We Will Never Forget our Lily Frogs
And We Still Love our Petable Turtles
Shouting into the Wind -- Almost the end of the Petable Turtles.
Illicit Grief and Real Loss -- Now the frogs are in trouble
as well. This hurts!
All I Want -- What do I want out of Second Life? Losing breedables, fully or
partially means I really have to think about meaning.
Our Frogs are Really Going to Die! The end
was almost upon us.
Eileen H. Kramer -- November 4, 2013
It's Cold Outside but Music Keeps Me Warm
I'm glad my One makes me lots of turtle necks and other winter dresses. I'm glad I have my thigh highs. In Second Life, the clothing layers are male and
you can't wear pantyhose. There is no pantyhose or tights layer. It is cold outside in many places, and it is going to be cold outside for a while to come.
This year, I've learned that snow and ice can take on all sorts of personalities. Here in
mk009 Nagisa Land it mixes with sand and clean, bright sunlight. You can see the result in this tree, which by the way is not phantom!
You are probably wondering how my One Who Thinks She Knows and I found
mk009 Nagisa Land in the first place. Well, the Xiao Bar in Nasp had a board of sister establishments, and each one I touched
gave me a landmark. Club Be True was the first one on the list. It's a cavernous place, all black and silver, and it
serves up the hardest hard style any where in Second Life.
If you are allergic to George Carlin's Seven Words You Can't Say on the Radio, Club Be True is not a place you should go.
Like many clubs of any style, Club Be True, features a bar. I think this bar actually serves real beer, which is extremely
culturally sensitive, since beer, particularly lager, is a
favorite Japanese tipple.
A club on
mk009 Nagisa Land that had an actual in it two nights ago was Pink & Monkeys. The music is standard hip hop, and some of the pictures on
the wall are a bit risque. There are poles and chairs for lap and pole dancing, but while some women use the poles, Pink & Monkeys is more a
dance hangout than house of...use your imagination. If you go there, be prepared to use a translator
nd realize that not everything translates.
Pink & Monkeys is of course full of detail. This is a custom made DJ desk and the particles that shroud the floor in mist are shocking pink.
The conversation at this club is actually something that makes sense instead of being the usual club spam, though the guests are fourteen hours ahead and often
playing hooky from work or on a lunch break. You are most likely to find a club like Pink & Monkeys inhabited during midnight and 5am on the East Coast.
And here is some detail my One just had to photograph, though not with me on it. My One looked at this fine, clean, toilet and said: "I wish
the seat weren't up. I wonder if you can lower it." I said I'd give it a try, and sure enough,
you can see the results, in the picture.
Of course not every place we found on
mk009 Nagisa Land was in the sky or inhabited. The Howacafe was snowed in. Snow that was almost blue drifted against the peeling, white fence.
The cafe's outdoor seating and indoor seating were deserted. The playground equipment stood forlorn and unused, until I got on that see saw to
sing the Majorie Daw song. Exploring has its rewards.
We got to see a snowed in swimming pool that still gave out a HUD. The pool had little puffs of white steam coming off its surface.
Behind the pool, stairs led up to a combination bar and store. The front part of the bar had a fireplace and chairs. The rear part was
a heated pool where drinkers could sit in the water while imbibing. There were no drinkers and I wanted fire and sun. The
bar's porch with golden sunlight on it
as you can see is impressive.
Then my One and I thought we had accidentally done a home invasion. The building looked like a spacious private home. It had a
swing on the front porch, lovely golden yellow furniture in the living room, and a kitchen with a refridgerator that opened. On the kitchen counter was a tip jar.
Homes don't have tip jars. Clearly this was some kind of accomodation, complete with bed with poses upstairs and a bath with no single poses either next door.
And yes, there was a snow man here. I will feel sad when all the snow men go back to their owners' inventories in a few weeks. They really have made this
winter pleasant.
Of course the snowman on the counter was not alone. Standing next to him was a little reindeer wtih a red nose. My One said his name was
Rudolph and while all his brothers and sisters picked on him for being different, his glowing nose and great flying ability came in handy to help
Santa deliver presents on a particularly foggy Christmas. One would think Santa has a GPS but he doesn't. He's old school.
I guess you have to ask where we go from here. My One needs to volunteer on Imagination Island tonight, so if we explore again it is going to be late. We'll get back to bushwhacking eventually, but right now we have a whole bunch of "Friend Bars" we've never seen before, and who knows what might be near them.
Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- December 30, 2013
Coming Home to Winter in Nasp
When you remember a beautiful old place, you have to go back home to it, so my One Who Thinks She Knows and I
went home to Nasp. Even though
Nasp only came into being on May 31, 2012, which was also my One's birthday, it has been part of an archipelago that we have been visiting
from the summer I first rezzed. The archipelago was home to then Niseko Hirafu which became
Niseko Annupuri. These sims offered the best skiing in Second Life, with rezzable skis with amazing slalolm animations. All that is gone now, although
Nasp was once a frozen wasteland called Niseko Annupuri Summit. Even if
Nasp did not have such a long history for us, we would still visit it.
The sim is an innovating mixture of art and retail reminiscent of Slow.
There were other islands in the Niseko archipelago as well. One was called just, plain Niseko, and
it had a lot of shops and you could rezz things in the town square. I purchased a free, mystery item. I rezzed it and found myself trapped inside a room of green boxwood with
no door or way to make the walls go phantom. I panicked and went home, leaving the box behind. I don't remember what happened next. I strongly suspect that
SL crashed which it did a lot back in 2008. I do remember the message I received. A very angry sim-keeper had auto-returned my boxwod, changing room (I think that is what it was now.) and
called me a "very troublesome person." That was a lesson worth its weight in gold. I was always a lot more careful to pick up after myseklf
after that. I was also more careful rezzing strange objects.
And to this day, we are careful about publicizing links for regions with an autoreturn of zero, that allow any one to
rezz objects, and that are not sandboxes. We received a landmark to what may be such a region in Xiao's bar, and then I headed outside.
It was winter on some parcels in Nasp and not in others.
Patchy snow like this happens in the "real world" according to my One Who Thinks She Knows
Of course my One was sure that the "underwater store" was just an underground store with a blue roof. Nasp is built
five meters above sea level which allows for underground construction. I went for a walk on the roof and...let's just say I am now a very clean avie.
I did a quick change into an old, favorite bathing suit, and posed for those wonderful selfies. I don't think I want to be a mermaid. It's too hard on
the thighs.
Then of course when I resurfaced, that cold air hit. I had a few choice words for my One Who Thinks She Knows.
