Our Frogs are Really Going to Die!

It's really going to happen. There are seventy-five servings of food and no where to obtain more, no way to obtain more. When the food is gone, our Lily Frogs will starve to death. Dragoness Rage who ran the store which sold supplies lost her land and has not been in world since July 10, 2013. My One Who Thinks She Knows sent her a message today. She told her that she was putting a message in a bottle. Some day she may see it. She will make the final message for a while a note card, so that Dragoness should she ever return will be sure to get it. By now Dragoness' messages must have surely been capped. This is Pabla who just laid an egg in the last forty-eight hours.

My One Who Thinks She Knows put our cat couch, Goofy Kitty, in inventory. This gives the frogs a chance to lay three more eggs. We have run out of prims, but My One, who has a good heart most of the time, made room. The frogs though will not lay eggs three more times because there is not enough food. This is Tzuriel, stuck half way in one of the bee hives. The bees don't mind because they are invisible and Tzuriel is phantom.

Here is Milo, another Lily Frog in mid-jump. My One got lucky with the camera. She probably won't get lucky again. There just isn't time. The weird thing is we still put eggs in the wall. My One refuses to destroy them. If Dragoness ever returns they and the ones in inventory are the new generation. They remain alive but dormant. They will be a living memorial when all this is over late this week.

Meanwhile, a semblence of normal life goes on. We even went exploring late Thursday night. This is me behind a fence at the top of a cliff on Undine Shore which is surprizingly near Stinky Stinky. Undine Shore has a Russian Air Force base with some great posters, but my One, did not want to include it on the Explore SL Spreadsheet because it is a role play, and she doesn't want any one forced to play along or visitors to feel like they are gawking, or intruding, or both.

In this case, Undine Shore is also part of a very active military role play. I was nearly run down by a tank. I scrambled to get on the porch and watch it. The driver could not control his vehicle and it did somersalts. My One said this would have been a disaster in "real life." Here in Second Life, everything that is scripted has a way of going out of control. I don't want to say more, but I've had fun driving vehicles my One has scripted. It took a long time to get them right.

My One took her bumbling lack of talent to several sandboxes in the past week to find a solution to hte loss of our Lily Frogs. Ones are all a bit ruthless, and my One said she wanted new frogs. She had no way to keep the ones we have from starving, so she would just build her own frogs. She no longer trusts any breedable creator. The zwickies are grandfathered in, but there won't be any new breedables. Losing the turtles was awful but it had to be. This with the Lily Frogs is worse. My One figured out how many Lindens we spent feeding breedables, and in the end, she doesn't want to publish the figure on this blog. Many others have done the same, and how many have been left hurting at the end. My poor One can't be the only one!

I'm not that happy with my One's idea to build frogs. I think in a way it disrespects our Lily Frogs, though she is sure that we don't neglect them, and she is photographing them and watching them. She will not box the frogs to spare us grief. They will get every serving of food. She will not destroy their eggs as I said above, but we are gettnig new frogs. I watched prims fly out of sandboxes and into the lost and found when the script made them move too much. I watched critters that were ugly and too big for us. I watched other critters bury themselves. Bit by bit, my One has refined the script we got for free. She has modified it to keep critters moving with reference to the ground which keeps them close. She has modified their speed and the script's sleep. She has modified the script to allow our new frogs to turn. She has added an on-switch and set a time limit so the script shuts itself off. This means our frogs don't move no one is around and they stop after three to fifteen minutes. Constantly moving frogs may cause lag. All that remains is for my One to texture her creation. Maybe later this fall, I will be glad she created new frogs. I think all of this is too soon!

I'm not sure what to think about the days ahead. I know they will be some of my hardest days in Second Life. Our Petable Turtles never starved to death except in inventory. My One says we probably won't be there when our frogs die. My One says that is just the way frogs work. They will die quickly and publicly. She aims to photograph the corpses and post them on our blog, which means right here. Petable Turtles did not end this way. My One says she is hurting even if she acts ruthless. She says she has to do something. She does not realize that there is nothing she can do. You can't make an avie and her One come back to Second Life. You can't edit the Lily Frogs not to need to eat or not to starve to death. You can't do anything but feel bad. I know my One loves the Lily Frogs in her own way, even if other Ones laugh at her and tell her to get a life. She says she will probably cry when they die, but that she will also feel relief. We have been heading down this road for nearly two months. My One says she will know that it can't get any worse than it will be later this week.

