My friend and gallery owner Asmita Duranjaya has very kindly given me a bit of space ( no pun intended) in her starbase gallery which is a huge planet/ moon . so I thought I’d make something appropriate and  came up with an inner planet creature feature filled landscape called Heart of the Planet. so if you have the time  and I know how difficult it is to find time in SL, to do all the things you want to, but well  I’d  love for you to go take a look . It’s very tranquil and pretty and somewhere lurking in the alien atmosphere is a monster so watch out oh and there are lots of weird sounds as well so put your headphones on or turn your speakers up  . I do hope you can drop by     So  If you can make it , the exhibit” Heart of the Planet”  will be opening on Fri 7th Oct 2pm SLT through the month   at this slurl which is on the planet surface  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Deutsche%20Info%20Welt/151/150/4066

 I wouldn’t normally put a fill in like this   but I keep thinking that the  few readers of my blog will have disappeared by the time I get back on the road   

So if you  are still there and are wondering if I am ever going to  finish this  tour,  then I want to assure you that  as soon as I  am back up and running I’m gonna make a concentrated effort to get back on the road and finish what should be the last leg of tour

oh and although this blog isn’t usually political  I just want to give you the chance to vote for keeping the vote in the second life JIRA  I mean what harm can it do keeping it in ? If you want to save  a little bit of democracy in your second life  why not have your say HERE and sign a petition to Rodvik Linden the new CEO you never know  he may take notice.

 cu soon…. promise

love  NISH xxx

Do not be alarmed .  

Not only are there coloured letters in this post there is  also just a slight narcissistic streak 

 On top of all that there  seems to be  a sort of  alter- ego- thing  or whatever …going on

 but  I will try to deal with that as we go   (  )  (you talking about me )

So… here I am still in Cecilia’s wonderful park. Weeks/months have gone by from my last post as usual and things have certainly slowed down but they have not stopped completely you understand. Just taken a back seat , whilst I try my hand at being an artist. (an artist  haha) Yes I know I said that I didn’t think I was an artist, but now I’m not so sure, after all I’ve been and gone and won the University of Australia Imagine prize for 3D art and design twice Three times now 

Drawing first prize with the renowned SL artist Bryn Oh at one point (I love this name dropping thing  ) (   I don’t  think Bryn actually  batted an eye lid  she certainly didn’t  brag about it on her blog like you’re doing here ). Oh  well perhaps  I’ll be like that one day   cool and blaze  (I don’t  think ) So there’s a few people out there in the metaverse that like what  I do  which is nice :) hee hee enough bragging (hmmm we wish )  Oh come on this would never happen to me in RL and I’m absolutely over the moon  to have something that I have made recognised as something good.  So there.  /me sticks tongue out at pink text  :)))))))))    (hey I saw that)  

So apart from that and occasionally nipping back to Steelhead to fiddle around with the building site of my Butterfly House and attending numerous parties and oh yes I almost forgot (more bragging coming up we fear)  On the same day I won the UWA 3D art and design comp (for the 2nd time that was ) I also got a special mention for a trophy that I designed for the competition. 

  (This was a separate competition organised by Freewee Ling and the folks at Artmesia (are you keeping up here) so I was doubly pleased. What’s more as though that wasn’t enough…… ( I think the reader thinks  it probably is )

I repeat ..If that wasn’t enough..

I also won second prize in a competition run by the wonderful artist Asmita Duranjaya  at her  gallerie starbase  in which you had to design a room in space using  a limited  amount of prims    I can’t remember exactly how many  but not that many which made it  a lot harder.

So am I an artist ? (Well if you don’t know  you probably aren’t) emmmm well I don’t know. I don’t know if it really matters.  These  were just  competitions  and art is so subjective  it shouldn’t really be judged should  it ? “L’art pour l’art” .(what?) (oh never mind)

 I do feel a bit like I’ve pulled the wool over every ones eyes and they’re gonna  suddenly realise  that I’m not a “real artist”  and that I’m not that good.(well what is a real artist ?)  (er…  erm..  well according to  the wikipedia it’s more or less someone engaged in making art) (well there you go then) (So does that mean when I’ve finished making  whatever I’m making  I’m not an artist any more ?) (In your case that’s probably true) (So I’m not an artist at the moment ) ( well no , unless you count this blog as art)     (So who are the real  artists ?)  (Oh I don’t know maybe the ones who just get on with it and don’t stop and question  “am  I an artist ?” )

  Actually on that note I went to see a sim full of art by Glyph Graves the other night. Glyph is  an SL artist extraordinaire.(He’s also a very clever chap inRL by the sounds of it).  It just blew me away with his  use of scripts and surreal , way out  imagination he put into his work. 

I suppose it really helps when you can manipulate stuff with scripts.  It was amazing I felt like I should just give up trying to be an artist It’s the same when  I see soror’s art (soror? ) yes you know her  soror nishi the famous virtual artist who does those wonderful trees and landscapes with sculpts and fantastic painted textures .

 (Now that is what I call art , you have been mixing with the creme de SL haven’t you ) Well not mixing with them so much  just getting a better look at all their fantastical art. (and you have  managed to fool a few people in to thinking that you were an artist) (hmm)  ( At least you gave it a go )

 (so now my ego has been  duly deflated it’s time to get on with rest of this tour ) (TOUR !!!!.. ?   you mean you’re actually going to do some more touring  I don’t believe it )  (hey I’m not having all that alter ego weird  stuff   and doing it again and again stuff I’m going to get right on with it and no messing about redoing bits and pieces and you interrupting me ok )(yep ok ) sorted. So  this leg of the tour might  not  have  that many highlights in it  but  as  I warned  you  It has got coloured  text. …..and  ban lines  as usual  plenty of ban lines   :(         but it does have a few cute animals     (YAY)

(oh just one thing ) (What?) (why the coloured letters again ?) Oh….. well I was talking to someone. .. Miso Susanowa ( there you go dropping names again )  She had just won the  contest for the trophy prize actually (she’s a “real” artist) ( and a real blogger isn’t she      )  (yes she is )   anyway she said she liked my use of colour in previous posts and what was the point in having coloured text if you didn’t use it.  She also gave me some cool roller skates which I will be employing as soon as I find a nice bit of road on the tour. And whats more  I agree with her, there should be more coloured text so here it is !!! (Oh ok )

 Right that out-of-the-way …….

I was still at Cecilia’s place in Teslin  Oh  by the way that’s  not a link,  I’m not going to link  places to their  slurls any more unless they are of particular interest  I just don’t think it’s  necessary , I doubt whether  anyone has  actually  tp’d over to a slurl to see where I just walked and it’s quite easy to find if you really  wanted to, plus you can see by my maps at the end  where  the places  are  and also it  takes me forever to do . (fine  just get on with it)

 So I was over  at Cecilia’s park (for the third time ) and  I wanted to go over to the Southern Islandia sims to take a look at one of my old haunts. not that  I was a ghost avatar or anything like that  you understand.

  Luckily Cecilia had a place where I could rez the Kayak

and after negotiating a few tricky currents

 and Cephalopods 

(I might still link to a few animals and stuff but not as much ) I managed to get out to the open sea and from there I headed east towards the  southern Islandia sims .

 Half way across I noticed a green dot on my minimap .

I thought I’d take a look you never know it could be someone in distress, caught in the laggy tides that frequent the SL sea. Floating on the surface above where the green dot, was a box called crate 11 . It was a  box made by Arcadia Asylum no less.  (I don’t know or have never met  her by the way)

  The box was last owned it said by bucket Linden and owned now  by Mia Linden.  Well  I’m not sure if I got this right but bucket Linden  seemed to be some sort of bot  because it said on bucket’s profile that it was a receptacle. “(I store stuff )”  . Hmm that was odd, a bit of a mystery, one that I probably would never find the answer too. I guess the Lindens just like storing stuff in boxes owned by  bots (scratches head) and dropping them in the sea here and there. Maybe it’s a visitor counter to see how many people cross the sea .  I got out of the kayak and dived down to where the green dot was . The green dot turned out to be an avatar called WuZetian Ragu 

and Wuzetian seemed to be in a permanent state of ghosting.  I never did get to see Wuzetian’s  proper form . The name  Wuzetian rang a bell in my tiny avatar brain  almost  like a deja vu and then  I remembered the poor guy stuck in Limbo back in Carmichael.  It was when I had been crossing over to the North Islandia sims.

Now I wouldn’t normally use a tp to get any where when on this tour only in dire emergencies such as getting stuck under buildings and being flung back home by security systems , but it was a whole leg of the tour back  and so I decided to teleport back to Carmichael to check up on that limbo av again . 

Seconds later I was back at the place where I had seen him and sure enough he was still there and his name was WuZetian Debts,  a connection surely. They must both have been bots as well as the crate thing. (incidentally  I dropped back  some days later and both WuZetian’s had gone and there was a copy of crate 11 at Carmichael…  How strange !!! I have seen Linden bots before, out on the far perimeters of the grid,  collecting data  or so people said at the time  . There was a few conspiracy type stories about them banded about I can’t remember  I think some people said they were  spy’s looking for criminal activity (you just made that up didn’t you) (no  well ur ur..  yes    I did sort of but  they  could have been  doing things like that  for goodness sake I’m just trying to  add a little  interest here).

I teleported back to Bireme and swam back to shore to rez my kayak again.Then  I paddled over to the shores of southern islandia

 and the sim of Picasso where  what seemed  a very long time ago  I had spent  a lot of  time camping (not haunting? ) (no ).  I was  either playing the guitar, gardening or cleaning windows.  I didn’t really mind  but I prefered the guitar .

(is that you there?) (yes) (ooh all in black) (yes,  well  I was a witch then,  see the wand in my hand)

 I remember there being   a large stately  fashion store with the most wonderful ball gowns adorning the walls  .  So while you were camping you could wander  the floors with your camera and dream of a time when you would have enough money to buy something there. (these were times, obviously  before  I went premium or handed my credit card number over to the lab. ) It’s amazing how long I used to camp, hours on end for a few dollars watching folk go by getting on with  their business. Sometimes you’d get a large tip from a kindly avatar. I remember getting L$100 tip once after camping out all night . I couldn’t believe it.  There was  a message with it  wishing me luck and saying to use the money  to  learn to build or script. Very sound advice indeed  although  in the end  I actually spent the money on some new shoes    .

When I arrived at the far shore and disembarked I made my way over to where I thought  my old camping place used to be.

 Obviously things had changed somewhat although there still seemed to be a  building selling fashion items, it was unrecognisable from the place  I remembered although still very grand.

 The store itself was owned by a Nonna Hedges and sold formal gowns  and costumes. Perhaps it was the same store I remembered  I can’t be sure.  Along with the shop there was also a wonderful patisserie

 and a large central courtyard with ponds and a small chapel to one end .

  After having a good look round and making a note to come back soon and purchase  one of the beautiful  dresses that Nonna had  designed ,  I made my way back over the sea to Cecilia’s park. 

  No use looking  back  all the time as they say Onwards and upwards and after taking the cable car back up the hill .

  I  carried on down the other side  and  rezzed the kayak   at the end of the valley and set off along the south coast.

 Well I tried to but  I immediately hit a ban line (yawn) and was catapulted on top of the roof of Fratboy men’s underwear and shapes.    

( Ha ha )     Hmmm   

I set off again and was very careful to watch out for the lines this time.

I laughed at the message s where I was told. ”You are no longer allowed on this land”…Grrr  I’d never been there for crying out loud stupid messages (are you sure you didn’t have a spate of griefing at some point) (yes I’m sure ,they are just stupid messages from stupid scripts) It takes ages peering in front of you looking out for these dam lines they are so hard to spot and then at the back of your mind waiting to see if somebody has employed some intruder  system.  Eventually I made my way through and after a good paddle down the coast came to a huge great store stuck out over the cliff. 

 Now I wish they wouldn’t do that, it really spoils the look of the coast line . Why bother buying premium coastline land and then ruining the view with a badly built badly textured monstrosity.  I suppose they don’t care  because people  tp in and never look at the view stupid people , stupid store , ( The customers aren’t stupid)  (emm ok  but some of them  are by the law of averages)

 As long as they buy the goods  it’s ok I guess. Still as I was there   I thought I’d take a look in to see what they were selling . ( here comes one stupid customer you were right  ) It took me ages to find a way in (told you so)   I don’t think there was an actual door  I managed to slip in through a gap in the wall .   I wouldn’t of said there was anything there that couldn’t be sold in a place half the size and with a bit of taste thrown in.  A few people  appeared to be looking around the store but they turned out to be  models ,

  just bots  I think  as they never replied to my questions when I tried to strike up a conversation (It’s a lonely business , travelling sometimes) I did wonder about the sold out signs on the walls.

How do you sell out of copyable virtual goods lol.

 So leaving the shop I  hiked  over towards Promethium where I could see the sim called Boardroom.  Its the most southerly sim on Sansara worth a look  I suppose (desperate  for interesting things to see or do ) I couldn’t cross over the land there to get to Boardroom because the IFT Scifi alliance group (I think that’s what they were called ) had abandoned a huge plot of land,

 (several sims worth  by the looks of it) which I had to trudge round because of the ban lines still up on it.

It was  dark before I eventually got back down to the coast line on the other side of the land. 

   I put on some scuba gear that I had picked up in Cecilia park and swam out hoping to get across to Boardroom

 but found the way blocked again by the abandoned land .

I had to cheat and tp the short distance across .

 I always thought this place was somewhere that people hired for actual board meetings but it turned out to be just another info hub with people just standing around not saying anything.

  No one was sitting in the large boardrooms with their large boardroom tables and boardroom chairs making virtual decisions about their real life companies.

 It seemed a bit of a waste of space .

 I wandered round for a while in my scuba suit

  jumping in to the water and  swimming across to the  two  little islands that lay around the main part of the sim.

   I then sat down deciding what to do or where to go next .

I had a strong inclination to head towards Kekekabic , the place where I used to live, where I used to have my shop and cafe.

 it wasn’t exactly on route it was quite a bit inland  but here on the south coast of Sansara it was the nearest  I would be to it and besides  I just wanted to visit to see if it had changed since  I last visited and there was no harm in making a detour, I wasn’t in a real hurry  (more a virtual one ) so I did.

 It wasn’t that easy travelling across land but after some considerable difficulty involving many dead ends (I won’t say ban lines  again ) (you just  did )(ok I will then ) There were ban lines  and while  I pick my way through the maze of  unfriendly unsociable unneighbourly scripted rubbishy bits of no good pixellated straightness

Here’s the interlude :

.