I needed my turtle neck dress; good, thick thigh highs;
and serviceable black, button shoes. And we were off again. The stores use a lot of texture and mesh on Nasp, so
everything takes a long time to rezz. Fortunately, my One Who Thinks She Knows was having one of her more patient days.
Those are good days.
My One fell in love with this painting on an easel in R*Shape. The store sells shapes and pictures all of them in
peaches and cream skin with blonde hair. I'm not sure why and niether is my One. This picture though is not quite a
still life. The cord, cat's tail, and doughnuts all repeat the same curve. Someone with an eye to composition took this photograh!
I really liked this pink dolphin that defies the laws of physics (It's phantom!) and jumps out of the solid blue floor that is supposed to
be water to fly through the air. There was also a hamster wheel and a spinning tea cup ride for sale in this store that sells furniture and
yard ornaments.
Our next visit was the Rain Cafe. A sign at the bottom of the stairs that led up to this second floor, gathering place said that it was
"closed." When has that ever stopped me. The door was unlocked and the piano had multiple poses and a keyboard cover I nearly slammed down on
myself. My One loves to photograph me playing the piano, and I can't resist a piano any where I find one.
Rain Cafe also has one of the most serious, snow people in Second Life. My One thinks me may be some kind of guardian spirit because he
wears an apron with a gold Chinese character on it. He never melts, and sits on a shelf above the brasier and below a poster of a volcano that is more than
hot enough to melt him. My One thought he was an especially fine snow man.
But what my One Who Thinks She Knows liked best about the Rain Cafe, was this stove. Heating stoves are as scarce as
hens' teeth in Second Life, and though a pot of coffee warms on its top, the stove has no burners. There is an electric range
on the other side of the cafe for real cooking. This stove, that burns either coal or wood, and which is well vented to the outside, is
for heat. It is the most modern, and efficient way to have a fire. My One wishes there were more heating stoves in Second Life.
Then there was this cobalt blue cash register with a crank. My One thought it was fifty years old. She now thinks it is a lot older.
She says that her grandfather who had a drug store in the 1940's and 1950's had an electric cash register, so this register dates from
seventy to eighty years ago. She also says there is something else very remarkable aout the register. Look carefully. There are no decimal points.
That is because it is ringing up purchases in Yen rather than Dollars.
And if you think this pink object is a vaporizer or space heater, you're wrong! It took my One a while to figure it out and explain it
to me, because she has only seen them in white, but it's a rice cooker! My One says she remembers them from when she was in graduate school in
"real life." Korean students on the male side of her dormitory have them. She doesn't really understand why they are useful. She makes her
rice in a pan on the stove. My One wonders: if pans for cooking rice have different personalities, why should different rice cookers have them too. I don't quite
understand this but she says it has to do with cooking speed and the specific heat of the metal etc...
Of course the lovliest part of the Rain Cafe's attention to detail is in the food that puts the food often sold in
"kitchen stores" in most of the English speaking part of Second Life to absolute shame. This beautifully plated, strawberry-kiwi,
heart shaped dessert puts even elegant, Japanese roll cake to shame, and that is saying a lot!
Then my One noticed that the Rain Cafe had a liquor license. Someone had been drinking red wine, and there were half a dozen bottles of
it waiting to go to the trash or recycling center. She found them behind the counter, and thought they were uncommonly picturesque.
Most drinking establishments and clubs in Second Life forget all about their empties, not the Rain Cafe!
And this bottle perplexed my One. It is whiskey. She was surprised that the Rain Cafe's liquor license, or the license for a "real life" place like the
Rain Cafe, and on which its builders modeled the virtual version would allow the serving of hard liquor. An American builder would decide whether she was building a bar
or a restaurant, though in some regions bars must also have a food menu. In the Rain Cafe, it was like Nevada: "everything goes." According to
this article Japan does not have liquor licenses, and establishments do not
card aggressively.
This still does not solve what patrons at Rain Cafe could be drinking with whiskey. Note, the absence of a cocktail shaker near the bottle and the sugar cubes, but my One says that sugar is an ingredient in hot toddies drunk in mugs rather than little glasses. According to Bar None Drinks the whiskey on the counter of the Rain Cafe was destined for some sort of Old Fashioned, but the bar still needs its cocktail shaker. Oh well, mixology originated in the United States along with a temperence movement and the ghosts of Prohibition. Japan has none of this history.
One last note: When we were there, Nasp was an empty sim. Japan is fourteen hours ahead of the United States East Coast and seventeen hours ahead of Second Life Time. Prime time might just not have happened yet. Also businesses are often group owned, making the sting of monthly or weekly rent a bit less sharp. The sim is changing which means it is growing, which means the rent gets paid, because if you can't pay your rent in SL.....
Iyoba BatOni with lots of help from Eileen H. Kramer -- December 29, 2013
In Search of Krystali Rabeni
My One Who Thinks She Knows is adamant! She says we can not disclose the location of the Mystery Sim.
It started out as an ordinary green sim, where some of our Arab Friends played group Zyngo, a game we wish we could afford, but
we can't. We still like to watch. We also noticed that the land allowed us to rezz items, and had an autoreturn set to zero.
My One landmarked the place...under Sandboxes.
Very early Christmas morning, my One and I went back to do some dress making on the Mystery Sim, and found ourselves under water.
I tried to swim for the shore and found I was trapped uner a megaprim, which clearly had NOT been there when we landmarked the spot.
We went back home and found a drier location. A beautiful build was in progress, one of those lovely Arab builds with lots of
archways, stairs, old stone, and yes, ecological integrity!
Of course my One had to go back, and she made me a second winter dress. She also staged several photoshoots with me because the
sim was so beautiful. It is a pity we can't say where it is. We can show it too you though. Krystali Rabeni is the creator of some of
the lovely architecture. The dresses are ours, and she does not have to worry. My One and I are responsibile builders.
We clean up after ourselves!
Others are not so responsible. This is CSULB which once was a land of
amazing blue mountains, deep oceans, rope walks, and a sandbox. These days it is flat. Only part of it is blue, and the owners have
set autoreturn to zero. You can see the result. This is NOT something we want to see happen to the Mystery Sim.
So I asked my One Who Thinks She Knows: "How can I write about the Mystery Sim if I can't give its location. Sure I can show
photographs like this one of my hang gliding over CSULB, but
is that enough?" Well, my One replied that she had never seen a beautiful, classic, Arab sim under construction. Perhaps we could learn about the
builder. Who knows, this might even be Axxo Erin's work. Axxo Erin who created Arab Land and
Sense, is one of my One's favorite builders and Second Life heroes. We did an Object Profile on a big portion
of the Mystery Sim build and found out it belonged to Krystali Rabeni.