Iyoba BatOni -- September 29, 2013

Three Stories of Sense

My One Who Thinks She Knows and I discovered Sense quite by accident. She had just made a dress for me with the quolls on it, and I had gone to dance with Axxo Erin's friends on a platform in the sky. I think I still have the landmark for it. My One had to log out or we crashed while I was still dancing. When I logged in again, I was somewhere very different. Here is one of the few realistic plants on Sense.

My One Who Thinks She Knows and I had just come out of this amazing cave. My One made me walk backwards so she could take pictures of me against the psychodelic background. My One loves her camera. My One all ready suspected where we were, and when we got out of the cave and saw a few of the sculptures and read a few signs, we realized that the ground level of Sense was an homage to Louis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, but it was also a beautiful garden filled with all kinds of flowers and trees. It had a labryinth, the Red Queen's Court, the Mad Hatter's Tea Party etc. There was a castle and a giant chess board.

Of course there was something missing. My One was excited because she was going to include this immersive model of a great story on the Explore SL Spreadsheet. She called it serendipity. She was thrilled that this was more of Axxo Erin's work. His other island Arab Land is one of our favorite spots for just taking a walk. Sense is almost as good, and that is saying a mouthful. But I knew we should not be on Sense by ourselves.

We needed to bring one of our turtles with us to explore the island, and I knew which one to bring. Pyhrrus was the first egg a long retired turtle named Bethel laid. Bethel's parents were Bernarde, a near white turtle from Boo Vaher's long gone White Turtle Project. Pyhrrus' father was Fariel who disappeared from my inventory. Fariel was one of my One's oldest turtles. He was born in July of 2010, and starved to death. He was a Cosmic offspring. His father was a green eyed earth, and his mother was a yellow turtle, both owned by the woman who ran the huge turtle market a few sims over from the the Honey Hut, but it is long gone now. I still remember how beautiful Pyhhrus' egg was back in 2010, and how disappointed we were when the HUD revealed he was "FIXED" and inbred. Bethel had mated with her father. This was a lesson to keep the turtles separate, and we were both sure we would never hatch that egg! My One even named it Useless because we both knew it was.

Well on July 11, 2013 all that changed. We decided to hatch out eggs that would never get a chance at life, and we remembered, a very beautiful egg we called Useless. Of course we changed the egg's name to Pyhrra, and when the baby was born a male, we named him Pyhrrus. Maybe this was a way of saying I am sorry. Pyhrrus only lived a few hours in the conventional way of Petable Turtles. He is a statue, but no statue turtles can breed. He will never grow, but he can ride on my shoulder. I told my One we need to take the babies out. We need to take them out even if they ask hard questions. When they ask the hard questions, we will need to listen to them. and to answer them if we can.

Actually, Pyhrrus did not ask very many questions. This was his first venture into the world beyond our sim. Travelling is a big part of the turtles' new life, and their new life is something for which my One and I are very grateful. Thank you Grimm Hathor and Anthony for the closure. It hurt, but other things since have hurt much worse. With closure we can begin again.

My One, though she loved the sim, was critical of it in many ways. She grew up with Alice in Wonder Land and other Victorian children's writers who wrote funny word plays that both kids and adults could appreciate on different levels. My One pointed out what is missing on My One, however, had a lot to say about the sim, Sense. She said that the Mock Turtle, the Walrus, the White Rabbit, and a few other characters who have memorable rhyming speeches that she remembers are missing. These rhymes are the clever hook that keeps Alice in Wonderland fresh.

She also complained that Sense lacked "ecological integrity." Alice in Wonderland, she told me, was a story of the English countryside. That is why Alice has tea with her cats and chases a white rabbit and meets a mock turtle because people back then ate mock turtle soup. My One has made vegetarian mock turtle soup in "real life." She says it tastes delicious. If Alice in Wonderland had happened in Westchester County in the 1960's instead of in 19th Century England, the story would have included the storm sewers instead of a rabbit hole and featured oppossums, raccoons, and skunks.

