A Hard Landing on a Soft Target

Neither my audience nor I have heard the last of Never B Solo. Thursday afternoon during the shank of Snow Jam 2014, I posed for (That's my panel shot above!) and my One Who Thinks She Knows put up a fresh panel and application. Our old one had expired, and a panel glitch had trashed it any way. Somehow, I'm not as upset about all this as I might be. My One Who Thinks She Knows is not nearly as upset about the ending of our trial as I thought she would get. I think My One realized that Clark Lane-Kent was not really holding up his end as far as making himself available. My One tells herself, that someone better will come along.

Meanwhile we are back to bushwhacking on the UT Pan American archipelago which includes the the Edinburgh Police Station and Jail, home to four alleged felons, none of whom got anything close to justice, according to my One. It just hurts to see poor bots in jail if you ask me. Also if the police are going to spend Lindens for fancy woodwork and lovely, Asian carpets, they could make more spacious and humane jail cells.

Of course my One thought she picked out what she thought was the easiest of targets. The UT Pan American archipelago is built up, well maintained, and yes it has a sandbox. This dress which I adore, fits a lot better than it does in the picture. I am taking a step forward, but my One wanted a shot of my face.

And yes, I got a second dress in UT Pan American Sandbox courtesy of the "Snow Jam." Then of course we had to go out exploring. We took care of the jail no problem, and we toured some new history exhibits, but were not well enough rezzed to get good pictures.

Then we found the Realms Garden and Greenhouse. Realms stands for Child Realms (Sorry no link!) much of which takes place behind ban lines, but the green house is available for any one, and it is a magnificent build despite the fact that it does not give note cards and the flowers are far from realistic. There are also Second Life photos and ceramic sculpties (flower pots) again without note cards.

My One says that the flowers remind her of sculptures and plants on UTSA RoadRunner II and Tejano Tech. She also says that such flowers are dangeously close to "playing with prims," a state that occurs when builders have too much sim and little accountability.

On the other hand fantasy plants, have held the University of Texas Archipelago together better than just about anything else. The Unniversity of Texas Archipelago of which the UT Pan American archipelago is part, was once huge and grant funded. The Great Recession, the end of the grant, and the end of half price tier for education and nonprofits sunk most of the islands. University of Texas at San Antonio was one of the few institutions to keep its sims. The other is University of Texas Pan American!

In addition, artwork scales up effortlessly. If a university with say seven thousand students and a couple of hundred classes wants to run a sim, and three or four professors each take a thousand prims for their classes, that's a nice busy sim, but if say a dozen professors each want those prims, the island gets crowded, and if twenty more professors want those prims, you need at least one other island and the funds start adding up. Art work is for the whole world, so a thousand prim installation can have thousands of visitors and be none the worse for wear. A classroom for one professor only holds that class and no more, unless it is built in a way that several faculty can share.

Meanwhile, my One and I discovered that all was not well or stable on the UT Pan American archipelago. This crutch belonged to either little Daniel or Alex, two hapless, bench warming, Little Leaguers who warmed the bench while note cards with multiple choice questions written by and for future gym teachers offered no answers to their plight. Baseball season has ended, or the boys have found better things to do. They and their note cards are gone, but the crutch remains.

Then there was this map. According to the small section you can see in the illustration the road between where we stood down by the maze and the sandbox was full of buildings. They were gone! Also missing, was the library which stood on UT Pan American One.

Something has changed on the UT Pan American archipelago, and probably not for the better. The mushrooms are a new addition to UT Pan American's entry point. My One and I suspect that there is a new chief builder in charge. She is a faculty member, which means that she can not mess up the sim as badly as a hired gun can. That is faint praise, but my One wants to write more about the new builder and her creations. Hey, that's better than writing about our travails at Never B Solo.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- January 31, 2014

Somebody's Child

The pictures on this entry aren't really just for decoration. They come from the stunning new build on LeQaa Al3rb which was worth a second look and tons of photograhs. My One took these before a snow storm cripped her city in "real life" but not before another storm broke in both our lives. Sunday morning at 10:45am in our time zone, we leanred we had a match at Never B Solo. My One was shocked, elated, did not believe it was real. She danced around the apartment singing Wish I Could Fly Like Superman, since our prospective son was the second son of Superman himself. Then because he was only a six month old avie (There are baby avies, and they fascinate both my One and me) my One sung the theme to The Mighty Heroes, the youngest of which was and still is Diaper Man!

On Sunday we began our five day trial! And at first it went surprisingly well. My One found young Clark Lane-Kent, talked with him, and we friended eachother. We also learned his time zone which was in England. After that, things bogged down. My One made an effort to log in during the day, but Clark Lane-Kent was nowhere to be found, or if we did find him, he was on his way out. We never saw one another. We still haven't.

Then my One and I received an amazing stroke of luck. The terrible snow that fell last night in the Atlanta metro area, meant that today was a snow day. Tomorrow will be another snow day. The snowcation meant time online so that our paths and Clark Lane-Kent's would surely cross. They didn't. My One was disappointed, and so was I.

Then this afternoon Never B Solo had a glitch, and panels froze and vanished. Both Clark and I lost our panels, and our trial. Then tonight when my One logged in, we began a check for Clark Lane-Kent, and found he was not online. Well that was nothing new. Unfortunately, he popped up in the Never B Solo group asking if any one wanted to adopt a little boy.

"Excuse me!" I felt like shouting. "We had a trial! You did not tell me that it was over. You did not told me you started guarding your privacy. You did not tell me you were ending it." My One was upset as well. We sent an instant message to Mr. Lane-Kent to ask him if he had simply gotten caught up in the glitch. We asked if he wanted to try again, but he did not answer.