My One accessed Krystali's profile and checked her picks. She hoped to find her "main store" or an island of
"prefabs" that were all those arches, fountains, statues, vines, protected fire pits, boats, and tumbleweeds, as well as culturally appropriate and
sensitive accessories one often finds on Arab sims. Such a sim would be so much fun to visit and photograph.
Krystali's picks turned out to be a disappointment. There was abandoned land, a new sandbox that felt sterile but which might be quite orderly, and
a skin store with not much on sale yet.... There was also the The House of Burlesque.
None of this sounded like classic Arab/European architecture, and indeed it wasn't, but there is some nice artistry inside the
The House of Burlesque. This fan is impressive, though
Krystali offers nothing in green or yellow. Not all avies have winter/summer color. My One says I am an autumn and can wear colors that she can't go near without not looking her best.
I look fantastic in yellows, oranges, and greens!
This carpet is the closest we came from the Mystery Sim to the The House of Burlesque.
It is rich, geometric, and we are not sure whether Ms. Rabeni designed the texture herself or simply chose it. I could feel how soft it was under my feet.
It is not a thick pile like a shag, but it is richly woven wool that is warm and reassuring.
And I even got to dance on the The House of Burlesque's stage.
The club was empty, so I gave the stage and the merry-go-round with crystal horses a try. I tried out several dances. I danced the wiggle. I danced the belly dance, and
of course I tried my old favorite, and my One's favorite, the chicken dance. I dance the chicken dance to lift my One's spirits when ever she is out of sorts.
Needless to say, I dance the chicken dance a lot!
So where did all of our travels leave my One and me? Well, if there is an Arab sim prefab shop, Krystali Rabeni doesn't own it.
That does not mean it is not out there somewhere. And yes, the Mystery Sim was the first Arab sim with a build in progress, that either of us has ever seen.
My One guesses that Krystali Rabeni is a "hired gun." She probably is being paid to make the build, or maybe she is doing it out of the goodness of her heart.
My One can not build like that. She says that some of it is not having had a chance to practice a build on that scale, either in terms of space or
number of prims. My One also says she would have no reason to practice because we do not have the room. My One can do smaller projects, and many of them
have nice shapes and are similar to what she sees on Arab sims. She says they give her ideas, and she loves her sculpties! This planter and
the KoLis (four out of our five. Can you name them? You've met them all on this blog!) all make use of both sculpties and tortured prims to give them
innovative shapes. My One can't afford to make a floor, so the grass is the place for her plants, which of course show ecological integrity!
Green and yellow are also among my One's favorite colors, though she also used blue denim and hot dogs to create
Famous Nathan, the Koli flying with the Zwickies. Our Christmas time KoLi trials have been blazing successes. Our KoLis now
fly free at Stinky Stinky. We are going to follow
Krystali Rabeni's Mystery Sim. We're not sure whether we should let her know we wrote this blog entry about her. She is a great builder, and that is true even if
my One lacks the talent and/or experience to be a hired gun. Those who create content can stand in awe of those who can make money doing the same.
We await the culmination of Krystali's work, and if she would turn on the autoreturn, we'd let the world know the location of
the Mystery Sim.
Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- December 26, 2013
Dragoness Rage Was Here
I've been doing a lot to make my One Who Thinks She Knows feel better. This is in many ways a fool's errand.
Even though we've been having lots of sandbox time, and we've been visiting
Dance Island and Haarlemermeer, my One, who is
still a bit out of sorts, wanted to "lick her wounds."
And she licked them right on the dance floor at
Dance Island! We checked my groups. We checked the Official Lily Frogs group to see when Dragoness Rage, the Lily Frog creator and owner,
had been online last. My One reasoned that it was Christmas vacation, and Dragoness might have more time to spend in world.
My One was of course right. Dragoness who was last online according to the group info October 17, 2013, had been in world recently, and left the
Official Lily Frogs group or else, concealed her presence.
"We have to do something!" cried my One. "We can't do anything," I told her. "She's answered all those notes you left.
She's been in world, and she's told you that she wants nothing more to do with Lily Frogs." And yes, that is part of her profile.
It is a message where to get Lily Frog supplies. It dates from before late July of 2013 when Raven's Writing Desk (It's gone now anyway) changed hands before
vanishing. Yes, we have been waiting this long, and no, Dragoness Rage did not bother to revise her profile. My One wanted to leave her one last message
and she left it as I stood in the Knot House on Teaching 7. My One said it was the last word.
Even she is not fool enough to believe it is NOT over.
She also knows that to go further than contacting Dragoness Rage again
for at least a few weeks to a month is stalking, besides being
totally useless. That leaves us to mourn afresh and alone. My One says we can expect no one to feel sorry for us.
We should have known a long time ago. My One, though, is not the kind to give up and walk away. She has stuck it out,
so let the world laugh at us. The world is all ready celebrating Christmas with tinsel and lights including this
tree on
Dance Island.
And here is another gorgeous,
Dance Island, Christmas tree. My One and I both love these. It was snowing on
Dance Island too. We had forgotten about this place, but there aren't as many DJ's playing gigs around Christmas time, and
Dance Island is open twenty-four/seven.
Of course some of the Ones who decorated
Dance Island have cruel senses of humor, which bely the ruthless streak that all Ones have. Mine just keeps hers under control a bit better than most.
Seeing this poor, fallen snow man made me sad. I'm not sure if a snowman is a bot that is alive like our Petable Turtle statues, but perhaps it has feelings.
My One said it was too cold for snowmen to fall unless someone pushed them over or wanted to imitate a passed out drunk. Anyway, you can
see my cause for concern.
There were no snow people on Haarlemermeer. Maybe the
Dutch don't build them or think of them as holiday symbols. There was of course this windmill. It was very old. It had a worn out millstone and
barrels of grain stashed outside, nothing on the inside, and one tattered blade. You had to sneak behind the blades to open the door. Inside the mill it
was nice and warm, but there were no wheels pumping water or grinding grain.
The snow on Haarlemermeer is much cleaner than that
on Da Vinci Isle. It is warmer there too. Some of the snow has
melted leaving grass exposed for the cows and chickens on this farm. There is also a potting shed/green house, but there was not much inside it.
In the vegetable garden, all the plants that needed protection had temporary plastic tunnels to keep them warm.
Of course it was too warm on Haarlemermeer for me
to ice skate. That was why we went there orginally. My One thought it would be fun and lift her spirits if I could skate on the canals.
The canals were very much NOT frozen. I did get to try the trapeze bar in the schoolyard though. Sometimes an avie can have more fun than
her One. That is why I try to lift my One's spirits.