.

.

 There we are, made it to the other side.

  thanks for that Tutsy      (wow great film it’s a shame he had to include your art)

 (yare well he wanted to, you’re just  jealous ) (what of your stupid bendy limbed robots) 

 (they’re not just robots they’re art) (oh  art … right!..  ok   sure  …yep  hmm ok ) (Shut it) 

So I was finally at  the road that runs around the forgotten lakes, as I like to call them.

 they don’t seem to have a name on the big continent maps they just seem to be clumped under the lost lake region  and next to the snowlands.   You know I said I had come second in the competition at Asmita’s galleries well I had also turned my Room in Space into a flying saucer. with the help of  a some vehicle  scripts. 

It just looked as though it should have been a flying saucer so that’s what I changed it in to.  come to think about it, it looks a bit like my trophy It worked rather well  I thought,

 maybe  I hadn’t put much care into the driving animation, just a simple pose and a couple of sticks to control the saucer with   

still it looked em .. sort of ok and made some cool alien saucer noises. It would be fun to travel the road up to Kekekabic by saucer and luckily enough there was a handy spot when I arrived at the roadside to rez it .  So off I set, hovering above the road heading towards my old home. Not far along I spied a few people laying on a beach sunbathing . It looked like they were camping as there was a time and money sign hovering above them. I hovered down half expecting them to get up from their beach towels and wave to me (fool) 

 I found they were just bots again, trying to attract more people to whatever this land had on it . I miss real people campers lol.  Just as I was thinking this a real virtual man (is there such a thing ) came flying into my saucer and asked to be my friend .

I accepted of course, I would probably never hear from him again anyway.  I couldn’t understand him too well either as my translator is not too hot and he spoke in French.   We made some sort of conversation though which was nice and he managed  to tell me that he was a real life artist (what another?) and then just as suddenly as he flew in , he flew off again and I found  myself in  Kekekabic .

There was nobody about of course. I had picked the wrong time,my friend Odessa who runs the Czarrina club  (and by the way makes fantastic machinima films for her glamour/erotic magazine Crush)  was not online and  the whole of Kekekabic was empty

  I had come at the wrong time if  I was looking to bump in to any one  . After standing around a while I wandered up the road and then looking back down towards the Czarrina I noticed something heading towards me . I focused in on it and it appeared to be two seats on top of a small wooden board .

 They were just making their way down the road on their own . I’d seen this sort of thing before caused by sim crossing and people getting thrown off vehicles it had happened to me no end of times . I thought I’d  try to hitch a lift on it all the same and amazingly It allowed me to ride without throwing me off for not being the owner .

This vehicle in fact (as it told me when  I sat down) was a free bus service . I’m afraid I didn’t get the company name that ran it. perhaps they should have done a better PR job .  It made me think of my old bus tour service that I once ran along these roads. Now that was a lot more fun than an automated bus. 

Funnily enough it was an Arcadia Assylum bus  I used to drive . Just as I was thinking about this another avatar appeared beside me in the other seat and after having seated and greeted  we proceeded along the road heading towards the snow country. 

 We got  talking  and my travelling companion Hype,  then  revealed himself to be a form of…. vampire ( dun dun derrrrr)

 (what was that ?) (sort of cliffhanger music, you know  dun dun derrrr) (oh emmm ok )    yes he was  one of those, you know  dreadful things that suck your blood remember (The things that live off others ?),  (Yes , parasites that don’t come out doing the day just  fly around at night biting people ).  and then as though that wasn’t enough to have me turn tail and run, he asked me if I’d like to join his group ……  My immediate thoughts were of that dreadful  group where  all the noobs were running around trying to suck your blood to gain points, (bloodlust)  (Yes ) but it turned out it was not to do with that side of the vampire regime he was a German vampire of the Salians  who on their group profile say they are not gathering souls but just friends , well it seemed like just a socializing sort of thing  but  I declined all the same it would have been against my principles to have joined a group rife with such beasts although he appeared a proper gentleman to all intense and purposes and we excepted each others friendship  and  continued the journey exchanging pleasantries (what you are friends with  vampires now ?)  (well actually  I’m probably friends with  a few) (well what about the vampire moths? ) ( emmm well  I’m sure they’ll come in handy and as they are very intelligent  they could be retrained to protect against  other threats) (what other threats?) (oh  emm   I don’t know just other threats , now let me get on with this tour ok) (ok Ok)

 . I told Hype of my bus tours that I had once done  in this area and he seemed interested in partaking in one and so I agreed to rez a bus and take him on a trip . ( evil laugh) (ya ha ha) (ya ha ha  you call that evil) he didn’t know what he had let himself in for. Actually they aren’t that bad, no really just there is a tendency to crash, …. often ..

 After finding a place to rez the bus we set off .

 I’m not going to say the exact route we took as that was always a surprise for the passenger and you never know one day you (the reader of this blog ) (Who me ? )  (no not you ,  the reader  the one who reads this blog  occasionally) ( oh   I thought that was me ) ( no it’s  not ) (well who am I then  ?)  (emm well that would be telling I’ll leave that  as a mystery) ( another mystery ooooh !! ) (I’m not you am I ?)  (emmmm.. no, you’re nothing like me ) (Oh)

 Yes well you might like to take that trip one day reader and if you do you might also like to know before hand that it involves dangerous cliffs and mountain tops and even some underwater parts . The full trip is rather long and people tend to go AFK rather than look at the spectacular scenery. I’ve had to wake several people up by crashing the bus in the past . (you had to wake them up  wow  that sounds a right riveting ride) (shut up)  

 Hype survived everything I threw at him and with good spirits, surviving several nasty sim crossings and some extreme terrain driving . I didn’t take him the full long route I’m not even sure if that is still open It involved a balloon ride and some really deep water gully manoeuvres where you can if not careful be stuck in very erm deep water . At the end of the ride after crashing over a  particularly nasty sim line I managed to lose Hype and was catapulted down the road. I did though  eventually find him and we  finished the tour by taking a ride on the fairly new automatic train that runs down beside the easterly snowland highway .

 I waved goodbye to Hype at the station and took the train back up the line .

 why  I did this  I can’t think , it was completely the wrong way for me . Then began what  has to be the most  arduous part of my  journey yet, as I proceeded to try to get back to the coast. It didn’t help that I had gone the wrong way after leaving Hype  and to save face  I didn’t want to head back down the rail track and look like an idiot  who didn’t have a clue where they were going , after all I was a seasoned traveller who knew these parts like the back of my hand (ha)   what I tried to do mistakenly was to go cross-country, take a short cut if you will , not a great idea,  it never has been  and in the end  I had to rez the balloon  to get over those dam  lines and then I still ended up crashing several times  and then having to  walk for miles and miles around countless parcels of banned land It was dark by the time I reached the coast again

 and I practically fell in to the sea with mental and pixel exhaustion.(awww)

 The next part of the journey mainly involved swimming and climbing round (ban lines? ) (yes them ) and over  the steep cliffs that overhung the ocean in this part of the world.

I did take a  boat ride along the way

It didn’t last long

 I did this until I had eventually made my way to the coastal part of the  snow lands.

  I was quite familiar with some of the sims here. During my bus tour phase of SL I had spent some time trying to find  routes through the snow to join up the  sparse road system  .  I headed up to the large cathedral that stands in  Snowball  

I had passed by here many times and it was a familiar landmark for me .   The cathedral was built by Cat Driver and based on the Notre Dame cathedral in France . . Cat was a member of the Kuhrang open air association , a group in SL who’s statement reads We all need our privacy sometimes, but blocking off ones land creates a maze of no fly zones that make it hard to get around. KOAA is a group of citizens that have agreed to keep their land open during times when they don’t require privacy so that others may fly freely about. Ultimately KOAA strives to create a more open environment and a neighborly community for the people of Kuhrang. KOAA also serves as an open community forum. feel free to invite others to join!……

 What an excellent group

 by the way Kuhrang is the sim above and  adjacent to Snowball and Sled.

 It was a shame when I got in to the cathedral  that some noob or griefer had decided to try their hands at rezzing prims 

  the rotters ( yare  lame brains ).    I left the cathedral through the north exit and stumbled into a land orb I just managed to escape by the skin of my teeth from being sent back home. It only gave me 10 seconds and I was on the edge of a sim so I only just finished elastic banding and had to cross back in a hurry Grrr. Further over in the next sim Sled there was a slightly smaller Cathedral also built by Cat,

so I took a look around this as well. It was beautifully constructed . 

 I made my way slowly along the coast after that sometimes having to detour the odd parcels . It was very pretty in parts 

 A lot of  folks who lived here had maintained that winter wonderland feel with snowy pines and log cabins. 

 Through Risoul, Caberfae, Trolhaugen and Klaw I  continued trudging  through the deep snow. At the very corner of Klaw there was a huge prim scenery board that had been rezzed with snowy mountain scenery on one side.

 It was odd but I understood why it had been put up It was to hide the other scenery board on the far edge where somebody had decided that the snow wasn’t for them. How mad is that I thought.

 A beautiful snowy hillside on the coastline and you want  the Caribbean . Why bother buying land here ?  The mind boggles as they say.(who says?)  (The people who say things when they can’t comprehend stuff) (what like you ? you mean)

 I made my way down to the corner and plunged in to the icy sea.

 I had to get round this monstrosity of a board somehow luckily for me someone had made a warming fire on top of the ice flow which helped ward the cold off for a while , 

 but I still needed to dive in again to get around the board.  I think I actually went under it in the end immediately feeling warmer as I arrived on the other side   

On the other side was a store and something called Art box

 I had been to an Art box installation before briefly. I don’t think it had been here at the time  I remember it on a private sim somewhere.  The Art box group make famous pictures in to 3d scenes that you can set yourself in to and become part of the art work.  I had put myself in the Scream by Edvard Munch.

 A year back now (my how time flies) ,  I’d seen Dale Innis and a friend  pose for several pics  at Artbox and  I didn’t want to put the same ones on my blog here so   I checked up on which ones they had done , ( all the best ones by the looks of it) (hmm  maybe ) I looked around for a picture that would suit  and chose  a picture by Dali  one of my favorites   Dream caused by the flight of a Bee around a pomegranate. It seemed an appropriate painting for second life, hardly out-of-place at all  in fact this sort of situation is quite common in second life

this is the original    ……

and this is the one  I managed to do

Yes  I know  not that great

. It was very hard to get the angles right to take a decent photograph this was about as near as I could manage .

(yes yes , I’m naked get over it , It’s art)

(I didn’t say a word)

There was only one other store on this side of the board selling apps for some sort of virtual iphone. 

In the middle of  the store  there was a large square hole with a drain that ran under the shop and an abandoned shopping trolley and childs toy floating in the water,  cool, that’s art   :)  .

  Out side the shop there was this  sign standing on the jetty

which  I quite liked but nothing else there to hold my attention so moving on from the shop I had proceeded to walk some way in land to avoid those red straight things that eject you ( what?)(you know …thingies) (oh…them )  .

 From a distance I spotted a huge rainbow that crossed the valley where the automatic train I had earlier travelled upon terminated.

 I made my way over to the rainbow but before I got there I found this neat little airship

 It was hovering over a large plot of empty land on the snowy hills. When I looked at the land owner (why I did this I have no idea just another one of those weird SL moments ) I found the land belonged to none other than Sachie Bade a fellow explorer and artist. (real artist)  how weird was that, (err sort of weird more just surprising ) ( oh come on to have found Sachie’s land amongst all these parcels of snow the first time I inspect the land!!?) (yare  ok  sort of weird). 

 I made my way down the slopes to one end of the great rainbow and just below the rainbow I found this handsome chap looking out over the valley

 ( see told you there was some cute animal pics in here) there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow  but he would do nicely :)

  I took a bubble up to the top of the rainbow as it was too steep to climb.

It was both very high and long and spanned the whole valley  which was known as Smithers Bluff . that was the whole sim name  actually.

 I managed to walk down the other side of the rainbow nearly the whole way just slipping off when it became vertical

and then I  wandered around the valley looking at various builds eventually heading towards what I had seen from on top of the rainbow, something called a space lift, it sounded kind of interesting  I imagined it might orbit you in some way .

 On the way I ran into Zooby the wolf who had got himself caught in a pond.

 I managed to free him, but by pushing him out  I somehow managed to knock my self off the grid .

 When I returned I scolded Zooby  (bad boy)

 and then went off to  find the space lift .

 When I got there  I went inside and  sat down, funnily enough  in a lift , this wasn’t as it turned out the actual space lift although  I suppose thinking about it , it might of been. 

 It took me up to a room with a Stargate type contraption in it

 but  after having messed about with the controls for a some while, trying to make a wormhole or something appear I gave up and left.  I found a place to rez the kayak again by the ocean

 and paddled for a short while down the coast until I reached Sognefjord ,named after the largest fjord in Norway.

At Sognefjord I came ashore and found an interesting project by Woolly Hax, where you could make different musical rhythms and sounds by holding various different sound spheres, as they were called.

I spent a while experimenting with these but it had been a long day and I was  getting tired.

  I jumped in to the sea  and swam for a while and looking under the water found an underwater art gallery set up by Tan Xevion with some interesting sculptures and paintings . (Was Tan a real artist  do you think ?) 

 ( Do you know what) (what?)  (I don’t think it really matter as long as the person viewing the art get’s some sort of emotional feedback an understanding of what the art is trying to convey that’s the important thing. It’s  not the person who made it it’s the Art itself )

(hmm agreed  )

The shoreline appeared to be ok for a while so I set off walking again but soon ran in to trouble from a large stretch of rental log cabins with ban lines everywhere. I got so frustrated at one point that I found a place on the rental land where the object removal had been turned off and rezzed some of my own ban lines which I had found on xstreet

I was going to leave them there but I felt guilty in not tidying them away . (I ‘d never make a griefer). (At least you gave it a go .      )

 So there you have it  for the time being . (what you mean  that’s it ? that’s as far as you went?  ) ( yes).  (Well actually I did go a bit further  but nothing really happened or held my interest and  I didn’t meet anyone  and  there’s no point  in putting that down here is there, I’ll just include it in the next post.) ( Oh  ok  well …  what now ? ) ( Nothing  the reader just  has to wait to find out what happens next  dun dun derrr) ( ooh   I bet they are on the edge of their seats ) (ha ha very funny)…

(hey) (what?) ,  (I thought you weren’t going to do all that thing with  me)  ( what? ) ( you know  me being  another coloured text in  brackets  ) (you mean parenthesis apparently that’s what Americans call curly brackets) (yes that’s what I mean)  (Well  I ‘ve   got sort of used to you being there now)   (so can I stay?)  (emmm yes   well maybe  If you promise to behave and don’t get in the way and just keep me company ok?) .  (awww  thanks  Nish )  Yw.  bye bye    . (bye) (hey isn’t there another video  )

oh yes   here it is 

 fit’s in nicely again  this one.  