OK, let it all sink in, while you look at this gorgeous fish trap/net, we found on LeQaa Al3rb. My One adores fish traps and lobster traps. I own one tunic and one dress in a lobster trap motif. I also have a lobster bouey dress that is very elegant.

Now what do you think I told my One Who Thinks She Knows? If you've been readnig this blog, my answer won't come as any news. I said: "We had a successful experiment finding an idiot bouncer. We've had at least one gorgeous offspring from our painte d zwickies. You got a match at Never B Solo even with the world's worst and most negative application. Hey, One, it's O-V-E-R!" My One replied: "We haven't seen Clark Lane-Kent, and hardly talked to him. Now he said a glitch wiped out his panel, but he shows no enthusiasm for restarting the trial, and he sure had been hard to find all week. I don't think he's been reading the messages I left for him. Maybe it's better this way. On the other hand, I have endured the pain of rejection and it hurt so badly... I can't reject any one. This adoption would have gone through, and I would have revised the application Sunday if only we had not had a match." OK, enough, we all know my One Who Thinks She Knows has a confused heart.

At least she thought this blog should go out instead of a new application for Never B Solo. I guess that is a step in the right direction. My One also feels that if Clark Lane-Kent really wanted the match to succeed we would just agree to the adoption or continued trial on our own. We don't need to pay the proprietors of Never B Solo another fortnight's panel rent for that. We know one another and can decide among ourselves what to do. Bottom line, Clark Lane-Kent isn't making enough effort and it's time we just let the matter drop, or put up another panel when we feel like it. I don't think I really care. We're putting in way too much effort for way too little result.

And yes we got our match and did our best to hang on to it. The adoption would probably have gone through tomorrow if the panels had not glitched. My One worked hard for us to get ups. The work paid off in a weird way. But it really is over. It's time to pack up and move on to other things. Don't you agree?

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- January 29, 2013

Builds and Memories Come, Go, Stay, and Rot

"One," I told my One Who Thinks She Knows: "You are a first rate coward and totally lazy. We're not bushwhacking and we're running to Never B Solo so that you can escape from doing anything hard." Yes, I know how to wound her pride. We had just gone back to bushwhacking and started with Black Bear Island that belongs to the University of Maine, and my One was so proud, but I knew the sim she was avoiding.

The sim was called Penn State Isle which is part of a three sim archipelago. At the mention of Penn State my One's blood ran cold. I don't pretend to know exactly why. Actually I do, and it is a long story that my One refuses to let me tell. This is not out of shame, and my One does not fear ghosts or demons (My One actually does fear demons even though they live in her past), but there was something else my One was afraid she would encounter, so I was shocked when my One agreed to face the demons in her past and risk crossing paths with them on Penn State Isles.

I prayed for my One and then we were off. The first thing we saw was a prim lion sculpture made of many prims instead of mesh, and a big sign advertising what sorts of attractions we might find on Penn State Isle. My One asked me: "How much do you want to bet that the sign is out of date?" I don't take sucker bets. Our fist stop was an empty art gallery, but there was a build a hundred and sixty meters above it that was full of videos about art and movies. We had a winner!

Alas, the rest of Penn State Isle is not nearly this productive. The Hacienda whose bar I am tending in the photograph, is beautiful, but sterile and unfinished. There are There are no note card givers, no interactive objects, no posters that list Spanish words and translations etc... Many buildings are unfurnished, and this beauty lacked a door. I had to cam and sit to get inside. And by the way, the library and a media installation promised by the sign are long gone, or maybe they were never built.

By the way, there are two more islands in the Penn State Archipelago, Penn State Isle 2 and Istania. Istania stands for I.S.T.ania, and I.S.T. stands for Information Science and Technology. Both islands yielded an exhibit or two for the Explore SL Spread Sheet, but a lot of what we saw was out of date. Neo Dante on Istania (Walk from the landing zone. It's constrained!) dates from 2007 and is still under construction.

Of course the Penn State Archipelago is not the only fossilized academic build. Black Bear Island, which was once state of the art, is the classic case in point. In this photo I am sitting in absolute consternation in the sandbox, because I want to work on a dress, but can't rezz my posing stool. The sim is full, which means no one is taking care of it! Actually, someone did clean it up since my One took this picture. They do that occasionally or else you know what it would look like.

And no, this is not a mess. These are server boxes for Plex Tex, a texture sorter that uses the cloud to store images of your textures so you can find them more easily in inventory. The last time we found the Plex Tex mess, we got in touch with its creator who is affiliated with the University of Maine. He said the project had hit a major road block. My One assumed that this time around, we had found the project's debris, and that nobody had asked TexPlex Engineer to clean up.

Boy did my One eat crow! She spent hours finding all our hair textures. We now have our very own Plex Tex box, with a hundred and seventy-five (cont'em!) textures inside. But the rest of what I said about Black Bear Island still stands. Most of the attractions are several years old. There are old student projects that stay because no one has needed or wanted to build anything new except of course TexPlex Engineer.

Of course Linden Labs really does not help places like Black Bear Island by keeping it on the educational discount. At $150/month (Private individuals pay $300/month) the University of Maine is more likely to keep the island even if just one graduate student uses it. This raises my One Who Thinks She Knows' prim envy. We take care of Stinky Stinky because we have to pay for it and if you can't pay your rent in Secondlife....

Of course if you don't pay your builder or if you fire her, she picks up her prims and goes home. Neither my One nor I are sure what happened to the former Mystery Sim, LeQaa Al3rb. We can reveal its name now because it is finally locked down, so the squatters and mess-makers will have to go somewhere else, but Krystali Rabeni's beautiful build is gone.

