are.)

The other day I got tired of this, as well as tired of mining way down deep in the mines for awhile, and built some fences and stuff. And viola!

That is the brand new Animal Enclosure (or whatever the agrarian name is) out at The Farm, featuring a number of captured sheeps and cows and chickens. And the Enclosure out at Lonely Lake:

which so far has just sheeps.

It is now Much Easier to collect eggs and milk and wool and whatnot (no more swimming or skindiving involved).

Known renegade animals include one Piggy seen deep in the interior the other day, and one last swimming sheep ‘way ‘way off at the edge of the map:

They will be assimilated! Maybe eventually!

(Also, MCPE players who haven’t yet should try hitting a grassy ground square with Bone Meal. Woot! I did this by accident, and was delighted. Also, hitting the leaves of a tree with the Sheep Shears is good.)

Now in fact being able to more easily get Milk and Eggs and Wool isn’t necessarily a Good Thing, since I already have lots of stuff of all sorts, and not necessarily enough places to keep it. Sort of like SL! And RL for that matter!

Most of my Chests are scattered here and there around the world, and full of unsorted and unlabeled Stuff (mostly Cobblestone). Here is the rather cluttered storage area of the Main Desert Base, for instance:

(At least we have double-size chests now!)

Finding anything in them is hard, as is trying to move stuff between them in order to give some semblance of organization so as to make it easier.

Walking down some long bare-walled hallway the other day, I for some reason pictured to myself an amusing scene in which the hallway was lined with little Shopping Mall style stores, with windows and doors and display cases and signs and stuff. (H&M Lonely Lake; big sale today only!)

I started fiddling around and actually building one last night just for grins, and once I’d done that and stepped back from it I was suddenly (thunder) struck with the realization that this could actually be Incredibly Useful for organizing things!

So here is what that first store looks like now:

and you can guess what is in the chest inside. :) The little Nether Reactor Core to the left is just for decoration.

And having done that and been Extremely Pleased, I started making and filling more spaces in that long hallway (between the Desert Mine and Lonely Lake, the long way not the shortcut) with other marked chests, f’rinstance:

and now the upstairs chests are no longer all cluttered with string and bones (and I’ve reserved a big area down there for chests full of Cobblestones), and I can eventually get rid of some of the chests up there so as to have more space for Palatial Thronerooms or whathaveyou.

Woot! :)

Almost inspires me to start boxing up stuff in SL, rather than carrying all eighty-five thousand (literally) things in inventory all the time.

But only almost…

Into the Hollow

I don’t usually plug mere stores, but I love this one. :) Into The Hollow has a small but marvelous collection of stuff. Sort of I don’t know Charles Adams meets Peter Pan or something.

Here is me, in Homemade Wings (including harness), and the Birdsong Ladies’ Underbust:

With odd and intriguing things for sale on the wall behind me.

This lovely Entomologist’s Collection here is only 10L!

(There’s a Haunted version for I think the same price.) Come and buy things before the owner realizes how much more she could get for them! :)

Here is more of the stuff; note the extremely educational Young Practitioner’s Series!

(I got to feel useful by helping out the proprietrix (the new and clearly talented an’ also nice Dame Hollow) , when I bought something that she’d accidentally set to For Sale Original, and I ended up owning it…)