THAT’S IT FOR NOW ………

 One of the main reasons it’s taken so long  is that I just couldn’t get going. I tried and tried but every time I started I just hadn’t the will to carry on . whether it was that I just wasn’t finding anything to tell you about  or it was just me not being inspired I can’t really say. I mean I could have just  blabbed on like I am now filling this post with nonsense ramblings, It might give you something to read if you were really bored and in fact that’s what I almost ended up doing before I wrote this . 3000 words in on this post and I decided that I was just waffling on so much and hadn’t really anything to say and so I pulled the plug on it  to start again. I mean really start again I did the tour leg again. As a matter of fact I tried to do the thing again I think something like four times before I actually got going. It just wasn’t happening for me. Yes I tried to be something different  as usual. I started off as me then I tried touring as a Dragon then as a lion then I tried doing the thing on horse back. It was mainly the lag that stopped me on these, but also   I just wasn’t feeling right. I don’t know how many hours I did touring using the various Av’s before I thought NO I’m going    do it again.

 This time I bought myself a canoe which I’ve wanted to do for some time. Not an Indian canoe but a sea kayak a proper touring one complete with drink bottle .I’ve had a far better journey than by going in any alternative av or by horse back . the kayak has been a dream to handle, I haven’t had to contend with missing limbs or sliding along the ground rather than walking, sure I’ve hit a few ban lines and been catapulted home from security systems but my boat has weathered the storm and got me (as I write this ) a fair way down the eastern coastline of Sansara . Why it is that I’ve taken so long to even begin this leg well apart from being artsy and making and exhibiting stuff at the UWA I’ve just had other stuff RL and SL to do and to deal with no excuses because I don’t really need any, just an apology to anyone who might possibly be wanting to hear my next thrilling bit of narrative lol.

It seems a shame to waste all those other attempts at doing it again so I’m going to combine them all and then perhaps I’ll get something more whole

Yes ok  I can hear you saying (or is that me)    “Can you please just get on with it”. “This is after all a tour blog”.

  Ok ok patience I just need to get a few of these other  voices out from my head and I’ll be right with you.      (what voices)  { who said that}           .

(You wouldn’t have wanted to read the earlier version that I deleted. It went on and on and on…………….)     hmm right. ok  enough.   [you heard her ]

 This leg of the tour has been shall we say probably the  longest for me and my av’s  but then again it’s had a few highlights and I’m sure there’ll be bits to interest you (try’s to think back …. Errm) {zzzzzzz} [Zzzzzz]  

One thing I have done on this leg has been to take a lot of photos so I think to save you from me, waffling on any longer I will show you the pics and try to tell you roughly where they were taken and maybe why or whats going on.  They might be a bit out-of-order but I’ll try my best to make sense of them…………….     

 Ok picture 1. (Shuffles through the endless virtual piles of photographs) .

………………………..

……………………

…………………..

OOps!!  :)

 always wanted to do that joke of the wrong presentation slide      hee hee.  (has that ever happened for real? ) can’t quite rememberwhere I took that picture . I think I just liked the colour.

There we are ..  Thats me as though you didn’t already know that . Thats how I started off . 

I started off in many other ways  but this is  as good as any way  to start now.

Here I am where I last left off  at the tallest structure in Sl remember , the one made by Mariner Trilling which seems to have  disappeared

 I took a photo just to be sure I was in the right place.

There you  see Gone!! here today gone tomorrow that’s Sl for you things happen so quick

 Now this  pic above is just before I decided to do the tour as a Dragon . I’m on one of the little islands that are dotted about in the lake district of Sansara

There we go Slipped into something a little less comfortable  My Dragon Avatar . I got this from the Isle of Wyrms it’s a fantastic place I recommend seeing it if you haven’t already .The link I put here takes you to  the fantastic cathedral where the Dragon eggs are kept . They only give out so many av’s every equinox so I consider myself very lucky to have bagged myself this lovely astral dragon . It breathes planets and stars from its nostrils don’t you know

There’s a website that tells you all about them.

I really must go back there when I get the time.

Look at all those colours and options you can fiddle about with  on the Dragon’s Hud

The pic  shows me  going down near the end of  the first bit of road in Coniston. I did several times  you can see the end of the freeway ahead It was sort of trying to tell me something. The freeway ends here ! .

Here’s me trying again as a lion this time

then on horse back

then I went twice more as default me  but by then I didn’t bother with a pic

 I did get a bit further than the sign with Dragon.  Here I am near the sea in Langdale with a guard dog .  Interestingly enough this seemed to be some sort of Port  with cranes and mysterious crates being transported around the place  I had my suspicions about  it as there had recently been some disappearances  of pregrid artifacts in the forest of Kahruvel . When I tried to look inside they were empty as far as I could see but there are ways of disguising primage.

 I took a few more pics just incase it may come in handy in the future , you know court cases and legal stuff.

There were two guard dogs there luckily I get along with most animals so they didn’t attack me I hope they don’t get in to trouble .

I tried to unload the boxes using the forklift truck. Maybe  I should have broken into one to see what was inside but I might have damaged the goods  best just record what was going on and carry on my way.

Not sure what I’m doing here looks like I’m just sticking my bum out as I  continue along the road. I do that sometimes when I’m not doing anything else , it helps pass the time  lol

  I’m guessing a bit but I think I’m  in Derwent here  or not far away There was this place called a Knowledge park  mainly with landmarks to points of interest

I found a lemonade stall in front of it where you could hand out lemonade  but nobody was around so I just stood there looking  dumb. wondering if anyone ever managed to give anyone some lemon.

I had a few slurps of the stuff myself .It does make me thirsty drinking virtual drinks  I often have to replenish my glass in rl whilst I’m trying to square up the virtual glass with my mouth. It’s so hopeless this animation it’s about time someone came up with a better one  actually they probably have   and if they haven’t then I’m going to give it a go. Wouldn’t it be nice to hold your glass elegantly and sip  rather than constantly knock the stuff down in one usually missing your mouth by a mile .

This is Sarana (sounds or looks a bit like Sansara)( I don’t mean Sarana looked like Sansara just her name)

 I don’t meet many people  as I’ve said before  but when I do, I like to get  a pic with them. We both look a little moody here and  I seem to have a wonky eye aswell. I have got an emote so I could have smiled but I hate my smile.

 Sarana was fairly new to SL and was finding it a bit  hard to get to grips with things. I doubt if she’s reading  this but if so Hi Sarana hope you’re enjoying SL a bit more and hopefully found something you like doing.

There was a boat rezzer near the Port in Langdale, obviously if you were stealing artifacts from the forest of Kahruvel  you would need a quick getaway if someone caught you  .  I rezzed one and headed out to sea.

This is me back as a dragon also in Langdale not far from the port . this is  after I had found an American football pitch with a vehicle rezzer on it. Don’t ask me why it had a vehicle rezzer on it  but it did  and at the time a monster truck seemed a good idea to ride around on,  especially as I was  a dragon.

I think just after riding around on a monster truck I sort of  gave up with being a dragon I did make an attempt at getting over to the Islandia sims but I just felt a bit big and awkward with everything . I’m not saying dragons haven’t got a place in touring  I just think they are probably better off flying around and I didn’t want to fly around all the time , you don’t get to see as much .

 Arh yes  now this is when I tried using a hover board (still in Langdale)   It was a free one that I had tucked inside my inventory  I’ve since deleted it  sometimes you pay for what you get  and this turned out to be pure rubbish .

I made it this far to Torver as a lion I swam out to a floating  island with  lots of trees on it . It reminded me of the eco dome  place I had found where I had got the idea about a butterfly house.

Maybe it was  like that originally and the owner had the dome taken off to save prims

 This is where I started changing back  to human form always an awkward moment  best done under the cover of trees

 I love my lion avatar but sometimes body bits vanish when its laggy and as for crossing sims it takes for ages to rearrange yourself , so not a good av to travel any distance in.

If you look close you’ll see I still kept my lion feet for a while  they felt like those big comfy slippers you can get or used to get from Woolies  and walking this tour has given me a few blisters to say the least. Wouldn’t it be great to have lion feet  (thinks ) Actually it would be great to be a lion  apart from when you were hungry and had to kill something hmm

Before I swam over to the island I wandered over (Actually I got lost and wandered the wrong way) to a freebie place in Stone pike with hundreds of free items.   Most of the stuff I’d seen before even purchased  for free elsewhere . A lot of dross mainly  But occasionally you can find a gem maybe a script hidden within a full perm product or a clothing accessory that looks just right with something expensive you’ve already purchased. For people entering in to SL life they are a godsend.  I still have my Cowgirl t-shirt I got from the freebie dungeon but I seem to have lost my red  mandarin top, don’t know where that went.  There are lots of  other things that I hang on to for  erm..  not   sure really maybe for sentiment .   I guess I  should have another  inventory clear out soon     when i wandered over as  a lion a guy who was standing there pretended to be scared of me . I’m never really sure whether or not I should speak or just growl . I growled this time but It didn’t make for much of a conversation. I think maybe with other lions I could talk.

here I am sailing away into a Classic Sl sunset I can’t say for certain where this was, I think in the void seas between The Islandia sims and the mainland.

My path after dismounting  from my horse took me in an easterly direction where I explored the northern Islandia sims . not strictly on my tour map but they are never the less attached to Sansara and I thought might make a pleasant excursion. My other restart which succeeded all the others and also the restart  which included the previous lemonade selling, missed out  the Islandia sims and had me purchase the kayak.

So the next set of pictures are of my excursion to the Islandia sims (I hope you can follow this) (if you can’t don’t worry I didn’t either). {I did} [well you would wouldn't you]

I’m not completely clear on the whole story of the Islandia sims but it seems they were made in 2006 by Linden Labs  to sell off as complete and the well-known land baron Anshe Chung  bought them up and controversially  terraformed them.

  Because they were set out on their own sticking out in to the void as they did they also became known as  Nerevoyde

There are three empty or void sea covered sims separating Islandia from the mainland of Sansara they are  Moses ,Bevel and Carmichael to cross them I chose a submarine I had got as a freebie at Abbots aerodrome. I also went over by sailboat as you saw earlier.

Now this is a quality freebie it works well, has good control, bubbles,  colour changes, noises.

Here I am investigating a green dot on the radar and finding  an unformed cloud av

I tried making contact with it but to no avail I think it was stuck in limbo  poor soul

I got to the coast of Montserrat and swam up an inlet  and into the Northern  Islandia sims.

From there I walked east down a long straight road occasionally cutting across the land to look at stuff

there was a nice field of flowers and cherry trees by the long lake that stretched parallel to the roadside

and just past that I found a box of fireworks for sale

  I quite liked them so bought a box. Don’t knows when I’ll use them but when the day comes I’ll be ready.  :)

Back on the road I found I could actually rez stuff on it

I rezzed a map of the continent so I could see where I was heading and also just because I could

  It’s not like it’ll be there for long if I leave it . Why aren’t all roads like this? Why do we at have to have rez areas along the roadside or on the old roads find a friendly place to rez our vehicles and whatever. Why is that? 

This is me petting a little dog  I think a staffy who I found outside an office block .

This is incidental to the tour but have you tried derezzing stuff with the emerald viewer I’ve only just started using emerald just to see what all the fuss was about and  I didn’t know what derezz did first of all I mean it sounds obvious but I was a bit frightened when I tried it on a building and it just disappeared . After consulting Google I found how to bring it back by changing group title but it seemed quite an awesome power to have. Along with the ability to have bouncing boobs I could take over this world I’m sure.

There was a really annoying noise in the office that the dog and myself were outside so I tried derezzing stuff to see where it was coming from  I thought it was from the computer

I ended up derezzing half the office till I found it was coming from a van that had somehow got stuck under the foundations

Whilst derezzing I got to thinking how people see the world in different ways and how If I wanted I could have derezzed everything around me and had beautiful views of the open countryside . .  It was like when they brought windlight out and said that maybe estate owners could have their own settings so that everyone saw the same sort of weather. It seemed a bit strange to me that some people would see a blood-red sky and purple sea while I saw  it in default mode. Maybe it’s a selfish thing but I felt that I wanted people to share the same views as I was seeing. It didn’t feel right that we could be in our own tiny worlds the world seems segregated enough I mean for one thing if we all saw it different  how could we discuss the weather   (what do you mean we don’t discuss the weather in SL) {well we don’t there is no weather although we could discuss the lack of weather} [ I think you've already done that]

I could see at the end of the road  some sort of castle

It turned out to be Alienbear castle a vast  store that sold beautiful jewellery. I’d actually been here before and hadn’t realised where it was on the map

It’s a very big castle to display jewellery in. Look at all that carpet must have cost a fortune. I suppose when you think about it A big store is handy in SL when you get huge av’s like my dragon dropping in . Not that dragons could easily wear the small pieces of jewellery sold here.

I looked around the castle for a while trying to find something with butterflies on it but I couldn’t.

So I moved out of the castle and ventured to the end of the road

I was at the end of the sims staring out into the void. I have been warned about the void, it’s a dangerous place many avatars have come to a sticky end in this unknown quantity. The thing is there’s something about it that has always fascinated me. I remember when I lived in my first home by the sea I lived relatively near the edge of the sim and I would often see objects and even people appear like ghosts across the edge in that strange soup of zero’s and ones (digital sea) . The people I saw would sometimes be animated as though going about their everyday second lives but they  didn’t seem to hear when spoken to. I had no idea what it was all about then and I still have very little knowledge of what go’s on there now. Perhaps it is a way of contacting other virtual worlds, maybe it records  avatars and objects else where on the grid . There is I’m sure some immensely powerful forces at work within this seemingly empty space. They  shouldn’t be mucked about with people not in the know. like me that is  :)  Trouble is I just find stuff like this fascinating  I want to test the boundaries as it were .

This is me trying to walk into the void  I know I shouldn’t and  I’ll get stuck one day .