Here is more of her work in progress back on Christmas Day 2013. The ivy hangs from a structure still covered with builders' measuring texture. I admired that she used this instead of plywood. I use contrasting paint because My One and I can never get our corners to match up. I know big, mega prims are not exciting, but they held the promise of what was to come.

That promise is now broken. We returned to LeQaa Al3rb to see how it was coming along and found the island, flat, green, and wide open. There were avies in the sky, so I flew up to them and found this huge, prefab. "Some people have no taste," I thought.

Well, actually, the second floor of the prefab was not that bad. It is a club of sorts with abstract art (not shown), a stage, a pool table, and a bar. It is just it lacked the charm of Krystal Rabeni's work. Any one with no ingenuity and cash to burn can have a prefab like this. It's overpriced to be sure, but my One and I build our own platforms and furniture. Four walls only goes so far.

Then a few days ago, the ground level on LeQaa Al3rb changed again. The island is now locked down and this Scandinavian or German village has replaced the green space that in turn replaced Ms. Rabeni's build. You can see the stucco buildings, gazebo, and fountain in the background. There is also a sailing ship and a cannon, but I did not get to photograph them.

And the new build comes with animals including these wonderful sheep. No they do not move. Yes, they are just sculpties, but they are sweet looking in their pasture full of grass and flowers. There are also herons and probably other sculptie creature. My One and I both have soft spots for sculptie animals. As for my One's inner demon. She did not even come close to finding what she feared or anything that would stir up her bad memories on Penn State Isle. As is the way with my One and her confused heart, she is just a bit disappointed as well as relieved. She said "Iyoba, I should have realized Penn State is a very big place with multiple satellite campuses kind of like Syarcuse, except Syracuse has only one satellite." She also said: "You know it was a long time ago. In the world of the internet, nineteen years is an eternity."

I had to leave it there because I can't tell the whole story on this blog, and I really only half understand it. My One insists she is not ashamed. I can't go any further. Also, we are NOT going to set the record for the oldest panel on the Parent wall at Never B Solo. My One did some thinking about our panel and application. She decided to keep the panel's photo, but revise the application so we have to let our current panel expire or take it down late Sunday afternoon. I guess even an old inner demon can't even cure my One's confused heart or stop her crazy experiments.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- January 26, 2014

Is it Over Yet?

My One Who Thinks She Knows needs to end all her experiments now! She needs to end them not because they were destructive (I of course feared they would be, but avies are creatures of moderation and reason!) but because they were more or less successful and they are over!. Do you hear that One!

No, we are NOT going to adopt a child at Never B Solo, and it is not because you wrote a legal brief, novel, or prenuptual agreement for your application. You could have written "asdfj" repeatedly. No one is looking at our panel! It has four views in eight days, and two of them are ours. It's got a good, colorful, caring, candid photograph, but we've done all we can do.

If you want to set the record for the longest resident of the Parent Wall at Never B Solo then fine. It's the cost of a bag of chips every two weeks. You say you buy chips when you do laundry. Fine, have lots of clean clothes, but we don't have to visit every day or waste blog space over the place.

I counted all the panels for you so you could make that cute, little chart. Yes, as of Tuesday January 21, 2014 there were nine children seeking parents and thirty-one parents seeking children. Quite simply there are not enough to go around. That's big news for five minutes, and then it gets old!

And yes, the statistics err on the positive side. Out of those nine children's panels is one for a pair of dogs, a girl who attends a boarding school with "strict discipline," and another child who only wants a two parent family and one looking for a father. My One is female. That means there is a prospective parent child ratio of six to one. Experiment over.

Of course, we have two other experiments. My One Who Thinks She Knows painted two of our zwickies. Yocheved is pearly white, and Protea, who is now full grown, is jet black. I can find Protea when I need to, and she holds her own shooting stars at her older, bigger, more visible family members. She is probably ready to mate, but the males have to catch up. My One will assign partners shortly. Zwickies operate on their own time. They seem unharmed, and Yocheved's first post-painting offspring was beautiful!

Now you are probably wondering about all these images. They are not here for decoration. I've made two more visits to Phat's in new dresses or controversial ones. Once I had a good time. Sunday, it was empty, and Sunday night way too laggy to be pleasant. The bouncers were cordial. This often happens when my One is looking for idiots with whom to make trouble. Idiots don't oblige my One and I am glad of it, so we take time out, relax, and visit Japanese sims. We visit them because they are beautiful. I took the picture of macarons at a cafe named Macaron on Gilgamesh, and the lovely space heater and kitchen counter were both on Cloverfield.

We have a long list of Japanese bar and cafe landmarks, and we are working our way down them. Bar Hide Out was just next on the list. It was still in business. We went. It was all black. You had to walk down a long, dimly lit stairway to reach it. It is really a basement in the sky. When we went there Monday night, it was full. The bar hostess said that this was a Japanese bar and that is was for voice. I asked if my translator would do. She said it had to be voice. I said I did not have a microphone. I left.

My One said we'd get a microphone. My One was grinning from ear to stupid ear! I knew something was up. We'd been snubbed in Japanese bars and cafes before, and even temporarily banned from one, while my One was in the bathroom in "real life." "I think we've found our idiot bouncer!" my One cackled with joy. I felt relief. Doing the photo shoot at Bar Hide Out was fun. We went there when it was empty. The Japanese are fourteen hours ahead of East Coast time.

Then my One procured a microphone. For this experiment to work, we needed to play by the rules. You want the bouncer to be the idiot, not you. Now, all of this is not really a waste of time. Bar Hide Out is a terrific Japanese build! It has a bit of cultural humor coded into its elegant, pitch black, interior. The dart boards and slot machines are all broken. The bar stool animations and chair animations, often make an avie look not just as if she is drowning her sorrows, but outright drunk and stupid. Bar Hide Out is an expensive whiskey bar like that frequented by salarymen, but it is also a lovely piece of satire. Below you can see a patron who has overstayed his welcome.