My One also says that despite the beautiful mushrooms all over Sense, Alice in Wonderland is NOT a drug story. It's a story about a kid's fantasy of a mutable world and satire of very proper England, with a lot of kid and adult friendly word plays. In any event, Louis Carrol, probably did not "do 'shrooms." These are a modern "Jefferson Airplane/Starship" interpretation of the story, that My Poor One Who Thinks She Knows really does not share. None of this, My One was careful to tell me, takes away from Axxo Erin being a master buidler or Sense being a great sim.

My One also adds that since Axxo is Saudi and much younger than she is (probably younger than I am too!) that he probably did not grow up having Alice in Wonderland, the nonsense poetry of Edmund Leer, and Robert Louis Stevenson read to him, did not memorize snatches of it, and it therefore does nost hold the same meaning as it does for her. My One says that three generations of her family have learned and memorized this stuff thanks to the New York City public schools who inculcated it in my One's grandmother who was the daughter of immigrants. Since it was American, it was good because that was the way "Grandma Senecoff's" family thought. My One's mother's mother passed on the stories to her mother who passed them on to her. Axxo's Alice is not my One's Alice, just as to another avie and One team, Pyhrrus would have been unnamed, destroyed by the breeder, or be another dead turtle in inventory or forgotten statue which would be another name for "dead turtle." Instead, My One and I have baby's day out, and Pyhrrus, whose name means fire, gets to enjoy a beautiful sim with us. I guess that is why my One gets upset about how we tell stories. How we tell stories changes what we see and how we live. I know that sounds awfully profound, but sometimes, at least here in Second Life, it is true.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- September 22, 2013

Fly MBK Flughafen, Zollberg, and Alpensee

Yes, they almost threw this book at us. The "they" were invisible airport security on the island of MBK Flughafen when we tried to pass through airport security to explore the upstairs lounges. You can guess who or what was the issue. It was Lucifer, my Petable Turtle companion who was riding my back. The guard asked me all sorts of questions and explained that it was Lufthansa policy that turtles were not allowed on aircraft, unless they were in boxes. Well, Lucifer is statued, but you can't put Petable Turtles in boxes any more.

Besides, this is Second Life, and it's my world and my imagination or practical ideas and avie-anity, which is like humanity for Ones Who Think They Know who have good hearts most of the time. Besides, virtual animals in Second Life have rights and they think for themselves too. Lucifer asks me all kinds of questions.

He was curious about the plane. Like most Petable Turtles, Lucifer has flown when his food dish and homing object were above ground level. It's no big deal, so he wondered why Ones Who Think They Know built planes in Second Life for their avatarim who could fly anyway. He also wondered why this plane didn't fly and got scaird when we both got stuck in the pilot's compartment. Ctrl-shift-h sure comes in handy at times!

We returned to the tarmac at MBK Flughafen and climbed the hill into the rural and mountainous country of Zollberg. We also followed the railroad tracks but made sure to stay away from the sim crossing which was soft. Zollberg featured a picturesque mountain village complete with a family of cattle living in a barn. Yes, they were virtual, but Bossy, the beautiful Holstein, needed a good milking or "pumping" has her scripted menu said. I was happy to oblige because it's important to Lucifer and the other turtles to see me being kind to other virtual creatures. It takes the sting out of the hard questions our turtles sometimes ask.

In this case, I let Lucifer know that Bossy and her mate led a happy life. Here is the mate, and is he not one handsome red bull! Unlike most bulls the mate is gentle because he gets to spend time with Bossy. What could be better!

Of course the main attraction in Zollberg was skiing! Here is the chairlift. We walked around near the bottom and soon saw SNOW!. Fortunately I have long johns, long pants, and a long sleeve turtle neck. I changed into winter clothes. There were free skis available, but I have my own animations, plus my One made me skis in the Berkman Sandbox (No link until it opens to the public again)two weeks ago. We are getting ready for cold weather.