After trying to walk into the void for some while. I gave up and I made a physical cube  just like I did in the rabbit hole experiment(What experiment was that) you know the one I did last but one post a while back now.  I pushed the cube and it fell  forward and  tumbled down the slope and got pushed back towards me.  I continued to do this until I managed to push it off the edge and make it disappear into the void “Your object has gone off world” it was returned to me . I wondered if the prim had changed in some strange way but it looked and behaved as any normal prim but who knows it might have changed and I just couldn’t see . I gave up voidpushing and moved over to the north side of the north Islandia sims where it was perpetually covered in snow like a miniature version of the snowlands in Sansara

 I found this side riddled with ban lines and I had difficulty getting anywhere. At one stage I ended up going completely in a circle trying to avoid them

 In the end I moved back to the road . I noticed it wasn’t a Linden road it had instead been made by someone called Tessa Harrington of Unreal designs I thought maybe she had been  a sort of  forerunner to the moles. the actual road was owned  by Ryan Linden his name crops up all over the place.

My next set of pictures come from the two times I made a diversion over to Linden Village which lies somewhere around Waterhead in  the Sansara lake district. I was still hoping to meet a Linden and get a picture with them.

 BUT…….Before I made my second journey over to Linden village I teleported  over to Newport Bay in the  the Blake sea where I bought my sea kayak

I must say I got a great feeling from being out near the Blake Sea. I haven’t been this way since I came over with my friend Kou to  Nautilus . I’ve always liked being near the water and now that the Blake sea sims have been joined to the  mainland it kind of got me thinking that I’d like to live out this way with  all that sea and the  islands to explore. So maybe I’ll look into it when I finish the tour. That  was the message wasn’t it, FREE WAY ENDS maybe I should go back to premium  and start paying . funny how these things hit you.

Now this is so cool why I didn’t buy one before,  the animation is brilliant Some things are definitely worth spending  out on

ah yes the freebie shop at Stone pike again

 In a kayak you get so close to the wildlife

I made my way down to Great Urswick then came ashore.

 Remember I’m on my way to Linden Village  the home of the Lindens (Yes we do Get on with it) {ok ok}

I noticed several large bunnehs lying around in the sunshine

Tearing myself away from these cuddly floppsy bobtails I set off cross-country towards Linden village

Just a bit further down the coast on my other trip to Linden village I rezzed a balloon

I did try going over land by my friend Kou’s wonderful paraglider  but forgot I needed a hill to take off from and crashed in to the sea

I landed the balloon in Sawrey at a science fiction cinema  owned by Cube Inada. 

 I thought I recognised the name.  Cube often comments on Prokofy Neva’s blog ; Second thoughts  I can never understand what Cube is on about most of the time he seems to be speaking a different language, then again a lot of the time in SL when I listen to conversations, I  have no idea what people are on about . They seem to speak in a  disjointed slang,  It doesn’t seem to be what I’d call normal conversation but perhaps its just my lack of intellect. (you hit it on the head there) {yare thickie} [lol]

 The cinema itself was up in the sky so I teleported up to take a look

I never have much luck with cinemas in SL  and after I had bought some popcorn and settled down I clicked on the screen to start the film and immediately froze and had to relog

When I relogged a message told me I couldn’t go to the place I wanted to and I was being taken to the nearest place available. The place I ended up in was actually the infohub at Zindra…… 

 Funny that an adult area,     I’m not age verified    I never thought I’d ever go to Zindra as I don’t want to give LL or any other company come to that , any more info than my credit card . I’m insured against internet fraud with my credit card. I’m certainly not giving my passport details or driving licence out,  I might come home one night and find someones taken my place that I’m no longer who I was . (who are you) {I’m me} [no you're not]  I’m not  very trusting with information on the net but that aside what the hell was I doing in Zindra .  Oh well I was tempted to look around as I might never see this place again but I didn’t really  have time so I tp’d back to the cinema  successfully this time and logged out for the night. ( thinks back to the first pic) I’m sure I didn’t take any photos there hee hee :)

The next day after logging in back at Sawrey I decided to give the cinema another go   I was pleasantly surprised when the film started without a hitch

unfortunately for me the film sucked big time 

I tp’d down and made my way across to Caldbeck.

across the river right on the bend was a sort of domed tent surrounded by pieces of equipment . I moved over to take a closer look . It turned out to be the home of none other than the Changhigh Trinity Sisters the dance group that I  had raved about during burning life . I remember them putting on this fantastic show of Music  light and dance .

There was nobody around so I was just about to get up on the trapeze when I noticed someone had tp’d in over the other side of the stage . I looked over and saw it was one of the Dancers. I quickly got down and made my way over to her .  I said hello but she seemed busy doing something and didn’t answer. I waited around for a while but she remained indulged in her activities so I left and headed down the river

Linden Village from what I could find of it wasnt much to write home about . I would (if I hadn’t had some inclination as to what the Linden’s were like) have expected an architectural show piece of outstanding builds . Great palaces of crystal and beautiful sculptures,  museums,  libraries, ……..well guess what 

there was this stone edifice that was sort of …interesting………not

and I found some prims that Dan and Kelly Linden had rezzed in what looked like an effort to get the basics of building out-of-the-way

DAN : “so that’s your basic prims , that’s a coloured prim and that there Kelly is a flexi”

KELLY : ” er  yawn  right yar… thanks Dan can we get back to that spreadsheet now  I’m still having trouble seeing why these numbers are going  down  “

The whole place lagged like crazy for some reason . My swimming AO which usually works pretty well  just made me hop about the water like a demented frog and swim about in the air.

this is me waiting for a Linden to turn up .

this is me on my other visit still waiting for a Linden

I did however spot Hamlet  Au from New world notes  up on top of a building. he was “away”, perhaps he was waiting for a Linden to arrive as well. It didn’t look as though there were any news stories for him or anyone else to report .

 I spotted a tour balloon up on the  bank opposite me in Ambleside so I  made my way over.

Look simple instructions

1 Sit in seat

2 Wait……………………………………………………………………………………………………

3  Whispers  cannot start ….path not loaded.

4 try going somewhere else {where} (possibly another world where stuff does work and the people who run it care if it does)

I flew over to the Linden village landing point in Kirkby which is basically designed for new citizens to get to grips with SL I wasn’t impressed. It looked ancient and I don’t mean the design  It just looked very 2006. not exactly a show piece more like a lego building.

 It should have been put away in a museum somewhere . Is that harsh?  Maybe I’m just disappointed with not finding a Linden.

 I did wait up fairly late. Then again knowing me I’d probably be too shy to say hello. On the plus side I did manage to bag a Jeska Linden bear (is that a plus?)  {oh yes } :)

 Before I trekked back to the sea I took a look at a place on the Caldbeck shore that taught people how to recognise heart murmurs 

There’s got to be everything here in second life hasn’t there.  haha   :))

each patient had a plaque on the wall you could click on and listen to the heart beat

I clicked and waited at the various signs but unfortunately I couldn’t hear a thing probably the lag although I suppose   they might of all  been dead .

Time I think for a break from this multi dimensional tour. {no come on let’s carry on }  No  just a quick break  some music would be nice  and I think this one sums things up nicely.

 I started  heading back to the coast and   I logged off  before I got there and as I was logging back in the emerald viewer gave me a glimpse of a sim designed on Le Mont Saint Michel in France. the viewer gave you a oppurtunity to visit there so I did and I thought it was brilliant. now if Linden village landing point had been a patch on this it would surely have inspired a few more people to hang around in SL . 

Here’s a few pics I put in a  sideshow for you .

After making my way back to the sea and my paths had finally merged  I set about heading south around the coast as quickly as I could only stopping occasionally to take a pictures mainly of wildlife

I spotted this little guy running up the beach  isn’t he cute.

Have you noticed the number  really bad drivers in SL.

I hope there were no patients aboard this ambulance. I suppose it could have been picking up  battered fish and taking them to have an operation performed by  the sturgeon        (Sry)      {so you should be}

by the time I got to Dearham it was getting dark

I had to come ashore to move round some ban lines

 I walked quite a way down the coast to find a plaice (enough with the fish jokes) to rez the kayak.

As I crossed the border in to Bassenthwaite I noticed two beautiful big yachts moored up on a jetty

I couldn’t resist having a peek in them as there was nobody around I didn’t actually go inside just looked through the window . The yachts were heavy on the prims with everything rezzed and I wasn’t sure there was a  need for a kitchen  but it did look really nice.

I carried on walking  and Just round the corner and  right on the edge of Black Mire and Lingmell I came upon  a smallish red house sitting on the coastline

When I actually got to the house I was delighted to find that it actually belonged to Frogg Marlowe of  Frogg and Jaycatt, two splendid musicians whom I had seen twice now , Once in Luskwood 

 and the other time at burning life.

 Luckily for me just as I reached the house,  Frogg  accidently teleported back home from a concert that they were just finishing up in Lusk

I said hello quickly and he said hi back , but then   he said he had to tp back to the show quickly to finish off a couple of songs . I hung around for a while and after the show had finished he came back to the house and I got to take a picture with him   much better than any silly Linden pic  Hee hee.

The next part of the trip simply flew by. There were few incidents and the kayak was still handling well

the water was calm

with a few waves here and there

Along the way I stopped a few times to look at the view

and rest a while..  I found this skateboard in a sim called Findlater  there was a tent pitched on the shore that I had an overnight stay in.

there was still plenty of wildlife around mainly dolphins .

At Inverloch  I came ashore to stretch my legs and found some abandoned land with  a big dog  called Akamaru standing on it 

 I looked  him up on wiki and he is a character from a Japanese anime.  He looked very friendly and I felt a bit sorry for him left here on abandoned land  but he wouldn’t come with me when I called him so I had to leave him there perhaps his owner will come back and claim him some day

he looked like he was waiting for something or someone

This lovely lady cephalopod was paddling on the south-east coast of Moy when I met her

After  a long paddle I got down to  to Gulquac and stopped to look at some ruins sticking out from the sea

The place was called Shangri La

Around the top of a glowing lamp like structure there were many gulls calmly standing around on a wall just under the sea’s surface

As I approached the structure the gulls went absolutely crazy making a hideous and completely eerie squawking sound

It was quite unnerving they started flying and dive bombing the sea goodness knows what they were protecting  I could make out a floor and columns  and sparkly stuff but I didn’t hang around for too long  the noise was horrendous

Further on down the coast under the sea, what appeared to be houses  and possibly stores for Merfolk stretched for some way  beneath the cliff tops

There were streams aswell  under the sea!!!  most odd.

At Tirol I took a turn west away from the Southern Islandia sims and headed towards a river that ran parallel to the open sea sims separating the mainland .

When I entered the river mouth I noticed  there was  wreckage  beneath the water 

Maybe the wrecks were from storms or possibly  they had just sunk due to neglect

The river that ran from Powder Mill to Pinehouse was very pretty   the folks that lived along this stretch  had taken pride in keeping it so

I left the Kayak at the end of the River and walked up into the sim of Teslin

Cecilia Delacroix had built a wonderful park  here with many attractions

among them was a cable car ride

an undersea adventure trail  with diving suit supplied

Drums!

An art gallery of Cecilia’s photos

And my favorite an aeriel runway .  There was much more besides. but It was time to go.

  Multi time touring takes it out of you. You can only actually blog in multi dimensions you have to actually do the tour in mono again and again. 

 So picking up my paddle I wearily trudged across the sim towards the seaand the south coast of Sansara.

And that about  raps it up for now. 

 It would have been nice to travel all the paths at the same time  and keep myself company ,  it sort of gets a bit lonely out here on the perimeter. Still I might have ended up arguing with myself as to which route to go  and how  to get there and what av to do it in  and  I don’t want to start doing that now do I . (No you wouldn’t want to do that )   {nothing wrong in arguing with yourself}  [yep I do it all the time ]

  CYA. 

 ^ END ……….

 In my last post I was musing on art and virtual design amongst other stuff and low and behold I’m working away on some finishing textures for the Steelhead butterfly house and a guy called Jayjay who happened to be the sim owner comes up to me saying he really liked the house and would I consider putting it in for a competition that the university are holding. You see at the time I was working in the SL sandbox of the University of Western Australia and they happen to have this art competition going on. well I said that I didn’t think the butterfly house was really art but Jajay said there was this other flagship competition which is more of an architectural thing, I think the winners design could actually be used at the RL university, not that they were looking for a butterfly house more an art gallery but he said it didn’t matter too much he even entered my little hummingbirds into the art part of the competition which has got me even more confused about art  :) 

So anyway I’ve entered the competition and It’ll be nice to have my creation seen by a few more people but that wasn’t what I posted here about today. Really that was just the background because, whilst putting the finishing touches of flowers butterflies etc to the butterfly house before entering it, I was paid a visit by soror Nishi, I’m sure you must of heard of her, she does this wonderful art with sculpted trees , flowers and landscapes all with an amazing, stunning wonderful texturing It’s sort of like a multicoloured stunning, cartoon alien world art and I absolutely love it,    

Whilst she was looking around the butterfly house soror invited me to an exhibition of some of her work which was being held by Juanita Deharo (another amazing artist) at her Virtual treeline gallery so I went along and was very glad I did. I’ve taken a few pictures in case you have never seen her work before. Obviously you have to be there to get the full 3D effect. So if you like what you see here, I’m sure you’ll really enjoy a visit. I’m not sure how long it’s on for, so hurry along to the gallery  a.s.a.p and you’ll not be disappointed.

 I’m here in Purple but where is everything???

Here I was ready to start the next leg of the tour .I thought I’d do this next section of the journey as a tiny purple bunneh. well why not ? :)

 Can you see the cute little bunneh 

there that’s better. Oh how sweet  but what lurks underneath?

There was something that annoyed me about the avatar that I had bought. It was cute and a rabbit and it was purple and  you’d think that would be enough to satisfy me and I must say  I’m not totally criticising it because it did what it said on the package  and I don’t know how else you’d make an avatar this small. (The new Viewer 2 someone shouts) (later not now I don’t want to deal with that right now)  

The thing is, when I look underground as I inevitably do and I look a little too close ,I get a glimpse of my concealed self. You have to put all that mass of avatar somewhere but it sort of puts me off having a mangled up naked body trailing along underneath me .

Just a bug with invisi prims I guess. So what I’m going to do is,(hmmm thinks) yes I’m going back to default me. Boring maybe but I always end up as me I’ve been me  for too long to change I’m not that good at change.