Of course our third visit to Bar Hide Out did not go quite as planed. It was hard to find our way downstairs or onto a bar stool. Looking clumsy in SL comes with the territory. We got voice to work though it sounded like bad cell phone connections. Some of the voices, were very smooth. You can still hear a lot across a language barrier. Our mic, however, was dead! We were able to hear, but mute. This meant we disturbed no one. You can see what I look like, so you know I am small and inoffesnive, although my brown skin, marks me as AMERICAN in a Japanese environment.

Our expulsion came faster than lightening. I laughed. My One was right, we found our Idiot Bouncer at last! Now we could get back to bushwhacking. My One sent an instant message to the bouncer, who also turned out to be the owner. Had it not been two in the morning in her time zone, she might have apologized all over herself and been real diplomatic, but the bad equipment wasn't our fault. We made no noise. We did not spin around on my nose etc... I was dressed well and modestly. You can see me in one of the pictures above in the tailored, harvest gold dress. "It would not hurt to show a little mercy," my One explained. "Equipment craps out."

That was when the fun truely began. The bouncer/owner said that this was a Japanese bar and she had told me before. That was why she banned me. Then she blocked me. My One just sat there grinning. She had the bouncer/owner's statement in writing. She checked the Terms of Service and Community Standards. Idiot Bouncer is in violation of both for discrimination based on ethnicity/national origin. If she had thrown me out for not having a working mic or asked me to leave for not having one (really better.) she would be in the clear. If she had told me that I might not enjoy myself because I couldn't understand the language, I could have taken or left the subtle hint. Not all environments in Second Life have to be inviting. She could have a dress code and told me where to get the right clothes or offered me freebies. She could have told me that I had to become and adult or furry avie, because you can change your body like clothes. I can't change being an American, and therein lies the difference.

And yes, a lot of this is cultural. No, it is not all right to have a public accomodation for only your own kind! AND Yes, if a Japanese person were to walk into Mojo Heaven or the Vintage Bar and Gallery the staff and fellow patrons would welcome them with open arms. In fact, many would admire the Japanese patrons for being brave enough to leave their ethnic bubble and explore the world. Yes, Idiot Bouncer, that really is how it is, which is why what you've done is morally wrong. I wish you hadn't blocked my One because she would have liked to give you a landmark to this fine grocery store on ECU V and let you try it out, and maybe she would have thrown in this this little scenario at Deakin Health too for fun. If my One handed out punishments in Second Life, she would ask Idiot Bouncer to try the simulations at both these landmarks, and reflect on her experience by writing a paragraph in her native tongue on how it felt. That is not going to happen, even though my One wants to file an Abuse Report. Punishment does not educate. Why does my One Who Thinks She Know have a way of turning a successful experiment into a failure? Think about that One!

Iyoba BatOni -- January 22, 2014

When You Squeeze Snow

Do you know what happens when you squeeze a snowball in "real life," according to my One Who Thinks She Knows? It grows smaller and denser as it melts; for your hands are warm. My One, who is sometimes downright crazy, but who also has a kind heart when it is not the victim of confusion, is chasing after something we can not reach! It is as if she has a nice big snow ball in her hand and she is on a typical, warm beach in Second Life. She is so greedy for more than this precious snow ball, that she squeezes it with all her might, and even the water on her feet spills down, gets warm, and evaporates just like the snow man now gone from the Le Soleil on Bluebird. I want to tell my One to stop. Our crazy genetic and social experiments have been either partial or full successes. We need to quit while we're ahead.

Yocheved wearing her new colors mated with Throckmorton and produced Beena, the zwicklet you see. She is downright gorgeous, and she would never have inherited that brilliant magenta if Yocheved were still blue. She also has her father's ruff, face, and legs. Way to go!

And we are finished painting zwickies. That makes me feel better. I like stability, and Protea, shown here all in jet black still has plenty of personality. She can shoot silver stars with the best of them, and fart in a rainbow of colors. She is fast, and when times are bad or she is tired, she can always hide in the safety grate behind my bed on the Ovi-Ring's upper platform.

We have yet to be thrown out of Phat's, though we have only been there once. My One has had other projects besides making me clothes to confuse some small minded bouncer. Besides, it's more fun when we don't find the trouble we seek.

What has delayed our fashion education at of Phat's experiment is putting up a panel at Never B Solo. A few nights ago, a child (A One Who Thinks She Knows with a child avie), asked on the Never B Solo group chat, if there was anywhere she could find pony tails. I said they often come in those free reseller boxes of prim hair. It's not great hair and would require a lot of resizing, but they're full perm. I put together a big tube of hair and sent it to her, but both my One and I think it is godawful hair. These are the pony tails my One made for me. She also made me new skate blades with demo knife blades, an extra prim, and textures free at Hobo Island. The texture machine is way out on an island in the bay. I sat in the swing and paged through page after page of metal textures.

The reason I needed skates is that skating is fun to do with a son or daughter. Our skates were several years old. My skates just fit on my shoes, but that is fine with me. The blades never get dull and the new ones are more like speed skates and are bright and shiney too! In addition, my One and I looked for places that would be fun to spend time with a child. We'd need to be prepared since some of the child avies are quite new. Cloverfield is a good example of a child and adult-friendly sim. Here I am vaulting over tires.