My One is especially proud of this back shot of Lucifer and me riding the chairlift in Zollberg. When we got to the top of the slope, we got out my skis and I put them on. We also set up the two skiing animations, some of the best money my One has spent in Second Life.

I was a little rusty skiing the slalom course because I hadn't done it in a while. Snow is fairly hard to find in Second Life, and my One doesn't know all the rules of slalom. Also, this course is not as long as the one on the now gone sim of Niseko Annapuri and not as long as the Northern New York run or as beautiful as the Wengens-Ambere-Toggenburg run, but for early September it was great to find a slope covered with snow and lots of little flags.

Of course the mark of a well built sim is that one can walk, ski, or bike off the trail and not fall through the earth or get stuck or blocked by walls. By that definition, Zollberg is a fantastic sim and Alpensee is only a so-so sim, but the off-piste rule gets kind of bent out of shape in high mountains. To cross directly from Zollberg to Alpensee, you climb to the snow plough house, and then follow the ridge line in the high peaks behind the apartments and stores, and then come down the other side. Going up works pretty well if you follow the ridge line. Going down is a lot faster than coming up, but I landed on my feet. This is me walking by the river. Thankfully, there are no palm trees on the German Archipelago and no cannas either though they could be kept in basements over the winter and bloom around Labor Day. Everything is temperate and often wild, like the tall grass and cattails growing by the river.

Despite its name, Alpensee is more than half water. That means a lovely river walk complete with appropriate fauna and flora and at least one picturesque bridge. Of course the river had its own wildflife, in this case, this lovely swan. If she started life as an ugly duckling, it was long before any one can remember.

And at the end or beginning of the river walk, depending on your point of view, we once again saw the draw bridge that leads to Meisterbastler South. This makes it feel like we have completed our journey in the German Archipelago, but our travels here are far from complete. Though Caliche (Let me in and you get a link!) is off limits to the public, Virtuelles Koeln appears to be nothing like the sim My One and I once knew and loved. The main Berlin sims have also received "upgrades," and there are still two more public German Archipelago sims to explore. There is so much to see in Second Life that a dozen Petable Turtle statues can not cover it all, at least not on one avie's back.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- September 13, 2013

Eating God

True to my word of promoting sexual equality among my shell family of Petable Turtles, I took Adiv exploring on Meisterbastler South on the German Archipelago. The Meisterbastler Kreis islands are new to us, and they offer a lot to see. For those of you who are curious, and my One Who Thinks She Knows is curious, Meisterbastler means master worker in English or master craftsperson if you prefer.

A location in Meistlerbastler South even made the the Explore SL Spreadsheet. Sometimes we bushwhack without even intending to do it. The Lesse Ecke Book Corner offers links to and excerpts of books by artists and poets. That means it qualifies as a small library.

A trip into the German Archipelago is very much a trip into a different culture. This punching bag where I got to demonstrate some moves for Adiv who is riding my back is one of the big indicators we are in a foreign country. Americans just don't consider boxing mainstream enough to offer it on a clean and well lighted sim. Germans and some other nationalities on the other hand even have punching bags in schoolyards. Americans of course once had college level boxing teams, but of course these days nice boys don't box. Neither do nice girls. Nice boys might wrestle or do mixed martial arts, but that is too violent, and might give some deranged kid bad ideas etc...

Of course any cultural trip includes a trip to at least one church. This one was especially elegant with lovely fuschia azaleas and a floor of black and white stone tiles and plenty of statues and even a cloister around part of the altar. My One explained some of this to me.