My One says that tonight we will release the KoLis for their first full roster, property trial at Stinky Stinky. Saying we have to "walk away" from our Lily Frogs sounds like a very cruel cliché when we really don't have any other choice. We said our goodbyes when the food ran out. We kept up hope. If hope is a candle, though, the candle has burned down to a stub. My One says the past tense in the title of this entry says it all, and it is the past tense word not us, that has the last word.
Iyoba BatOni with help from that out-of-sorts One Who Thinks She Knows Eileen H. Kramer -- December 24, 2013
Finding What we Need as Winter Finds Us
Don't get me wrong. My One has not given up or lost her taste for having me visit the slopes.
She can't ski where she is in "real life," and I also love to ski, but late this week, winter found us
instead of vice versa. It all started when we decided to visit
Legal Insanity since it was close to Hallucination.
Legal Insanity
was a retail sim, but it took both my One Who Thinks She Knows and I a while to figure that out, because
it had something even the ski slopes at Wengens and Toggenburg did NOT have: snow that
fell from the sky, and formed soft drifts. I smeared the cold stuff over my face and stuck out my tongue to taste the flakes. They tasted like lemon.
My One says that December snow flakes are seldom ripe. Snow flakes are at their prime in January and February, and rotten by March and April. She says, though, that she craves the
taste of even November or April snow or even freezing rain. She envied me.
There were also snowmen all over the courtyard between parts of the big store on
Legal Insanity. Some were standing. One was passed out and one stood on his head.
I had fun imitating the snowmen and posing for pictures with them.
Of course we were not alone. That is what clued us in that there were avies heading for the store, and ignoring the fun in the snow.
I thought this was a bit strange. There are stores everywhere, but snow flakes do not fall
every day in Second Life.
But suddenly winter was everywhere,
even Portugal Porto, where a sign may or may not be in English units
and may or may not be accurate. My One doubts that is is accurate and worried about the plants better suited for a Mediterranean climate now being
subjected to frigid temperatures by sim managers more interested in faux Yuletide cheer rather than ecological integrity. Still, I liked the sign, and I think
my One did too, because of course she photographed it. Of course
Portugal Porto is now the home of White, a house music club, that started out on
Anjuna.
Portugal Porto is a great new home for that club!
Then of course my One got the bright idea to visit Mad Pea's Christmas City on
Da Vinci Isle. We'd try to go
there once before but the lag stopped us. This time we had better luck.
Mad Pea's Christmas City is an urban Christmas without being a Christmas in the slums. The snow is there, but it is
dirty, and of course there is the ice. Bring your skates, or just slip and slide like I did in the tunnel where
the flood had frozen and I jumped for joy!
Of course before I went into
the flooded tunnel in Mad Pea's
Christmas City, I got to climb this snow drift. My One said it was the kind of a drift that the plough piles up as it brushes aside snow fall after snow fall
that "sticks." My One used to live in Utica, New York before I was rezzed, and she told me about snow drifts like this. They really get this big, and
when there is too much snow, the ploughs dump the excess in the canal where the water melts it eventually. By the time I climbed this drift it was mostly ice.
Of course there was also skating at Mad Pea's Christmas City. The
skating was out in the harbor near an old tug boat on which you could climb if you felt so inclined. I was glad I had a waltz animation for figure skating and
skate blades that convert any pair of shoes into skates. This is much nicer than the give-away ice skates. I also have skis that I can just wear and an animation. This comes in
handy when skiing across sim borders when scripted skis may or may not keep working, though I have scripted skis as well.
It soon became apparent that despite all the
fun we were having we were not using Mad Pea's Christmas City as
intended. We found two presents like this, and could not open them because we were not part of Mad Pea's group. I am full up on groups, and my One did not think
the Hunt which was what the boxes were part of, was a great use of our time. I agreed. Yes, you can guess it now, despite all the interesting architecture and the lure of
urban snow, Mad Pea's Christmas City was a retail sim.
Well, Second Life is monetized. No big news there. If you can't pay your rent....
And neither my One nor I were interested in paying the rent, not that we have anything against retail, not that we've tried that hard to make money in it, and
not that we've made any. My One does buy me things or obtains freebies for me from time to time, particularly things she can not make like animations or free scripts.
My One Who Thinks She Knows has learned to tweak scripts. If my One could NOT tweak scripts, we after all could
NOT have KoLis.
Still, neither my One nor I understand why any one would bother with a hunt or with shopping endlessly in Second Life.
Even if one likes what one finds in a hunt or professional content providers make beautiful well-suited items can anything be as
perfect for one's needs as what one makes for oneself? I think this is especially true for clothes. My One sews all my clothes, and I would not have it any other way.
I can get exactly what I want. It is not just that I am hard to fit, though I am.
My One thinks I am a size "10 Petite," and there are no Petite departments in
Second Life. I also wear a large shoe size (probably about an eight or nine) and refuse to cut off my feet to wear prim shoes. Larger hands and feet make me stronger, and avie feet are NOT ugly if you
make them good size. Large feet mean an avie is grounded and has strength.
It's that most content providers just don't make interesting, novelty textiles, the way my One Who Thinks She Knows does. Also my short skirts
are modest enough to wear anywhere and not feel embarassed should photographs of me turn up on the web. My One has a sense for nature, plants, animals, and sometimes food.
She realizes that everything does not have to be black or red, though I have a lot of red dresses. My One has an eye for the tailored look without making it too severe.
And if she does not create absolutely perfect prim skirts and texture tops, she still comes up with interesting fashion it takes some nerve to wear.
Another One calls her an artist, but in Second Life, my One says that everyone can be their own artists, and more importantly custom
manufacturer.
And being your own custom manufacturer is important. Sure it means lovely items like this golden tanager dress, with its tailored look, combined with
modest warmth (Thanks for the thigh-highs, One Who Thinks She Knows!), but it also means animals and plants in varieties suited for a temperate summer and
tropical garden. We have both kinds; for necessity is often the mother of invention. When I was less than three months rezzed, and my One barely had a reliable
connection, My One searched in SL Marketplace for a modern (Langstroth) bee hive that did not act as a security alarm. She found skeps. She found a hornet's nest, but
she had to upload the textures and bravely tweak a script to create one of the few (There are still very few) friendly, Langstroth hives in Second Life.
Our land in Hartley was after all the Honey Hut.