And not all kid and adult-friendly places have to look juvenile or be out of doors. Here I sit on a couch at the Tri Beca Blues Club in Midstate New York. The club is empty most of the week and plays nice jazz. It has no pole dancers or other crude-minded attractions, so kids can dance, sit, or run around. The bar serves no liquor. It serves no drinks at all, but if it did, children could always have a soft drink while soaking up a little culture. They are not prohibited from the venu, and the club sits empty except for Friday and Saturday night.

And though there are pictures of dancing couples on the walls, the music, moldy oldies from before my One Who Thinks She Knows' time, at the Vintage Club is fun for young and old alike. Again this is a public space that sits empty most of the time, and if the children get bored, they can ride the Cyclone, Second Life's best roller coaster, or go for a ride on the train, or even travel to the North Country to ski. Skiing is problematic since I'm not sure how existing free skis work with child avies, and not everyone likes snow, which is why it is fast disappearing from Second Life even though winter is far from over.

Now I have had a lot of fun. The zwickies are happy. I have new stuff, and have enjoyed myself visiting some very pleasant spots, but... I know my One is wasting her time. Here are all the teens/adults available for adoption on January 16, 2014. There are fewer than the picture shows. There are six "full panels" in the picture on a display that can hold sixteen. Of those panels the one in the upper left is darkened, and another teen/adult is trialing, which means no longer available. That leaves four teens/adults for over twenty prospective parents. There are currently only five out of thirty-two slots filled for human child avies (There are also vampires, lycans, furries, and nekos as well as quads and robots.) are filled, and of those, one child is trialing and another is adopted. YOu can do the math.

For reasons that my One can explain better than I, it is easier to play an adolescent or adult child, than a child avie. A lot of people think having a child avie in Second Life is creepy. My One says she is not sure why Ones have child avies, but they must have their reasons. She is trying to figure it out by reading the applications you get when you press a panel, looking at the photos, and talking in the chat group. So far we have learned that avies who play babies don't have to say anything, and child avies also choose to be inarticulate. Even adults have trouble voicing their wants. Few of the kids come up with things they could actually do in Second Life. This worries my One who says she and I can't read minds. She also thinks that the adults who play child avies don't play them as developmentally accurate. Of course my One spelled it all out in her application. Transparency, even if it means divulging negatives, is always the best policy.

I still fear we are going to wind up without a child or with a trial that does not result in a match. When my One is not reading applications (Oh she is so curious!) or busy with me in the sandbox, she is busy imaginging how she would redesign Never B Solo to make it more tasteful for adults as well as kids. After all the parents are the majority. What happens, we wonder, when most of them walk away disappointed? I'm not sure they get new skate blades or hair or a folder full of landmarks. Doing one's homework does have advantages even if there is no one to accept the assignment. We need to get back to bushwhacking, and my poor One needs to recover her sanity sooner rather than later.

Iyoba BatOni -- January 17, 2014

Into Darkness with my One

Forget kind, though she has a kind heart some of the time, though sometimes I think that heart also leads her astray even when it is kind. Forget confused; for it goes beyond that. My One is crazy, and I am her avie! I follow where she leads, and she is lost. I will be glad when either she or I find our way out of the morass, but I think that is going to take a while.

As you know, my One Who Thinks She Knows has painted not one but two of our zwickies, including our newest zwicklet, Protea. Poor Protea! It is Protea's mother, Yocheved (formerly all blue and an ardor) to be all white. It is Protea's fate to be black as jet, black as a cinder, black as coal. She has no face, except my One says it's there and I know it's there too, but do you? And still, there are still two more parts to paint, in this picture. Now there are one. Protea is a type K. Being black makes her look like a little, feathered tumble weed. And yes, the bigger zwickies shoot stars at her. She shoots them back and farts in their faces, because that is what zwickies do, and Protea is a good little zwicklet, sound of mind, and not too rattled by being painted. She may be black but she shines a light for us. If only my One could see.

"Don't worry," my blind One Who Thinks She Knows explained. "As we take risks with Protea and Yocheved [the now all white ardor zwicky], we shall take risks with ourselves. As they suffer, so shall we. As they yield rewards and surprises, we will also find rewards and surprises." Can someone explain the logic of this? It sounds like we are filling a hole by digging it deeper.

Still my One has set up two sociological experiments. The first one was for us to go dancing at Phat's on Friday. Now this would seem like an innocuous act, except my One had just helped me make a brand, new, turtleneck winter dress. Phat's is formal wear optional which is still quite dressy, but it allows dresses as well as gowns. Sometimes though the the bouncers forget to read their own rules. Yes, my One was looking for trouble. No, I did not want trouble. What sane avie does! I sat outside the club, nervously on a bench. Then we headed upstairs.

Yes, I got to go dancing. You have to be careful taking photos in clubs because you don't want to include other fully rezzed avies without permission. My One makes an exception to show slow rezzing, or a how I see it scene, but that was not the effect we needed. I got to dance. I like the upstairs with the pretty trees better anyway.

And as you can guess by now, the bouncer didn't bother us one bit at Phat's. In fact both bouncer and DJ gave 100% and my One gave them a 25L donation. If you go to clubs a lot the tips can bankrupt you, and our One needs our money to feed the zwickies and pay the rent. The furniture at Phat's by the way is very beautiful. My One and I both adore the color scheme, and given our good treatment, we'll probably be returning to Phat's again until we meet a clueless bouncer on a night or morning when we least expect it.

Meanwhile, my One had an even more difficult project in mind. We had been on the Never B Solo chat group forever and seen the advertisements. Of course trying to adopt a child avie or teen avie in Second Life is a lot like dating and fraught with rejection. You can see why my One wanted to get our advertisement back on the board. She said it was going to be the best .40 she ever spent. She worked over our application, and no she did not use a manual typewriter like the one we found in Macaroon on Gilgamesh.