A church is where one can worship God. Ones go to churches, synagogues, mosques, and schteiblels to do this. Sometimes they can confess their sins. My One has decided that most of the churches in the German Archipelago are Catholic. That is because most of the islands that are supposed to be mountainous and Munich are in Southern Germany near the Austrian border, and Austria is Catholic. Also, in the 1600's Germany was in the Thirty Years War, which was part of the Reformation and the Southern part of the country which was then not a country but a collection of states, went Catholic in a big way. Like Protestants, Moslems, Jews, and those of many other faiths. Catholics believe in a God who made the world. God made humans and animals. Humans created virtual worlds in which avatarim, bots, and virtual animals live. I'm not sure how much the God of Ones Who Thinks They Know has to do with virtual animals, including this pigeon or Adiv who was on my back. The virtual animals may be too far away. Also while there were plants and statues of humans in the church, there was nothing that looked like an animal. There was not even a mural of Noah's Ark, or Joseph riding in his chariot after he became Vice Roy of Egypt. Joseph is a character in the Bible.

On the balcony above the church's sanctuary we found this huge, pipe organ. I got to play it for Adiv. It has a really big sound. You could pick your songs, but I didn't like the selection. I played "Crocadile Rock" instead. I like old school songs. I guess an Elton John song from the 1970's is pretty old school.

Then we saw these items left out on a table in front of the altar. I thought the avatarim and their Ones had just been messy, but I was curious about the goblet and I wondered what was in the thing that looked like a sugar bowl. The candle stick looked religious, but the rest baffled me. My One got to do the explaining. She said that the chalice and the container with the lid was used for a ceremony called Communion. Inside the sugar bowl were wafers of bread called the Host. In the chalice was wine or grape juice. The priest would give any one who wanted a wafer and some wine.

Now that doesn't sound too bad, except that the wafer and wine are not really food. This is not like food I can't eat in some of the places on Second Life. The Ones in "real life" really do swallow the bread wafer and the drink, but the wafter and wine are not really a wafer or wine any more once the Priest blesses them. They are the body and blood of Christ who is God born as a human being. In other words, Catholics and some other Christians eat a piece of God. I guess Ones Who Think They Know had virtual food long before they had virtual worlds, except nobody is going to eat me.

My One said there is even a fancy word for eating God. It is called trans-substantiation. That is how the ordinary bread wafer and drink become something else. Now I wonder if Ones Who Think They Know think that they eat God, does that make them feel stronger and more powerful inside? Does it make them feel like they really know everything? Does it make them think that they can do anything? You don't need to eat a small piece of God to think those things any way by the way. Ones are by their very nature rather stuck on themselves and think they are the only creatures in the universe to think independently. They don't know that even the pigeon who sits outside the church watching the avies and their Ones thinks his virtual pigeon thoughts.

My One of course had an explanation of her own. She said that at the Last Supper, before Jesues (God born as man according to Christians) was executed by the Romans, he made kiddush and hamotzee, blessings over wine and bread. Jesus, according to my One Who Thinks She Knows was Jewish! Communion is really the Christian version of kiddush only instead of being thankful for good, nourishing food, the Christians have added an extra complication. And no my One says that it is impossible to eat God, and she agrees sometimes Ones feel godlike when they shouldn't. My One has a good heart most of the time after all.

Iyoba BatOni with help from the One Who Thinks She Knows, Eileen H. Kramer -- September 12, 2013

The Secret Kingdom

It's hard to go back to Wednesday which really feels like the previous year, and very much another world. Bushwhacking had been dreary to say the least and given the lack of pleasant surprises, there was no doubt an unpleasant one lurking somewhere. That was reason enough not to take a turtle into this misadventure. We started on Moonstone, which is now fully abandoned and left high and dry and worked our way around surrounding islands. We found a lot of not ready for prime time islands. Other institutions were repurposing their sims. Some of them had closed their sims to the public, and that meant Iyoba and me. RSC SE Community, a sim run by a consortium of universities in Southeastern England, had a sim that was under development, terraformed, and not much else. Across the river, however, was RSC SE Staff where there was a city with a museum, a pub, and so much more.

The city was London but this was not Mayfair or some other ritzy neighborhood acting as a thin veneer for the typical, overpriced, mall of clothing shops with most of the main stores somewhere else. This was not a mockup of the typical London tourist attractions either. It was also NOT a prefab slum out of a box, complete with dirty streets, rats, and grafitti, and of course the inevitable laundromat and a few garbage bags wtih friendly ratties.