I did buy a shoulder bunny with animated head and tail  instead and he’s rather cute too and next time I promise to try harder to have a go at change because change is good. Isn’t it??

Now getting back to where I began. Where was everything?

 What had happened to the beach house and landing stage and that funny little rabbit with antlers stuck to its head taking a quick look at the land told me Purple was up for sale. The whole of it was up for sale good gracious me; gosh  I didn’t know purple was owned by one person in the first place. It’s a nice sim to own though especially with the coastline and easy connections by rail and ferry to surrounding Sims  . I click and buy the land for $3000000. I’ve had a good day and sold several pairs of binoculars ha-ha if only :) Wow that is a lot of money. You either need to have some disposable cash or a good business, possibly renting the land out to afford a place like this. Think of all that mainland tier, $195 a month. I guess to some people it’s not that much of a layout .

After scouring the area just to see if the owners have left anything interesting behind (which they hadn’t ) I move on. I’m still thinking about what I could build if I had all that land. My friend  Head had suggested I try Open sim  but it all seems a bit techy for me at the moment and  I want as many people as possible to see my creations. It’s an attention seeking thing maybe but I don’t initially make things with that intention.

   Heading east I pass a couple of grand American Victorian looking buildings.

 I know this of course from my time in Steelhead. Lovely old buildings they are as well actually the second one is a bit more fortified than the first more medieval I’d say. Not that I’m a historian but I’m taking an interest in these things now So that’s good isn’t it that new interests are sparked by being in this world . There is definitely something for everyone here you just have to find it.(Search is a good starting point) I tend to drift from one interest to another, that reflects my RL as well. I never tend to stick to things for long although I have managed to stick at this virtual world thing for a while now. Maybe because of the diversity of interests within this world and being able to pick and choose what I do has helped. there are no massive outlays of money for a start this has also helped. I’d be broke by now if I tried all the things I’ve tried here in RL.

You do still have to work at things if you want them to be right though. I know this from my building. Anyone can build in SL its fun and it’s relatively easy to pick up. But to build something good that looks good whether it be a fantasy mushroom table with dolphin flipper legs or hi tech space weaponry with hundreds of complicated scripts, you need to work on your skills. The early bits and bobs that I used to build, I look at them now and think how bad they are and I dare say, when and if I, or even SL itself is still around in a few years time I’ll look at stuff that I build now and cringe . I do have a need to create but I wouldn’t call myself an artist, just a builder of virtual reality not a creator of fantasy and ideas, there is a difference in how an artist perceives the world around them and interprets that in their creations. I wish I could do that but I don’t think it’s something you can learn.

So what does this have to do with anything? well nothing much mainly just my thoughts on things, you know getting them out of my head and all that but the thoughts were strangely sparked off whilst I was looking at some Linden built road in Sido. Linden built road this is, not mole built I hasten to add. I’m not going to say which Linden built this particular road that I was looking at and It’s not the only example of Linden building that I’ve come across where the structure on initial appearance would seem to have been built fairly quickly and without much care.

Looking at the new mole built roads they appear carefully laid down with nice texturing and an eye for detail,

(See how they curve the road and texture  around the bend.)

 built by skilled builders whom I hope as they say  were picked for their building art, and scripting  skills. In fact going by what I’ve seen so far, I’m sure they were. Now this example of the old Linden built road that I was looking at seemed to show a disregard for detail and planning. Just a quick rez plonk it down roughly level and not to worry if the textures are not quite lined up or come to that whether the prims themselves are lined up correctly.

 Then I began to think. Perhaps that’s my non artistic eye looking at it. maybe this road set as it is in a virtual world could be considered a form of art It did really get me thinking about what was classified as art and whether having things precisely right was all that important. Maybe it was the idea of the road being there that was important .Could it be that an artist would lay down a road different from a builder . In RL some things just wouldn’t function if they were built incorrectly. But here they don’t have to. Things don’t have to be to scale.  In a virtual world RL precision serves no real purpose (except of course in certain real life role-playing situations) Even driving a car was sort of roleplay it was a fairly pointless exercise when you could fly or tp. Maybe that’s why artists are so prevalent in SL with no RL constraints including gravity. There are no real limits here with the exception of material/tier and subscription costs possibly. Ok this is going nowhere and isn’t making a lot of sense, a bit like the last post in a way :) still I’ll carry on and maybe like monkey’s writing the complete works of Shakespeare, something will make sense in the end.(some hope )  . So imperfect roads or not, I decided to walk on them for a while as they were close to the coast line. I stopped at a little shack by the side of the road to get my bearings

and then I moved on and stopped further along the road to take a look at a sign for the W.S.P.A. (The World Society for the protection of Animals).

This obviously took my interest as they were campaigning for animal rights. I am a patron for several animal rights and welfare charities in RL and I try to contribute and support their campaigns as often as possible but I wish sometimes that the campaigners of these various charities would band themselves together under one flag for greater strength. Just because they have different ideas on how to campaign does not mean they want different things. There are so many smaller organisations that would benefit from working under a united front. And I think this go’s for similar charitable causes in general. That saying, I do think virtual worlds are a relatively cheap and worthwhile place to make people aware of the work they do .

 bla bla bla there I go again  II STOP Right that’s definitely enough of the rabbiting . (For the time being)…On with the tour……>>>>>>>>> FORWARD.

After looking at the signs for the WSPA I started off down the road and found myself back to where I had come from back at the little hut by the side of the road.

Oh dear my directions were really messed up I think I travel north and south better than I travel from west to east :) i should take heed of the map more. I set off again with intent on getting my direction right this time checking the map every now and then to be sure. I was approaching the volcanic island Sims and looking at the map I could see what appeared to be a huge volcano in the sim of Mahulu There was a river stretching down from the crater rim so I rezzed a boat on the coast of Palulop and set sail .

There was no wind as usual and for some unfathomable reason I don’t like to cheat by using false wind so after a while I switched the motor on. The scenery began to change to a sort of volcanic ash grey and the grass became greener I guess do to the high nutrient content of the soil.

I headed up in to the mouth of the river and managed to push myself underneath a low bridge.

There is a command for making the boat phantom but I can never remember it, still it makes things more fun getting under obstacles by pushing them.

The river wound round a series of bends and then it split with a second distributary heading off to the sea whilst the main body of the river sat higher than the two streams and flowed over a fall.

 There was a small temple structure with a landing jetty to my left so I moored up and stepped ashore. On the other side of the waterfall there was a blue disc like object floating in the water which said touch to rez an inflatable boat

 so I touched it and sure enough received an inflatable boat. when I sat in the boat the boat said “ You are not the owner” but then said, “But that’s ok “ which I thought was quite funny . One thing I think that everyone tries when they first arrive in SL is to sit on or in a vehicle that does not belong to them. Usually you just get kicked off, occasionally you’re sent skywards but you soon learn the “ This vehicle does not belong to you” message which is written in to most vehicle scripts.

 The inflatable boat also told me that it had a leak but would probably last the journey up the river . I took my chances and headed upstream. The boat did appear to have a leak as it had said, but it managed to carry me up the river eventually to a high fall cascading down from a small but fairly deep tarn.

Above this I could see a suspension bridge traversing the gorge above.

I deflated the boat and jumped ashore making my way up to the tarn (Not Gorean riding bird) above the tarn a huge rock jutted out from the slope. When I checked on it I found it to be even bigger than I thought as it was buried deep in to the hillside.

I made it up to the top of the gorge and waiting on the flat plain above I found four monkeys sitting around a black monolith

obviously a reference to the film 2001 A Space Odyssey. In the film when the black  monolith on earth arrived everything changed.

Crossing the creaky suspension bridge I tracked over to the foot of the volcano that I had first seen on the map.

At the base of the crater I met a scripted polar bear called Coldfoot who held out his paw for me to shake.

 Coldfoot was under the impression he was at the North Pole but seemed to be enjoying the heat generated from the nearby volcano although luckily it was not hot enough to melt his igloo.

 Leaving Coldfoot I started climbing the steep crater side.

 I slipped a few times on the unstable lava rock but eventually got to craters edge. It was very high up.

There was a little platform on one side of the crater built by Ryan Linden and there was another at the very bottom built by Eric Linden. I think maybe the volcano had been scripted to explode at some stage. Whether it still did I didn’t find out.

It certainly didn’t do anything whilst I was there. Eric had also made the red lava that contained bubbles made by Ben Linden. I’m sure it was all meant to do something but didn’t any more, maybe someone can tell me what it did. Perhaps the moles can fix it if it’s broken .Donning a space helmet for protection :) I jumped down into the molten lava

 It was deep and I found absolutely nothing at the bottom

oh well you never know do you. I might have found the answer to life etc.

 but jumping into the deep crater had reminded me about something  the Bakers had said in a comment on a previous post  that I should take a look at the rabbit hole (as they had called it ) that they had discovered in Blackmount so while I was thinking about it I thought I would go see it so that’s what I did .

There’s nothing like a bit of spontaneity  . I teleported over and found the rabbit hole just as Baker had said with the odd-shaped spike thing seemingly being tugged towards the hole.

Most peculiar, a bit like the bugspikes I had found in Spinach

but the other way round.

  Now this was a very deep hole even maybe a little bit scary look at the depth of that thing.

 I decided to throw something down it first before venturing down myself. I rezzed a wooden cube on the piece of land adjoining the rabbit hole then edited it to a position over the top of the hole.

Then I made the cube physical and it dropped down into the hole. I watched as it hurtled down the shoot getting smaller and smaller eventually disappearing beneath the water that I could see near the bottom.

 Hmmm Oh well In for a penny in for a pound as they say And without hesitation I launched myself off the side of the steep rabbit hole edge and dropped like a stone wooooooooooooooAAAHHHHH.

 When I got to the bottom I found myself beneath the water and standing on a greyish rocky surface.

Just by me was my wooden cube which had safely made it down to the bottom. I experimented by sitting on the cube and pushing myself through the sides of the rabbit hole

 but found I could not go any further out than the edge of the cube.

 I moved the cube back in and pushed it slightly . the cube being still physical rolled around  a bit with me on it

 then suddenly went ballistic and shot out of the hole like a rocket, carrying me with it AHHHHHHHHHH 

I can’t remember where it took me mostly straight up I was too busy trying to get off the cube .

In the end I had to reboot.

 I’m guessing I was lucky to get away with my second life but there you go these things have to be tried. What risks I take for SL science  :)

I figured it would be safer back inside the volcano:)

After I got back to the crater and had climbed out . I made my way down

I came back down to the river and near the landing stage I found another type of inflatable boat that I could rez 

and make my way back down to the sea at Olopue. I swam across the channel there to the road . Someone had built a large sort of landing strip with brightly coloured markings aswell as a couple of little creature things,

 most odd and interesting

I think the one on the right looked a bit like Mickey Mouse but without arms and legs and the one on the left was a cat but it’s ears were not finished or perhaps it didn’t need ears. Why would it need them ???? 

Around the corner in the sim of Laka I came across a funicular railway which is a train that goes up and down a cliff side usually pulled by cable.

This one was powered by water. I’ve looked it up and there is such a thing in RL there’s one down  in the county of Devon in England.

I took a ride down the cliff side in it . as I went down water was pumped from a tank beneath the train I’m not sure exactly how this worked but it was cleverly scripted to do so.

 At the bottom was a boat chandlers selling several different types of boats . I resisted the urge to buy one, my inventory seems pretty full of stuff at the moment  I was due for a stock take . Every now and then I take myself off ,usually to Mischief where I can sort through my inventory . Often rezzing stuff out on the beach that I have no idea what it will be until it’s standing there in front of me. It’s truly amazing the rubbish I pick up in world. as well as that I tend to hang on to half-finished building projects just incase I decide to carry on with them. I still end up keeping stuff that I know I’ll never need.

 There was still an urge to buy something so I took myself off to the malls in search of an invent filler

Meanwhile while I satisfy this craving for something new here is a commercial break ………………………..

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…………………………….. !

Ok I’m back

 There we are that’s better New clothes new hair and ready to carry on

 :) I know it’s just a small change  and I’ll probably not stick with the hair  but hey I’m still trying .

 Back in Laka at the boat shop, I studied a map of the route out to sea so I could head out to the Nuba regions.

 I didn’t study it too well though and after rezzing the motorboat and heading out I ended up hitting the ban lines.I even tried flying out on a magic carpet

and still managed to hit the damn things. I found the Nuba regions very pretty with their  winding water ways around the small islands. The only thing was the sheer amount of ban lines and I know I mention this nearly every post but it just so infuriated me this time. Every turn I made I was hitting them . I ended up swimming a lot of the way. I would have loved to have sailed gently down the stream around the many fine builds, but you little island mentality people who put those ghastly red flashing strings things up all over the place just will not allow me that pleasure You won’t will you Ggrrrr. I always hope when I have a moan that someone might see this and think twice about sticking ban lines up. (Yes crazy) .So between swimming and trying to rez the boat time and time again I did manage to see a few nice builds like this little homestead

 and this hopeless lighthouse at Urdu not because it was a bad build, it’s just that it failed to keep the ships off the rocks :)

 My favourite build though was the Sinking Inn at Zazi by Paradox Ruska

 a fantastic  building in sort of separate time frames showing how things change.

 Now I’m not quite sure if I’ve got this right but one of the inns is a ghost of a building as it would have been in the past  and the other is the present day building when the waters have risen above it with all the fittings and fixtures strewn all over the river bed and fish swimming through the remains. I think that’s it  although it might be the other way round and the building in the water is in the future.    I went  back there later to take a few extra  pics and I chanced upon the builder Paradox   standing on the jetty. it’s not often I manage to meet the creator of  a great build like this  so I stopped to have a chat with him and a very pleasant gentleman  he was indeed, a fellow Brit I might add which probably explains why I managed to meet him in the first place.(time differences and all that ) Paradox did tell me all about the building  but my head was so jumbled with stuff by the time I got to write it down  . But anyway If you get the chance , it’s definitely worth a visit .

Inside the present-day Inn,  a clock on the wall Tp’s you through time and under the water to the sunken Inn of  emm the future/past/present

 I carried on past the ban lines and security systems mostly swimming as the lines seemed to go from one side of the stream to the other

It was nice to find a security system at one point that actually said” Hi Welcome” ,it even said “Goodbye” as I left the area which made a pleasant change from being given 5 seconds to leave . I think I must have crossed this again as I received an emailed IM from the security system saying another goodbye to me. I wonder if it’ll send me a birthday greeting. Perhaps I should send in a jira requesting that you should be able to make friends with inanimate objects   then we could  build our own friends

 In Lozi I found a really nice sandbox called Harbinger It looked like an excellent place to learn to build and I would recommend to anyone who is learning building skills to take a look here.