We also needed a photograph for the wall, and I posed for it in the yard of magic maniuplatives on Glasscock. We found the dress in old blog pictures, and I thought it was very becoming. It was important to put a lot of thought into our photograph. Our application is another story. It is long. I can't decide if it is a novel or a legal contract, but my One wants to be up front about everything. We had a failed trial about fourteen months ago. It was the right thing to do for the potential adoptee to end the trial, but neither my One nor I want a repeat performance.

That said, we quickly learned how different our application was. My One does not care. We quickly also learned that those who play young children in world, lack the articulateness that can save two avies and their Ones from disaster. There was also something else very strange about the two little kid apps we read. The child avies seems to like things that people do not actually do inworld. My One says a lot of Second Life exists between a One's brain and the screen. I wish she knew what this meant. She also thinks that the children's application at Never B Solo is too abstract for children less than five years old to fill out meaningfully. Older kids and even some adults may have trouble too.

Right now my One is really into the adoption project, and in a way I am too. We are looking for child friendly spots inworld. My One's and my days of exploration are a plus. Our knowledge of building is a plus. My One's religiosity is a minus. Her age inworld is also a minus. And yes, both of us realize that there must be hundreds of ways to play a child or teen and equally hundreds of ways to play a parent. And sadly or maybe not so sadly, my One believes everything in Second Life, even adoption boils down to business.

That is why we went skiing instead of dancing last night. We wanted to make sure the slopes were still there and the little ones could get free skis. We listened to Depeche Mode while we skied under the bright, night sky. We can ski in joy, ski in sorrow, or ski in expectation.I wonder what will happen when skiing is no longer a solitary event for us.

And my One remembers her mother teaching her to skate at age three with strap ons. There is still skating at 0031. The Dutch love to skate on their canals. Think of Hans Brinker. Skating also makes me think of Protea. We colored her legs jet black late last night. She is not as invisible as I thought in this bright night. In fact, she lights it up like her own black star. I wonder if our potential offspring from Never B Solo will appreciate Protea's dark beauty or any of the zwickies grace. What will my One Who Thinks She Knows say when our child, if a child matches with us, calls our zwickies "jelly fish?"

Iyoba BatOni -- January 14, 2013

Kind, Cruel, Confused, and Fragile

"We're going to do it," my One Who Thinks She Knows told me. "But if we do it, all the zwickies are going to have to earn their keep." That means we are going to find a bit about their genetics. Also, they are going to spend more of their time on the Ovi-Ring which functions like my house. My One moved the feeder under the platform near my bed and our mason bee nests. She got Protea out of inventory, and took her out of stasis. The first thing she did when she was born was dance.

Protea will live in a garden. You can see it in that photo. She will be able to see the ocean. She will be able to sometimes share space with the KoLis, and she will have seven much older parents and siblings to teach her the ropes.

This last part worries me, and it worries my One as well. Protea is a Type K zwicky. Only Type Ms are smaller, but all the other adult zwickies, even Throckmorton were much bigger than she was. We had never had a zwicky so small.

And last night, Yocheved, Protea's mother shot a star right at her own child. I realize the child was a zwicklet and zwicklet's do not share a One's or avi's idea of family. Here Yocheved is receiving as good as she gave. Zwickies play rough. My One has thought about turning the "anger off" but she says that it will probably be easier for baby Protea to learn sooner rather than later. Being small, Protea can hide in the safety grate behind my bed if she tires of combat.

KoLis of course do not fight. They fly around and try to lose themselves. The fun with KoLis is hunting them down, and reanimating them. This replaces feeding and hunting for eggs. My One is thrilled that we seem to have amusing and memorable KoLi moments. That is why we have spent a lot of time on our land lately. Watching our kritters is good for my out of sorts One.

Of course my One "did her research" on Solstice zwickies like Protea before taking her out of stasis. She learned that most Solstice zwickies have a red rough and red markings on their face. The only reason Protea's ruff was bluish-purple was a strong blue overlay. Worse yet, in lighter colors Solstice zwickies look blood-stained. And my One is not fond of blue as a color for critters. In short, Protea is about the ugliest zwicky she could birth. In the old days we'd say looks aren't everything, but my One has other plans. She has some colorizers. Since painted color may or may not work in reverse of normal color, my One decided she would paint two zwickies, one female would be white, the other would be black. This means both Protea and her mother, Yocheved, will suffer together. In fact, if you look carefully at the picture of Yocheved getting socked with a silver star, you will see it has all ready begun.

Two days ago, my One painted Yocheved's face white. The colorizer also shrunk Yocheved turning her into a type M so she is tiny like Throckmorton. This will make life easier on him, since perhaps her babies will be smaller too. Throckmorton has to carry large zwickies' babies regularly.

Ardor zwickies, such as Yocheved, have extremely interesting markings that make a white face appear silver or smeered with soot. At least it's not blood. They also have nicely marked legs. We've both seen hybrid zwicklets with ardor style ruffs, so painting Yocheved's ruff will be an anticlimax.

Of course I'm not sure what the KoLis think of any of this. My One can retexture them as she pleases. That means they stay forever or we get another one at some point. There's no starving to death and no retiring for them. You know, a One who can create creatures, is a One who can play God.

Here is Yocheved as Griderz, another One Who Thinks She Knows, made her. My One thinks she is just adding her work to that One's work, but Yocheved used to be an average size, Type F, zwicky. Now she is the small one because my One wants to see what kind of babies she will have when she is all white.