This was a gritty, working class neighborhood that mixed bits of surviving old buildings with more contemporary sites. There was an art gallery, a classy pub on the Thames, a Chinese restaurant with no vegetarian option, the fish and chips store, and of course a museum. You can see the detail with which someone created this neighborhood in this shot of condiments in the Happy Sole Fish and Chips Shoppe. Yes, this entire neighborhood made the the spread sheet It richly deserved it.

Our biggest surprise in exploring RSC SE Staff, however, came in the Brunel Tunnel Museum. Posters on the wall told the story of a tunnel built beneath the Thames River in London, nearly a hundred years before the Lincoln or Holland Tunnels. You can tell I am from New York. What I found curious about the posters that explained the project was that they never spoke of the tunnel's workers as sandhogs. That's an Americanism. Live and learn. Of course the biggest surprise in the Thames Tunnel exhibit was that one of the engineers was named Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

That may not mean much to you, but I had seen a sim called Isambard Kingdom and thought that sometimes academic sims die, get replaced, get renamed. This one was a role play sim. I did not need to get caught up in someone else' role play, and Iyoba was not the Medeival type. We were off by about eight hundred years or more. Isambard Kingdom was Brunel University's sim which much like Berkman (Now closed to the public) or the defunct South Hill, hid its institution in plain site. I of course knew Berkman was Harvard and South Hill referred to a neighborhood in Ithaca. As a Cornellian I was privvy to a nice, inside joke. Now I could laugh too and so could Iyoba.

Most of the exhibits on Isambard Kingdom are above ground or else well above a piece of mainland. The Wind Power Museum is surprisingly detailed with a turbine, posters, dioramas, and a virtual transformer all in a picturesque outdoor setting.

There is also an automotive museum, filled with posters and models. There are web link givers too but most of these lead to links that refuse to load. I'm not sure if I just hit the server on a bad day or if the links are really gone.

Last but surely not least there is a Picture the Music exhibit, which is a museum of music history, actually located on a bit of mainland. The museum is mostly posters of bands, and assorted concert settings and listening venues, but I found this poster of the Runge Color Sphere rather interesting since some classical composers applied it to their work.

I'm not sure of the long term status of Isambard Kingdom or of RSCE SE Staff. I hope they stick around for a while. Both islands give a lot back. I'm glad I did not give up bushwhacking with Iyoba even if we did have to sideline the turtles. As an added bonus, a lot of the area around Isambard Kingdom is unexplored, so maybe one good sim follows another. Maybe I've never said it before, but bushwhacking goes on forever.

Eileen H. Kramer with help from her favorite avie, Iyoba BatOni -- September 8, 2013

Lady Turtles' Day Out

Every sim deserves a second chance, especially when my One Who Thinks She Knows messed up on the draw distance and created way too much lag, so it was back to MBK Westend for us. There was lag but if we waited, it was tolerable. MBK Westend was a car and truck sim. That does not excite either my One or me. Passive motion in Second Life works out best with balloons or trains. Traveling in other ways works better on foot, on skis or skates, or by surf board or boat, and overland by bicycle. I have a great safety bicycle, but that wouldn't have worked very well where we were going. Our goal was not MBK Westend but the lost ski area somewhere in Lower Austria. That was where it had to be. It would not have snow, but it would have a fun, kind of run down but comfortable ski lodge that would remind my One of the Old Vernon Valley ski area of her childhood. I don't have to tell you it was gone.

What we saw a lot of instead were police or "polizei" as they are called in German. Cops make my One and me both skittish, and we have good reason for that. They are not real police, and in Second Life being a fake cop is often a great excuse for acting like a real asshole. We can both remember a time in the Hobo Sandbox when some idiot who pretended to be a policeman threatened to arrest me. We joked about it and claimed we were being arrested for wearng ugly clothes or bad bulding, or building an awning without a license. It was great fun to make fun of the fake cop, but a few hours earlier we'd actually be caged in the ABC Sandbox, which alas is also part of the German Archipelago, and no we did not report the griefer. Let's just say we had other places to go, and the caging took us both by such surprise, it was almost humorous. Making dresses or in this case an experimental caftan, that is not ready for prime time is a great way to have a target on your back for a certain juvenile species of avie and One. Well, if there were cagers on the loose, my One and I both figured that there were also idiotic, fake "polizei" not far away.