And of course my One used her skills to texture and bring to life our fifth, and for now, last KoLi. Her hame is Soyala which is Hopi for
born at the winter Solstice, and she wears a snow pattern. She has a face only an avie and her One could love. Her pattern comes from a search for
ugly patterns, but white snow flakes on a red background are spiffy, and those red eyes on a greyish-pink background
cry out for a kiss. I love Soyala and all my KoLis. I love my One who demonstrates that she has a good heart some of the time at least, through her
creations. I am glad I don't have the kind of One who drags me along shopping.
Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- December 22, 2013
Coming Home to KoLis II
Before More Fame and Fortune
Face it. My One Who Thinks She Knows is addicted. My One Who Thinks She Knows is also desperate. She is totally
addicted to and desperate for fame and fortune. Add this to her usual out of sorts nature and you know what it is like to
live with her. I guess all Ones give their avies trouble, and my One truely does have a good heart most of the time.
But right now we are not bushwhacking because we finished revising the Explore SL Spread Sheet
and my One wants to make some big changes before we start afresh. Meanwhile, what do we do?
We work on making and trialling our KoLis! And no, that is not a picture of KoLis or even a sandbox. This is
The Adventure of Ruin on Uchida. My One forgives this
academic sim its ban lines because it has this faux Aztec adventure. You don't even need any special equiptment. This is an orientation course, but it is
so beautifully made and so elegant, it is worth just the walk as is any good labyrinth. It was our last entry into the
Explore SL Spread Sheet. My One now has to: archive the spread sheet in its current state,
clean out all the grey entries because those sims are gone, and start fresh, which is where she is going to make some changes so the spread sheet can become
a fusion table. Leave it to Google Drive to create a database in the cloud, but my One says other Ones have to be able to search the spread sheet, and right now if they
don't have editing privileges, they can't!
If you want to see all our KoLis look at the image next to the first paragraph. We have four of them now.
Generally, the KoLis behave well when we turn them loose. We have yet to lose a single one.
Well they almost behave. We made the mistake of loosing them in the the TBI Center on
Rhoda. We had to follow them to the ground, and down we all came. The one on the left is
Big Noam. He got to be Big because my One had to resize him so we could keep track of him. The KoLi second from the left is
Marija. She is colored like our now vanished Petable Turtle, Farielle, and named after Jurgis in the Jungle's wife. My One has a sense of
respect for all our animals, including our Petable Turtle statues.
Second from the right and third from the left in the unfortunate group portrait of our KoLi's is Famous Nathan. My One did not know what to call our
third KoLi. She only knew she wanted a male. Nathan was the name of Nathan's Famous, a hotdog and sandwich restaurant which my One says made wonderful hamburgers with cooked onions and
excellent corn on the cob, a three year old One's favorite lunch from back in her childhood. Well, Nathan would have to be Famous Nathan, and yes those are hot dogs on his elytra, the hard part of
his wings.
And on the right is Giulia. She is purple. She is named after my One's boss at work, but my One used a Italian spelling. My One
found a wonderful flowered pattern for her elytra. She also did something novel with the face. KoLi are insects. My One jokes that they have faces only a mother would love.
We still have one KoLi to go. My One has the textures for it all ready uploaded. It is a girl. My One asked me to keep her name a secret, since she is not born yet.
The next step will be a property trial for all five of our KoLis. Wish us luck. My One wants to write KoLi note cards and put the KoLi's their textures, a master texture template, and
the unpainted bauplan into a kit, and invite others to own/develop/customize, their own pets. No more breedable sellers. They walk away and break too many hearts. My One who is out of sorts, says that
other Ones do not need their hearts broken (Neither do other avies either!) and boy is she right!
So what do we do now that the spread sheet waits to start afresh and our last KoLi waits to be born? We travel. I try to go places with
my One that make her feel better, late at night, when she is nearly unbearable. We discovered the Vintage Club on
SoHo New York when we went out there to
ride the Cyclone. Here I am playing the piano. It is
always wonderful to find a bar with a piano.
Of course my One thinks the Cyclone is the
best roller coaster in Second Life. The Dead Coaster on Mirai comes in second.
It is faster, and disobeys the laws of physics, but the Cyclone shudders and sways. It is slow with that feeling of anticipation as your
car rises to the top and then coasts down realistically. My One can feel her stomach in her throat when we ride the Cyclone. She really likes that.
Unfortunately, it is hard to take good action pictures on this roller coaster. My One is too busy enjoying the ride.
Then my One wanted to
visit HalluciNation because it looked so pretty on the world map.
I figured we wouldn't even be allowed to go there. I was wrong, and as you can see the Sim lived up to its billing. I doubt its tenants/owners get a nonprofit discount.
My One joked that they used their funds wisely. Everything on this sim is custom made, right down to the texture covering the ground and the
blue, green, and pink trees like this lovely willow.
Well maybe not everything on HalluciNation is
custom made. These sunflowers look like they came out of someone's plant box. My One has made two kinds of sunflower and ours are better or fancier.
Actually, these were not bad, and they went with the ground texture in an unexpected way.
This daisy chair is home made. My One loved the subtle pink petals and
realistic center. I did not sit in it. It was just perfect for a photograph though.
A river spans HalluciNation and
it has only one bridge. You can wade across if you would like, but I had on a new dress and I had been on way too many snowy sims.
I did not want to get my feet or clothes wet. That happens way too many times accidentally. On the bridge were dodos. My One does not think they are breedables, but they
may be sculpties from a box. The dodos made both of us sad because in "real life" they became extinct in the 1600's when explorers found
Mauritius. Back then, people did not know you could hunt a species to extinction. They idea that you could kill all of something off was very new to Ones.
In the 1600's the idea of extinction did not exist, my One says. People just did not think it was possible.
And this is my One's
favorite picture from HalluciNation. While she would not make vegitation
like this (It is too high prim!) she loved all of this, the light blue flower that reminded her of a nigella, the zebra tree, and even the frost tree which
is just perfect for this time of year. My One wishes more sims looked like HalluciNation, but she
also knows if they did, sims like HalluciNation would stop being special.
According to Grid Survey, HalluciNation is a bit
more than a year and a half old. It has no shopping malls or land rentals on it. Let's hope its owners can keep it financed. See it while you can.
Iyoba Bat Oni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- December 21, 2013
Snark has a Season
I don't want to apologize for criticizing
Healthinfo Island. The island is a sim size exhibit of medical and health related information built by librarians and their friends and fans.
There are a lot of prims; experts behind the build; many prims rented at a nonprofit, half price rate. This means my expectations are
and should be high. There is also little or no oversight, because a lot of people who might care about this exhibit are not in Second Life.
You can guess the results.
the Health Exhibits look good if you like PowerPoint slides.