And there is an even crueler fate in store for Protea. When my One gets done with her and the diabolical, Zwicky Colorizer, Protea will be black as a lump of coal. She will look like a little black clump of feathers. My One says she already looks like a feathered tumbleweed. I hope my One does not say cruel things about the KoLis. I am afraid of what will happen when we paint Protea. I think it is not fair that the price of this zwicklet being alive and among us is participating in genetic experiments. I wonder how my One would like to participate in genetic experiments. You know, I'm going to ask her that.

Iyoba BatOni -- January 9, 2013

A Confused Heart

You have probably wondered: If my One Who Thinks She Knows has a good heart some of the time, what other kind of heart does she have the rest of the time? Now I think I know how to put that in words without making her out as a total monster. First, my One wants to do pleasant things with just a little risk. She likes to visit new clubs/bars on Japanese islands even if we got snubbed Saturday night. These are flowers freezing to death in the cold outside of the B & K Bar on mk009 Saznami Land. Someone was home. We went to the bar. We used our translator. Then the other patrons said they were all leaving and closing the bar. They did not say where they were going, and my One wanted to get some sleep in "real life." She says it all worked out, even though we got snubbed.

And now my One wants to twit the brainless bouncers at Phat's. This didn't work the last time, but she thinks it will this time. This is stupid, but my One Who Thinks She Knows has great ways to distract herself from the problem at hand.

Our problem, who should not be a problem, is a little zwicklet, a Type K, which is the second smallest type there is. She is not even beautiful. My One is not one bit impressed with Solstice Zwickies. She says they look as if someone has dipped them in blood, and while Protea is unusual for having a purple ruff (It should be blue, but there is a red overlay) instead of a red one, she is neither the smallest nor prettiest in her cohort.

But here is our problem. Zwickies like Petable Turtles and Lily Frogs have no parental feeling. The males gestate, but after that, their involvement in their little ones is through. A zwicklet is no more interesting to them than a tree or a rock. Females are just ovipositors on flying ruffs and tentacles. This is good because we can put the young into inventory after respectfully photographing them and naming them. We want a record of their existence. Well, there was Nimrod nuzzling and paying attention to the zwicklet we would name Protea. Yes, even her name came as a surprise. My One had several names in mind, but when she looked at Protea near the protea plants, her name just popped out. I know...it's not that original.

My One has a good enough heart to know that even the zwicklets we stow in inventory deserve respect, and the Zwickies on our land have a spark of something in them, even it is not life like her own or even like mine. She is not the first person to think Zwickies have something going on in their flying heads or perhaps their hearts. She remembers being told to let her zwickies fly out of doors to improve their reproduction. It was useless advice, but that is another story. The point is that when my One Who Thinks She Knows saw Nimrod paying attention to Protea, she knew there was something special about that zwicklet.

Of course my One tried to be reasonable. "Yes, there is something special about Protea, and about Nimrod when you think of it," she said, "BUT there is no way I am going to hatch out another zwicky, especially one I don't think is beautiful. Look, we just got the KoLi's and they are exceeding all expectations." It is true, that my One set expectations pretty low, but you can see here, that Big Noam is giving us a "moment" of surprise and wonder, by hiding in the jicama. That is his north end going south.

And here is Big Noam in his hideaway with a front view for those who like that better. KoLi have personalities, a sense of humor. They are mobile, and reanimating them, and best of all finding them, make them interactive.

Also, KoLis often have faces only a mother could love, though their elytra are beautiful! Here Famous Nathan takes a devil-may-care pose right in front of the triple decker planter. Nice planter. Nice KoLi's, but if Famous Nathan is not beaitufl, well, neither is Protea. My One of course said she had to think. If Protea were Nimrod's daughter, and the only daughter about which he has ever cared (He could have cared less about Bishara who is also his.), maybe it means something. My One then struggled to get onto the Griderz site to confirm Protea's paternity.

In the end my One did not have to go to any site, to figure out Protea's parentage. Nimrod had mated with Fortunata and produced a green and orange offspring whom we had named Pilar. Pilar like Palmyra and Protea is now in inventory. What else is new? Under her ice coat Bishara is mostly purple with turquoise tentacles. This is a picture of Bishara before her ice coat rezzes. Normally we hate these pictures, but it proves a point. Neither of the white male zwickies mating with a purple ruffed female, could have produced that rich blue ruff that looks purple on Protea. Protea's mother was therefore, Yocheved, and her father is Throckmorton. My One solved the mystery. Protea was not Nimrod's daughter. She was not even his half sister! She was Bishara's half sister through Yocheved. That makes her half sister to Nimrod's daughter (Bishara's father is Nimrod and her mother is Yocheved. Incest is the way of life in Zwicky colonies.)

KoLis do not need food. Baby Protea will need food. My One wants to paint Protea so she will be white or black. Genetics of painted zwickies are weird beyond belief, but she is not sure she really knows them. No matter how she paints her though, she will splashed in blood. I tell my One that a smaller female will be easier for Throckmorton to mate with. I tell her we can put the turtles in inventory. They won't die there! We won't take them out again much until the snow goes away. Protea will only eat 14% more food. My One, oddly enough doesn't feel adding one more zwicky will be disloyal to the KoLis or the turtles, but unless she can find out what is special in Protea, she won't take her out of stasis. "It's an irrevocable decision and a financial committment and..." "One," I said to her. " You have a confused heart, and if your heart were less confused, it would be good all the time." But maybe if my One's heart were good all the time, she would lose her ruthless streak, and the other Ones would do something terrible to her.

Iyoba BatOni -- January 6, 2013

Warming up the One and Wondering

My One Who Thinks She Knows came in after nearly five hours in not quite freezing weather down at Atlanta's Five Points where she went for the Peach Drop. She needed to get warm, and since I had planned to explore Marine, a Japanese cafe on Cloverfield.