There are many helpful tutorials and tips as well as free textures and sculpties to help you on your way.

As much as I wanted to stay and build something I remembered I was on a tour and would forever be if I didn’t get a move on so I headed off south

crossing several sims worth of open sea

and edging round the Grange and Carnforth sim with its excellent  statue of liberty

Then a quick canoe ride in Furness. I think it was Furness it could of been a bit further on my notes are terrible.  It did remind me though that I want to buy a canoe before the next leg of the tour . Such a nice way of travelling unfortunately I lost the canoe at the next sim crossing.

 I made my way steadily towards the hidden lake sims, passing Pooley stage (another welcome area) and then up to the very first place I ever saw in this amazing world:

 Orientation Island. I have to say I didn’t think Orientation Island was still around. But when I saw it on the map I just had to pay a visit.

It was exactly how I remembered it over 3 years ago.

(wavy lines and harp music as I reminisce)

 I had been seeing stuff about virtual worlds for a while on the internet and on TV once or twice.

 Just to get away to a place outside of the real world, which at the time I had completely become disillusioned with, seemed like a good idea. I would still have to come back to the real world, but my intention was just to escape from the hurt and cruelty of reality for a while which is how it’s mainly been since.

 I have to say SL was not my first choice of worlds. I tried the world “There” first of all which incase you haven’t heard has ended recently.

 At the time I tried it , for some unknown reason it didn’t want to work on my PC. Remarkably for SL  when I loaded it ,It worked first time and dumped me straight on to orientation island.

 I don’t know about other people but I found Orientation Island a great place to learn the basics of SL.

 With its simple path across an island leading to tasks that showed you how to use your interface, why would you need more. Yes you had to read the help cards and not just run across the island to the end like I know some did . I made an effort to learn the controls. It wasn’t a huge effort. The basic movement and communication control is all you need to get started in this world. The rest you can learn as you go on but a small effort on your part is all that’s needed. The rest of the stuff like building, photography and groups etc I just read up on using the internet, Googled it as they say now. That’s what search engines are for aren’t they. I’m still amazed when people in group chat ask for things like site addresses and how to do this and that etc. I just do a search and find the answer for them, but why can’t they do it? It’s all out there. People have spent time and effort to tell you so have a look you lazy sods :) I guess people enjoy helping people really, I do as it makes me feel slightly more needed.

So here I was looking down that path again it really was a memory jogger. At the bottom of the path I found the parrot that would talk back to you and give you a kiss if you asked it for one

 and there was also the beach ball where you learned to push and lift physical objects. At the end of the path was a chasm that you had to fly across in order to get to a temple.

 If you succeeded you were ready to enter the big bad world of second life. I made the flying lesson  first time but I notice now when I look down into the water there are instructions down there for folks who are unsuccessful at their first attempts .

This process was enough to have me hooked especially the flying business that was a big Wow factor. It felt like I had entered my dreams. Even then I had some affinity with my avatar I felt like it was a part of me, something more than just a game character, some part of me had definitely gelled with the clunky badly moulded Ruthed out character that waddled on to the screen in front of me:)

(wavy lines and harp music brings us out of nostalgia )

 I didn’t know this back then but up from Orientation Island was the home of some of the Lindens, Linden village Annexe and that is where I headed for next.

Linden village spreads across six sims the first being Levenhall and lies north of the orientation island and the two public help islands. I briefly stopped on one of the help islands

 but as I didn’t really need any help I swam off to the rest of the village .

 The first Linden owned building I came upon was a sort of cinema conference setup. It had a large screen showing a film about space travel.

 The complex was owned by Infinity Linden and there was a sign up on the left hand screen .

I sat and watched the film for a while but it was rather dull so I decided to see if I could get any bears whilst I was visiting the village.

 The Lindens are famous for their bears amongst other things. Also I wanted to know if any of the Lindens that lived in the village were builders. And just possibly I might pluck up the courage to talk to one of them, they always seem so busy though.  I didn’t want to disturb them too much.

 I hiked around taking photographs and looking for bears for some time .

 I did manage to find a few bears I could copy. One of them from Enus Linden who had also built a nice little temple where the bear sat.

 and the other from H Linden who I noticed was one of the Brighton Brit Lindens.

 H had built a sort of stempunk/ robot bear

and had also built prim processing machines inside his house.a bit like the prim rig in the ANWR sim.

 Most of the builds were mainly built by other residents but the occasional part of a house was self built . I can’t say I found any Linden built builds that really impressed me. I was surprised to find a plot of land owned by the renowned artist Poid Mahovlich in the Linden village.I only know of Poid through her art which I’ve seen at Burning life. I guess she works quite closely with the Lindens perhaps they have no artists of their own. There were a couple of Lindens at home but like I said I didn’t want to disturb them. If I had seen one of the Lindens just walking around like me I would have said hi and got a pic but the opportunity never arose. I made my way back to Levenhall where I had began and then crossed over to Beaumont where I found another bear to copy by Periapse Linden.

More of a cat actually but I’ll not quibble. He also had an avatar cannon that I thought I’d have a go in as I had never tried one before.

 BANG     

It shot me right over to Rodney Linden’s futuristic black tower. Wooo great fun I did it again and again lol.

NOW (Just a little side note about the new viewer  ) It seems there were not a lot of real builders or Linden artists amongst the Lindens in the village which might explain why the new version 2 viewer I was starting to use seemed so awkward in dealing with prims and generally looking at stuff. With all those clunky menus popping out everywhere destroying the view I was still finding it awkward after a couple of weeks of using. Yes it is a Beta version but I just didn’t like the whole feel of it and couldn’t see myself doing so unless they completely redid it ,which they weren’t about to. Now I know I said you should put a bit of effort into these things and I did, I tried, am still trying but any FOOL especially this one could see this was no improvement over the last viewer.

 I knew how to use it, I knew what all the controls did, I just couldn’t see the improvement , I couldn’t see much at all with that great big menu of buttons scrolling over the screen and pushing my huds off the other side .

Look at this screen shot if I want my inventory open and minimap and chatting at the same time and as for building don’t even get me started  why do away with the pie chart (idiots) GRRRRRRrrrrr.

 Sure there were a few bells and buzzers like web on a prim which was cool and extra layers but that wasn’t swaying it for me and so for the time being, as I had a choice I thought I’d try Kirsten Lee’s latest shadow viewer.

Now look at this also with inventory open minimap and chatting

 This at the time was her S19 viewer. Ah bliss I even managed to get some shadows with it.

 Everything I needed neatly packaged.

 Mind you the new viewer 2 might of fixed my purple bunny with its alpha layer you wouldn’t need invisiprims for the bunneh then and Kirsten has now started making a v2 viewer of her own.

If only we could have the old style viewer with some of the new features I’m sure it would be a winner.

 To round this leg of the trip up I left the Linden village and moved across into the Campus region to visit a build by the artist and writer Mariner Trilling who had built what was called “the Tallest thing in second life”

It’s an enormous stack of around 300 prims reaching way up into the sky about two miles high.

 Whilst I was there Kou the Rabbit sky pirate came over and when we had eventually reached the top of the structure

we jumped off the top and sailed gently down using Kou’s wonderful paraglider Wind rider.

I don’t know if you’d call Mariner’s tallest thing in SL art or a structure or what. I think I would just call it, great fun, here’s what Mariner said about it.

Well that’s it until the next time and who knows what changes will have come by then, So whether you’re reading this in the future or present or even if you’ve read it in the past have a great day and Enjoy your second life   (yes even you people with red  lines round your houses you have a good day too  :)    )

Bye for now.

It’s always seems difficult to get started again after a break, and this winter holiday seems no exception to the rule. Although I haven’t been exactly lazing around. During the break I’ve rented myself a plot of land in Steelhead, a Victorian American steampunky sim I learned about from Mr Headburro. At the moment it is just a building site with  a beautiful gypsy caravan on it just like the one I saw in  Tawny during my Going Round The Bend post

 Since renting the land, I’ve been busy building a butterfly house for the town, where along with having a colourful display of butterflies, I plan to breed vampire moths, in fact I already have bred a few specimens. I might even breed some anti zombie moths aswell .

Now I’m not going to show you the complete house yet because I want it as a surprise with a  grande opening and everything, sometime  maybe around easter, but here’s a pic of part of the inside which doesn’t give too much away, besides it will be ages till it opens. and even I’ll forget what it looks like by then.

 As well as this I’ve been sidetracked with winter activities such as skating

 and attending the annual Linden snowball fights

 and of course there’s been shopping . I have to keep an eye on how much I spend now. I’m not getting that stip end from the Lindens anymore which I used to buy myself something nice with every now and then.  Now I have to watch what I’m spending it’s so easy to go mad on stuff. Mind you I’m not shelling out on a premium subscription any more so I ’ll be saving a bit that way, I just need to budget that’s all. I do intend to start selling again as soon as I’m settled so that hopefully will pay for the treats. I’ve made several nice bits and pieces for the butterfly house which would make nice standalone gifts including a cute little humming-bird,some furniture and of course my moths.

Another thing I did over the holidays was start following rabbits.  They seem to be all over the place at the moment.(or is it just me) They’ve even brought out a sort of sion rabbit called an Ozimal bunny.

The rabbit following began whilst building the butterfly house at a university sandbox . I’ve found university sandboxes the best places to build in as they tend to be fairly quiet and some are even policed to stop griefing. Anyway I was taking a break from making the B.H. and was  making a happy holiday /extravagant particle /sound 3d thingy greeting card. At the time I  was just  sitting on the wall that surrounds the university sandbox………

 The sandbox  by the way is  in a sim called Whitmyre and is in the Robert E Cook Honors College part of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania  and has a quite excellent archaeology department. I know this because, Miss Nova Saunders ,one of the tutors at the College showed me around.

 I call her Miss because she’s a teacher and might give me detention or lines or something if I do wrong.

It’s a good job she isn’t an English Teacher:)

This pic is of a  Mayan temple excavation in Northern Belize around 100BC

and this one shows Native American huts as they were 1000 AD

 It must  be  so fun now to learn stuff in a virtual world. I wish they had this sort of thing when I was studying. It even has an underwater dig part to it

 and everything is based on real life digs. Virtual worlds are such excellent places for educating people, especially for historical subjects which can be recreated so easily here. I’m actually learning quite a bit myself about Victorian times as I build my butterfly house. +

…………So I was sitting on this wall when I saw these two girls chatting away together and one of them was dressed in a rabbit costume and she is  saying about the new watch she had recently got, just like the rabbit, in the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland story by Lewis Carroll.

Well in the story Alice follows the rabbit down the hole into Wonderland, so that’s what I thought I’d do. Not go down a hole or anything after all I’m all ready in Wonderland. I just decided to follow her trail. Mind you I could hardly get up and follow her about could I, I’d soon get a TOS report against me and besides if she had any sense she might teleport away from her stalker and then I wouldn’t know where she was . No, what I decided to do was have a  look at her profile pics, so I did  and low and behold I found on them  a place called Sanu, in a sim called Scribble  The description of Sanu had amongst others the  words Bunny and Bunneh.  So I teleported over to the place and found it to be a  fashion  shop selling various  clothes and accessories.  It had a sort of Alice in wonderland/ bunny  theme about it with large cakes, bunnies and bunneh’s dotted about the place.

 I’ve actually since gone back and taken a few more photos of the rabbits there

 and whilst I was there apart from winning a prize of some cool pink hair I bought these really cute earrings with the tiniest rabbits I’ve seen

 as well as a tiny butterfly.

While I was there the first time around, another girl teleported in as I was looking around the place  and I  glanced at her profile pics. This time I found a place called Alice’s Garden an obvious link on my rabbit quest so I teleported over to a sim called Carmina where Alice’s garden was located.

 Alice’s garden was a sort of, I don’t know , sort of a garden centre selling all sorts of wierd and wonderful creations. I bought this unusual bird chair there.

The rest of the place although essentially a mall was quite a quirky interesting build with rustic story book wooden houses and unusual not your run of the mill sort of gifts.

 I bought several items from the shops there.

 As I wrote this piece I went back there as my alt Coffee the bear  for a pic of the bunny that sits in front of Alices Garden and I bumped :) into a girl called Jenn Hienrichs. I took a photo of her with the bunny and she gave me a link to her blog  SL Things To Do  which amazingly I’d been reading only that day. True, It rang a bell when she said, but it wasn’t till I looked it up again that I remembered. So Hi Jenn . Great blog by the way especially  for us explorers.

Just look at that big  patchwork rabbit , he even has a big pocket watch and monocle

 I looked for another clue in following the rabbit trail but there was no obvious choice apart from a sign saying something about a film to watch. I ended up Teleporting in  to the sky where in a sort of waiting room by a station.

I sat and watched a short film about a guy called Burton who had lost his sweetheart called Carmina. Obviously Carmina was whom the sim had been named after She had apparently gone  looking for herself as many people do in SL and he was left on his own forever searching for his sweetheart .Awww. There were clues consisting of photo’s that he had thrown out of their photo album and they were scattered around all over  the sim. These photographs were places Carmina and Burton had been too before and it was hoped by Burton that she might go to them  again. As you found the photos you put them in a passport that was given to you at the ticket office on the station.

 There was a short train ride which left you back down on the ground and then you were on the search .Each photograph had a landmark to an interesting location in SL, It was a very well done and a  good way to get people to go exploring and of course with a mission to find  Carmina.  Well Carmina wasn’t a rabbit  so I left the trail there and sat down to have a read of my book  under a tree .

What? a rabbit..!! Where?  :) 

 I could have been there for ages searching for rabbit trails. but as I said I had other things to do and I couldn’t find any more bunneh trails so it was back to the University.

Hmm right…… Now all this sounds like it has nothing to do with the tour really has it? Well it has in a strange sort of way  . You see, the one other rabbit I have been following recently is the Rabbit sky pirate. Yes the Rabbit Sky Pirate who has a wonderful blog where he recounts his journey’s across the SL continents. Much the same as me except he get’s on with it and doesn’t waffle (rabbit) away and colour every B orange , or any other colour .