They are no older than fifteen months, but there is one problem with the exhibit. It lacks a slide or notecard that gives references or as students
sometimes call it a "works cited." A student who does not include a "works cited" in his/her PowerPoint fails. For professionals to
leave out the reference list is just plain sloppy!
the Consumer Health Library has handsome furnishings,
Frank Lloyd Wright style stained glass windows, but only six note card giving books. The rest of the books are fake. Yes, it's a beautiful place,
and if this were a student exhibit, I might consider it fine, but there are no links to any of the any of the USDA's
nutrition related web sites or to the Intrepid, Healthy Lifestyle Hunter at the University of
Idaho's College of Agriculture and Life Science sim. None of Second Life's Wounded Warrior/TBI or PTSD related sims have a link, and there is
no web link to any government sites that provide information to wounded warriors or veterans.
Concussions and resistant bacteria may be in the news, but you won't find direct links to information about them either in the
the Consumer Health Library.
Some of the reason for the the Consumer Health Library's lack of
depth and breadth of information is its design. These note card givers require a "proprietary" texture. Adding more of them means more prims in a prim heavy,
highly decoartive design. I wonder if there is room for more information here. That's not a good thing to wonder.
The the Consumer Health Library is not the only
part of Healthinfo Island that is less well made than it appears.
The herb garden, which did NOT make the Explore SL Spread Sheet has only six plants repeated
four times to make four corners. There are many more than six herbs, and making plants is not that hard. Sorry, this is my area of expertise, and I probably have
at least half a dozen additions that the folks running Health Info Island could
add to their collection. No, I have not offered them yet, but they are free to copy at the Temperate House
on Stinky Stinky, my land.
My selection includes, chilis, yarrow, monarda, and borage, among others.
But it is the the Path of Support that is perhaps the saddest exhibit on
Healthinfo Island. It is not sad because it leads to groups of those who suffer from or
care for victims of terrible diseases and devastating injuries. It is sad because most of the information there is out of date and hard to chaange due to those proprietary
textures.
Most of the signs on the
Path of Support led to groups in
Second Life. I wondered how many of those groups were active or still even existed. Bushwhacking is not for those who
lack a spirit of curiosity and downright noisness! I sound found myself joining and leaving groups at an alarming pace. This is
the group info for All ABbout Cancer. None of the hand full of members have been in world in months. I did join two groups, but have not heard from
either of them and it has been several days. There is, interestingly, no Relay for Life group on the Path of Support. Go figure.
Some groups had gone
private so those searching for support would either have to ask to join or just not join at all. A group that dealt with TBI gave me a notecard
that had a landmark for an island instead of a group link.
I clicked on the link to the TBI island, and found
a dog park. Maybe they have a TBI exhibit there. Maybe it would be a good place to trial my KoLis. I do intend to visit the place, not that I am
found of virtual dogs. And yes, I do know that the creator of the Path of Support is no longer as active as he once was, but someone else has taken the path over, and
pehaps they can truely do it justice.
And yes, I am a spoil sport full of land and prim envy. I've got my 2048 that I rent at full price because I am NOT a nonprofit and a 512 that comes with my premium membership. When you pay for your fun, you take care of your land. When you pay for an exhibit you keep it up or tear it down. When you pay and leave it to rot, you fully deserve snark on this blog.
Eileen H. Kramer with help from Iyoba BatOni who slowly walked the path of support -- December 16, 2013
Coming Home to KoLis I
Texturing and Trials
I could be wrong, but Dragoness Rage is not coming back to Second Life. There will be no more Lily Frogs.
Flurbils died a long time ago. There are no habitats for sale (if we wanted to waste the prims) and
the creatures once rezzed, cry for the server that no longer serves them.
The Petable Turtles are statues. Iyoba, my favorite avie, can wear them, but she can't wear them every where, and
an immobile breedable is missing something, though wearing the turtles is a rewarding experience.
We still have zwickies, but if we had it to do over, would I buy a starter pack today?
This is not a rhetorical question. Zwickies are beautiful and
worth every one of their hefty eight prims. They're worth every Linden I spend on feeding them. They are worth the
effort to name their young. The problem, is that my wonderful Zwickies are a victim of the breach of trust that
losing both the turtles and frogs has left behind. I no longer trust any breedable developer. I invest the food.
I take care of the critter, and if the developer closes (You hope it is orderly as it was with Petable Turtles.) or
leaves the world or just shuts down the server....if you want to read about it, the posts are on the top of this blog, and they are there
for a reason.
I was not going to buy into another breedable only to feel that sting of betrayal and the bitter taste of
grief. If I wanted a moving critter that I could come home to and watch as it hopped around, I would develop it.
There would be no food bills paid to a developer and no server that someone else could turn off. I went through several bauplans.
I started with a frog, but Iyoba said it was disrespectful. I tried to make a beetle that came out looking more like an aphi.
It was built from "personal box" sculpties so untransferrable. Then over Thanksgiving I came up with the KoLi bauplan.
KoLi is a weird spelling of coleoptera, the Latin word for the insect order containing beetles. The KoLi is a beetle with
its elytra (wing covers) partially open revealing a fused thorax-abdomen. It also has a head and six legs. All this comes to
four prims thanks to Tokoroten, sculptie maker.
Sunday I textured Noam, my first KoLi. I also moved his script from his home prim to the whole creature. I adjusted it to run for
thirty minutes. KoLi's move for thirty minutes when touched, and any one can set them moving by touching them. Then I touched
Noam, and watched him dart about Sandbox ABC. Our first trial
was only ten minutes.
The trials were going to answer a whole host of questions. First, if I turned on my KoLi would I be able to find him
after thirty minutes? If someone else turned on my KoLi and walked away, would I be able to find him when I came inworld?
KoLis are fantom and can travel pretty far for something that is small. There was good reason to fear a buried KoLi, a KoLi stuck in a wall, or
a KoLi going off sim or under water. Also, and more importantly, would a KoLi be interesting enough to hold my attention.
A KoLi after all is not a "real virtual breedable." I told myself that not having young I could not hatch out to pick up and put in
inventory was good thing, but I can tell myself all sorts of spin all day long.
Trials in the the IEEE and
Sapporo sandboxes showed that KoLis stayed where they belonged more or less, did not get buried, did not fly into the sky so high I could not find them,
but they were still difficult to recover. I had to do some weird tricks with rendering and removing the surface patch at
Sapporo. Still, I am eight recoveries for eight rezzings. That kind of
batting average would earn me millions of dollars in Major League Baseball.
It was pretty easy to figure out why KoLis were hard to find. They are smaller than Petable Turtle or Lily Frog eggs.