We had received the landmark from a series of wall posters. Many of the posters still exist while their landmarks are gone or the land repurposed. I even managed to get banned from an island called Zilch. Well zilch is what they get for a link. Who wants to send readers somewhere so inhospitable. The Marine Cafe, by contrast even had a host who bent over backwards to understand my machine translated English. I in turn struggled with his machine translated Japanese. I am quite sure I throughly "embarassed" the Japanese language. Thank you Metanomics for making a fine, free translator.

Since my poor One had not had a chance to drink New Year's Eve (The crowd at the Peach Drop contains a drunken element, and it booed a comedien off the stage. To lose one's wits in such an environment is to ask for trouble.) and asked for a beer, preferably a dark one (She apologized for her cultural difference.), but the host said the cafe "did not serve alcohol!" She said it would not be a good idea to order tea, and the proprietor gave her espresso. I in turn offered him all five of our Mourning Dove Soda flavors. It is always good to have something to trade. When I said I enjoyed dancing, the host invited me to the dance floor and even put on his own mix of lively, 1980's dance tunes.

Of course, we had to return to Cloverfield New Year's Day for more pictures. The playground is located near the dance floor. Japanese culture like Brazilian culture handles child avies very differently, than do Americans. I think many Japanese are kids at heart. This was a fun swing, easy to start, and equally easy to shut off.

A lot of things on Cloverfield are extremely well made. This swan boat which rezzes for each customer is a sterling example, except of course for its usual wear and tear. The boat is easy to stear, and you can take it all over the island. It also does not flip over, upend itself, or do what a lot of rideable items seem to do. If it is a bit slow, its smooth ride more than makes up for its lack of speed.

The other establishment we visited on Cloverfield was the Angel Cafe. Here is a hot pot of coffee waiting for you. I'm not sure why there is no pot of hot water and tea bags or tea balls. Ice tea is an American invention, so neither of us expected to see that! Also, Americans even drink their hot tea very differently. Tea is an individual experience. Decent tea comes as bags individually wrapped in a host of flavors. This is true of herbal, green, black, white, rubios, and Oolong teas. In a restaurant or even a private home, or grubby hole in the wall deli, the guest can choose from the boxes stacked on the dining room table (Many have pretty labels), or from the bags laid out in a wooden box with compartments. In the hole in the wall delis of New York, a tea menu made of box fronts with their distinctive labels sits above the cash register. You order your sandwich and receive a large styrofoam cup in which your tea bag steeps in plenty of hot water. In a home situation, you get a mug or tea cup of hot water for your individual tea bag. I don't think the Japanese do things this way, even in fairly pedestrian settings. There may be a formality to tea drinking that keeps it out of cafes.

And, no the Angel Cafe does NOT have ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY. These golden, yellow tulips came from a distant florist, and before that probably from a cold climate or a forcing shed. There is no way they could grow on a troplical beach. Yes, birds or paradise, ginger, costus, or heliconia would have been a lot more appropriate, and protea would have been divine!

The Angel Cafe's portion of Cloverfield is also heavy on nostalgia. Here I am on the back seat of a Volkswagon Minibus. The last of these rolled off the assembly line in Brazil less than two days ago according to my One. My One says this particular minibus was not accurate. It had a piece symbol on its nose rather than the VW logo. Oh well, a lot of items on sims are well chosen decorations, not creations of the owner.

But this item, really perplexed and fascinated my One. She said that she had had a mono record player when she was a child. It was avocado green. This was 1967 after all, but by the 1960's stereo was what you would have in an establishment like the Angel Cafe. This record player is proudly mono. My One also says it is NOT playing a long playing record (also called an LP). She says that the record on the turntable is a ""seventy-eight" and has a single song. My One suspects that this record player goes back to the 1930's or 1940's. Why would any one have nostalgia for a terrible time that happened long before they were born? My One did admire the radio system that showed a menu when I touched the record player. We have a publicly changeable radio on our land, but it shows no menu.

Of course the saddest thing about Cloverfield is that we have not explored the whole island, and its sister island. There could be alot more surprises like this bench, the two ends of which are carved to resemble pigs. I thought they were bears, but oh well.... This of course means putting on my swim suit and taking a big dip, but the water is warm and the sand might even burn my feet. Also, sometimes I need to keep my One warm.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- January 1, 2014

Eileen and Iyoba's Do It Better 2013 Roster
Name of Place	Why it Qualifies
The State Fair at Morrill	It has great rides; fun games; a huge, educational, archipelago nearby and also the Avatar Fitness Club near by with hard, house music and a crowd.
Hanako Land	Interesting architecture, amusement park rides that are kinetic sculpture, a four story castle, and a house of horrors that is sure to have your nightmare waiting for you.
Shinrei Ueno Hospital	This is a unique build with shadows, darkness, urban exploration, and ghosts. It also is an abandoned mental hospital with all the assocations this brings.
Fiteiro Cultural	Two clubs, art exhibits, innovative builds and architecture, sculpture, an old Dutch village and more!
Towson Innovation Lab	Art that comes alive and is always updated plus a well run, public, sandbox.
Soho New York	Home of the Cyclone and gateway to a variety of museums and galleries, temperate nature walks, the largest train on estate land, and the second longest ski run in Second Life. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Portugal Porto	Enter the Old City to see a Southern European fishing port as old as the Roman Empire. Visit four clubs. Shop in the stores, or just go for a walk. Unlike most of Second Life, this sim is populated but almost never crowded enough to crash or lag.
Virtual Rosewood	It can happen here and it did. A monument to and museum about the Rosewood Massacre that happened in January 1923 in Florida.
Electrobit City	Gaming meets kinetic, flat work and hard edged art for an immersive and exciting experience that never grows stale.