I got the link to his blog from Baker blinker who kindly dropped me a note about this rabbit explorer. His blog is in Japanese but you can translate it with Google and I always find the translation from Japanese to English quite endearing. Now then you might be wondering what this has to do with anything connected with the tour………….well

 The connection is that after making my way back to the shore, (do you remember where I ended up before the Holiday)     (Come on get on with it)..

Yes in the middle of Heterocera, that is after I got My free Michael linden mug and shirt from the vendor,  (yawn)    Well I was standing there getting my bearings. When out the corner of my eye I noticed someone standing a little way along the lake side.

 Taking a closer look I could see it was a rabbit on a helicopter launch pad. Now at the time I didn’t twig that the rabbit was the Rabbit Sky Pirate (for it was) not even when he came over and introduced himself and said he knew my blog.

I had only just began reading his blog and He was some what taller than the rabbit I had seen on it. I suppose in the back of my mind I did have an idea that he could have been the Rabbit Sky Pirate but as I was talking to him at the time it was difficult to look up his blog even though he had given me the url for the blog , it didn’t say ‘Rabbit Sky Pirate’ on the url. It actually said http://kuzoku.blogspot.com/…….. that is because his name is Kou. (not Rabbit Sky Pirate :) ) So all the time I was talking I didn’t really know who he was, but now I do and we have become friends .and I have visited Kou’s beautiful gardens in the mountains and even had some breakfast/ Dinner with him.

So that was the connection with rabbits and the tour. So after I had met Kou, who had just purchased some land on the shore , it was actually time to get going on the tour .

(at last )

 (Told you it took a while to get going).

(well here we go )>>>>>>

I made my way back down to the coast off of Pachylia on the outer ring island and from there tried to take my boat out through the offshore housing,

but was hopelessly cut down by ban lines. So after getting myself sorted I swam the rest of the way

 keeping a safe distance from various sharks

 until I could find a place to rez my balloon. I thought it the safer option as I could rise high above any ban lines and still see down below with a higher draw distance.

There was one last place I wanted to go before leaving Heterocera and that was the Temple of Iris better known as the Moth temple, a Linden Historical sight. So when I had eventually found a rezzing place I set off in my balloon and drifted calmly over the sea in a southerly direction . I eventually spied land and I stopped over a small church that had been built on one of the tiny islands connected by boardwalk.

 It was early morning , still dark  and the church bell could faintly be heard chiming above the dawn chorus and chirping crickets. I clambered  out from my balloon and looking round  I could make out the top of the temple above the tree tops, with it’s moon like orb floating above a giant moth effigy.

 I made my way round the boardwalk and walked slowly and as reverently as I could up to the base of the temple . There were no stairs to the various levels but I felt it fitting that you should fly up there like a moth and so I rezzed my butterfly wings and flew up to the first level . I also took along  a fairy butterfly that I had bought at the same time I purchased the wings . I had called her Moth so I thought it only right that she’d be with me at the temple.

 As the Moth temple is an entry place for new av’s , I found  a few people standing there, most of them changing their appearance . I’m quite amazed at the way some  newer av’s less than a couple of months old seem to have filled their group listings, got new skin and hair and generally sorted out their second lives within such a short time span. I suppose they could be alts but they don’t act as though they’ve been around for very long . It took me ages to even think about changing my skin from the default. You just get used to the way you look and I didn’t feel like changing. As for groups It was a really big thing when I met the wizard and he asked me to join his  group. Me being shy had hardly spoken to anyone and I remember being so excited not knowing about magic and roleplay in SL it was like for real and so exciting .

 As far as I knew nobody was speaking to each other here, everyone concentrating on getting their look just right, so I left them in peace and flew up to the higher levels.

Making an inspection of the temple I found that Xenon Linden the guy who had built the temple, had began building it sometime in Feb 2005. That’s the same year he had  built the great wall .

I flew down to the base and took a picture of  four huge wooden legs which supported the many columns and arches above .

While I was there I spied some lamps that apparently rezzed moths , I guess they rezzed them during the evening as there were none about at that time. I decided to let a couple of my own vampire moths out around the temple so that they could soak up the atmosphere. I first checked there were no vampires about , I didn’t want to cause a scene. It was day time anyway so they should have been safely tucked away in their coffins

Across from the temple , I spied a set of large Moth wings attached to a striped moth body.

 They were owned by Prokofy Neva and had been made by Osprey Therian both names I knew well; Prokofy from the extremely topical and informative Second Thoughts blog that he writes and Osprey from her also highly enlightening and entertaining  blog Atomic Raygun  aswell as the travelling variety show she directs and acts in TSMGO . I’ve seen it on several occasions now and it’s very funny and extremely well done .

The wings were sitting outside some huts on the Moth Temple Preserve Infohub set up by Prokofy and built by Jessica Ornitz and they were free to copy. Well I couldn’t resist trying the moth on so I flew over and copied myself a set and once I had adjusted my self inside the moth avatar , I flew back up in to the centre of the temple where a fire was burning away in a pit down below .

 Inside the flames and smoke of the fire I found a red box belonging to Ryan Linden.

 At first I thought I had found another Linden mug and t-shirt vendor but instead it contained a clue to some sort of scavenger hunt. You could click on the box and it would take you to a URL and give you a clue, but the link seemed to be broken.

After exploring the temple a bit more I crossed back over to the infohub to have a look around . Amongst the many attractions and games

I found a great music room where you could play along on a guitar or drum to a writhing beat,

 there was a hairdressers where I got a shampoo,

 a bath house

 so relaxing after a long trip,

 a bar where I bought an anti vampire garlic necklace for free

 and also a tattoo parlour. I was a little disappointed that there were no tattoos for sale as I would of liked a moth tattoo to remember my time at the temple.

 Further round Jessica had built a peaceful little isle with various animals/ birds and a temple with a place to meditate.

It was time to leave the temple and continue on my journey .  I decided to try and walk the boardwalk as far as I could.

 It got a bit difficult in parts to see which way I had to go but I tried to head south as far as possible.

I noticed a fairly large gathering of people over in a building that I was heading towards so I took a look in.

It seemed a normal shopping type mall with a gothic theme about it and quite a few campers scattered around to boost up the numbers . An Italian girl asked me for help in finding a vampire skin Maybe I should have let my moths regurgitate something  but  I ended up instructing her on using the search facility on the viewer.Silly me I didn’t stop to think that maybe there were skins in the building we were in doh. I spent some time in telling her the buttons to press. She either humoured me by going along with my instructions or else she probably had been quite surprised when she eventually teleported to some completely different shop on a different continent altogether, nowhere near where she was used to being. I thought that just maybe she might of started a whole new second life, finding new friends and places to go just  because of my dumb instructions

. At the end of the boardwalk I rezzed my balloon again and set my course south rising up   high 

 from there I just had a relaxing flight watching the scenery go by and the shops and houses beneath me. I was surprised at how long some of the big buildings took to rez, some of the larger ones never rezzing completely even though I was going very slowly past them.

 Looking down I could see the fishing boat ferry that I remember Ugiyasu (another  fellow explorer) had mentioned in her blog @YAMATO and I decided to try and catch it. I bailed out of the balloon

 but by the time I got to the ground I had missed it so I made my way to the road and found myself in Tuliptree.

 There was lots of new train stuff going on since I last came this way. When I had first set foot on this continent there was very little in the way of independent train makers

 I walked around a while and I found the second Life Railway Commission’s office of which I am a member

. The Aim of the SLRC is to oppose the takeover of Linden railway with automated Linden trains and signalling systems.and keep the central rail which guides some of the trains.

I learnt so much when building my trains. All about texturing, prim work, animation and even bits about scripting and also it was just great fun when I had eventually made it, to actually ride my train along the central rail track that runs around the Heterocera atoll  it would be a shame to see that gone.

 There are lots of people who create vehicles to run on this line so I support their efforts to keep the tracks free of automation.  I’m sure if the Linden’s put their minds to it they could build an underground track beneath the current railway that was fully automated or maybe one overhead . Why ruin something that works and that many people enjoy.

I’m not sure that the guy behind the desk was so dedicated to this job though 

 I carried on down the road down through Columbia and into Cecropia. It looked like Zimmy who owned the shopping parade in Cecropia and whom I had rented a shop from for a while, was extending his miniature railway that ran around his mall

I followed it down into the rabbit warren of tunnels that ran underneath the land

 At the end of the track I met an old friend of mine.

I think he must have swum across from Purple. I hadn’t seen his smile since around May last year

Do you remember this Snap shot 

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

By Lewis Carroll

My how time goes by so quick  ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’

Returning to the surface I found the pipeline that runs to the ANWR prim rig and I stood there for a while waiting for the main ferry to come in . Whilst I was waiting , the little fishing boat that I had missed earlier turned up

so I decided to take a ride in it.

 It took me back up to Tuliptree and then returned me to the pipeline. When I returned I carried on waiting for the main ferry but it didn’t seem to be running so I debated as to whether to sail or motorboat across the strait. In the end I decided to swim.

 I know it’s winter and the sea is pretty cold at this time of year but I love swimming and just maybe nobody had swam this sea before. I might be the first, who knows? So changing quickly in to my cozzy I dived in and braved the deep ocean. At least I knew there were no sharks in here maybe just the odd crocodile :)

 so after that  fairly lengthy swim which I rather enjoyed I clambered up the jetty in Purple.

And I was once again on the shores of Sansara.

Changing out of my virtually wet swimsuit

 I set off along the coast of purple

 but not before this little guy hopped straight  out in front of me adorned in festive red nose and stuck on  antlers.

 Oh yes , he was  described as a Jackalope ,  a mythical  North America creäture

But he wasn’t fooling me,

 I know what he was       )))))))))

 C YA.

   (\_/)
  (0_0)
C(“)(“)

this post is dedicated to Lewis Carroll  born  27th January 1872  . Who probably gave me my first glimpse of fantasy and also a welcome introduction to absolute nonsense.

LOVE NISH

 The sim was mainly owned by a Buba Biberman who by the looks of it was a watch maker by trade .

 Taking a look at the diner which was called the Silver King Grill I noticed it had been built by Bill Linden and the road that ran up to it had been built by Michael Linden. I guess they must have been friends of Buba.

I had some Cherry pie at the diner as it looked mighty tasty, yum yum very nice. There was a band stand next door to the diner, but nobody was playing that night which was a shame .

 I finished my pie and crossed the street to the small parade of shops. One of the shops was a chemist where I got a prescription for some pills,

 well you never know what ailments you can pick up on these tours, best to play safe  .

 I re crossed the street and found planted on the other side, a telehub built by Ryan Linden in 2006 and now owned by Bubba.

 I sort of like the idea of telehubs and folks having to walk or fly to their final destination. I heard there were  possibly  going to be buses laid on for folks to get to the houses and shops at one time. I think that would have been fun for strangers to meet up and take a journey together. Just a few yards from the telehub I purchased some beautiful textures at a shop called Lauren’s tiling textures. I bought them to go on the crystals that I had started to grow. I guess I could have mucked around in paint or Photoshop for an age and made something up, but these were exactly what I had been looking for, some really good quality textures at a quite reasonable price. So after I had done  a bit of shopping, had  something to eat, and taken some drugs  I was ready to go.  The two lane highway that Michael Linden had built finished at the end of the sim and was replaced once again by the route 2 cobblestone, mole made road.

 I still like the attention to detail that has been put into this roadway. I even found I could buy one of the man-hole covers for $0 (just as a memento of my trip) and the park benches and waste paper bins just added to the enjoyment of walking this route.

 In the next sim of Ginsberg I found a multitude of huge spheres floating in the air.

Each sphere had a separate theme such as space, beach, winter scene, and desert.

Once you flew in to them you became encapsulated in to your own tiny world. Quite neat in a way, they were all for sale and had been built by Tommy Parrot, who it seemed also owned most of the land that I was passing through. He had even had a zebra crossing built by Garden Mole to cross from his mall over to his other market place on the other side of the road.

 His stuff must have been selling well or maybe he just had some spare cash.

 In Quaker I found a western theme going on, with covered wagons and bucking bronco’s .

I liked these two Tarns that were perched near the Saloon

 but I wasn’t so keen on the decor inside. All those skins gave me the creeps. I’d far prefer to see them on prim animals. :) I decided to leave without taking a drink as I usually do. Not that I need to you understand  I just like to soak up the virtual ambience of a place .

 Hurrying along, taking just the briefest of stops to take a look at anything that caught my eye, I breezed through the next sims eventually reaching Tawny, where I spied a pretty little tree house sat up in an oak and surrounded by a summer meadow of wild flowers.

 I took a rest here for a while and then noticed a little way across the sim from me , a group of gypsy caravans parked up in a circle.

 I crossed the meadow to take a look at them.

 The texturing detail on this one was really well done,in fact it was beautiful

 Just nearby from the caravans a small market square was selling bits and bobs. I can’t resist having a nose round these small market squares you never know what you might find and I couldn’t believe it when the first stall that I looked at displayed a pack of tarot cards.

 Yes that’s right tarot as in THE FOOL tarot in my last post, what’s the odds on that happening. I just had to try them out, I would have been a fool not to or should that be I am a fool and that’s why I tried them out, I’m not sure.

 Anyhow there was a HUD that you wore and then you dealt the cards out in to various patterns. Not having ever used tarot cards I chose at random the Celtic cross pattern and for the significator (which should represent the seeker that being me ) I randomly chose The Magician 

Now I won’t go in to all the connotations with the infinity symbol and number 8 that this card holds you can read that up for yourselves as I did . The thing is I had no idea what I was really doing apart from finding out what my trip held in store. So after the cards had been dealt and not knowing what it all meant, I took a quick pic of them and then because something cropped up in RL I logged off.

The pic wasn’t all that great but you can make out most of the cards and what they represent .

My immediate future was the five of wands  I’ve linked this to  a Wiki result but there are many sites that go in to more detail. After making a search   I found it  meant; – Problems and possibly upheaval that simply cannot be avoided. Minor irritations may also occur, but whatever the circumstances, i.e. tests, opposition, trouble strife; great mental agility and the use of ones inner mental resources will be needed to triumph. Success can be achieved but only through relentless hard work. Hmm hard work I didn’t like the sound of that, this was meant to be a tour in a stress free virtual environment. I sort of was working in a way on this tour though , travelling and logging everything down so perhaps it meant working on this blog and I was definitely using  mental resources aswell :) .