Still MBK Westend was worth a second look. Here we are near the sim border. Adiv is on my back and I am looking over the balcony wall into Moedling. It is spring and the plane or linden trees (Yes Linden trees! Cute inside joke!) are still in leaf, and the leaves flutter in the breeze over bucolic countryside.

And here is the Austrian flag flying at the borderpost between MBK Westend and Moedling. There were German and Austrian state flags there too, but neither my One nor I could figure out what they were or what they meant. The border crossing was unstaffed, even by a bot, but my One said that was because we were in the European Union and did not need to do much when crossing a border, unless of course in "real life" they wanted and needed to check your American passport. My One is American and this would happen to her if she traveled in Europe in "real life."

Moedling too, deserved a second look. Yes, there is a mall there populated by bots and selling rather interesting clothes, though nothing we'd want to buy. Sorry, my One likes to make my clothes, and I get a good fit that way, even if we experiment with caftans sometimes. The caftan has issues when we walk. My One is going to try again. Let's just say it's going to take a lot of prims. This cafe, was beautifully built. There was a barrel for beer, a bar that served, hard liquor, and also food. Nobody "proofed" me, and I got a piece of peach pie to go to take home to our turtles. My One thinks it's going to look utterly awful. There is a reason we are in the food business from time to time. The cafe door, however, was a real work of art as you can see by the photo.

At long last we reached Lower Austria, and found as I already told you, no ski area. My One thinks it got moved to Semmering, and rebuilt on a much reduced scale. Of course there was also no snow, but we both kind of expected that. If you want snow in summer, you need to go to Toggenburg and the surrounding sims. Someone could probably attract quite a clientele opening up a Patagonia sim that featured snow in summer. There are resorts that specialize in summer skiing in Chile and Argentina in "real life." Here we are at the "end of the world" on the back side of the mountains in Lower Austria. A few feet beyond this bridge at the end of the road and the end of the sim, we encountered ban lines, a rarity on the German Archipelago.

Of course my One and I had great fun climbing the mountains. There are real trails, some of them nice and trecherous, and board bridges, and even high, forbidding ledges like this one. It's all stone, so summer clothes are fine. Unlike the boy turtles, Adiv made it to the summit, in fact she made it to several summits and so did I. This also made my One feel really good.

Of course, my One did not find the German Archipelago perfect. Mesh and lag she can forgive. On a decent connection with the right draw distance, we could always wait a minute or two, and then everything worked. The German and Austrian sims are well built, but this picture is emblematic of something that irritated her and made her tell sad stories. "Once there were Jews here, even in the country, just as there are Jews in rural and out of the way spots in the United States today, and there are more urban sims. We've seen plenty of churches and this thing, but we've not seen any synagogues, not even buiildings that once were synagogues. It is as if my people have been wiped off the map. That is not how it is in 'real life.' Today there are Jews from the former Soviet Union and there are also Turkish immigrants who are Moslem, yet neither of these religions exist anywhere on the German Archipelago."

My One was very careful NOT to accuse the owners of the German Archipelago and Austrian Archipelago of overt antiSemitism. If there is antiSemitisim at work it is institutionalized, deeply ingrained and unintentional, but there nonetheless. More realistically, just as in the Deep South, where my One has lived for nearly fifteen years, the builders have simply marginalized minority religions, and probably done so without malice. My One says there is a fix for this. She could rent property and set up an interfaith cultural center. Money always talks in these situations. The problem is My One keeps tight reins on the purse strings. She, however, will price one of those empty stores in Wien Neustadt since Austria's Jews live in Vienna in "real life." She will also look for rentals in the German cities. A small rental stocked with Jewish and Islamic links would solve the problem. Now if only my One can pass that hat and get this little miracle subsidized. If wishes were horses, my One and I would each ride a pegasus zebra if you know what we mean.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer, the One Who Thinks She Knows -- September 2, 2013