They were way smaller than most breedables. Being small makes a breedable hard to see. You can see that by looking for the
KoLis (It's not that hard because I give you hints.) in the image above. This was during the
IEEE Sandbox trial.
A more adept LSL sripter could probably work out a sophisticated solution to the KoLi recovery issue. My solution was
the crudest one and most direct, make Noam larger. He is now the size of a Petable Turtle egg give or take a bit.
He violates the laws of nature, but I can find him, and yes, that is a picture of a Zwicklet, as I call new born (in stasis)
Zwickies. Her father is Geronimo, my white, Luna, starter Zwickie and his mother is Subira, an Ejecta, scarlet, starter
Zwicky. She is beautiful, and I have no space for her. She would also cost me between one and two dollars a month to feed, or she would vanish.
She is now safely in inventory like over a hundred of her siblings and relatives.
I only hatched two of countless Zwicklets, Nimrod (Pictured above) and Bishara. Nimcrod's parents are also
Subira and Geronimo. After "statuing" my Petable Turtles this summer, I had second thoughts about breeding.
As much as I enjoyed finding babies and gathering eggs, if you can't hatch even a small minority of your young, why
bring them into the world in the first place? My female Petable Turtles spent their entire lives pregnant seventy-five percent of
the time. Again, I can spin to myself, and I could just be spinning.
After all, there is not much difference between a now defunct Flurbil or a KoLi and those partially animated
Sculptie Animals. What
is a breedable that doesn't breed? What kind of interaction can you have with a critter you don't feed?
Do I really like to watch Zwickies that much? Maybe the answer is yes after all. This blog is full of Zwicky, Petable Turtle, and
Lily Frog pictures. There are even some Flurbil pictures if you look back far enough. I always found those sculptie creatures
fascinating, and nearly bought an armadillo. Maybe I wasn't deluding myself.
After all, I did not mind all the trialling I have been doing. It does not make me ecstatic, but then again watching
turtles walk, frogs hop, or Zwickies fly is not that sort of pleasure. It's the quiet thing you do late at night when you are
too tired for anything else and not ready to sleep. In a life that has left me out of sorts in the last eighteen months, my breedables have
been a source of comfort. That's why losing them hurt so much, and this morning in the QuikTrip, a gentleman who often sees me there, said I
was one of the few people who was smiling today. I did not think about the KoLis beacuse I was focused on the day ahead, but
now I realize something has changed in my life.
It will be a while before I will be comfortable enough to leave the KoLi's on my land. I plan to have four to eight of them and even give them names. It will take a while to get all the textures together. In a way, that is a good thing. There are labors of love, and I think this will be one of them. And no Iyoba, KoLis can never replace Lily Frogs or Petable Turtles, but there is much to be said for partially at least, fixing one of the broken places in one's out of sorts life. On with the KoLis. There will be more to come.
Eileen H. Kramer with help from the ever patient Iyoba BatOni who really does think for herself -- December 11, 2013
Cold, Mysterious, and Wet Places
One of the problems with bushwhacking, which has now become part of my One Who Thinks She Knows search for fame and fortune (Does it ever end? She
even believes it is good for her!), is that it can leave us both cold. This is when the pictures lie, though the
Mars Meteor Crash on the Exploratorium sim was pretty good, because I could walk around the crater during the
crash and after and not get hurt.
Most of the the Exploratorium did positively nothing for me,
even when it made great photos. Some of the reason for this, is that physics and math is neither my one's nor my favorite science.
My One has been to viewings "real life" and star gazing has disappointed her. Math is hard and space is cold, and physics is brutal. That is
what my One thinks, and I share her knowledge and memories.
And we were NOT impressed with the
Bracken Library at Ball State University either, even though it is a real working library, and certainly deserves its place
on the Explore SL Spreadsheet, no questions asked! It is full of connections to LibGuides, archival media, etc...
But most of the databases are locked down due to copyright, and my One loves to tell me her Ball State story which she now forbids me to
share on this blog. The story is not exactly urban legend, though it has spawned at least one urban legend that my One's colleague supervisor told her.
That was a long time ago, and the colleague-supervisor has since retired.
Of course my One was still out of sorts as ever, and licking her wounds. At times like this, we have to go somewhere to relax.
Often our idea of relaxation is amusement parks. Clubs just don't do it, when my One is trully antisocial. Other times only going
for a walk will do, and my One loves certain localities such as SLOW.
The place is very flat, and it is late fall there. My One and I both love temperate wet lands. My One calls
SLOW an estuary. It's a rare find. It is also a commercial sim, but
the stores look like art. Would you believe that you are looking at a store under the golden yellow leaf birches?
Inside and around the outside, many of the stores on SLOW resemble houses
or cafes. That means you don't have to have any intention of buying. Just exploring (It's not window shopping on this sim!) is fine.
This charming water pump and houseplants is representative of what you will find. Yes, get your One to bring her camera.
And SLOW is ineractive. This store, bbqq, has a ladder that leads to
a rooftop lounge. Many of the stores on SLOW have artistic names
that must make more sense in Japanese than English. My One finds them poetic, but she is not sure she really likes the architecture. The faux distressed walls and
austere look are also photorealistic perfection though done so well... they are almost done too well. Seeing perfection in builds discourages others from trying, and
in Second Life, you don't need perfection. You need what will work. A house or store won't collapse. Getting things the right size and making round shapes instead of boxes
helps a lot, but perfections feels unattainable and discouraging.
That said, my One still loves SLOW. She loves the
bits of nostalgia and anachronisms like the water pump (see above) and this cash register. If you look carefully at it, you will find a
crank on one side. My One says this cash register predates the ones she remembers from her childhood more than forty years ago.
This cash register comes from the 1950's or before. She also said that in a Japanese store, they should be using an abacus instead if it goes that far back.
There is an interactive abacus at Sheridan College.
And behind bbqq on SLOW there
is a very, steamy onsen. These hot baths are a godsend for us avies. After all, we get cold and dirty. Letting us get clean and relaxed in the hot
water helps lift our morale so we can help our out of sorts Ones Who Think They Know, and my poor One needs all the help she can get.
The only problem with the onsen is it has no pose balls. This is why it is good to have animations in inventory. I have a washing animation, but
just plain sitting or lying down also work.
Besides finding the landscape on SLOW fascinating, my One
is also intrigued by the culture. Yes, there are national differences in Second Life. This illustration proves it.
In bbqq, there is a whole school for sale. It is photorealistic, old fashioned, and lonely. There are also just school desks and chairs.
Drop, another store on SLOW also sells school furniture.