 So it looked like there was a bit of stress  to come hmm oh well I’m fairly used to that. I won’t go through all the other cards but my best outcome the six of swords said Gradual change, movement or travel away form difficulty or imminent danger. The solution of current problems. Long journeys and passage from pain. Obstacles that are overcome. There you go what it was really saying, which is always good advice; Try hard and you will succeed :) simples.

 I did note that the fool card turned up in my distant past which didn’t really correspond to what my encounters had told me. I shall have to have another try again soon when I’m a bit more familiar with the deck, which incidentally I ended up buying from the stall.

Leaving the market I headed back down to the road. As I was crossing the meadow I heard a boinging sound coming from a small red particle cloud, but I couldn’t actually see where it was emanating from.

 I found two more of these clouds close to the road and up in the air. The prims must have been miniscule and what with the red cloud surrounding them even pressing ctrl- alt- T (which shows up transparent prims in red) wouldn’t locate them. It was rather pointless really but it occupied quite a bit of my time trying to find the dam prims.

 Why I bothered I don’t know, it was just annoying me. Anyway I was unsuccessful, they must have been some sort of griefing thing because I couldn’t see any other purpose to them apart from being an annoying puzzle.

 In the middle of Stout after the t junction where the road tees off to Rivulet and a dead-end, I stopped to look up at a huge rock like structure with a castle on top.

 It was obviously owned by vampires I didn’t need to look too far for traces of their rituals.

 It was as I was about to carry on that I noticed where the road wall curved away, The road curb stone that Bloomin Mole had laid was just sticking through the side of the wall. It was almost hidden from anybody just casually passing by and I had nearly missed it.

 It was quite obvious to me now, when I took a closer look. Yes there it was none other than my little friend the vampire moth. It had to be just look at those little jaws, see I’m not making this up, it’s there on the wall go take a look for yourself.

 So there was yet another warning sign for the bloodsuckers written in stone again. Yes I’m not a fan of vampires you might have guessed. Even with all this effort to try to romanticise the fiends I just don’t buy in to it. To me they have always been parasites They take your mortal life away and then you can’t go out during the day, no sunshine yuk, stuck indoors all day sleeping in coffins not a nice comfy bed no thanks.  And as for the latest line of so-called veggie vampires spawned from the twilight novels and film, even worse that they prey on poor defenceless animals. With luck my tiny pals the vampire moths will keep them in check ha ha ha ya haah ha ha ho ho hee hee Hhhck hmmm.

reaching  for the bottle I swallowed a couple of pills  :) ahh that’s much better

  I crossed in to Rivulet and a little way in, the road stretched across the sea to a small island There were three piers jutting out from the road all built by Mighty mole

 One had a tree on it, another had 7 white stone plaques in a circle and the middle one had a lighthouse at the end which by the looks of it had been struck at some time or other by lightning.

 Across on the island I discovered amongst the rhododendrons what appeared to be the remains of a stone house long since abandoned and with only the chimney and lower wall surviving.

Turning round I made my way back up to the t junction in Stout  and Followed the road south to Ear, I found it odd when I came across  this scripted green shiny seaweed planter on the boarder.

 it belonged to Ben Linden who had obviously left it after planting seaweed in the bay but it was quite a distance from the sea, maybe it had blown up with the wind.

 As I entered Satellite the road opened out into a sort of market square but a Linden owned market with nothing for sale

 It would have been nice to see the return of items set to an hour or so to allow people to set up stalls and sell their wares. They would obviously have to be there for that period and rerez the items or sale boards, but that would make it even better like what I was saying when I was on the great wall. A real marketplace is what’s needed an event for people to gather. As soon as I finish this tour I might set about arranging something like that , maybe it won’t work but I might as well give it a try You couldn’t even get a cup of coffee here all you could do was pose, as you stuck your head through some medieval stocks as though any one would want to do that honestly :)

 I reached the end of Route 2 in Snout and wondering how to continue I consulted my tarot cards.

 I still didn’t know what I was doing and wonder if I ever will there is such a lot to learn, good job there’s the internet .I did a five-card deal this time and the advice card was the Knight of cups which is a sort of go with your heart sort of card and the outcome was the moon card which when I looked at the story behind this card seemed to make perfect sense.(to a fool that is ) :) 

I decided after doing my pretty hopeless divinising and also by consulting the map, that I’d travel by boat, down the coast till I reached Vicina and then take a train from there to Lutra or there abouts . So I set sail well actually for the first bit I used my motor boat, I fancied a change and thought I’d give a little airing to my creation, not that I’m thinking of selling it now, it will just be a one-off .

 As I headed out to sea I found several more of the seaweed planters owned by Ben Linden

 and also a lump of lavender with another flower attached just floating up in the air??

There was certainly a lot of aqua/aerial horticulture going on in this area

 A few sims down the line and I got back into the yacht.

The wind was strong and I raced down the east coast. I made good time all the way to Vicina , but as I reached the sim the wind died and I ended up swimming ashore.

 I climbed up the bank and walked along the rail track for a way and after finding a rezzable area I set off in my train

I only stopped once to look at a  nice little cinema which was closed

(Well what did I expect?, One that was full up. Lol)

 I did find two blocks of plywood and somebody’s hair left behind in it though, which was kind of entertaining  .

 Well apart from that little diversion I had a smooth and uneventful journey. When I reached Dubia I abandoned the train for no real reason other than that I just wanted to stretch my pixels a little.

 After walking the tracks for a while I decided to swim down the river from Dubia to the coast. As I crossed the sim border from Dubia into Polia the land dropped down to meet up with the sea and although there was a waterfall I didn’t drop down and ended up swimming in mid-air a bit like the tunnel that I had swam through back in Moma.

 After eventually getting back down to the river I swam to the side

where a friendly looking pelican was preening itself.

 I decided to look around the house it stood in front of, which seemed kind of intriguing. I’m glad I did as the caves that lead from the house were absolutely fantastic there was something magical about the whole place, every corner that I turned led to some wonderful discovery.

 At the end of the cave system a room opened out with a circle of chairs around a blue pool.

 As I looked around, my eyes caught sight of the edge of one of the embroidered chairs. Was that what I thought it was?

My eyes were playing tricks maybe.

 Making my way back out of the caves I ventured up into the gardens above the house and caves. The gardens were beautifully laid out, lush with colour and teeming with wildlife the people who built these gardens paid careful attention to detail It hadn’t just been scattered around like so many gardens I’ve seen. The whole build was really well thought out. I noticed as I eventually left to carry on downstream that the sim seemed to end quite abruptly at the sea. I checked the map and realised that there should have been another sim Grahica at the end of Polia. There was a hole where Grahica should have been

 Dun dun derrrrr. (dramatic music)

 I waited for it to rez but it didn’t,

I waited some more…….

Oh well you say, the sim must have been down. That’s what I thought.

 I decided to try to walk into it. You can’t walk into a sim that’s down. If a sim is down it won’t let you It doesn’t exist. Yes but this seemed different I gingerly put a toe forward and to my surprise I floated.

 Yes floated like I was swimming. of course I had my swimming AO on but I wasn’t in the water I was above it . Then something even weirder started happening. I started jumping.

 I was bouncing up and down in the air/water whatever it was.

 It was surreal I bounced out a bit further

 and I think I must have twisted awkwardly because then I suddenly froze and was logged out . I’ve never experienced that before, I don’t mean being logged out I mean the bouncing in an empty sim syndrome that I experienced.

When I logged back in Grahica had returned and I was standing at the end of the river looking out to sea.

I rezzed my sailing boat and made my way down the coastline.

 The sailing was good with a steady wind behind me

On the way I saw another pelican this time swimming in the sea

and also the first sight of these sion chickens that I keep hearing about .

The next bird that I encountered was a bit more unusual Isn’t she sweet :)

 I soon reached the sim of Thera. It’s an interesting named sim is Thera . Most if not all of the Atoll continent’s sims have moth or moth connotation names but Thera is not only the name of a moth it’s also the name of a volcanic island 120 mile southeast of Greece in the Aegean sea that apparently exploded in the mid second millennium BC. The eruption was one of the largest volcanic events on Earth in recorded history. The island is known to the Greeks a Santorini and If you take a look at the satellite image it’s very like the atoll continent that I was travelling on even the mountains in roughly the same area 

As well as that, It’s also very similar in pattern to the UK   look!

 and for my friend bb, and other  residents who are interested  please note,  very close to the island of Patmos where St John in The cave of Armageddon received visions before writing the book of revelations.

 It was in the sim of Thera that I decided (unaided by visions, but maybe influenced by virtual drugs and rabbit holes);  to head inland for one of my little excursions.

I have never been to the very centre of Heterocera and so that is what I intended to do. Pushing the rudder hard to port I ventured into the heart of darkness ; in to the mouth of what many believe to be the remains of a gigantic SL extinct volcano The Atoll Central basin.

There were many routes leading in to the outer basin from the surrounding ocean of Heterocera I took a narrow strait starting in Idaea. It was very quiet only the lapping of water as my boat slipped very slowly through the channel.

 As the sky darkened, unfamiliar and slightly unnerving sounds could be heard up ahead, I caught glimpses of strange and unwieldy beasts as they occasionally broke the surface to see who dared to enter their territory.

 I also got a slightly stifling, muggy feeling asthough the air was getting warmer .

As dawn broke I found myself in Hagen and confronted by what must be one of the longest bridges on the mainland. It has to be in the region of four Sims long and constructed entirely of wood. It stood like a gateway to the inner world of the Atoll.

 I folded my mast and punted the boat under its span.

 The water although still fairly deep had large rocks sticking up just below the surface and I had to take care, not to run aground.

 There must also have been a wash from the ocean somewhere as I was surprised to see a large wave racing towards the shoreline. I couldn’t resist surfing my yacht along its length.

 When I finished the surf I found myself washed up next to my third pelican on this leg of the trip.

 I continued north eventually hitting a sort of manmade island in the sim of Pinastri

 I beached the yacht and from there walked and swam underneath the island across to the central basin

and then up on to the outer ring road

 The circle of land  inclined upwards towards the centre sometimes with almost sheer rock faces to tackle

 I did eventually reach the inner road that runs the length of the perimeter edge I looked around, you could see the other side of the cavity and the road running round quite easily. There were various houses and small shops dotted around the edge.

One of the shops was brightly lit with oriental patterns and glowing trees and like a moth to the flame I was drawn to its door.

 As I entered a tiny butterfly fairy fluttered over to welcome me.

There were all sorts of gifts and items of interest but standing next to a fortune-teller with a crystal ball was a beautiful set of wings in a sort translucent fuchsia purple.

 It was fated that in order to go to the very heart of Heterocera I would have to fly there on these wings

 and they were only $30, a bargain :) I packed them into my inventory and rezzed them upon my back.

 It was the first time I had ever worn wings, they were unscripted and didn’t flap but still it was nice feeling being part Lepidoptera.

 I launched into the sky and soaring past a brightly lit sign saying I Love You, I headed to the middle of the sim.

 I stopped and placed myself exactly at 128,128, 128 which I guess is plum in the middle or at least seemed to be

 I hovered, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did.

 So after some while I l flew straight up as I had done in the fuchsia sim in my fuchsia post 

 and from up in the air I caught sight of a large spinning sphere.

 Belonging to a CEO Soderstrom he had apparently left SL to concentrate on RL so his profile informed me.

I was interested to know why his sphere was still hanging over somebody’s land.

I dropped down immediately underneath the sphere and landed in a skybox selling skins and clothes. I tried a few skins and some hair on

and  bought a couple of freebies and then I continued down to the ground where I found the plot of land was for sale .The land wasn’t owned by CEO any more but by someone called Auraya who owned the dress and skin shop I had just been in There were several items scattered around that people had rezzed here and there. The main one I noticed was the large red chocobo which reminded me of bb’s post he had done on  Extasia which is Fuchsia’s twin island sim.

 In the post Baker Bloch had found a yellow chocobo and also a red cardinal bird. Still thinking about this I teleported over to the Extasia sim and found the yellow chocobo to be missing I looked around in case it had moved but it was nowhere to be seen. The red cardinal bird on the other hand was still whizzing round and round in its manic orbit.

just a short way over from the cardinal I suddenly noticed someone else had arrived

an Italian girl looking for land presumably I managed to get a picture of her tattoo’s before she tp’d away

It’s interesting to note that a cardinal is also a butterfly

which feeds extensively on violas.

 What this has to do with anything I don’t know,  I had started making strange connections  again where there probably wasn’t any but then these thoughts are going on in  my mind and it’s kind of best if I set them outside :)     

 I moved back over to the centre of the sim and fluttered down towards the water and submerged myself gradually beneath the surface and eventually to the bottom. I couldn’t see anything at first but then when I turned around I saw a stone plinth with a sign on top saying: 2006 SECOND LIFE LINDENS TSHIRTS & CARDS.

 It also had some floating text saying Click Me 16 cards left. I clicked and it went down to 15 cards and I was given a folder with a Michael Linden mug card and 2 T-shirts I examined the sign again and discovered it was owned by Nicole Linden and built by Ryan Linden in 2004. He was the same guy who had built the telehub back in Ranunculus exactly north of where I was now. I checked his profile and the groups he was in. One of them was a group called love machine , a group with only two other members, a guy called Ryan horn and Philip Linden. When I did a search on Lovemachine it turned out this was Philip’s new company with long time linden employee Ryan. I’m not sure whether Ryan Horn and Ryan Linden are the same people but when I clicked on Ryan Horn’s profile a familiar face came into view. I couldn’t place it at first but then I remembered the Violet telehub I had explored back in Fuchsia and the photographs that had been left there. I took them out and took a look at the two av’s .

Very similar but maybe everyone looked like that in those days. As I was looking at the two pics I noticed something that I had missed the first time I had studied the Violet pics and that was the tattoo just peeking out of the avatars waistband I guess I hadn’t been looking for these sort of things at the time but now I was , it was quite clearly a butterfly.

There was something else that I found; Ryan Linden was not only an early employee of Linden labs he was also a sound engineer and by all accounts a talented musician

 and the latest group that he’s been  playing in is called.

 Moth Vellum. Whoooohh shpooky…

 Well I’m done for now, if you managed to stay awake to the end of this post and even if you just flicked through the pics and maybe fell asleep half way through. I will wish you a Happy Holiday season or whatever you want to call it and I hope you enjoy your break and if you don’t have one I  hope you get one soon.

I’ll leave you with This  gorgeous song  from Beck

Relax Unwind unfurl your mind  float downstream I’ll see you at the other end

 Round the Bend           Love Nish

enjoy