Sometimes Our Turtles are Better Off in Inventory

It is a sad fact but there are places and times when I can not travel with my beloved, Petable Turtles. Sometimes, this is due to prejudice, but if avies and sim owners are prejudiced against my shell family, I'd rather not associate with them or visit their sims most of the time. There have to be exceptions to all this, but I'll let my One Who Thinks She Knows work that out. Then we have issues of lag. In this case, the Goethe sim in the German Archipelago was working fine, but my One was having trouble with her connection. She has asked me not to elaborate on the trouble, but Petable Turtles have scripting and anything that slowed things down was out. This is Goethe house. Everything inside is in German, but the furniture is beautiful and my One likes Goethe a lot, what little of him she has read in translation.

A lot of our walking was on railroad tracks. My One said there were no "third rails." A third rail is a very bad thing, and one of the reasons you don't walk on railroad tracks in "real life," but we did go into the railroad tunnel on the Goethe-Muenchen border. Taking a turlte into a dark tunnel when there could be an oncoming train is dangerous. Also, the tunnel could meet a blind end. We could fall down a hole. You get the idea. The red subway train in the picture didn't go anywhere. I'm just using a jump animation to fake being hit by a train.

The real fun happened when I tried to ride the subway. My One had to help me cam and sit to get a seat. The doors appeared to lead nowhere. Boy was that right! When the doors opened, there was another solid door on the other side of them. Yes, I really did get trapped in the train, and My One had to camm up to the surface in Muenchen and find me a seat at the fountain. Later we learned that there waere escalators leading from the subway waiting room to the surface, and that this is a very pleasant way to leave Muenchen for Goethe, and one that doesn't leave you trapped on that big highway where you have to dodge cars.

Of course you don't really have to dodge cars. Some swerve to avoid you. Others are phantom and pass right through you. No, this doesn't hurt! And others...well these poor Mercedes on Beethoven, they just can't survive an encounter with a little avie. My One aws thrilled to see them all smashed up and me unhurt. She was very frightened and out of sorts (I can't say why), but she was so happy to smash up cars. We smashed five of them, and I am none the worse for wear, but a turtle on my back might find a demolition derby scarey. My One says every avie should have a few smashups with a Mercedes on Beethoven. Just don't bring your turtles.

One place you can take Petable Turtles is LAMU Island. Saying LAMU Island is a mall is like saying that the Mona Lisa is an oil painting. As you can see from this image, the architecture is amazing, and it brings to mind the now defunct Alhambra sims and their neighbor Gonzaga University.

I did not bring a turtle with me the first time I visited Lamu Island because it was late at night, I had just come out of the sandbox with a new Shrew Dookie dress, and we had lag issues. We have them a lot. Lag teaches you patience. Here I am posing with a donkey. I think even then I was thinking, let's bring those turtles.

And yes, there is mesh on LAMU Island, but there are creative ways to use mesh, and mesh that just creates lag. This tree in a sweater which reminds my One of the thneeds in The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. This thneed, however, is quite fashionable and necessary.

I did bring a turtle the second time I visited LAMU Island. His name is Damien. Yes, the male turtles are getting out a lot. I'll try to even the score with some of the females. Every time I take a turtle back to inventory or put him or her out on Stinky Stinky he or she tells the others where he or she has been and what he or she has seen. Education is better than eating and breeding. I can supply the movement. Turtles don't weigh anything. They are phantom, remember!

And my One loves to take photographs like this. This is a washing area for a small mosque on LAMU Island. My One who knows a few words in Yiddish called the little mosque a Moslem shteibel or prayer room. The Islamic world is full of shteibels. These towels make excellent use of newer textures and perhaps mesh.

And when Damien and I found this coffee house with beautiful carpets, we just had to dance. Turtles who could never dance when they were "alive" love music. Now I can dance with my turtles. Faith and imagination make the difference between mourning and a bitter sweet kind of joy. It takes work to give life to our Petable Turtles, but I don't mind. Sometimes it is a labor of love. Other times, we still have to be careful, though the turtles do now know about the frogs and feel bad for them.

Iyoba BatOni with help from Eileen H. Kramer -- September 1, 2013