Though there are some adolescent, Japanese avies, there are very few children. My One wonders why the Japanese have such a nostalgia for
middle and elementary school, and for these old fashioned, uncomfortable desks and chairs. My One says that she sat at somewhat more spacious desks when
she was a child, but putting them in traditional rows was what teachers did to punish a class for being too loud or rowdy. "Why?" she wonders
would any adult be nostalgic for such a painful memory?" Maybe the clue is that Drop, a store on SLOW
also sells a "crazy desk throwing" animation.
Then there are the SLOW tides. My One let me
sleep on the roof of bbqq, but when I woke up the water was everywhere. This picture shows the waters around Drop.
The water was not any Deeper than my feet, and it had been that deep earlier on top of the soggy ground. It just looked deeper because it
had changed color, or the ground had become invisible (or refused to rezz). My One talked with other Ones and avies on
Builders' Brewery and they said it was possible to have a script that would change the sim on schedule.
My One thinks that SLOW might have a tide script that turns the land invisible. The water is real. The sim is all at sea level.
My One still thinks just barely flooding the sim and leaving the climate temperate is magical. She also likes the dead grass and autumn trees.
She says they give the sim ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY. Those are two of her favorite words. She is glad that the stores are not ugly malls. She loves the
cracked roads, and we willkeep wandering them endlessly, whenever my One Who Thinks She Knows is out of sorts, and you all know that
happens a lot.
Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- December 7, 2013
Faith and Inspiration in Little Pieces
What do you do when your One is unusually stressed out and exhausted from taking care of her mother? What do you do when your One seeks fame and fortune and she finds it, but so what.... What do you do when you nearly lose your turtles and really lose your Lily Frogs? What do you do when you have to help your One, but you are not in great shape yourself. One answer: Bushwhack, but go where you can find inspiration. That is why we started with UDIMA, Madrid Open Uniersity's sim.
UDIMA is special in a whole number of ways.
First, it is not a cookie cutter sim. It is a completely original build, with brutalist buildings that mirror UDIMA’s physical campus.
There are, unfortunately, not a lot of places to go on UDIMA. Ban lines protect the academic buildings, and the sandbox does not work for nonstudents. Normally, my One who Thinks She Knows would consider the banlines a first class nuiscence, but she cuts UDIMA a lot of slack and for good reson. Spain
is in the midst of terrible recession. With the austerity that comes with a fiscal crisis, government services get cut, and the first are higher education, and the first among higher education is.... discretionary spending like.....
Yet, UDIMA still stands. I don’t know if any one ever uses it, but it was first and foremost on their web site on December 3, 2013. I guess some people keep the faith, and for my One, that is inspiring.
Of course just one visit to a terrific sim was not enough to trully lift my One's spirits. They are heavy spirits when you think about it. Also it did not help that we got banned from a club on Poesie, because we were short. I was dancing when we got banned. My One Who Thinks She Knows was in the shower. My One says you are always banned for a bad reason. I usually get banned when my One is in the shower or washing dishes. It was our second ban in less than a month. We were both glad it was our first visit to this club, because we were not attached to it yet, but it still hurt.
That was why we were so excited when Axxo Errin, one of our favorite builders sent us an invitation to come and visit Sense. There might be Xingo, but usually there was music. Instead of either of these, we found a photo studio, where my One, who can be a whizz with the camera took a few selfies of me. I guess they are avie-ies. Then we wondered what had happened to the ground level of the island. Axxo had been doing some rebuilding.
I parachuted down and found, someone's bedroom instead of Wonderland. It was hard to tell how old the place was. It had a flat screen TV, a passed out girlfriend, a can of Scudweiser, and a place to plug in the computer. You can see the size of the bedroom's owner by the height of the plug. Unfortunately, Wonderland is gone, and there was not enough here to keep this new installation on the Explore SL spread sheet.
Fortunately, my One took the loss of Sense very well. "Sims change," she said and she said we needed to bushwhack again so we can start a fresh spread sheet with the first of the year or sooner. We both remembered the the HKPolyU Campus as a strange but beautiful place, from last fall, and we were not disappointed. One exhibit has moved, and the library exhibit shown in the illustration has expanded. There are easy teleports to get around everywhere, and yes, this enclosure took a lot of prims, but it's a clever build.
And the exhibit within these scarlet, Swiss Cheese walls is much larger than you think. You have to look carefully at both sides of each panel. The panels show stills from what look like movies or Chinese opera. Since neither my One nor I can read a lick of Chinese, we can only guess at what stories lie behind these interesting pictures.
This poster in the the HKPolyU SD Exhibition Gallery and others in its exhibition arouse curiosity in a whole other direction. The graphic arts' course' exhibition's theme is suicide prevention, but instead of focusing on how a suicide effects six other lives or that it is a "permanent solution to a temporary problem," the posters make suicide seem grotesque but sexy or in this case, seem to blame others.My One does NOT want to have to love someone to keep them from killing themselves. She says that is too much responsibility. Why should the moral onus fall on her? I guess Chinese view suicide quite differently than Americans.
Of course no attempt to lift my One Who Thinks She Know's spirits while doing useful work would be complete without a trip or two to Graulhet Virtuel. This replica of a French Industrial town undone by outsourcing with pollution and old buildings left behind is soothing, educational, and fun. It is fun even though the pipe walk is down. A rebuilding sim is a live sim.
Of course my job on Graulhet Virtuel was to make sure that the museum posters that explain about the town and it's now long gone leather industry are still there. Without the sky tunnel, which was a wonderful pipe (I miss it!), the whole mseum could have vanished. It did not. It's on the yellow river walks and on the docks and in the arcades. My One thinks they could monetize the sim by renting out store and cafe space. Graulhet Virtuel lives on grant money, and we all know how that is. If you can't pay your rent in Second Life....
Of course I enjoyed walking in Graulhet Virtuel, especially after I gave up looking for the sky walk. I even enjoyed the half constructed areas and the soft spots. I'd like to see what this sim looks like in six months, but something bothered me. Usually my visits to a sim when we bushwhack are all business with no time for fun. Graulhet Virtuel was no exception, and that was a dirty shame.
Graulhet Virtuel has a ferris wheel! It does not look like much...No I take that back. It is old, rickety, and realistic, unlike the fantasy wheels at Hanako Land and Mirai. "But," my One thought. "I bet this wheel goes a lot faster!" It not only went faster. It went backwards, and was super easy to start and stop, unlike many amusement park rides. The ferris wheel at Graulhet Virtuel is a real winner! And going round and round lifted both my One's and my own spirits, at least for a time.
Iyoba BatOni who helps Eileen H. Kramer -- December 3, 2013
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. |