Sunday Drive, on Friday!

Whilst roaming about in search of a nice set of eyes that someone told me about I came across Saber's Cubcar Races & Fun Center (SLurl) and totally forgot what I was doing. It was a blast to rez one of these monowheel cars and simply race around the track. After a while I discovered a high gear and went even faster. Taking a break, I tried the Battle Boats but without an opponent to shoot at, it wasn't much fun so I went back for another couple laps on the track. Weeeeeee!

Busy Busy Busy

I've been spending quality time with my lovely wife, Angela, busy at the Isle of Lesbos where I make signs, stand guard and have started a new "hunt" project. My hard drive is filled with pics backed up from my explorations, but until I get the time, enjoy these:


One of my recent projects at the Isle ... signs for the new area where folks can rez their purchases. This is the Instructional one. Another was a simple arrow. I work mostly in Acorn but often use GIMP for some of the trickier edits where I really wish I had a $700+ program.

I love Japanese sims. My friend Serenkitty is always recommending them for cool freebies. I go for the great architecture or unique builds ... and things like this :)

The Garden of Da Vinci. I don't know, but I keep wandering by the place. This is not my pic. I got it in-world somewhere. Possibly at the Garden.

Some of the the things I do

Semi-unofficially -- mostly because no one has stopped me -- I build things and add activities at the Isle of Lesbos (IOL), often getting approval after the fact. Like the skydiving center. At one time it was an attraction in the IOL Mall sim. When the mall was recently redesigned and rebuilt there was no provision for sky diving so I simply added it to the main Isle. No one said take it out so I left it there with only minor tweaks here and there. Sensing no further objections I beefed it up today. That is a genuine Cubey Terra jump chair in the foreground. The original base jump at 300 meters (250m above target) is still in place and like nearly all activities on the Isle, the facility is free to use. In the background you can see the free ice skating pond I built.

Not free but nonetheless still fun is fishing! After adding the 7Seas Fishing kit to both the mall sim and parts of the main Isle not too long ago and then telling the owner about it, I've been given the go-ahead (and some cash!) to hold fishing contests. This is a picture from one held yesterday. Turnout is usually decent, which is good as the owner hopes this build traffic in the mall sim. I might try increasing the prize and an "all-nakie" tournament is in my mind for the beach on the main Isle. If anyone has suggestions for making the events more fun, drop a note card on me in-world or leave a comment on this post.

I might schedule a nakie fishing tournament before my Nakie Beach Party in June. This party is held the first Saturday of each month from 3-5pm SLT and, of course, it is Ladies-Only. With the nudity and a prize starting at L$3,000 the party is usually popular and sometimes gathers cheaters. The Saturday parties always start with a prize that large, but sometimes they grow. The 17 May party rapidly built up to a L$25,000 prize with over 60 folks attending.

Many of them originally showed up for our big draw, DJ Kuthola Homewood. If you need a music at an event, contact her. She's awesome.

Look for future posts about IOL ... we are always growing and adapting to make our sisters happy.

Ho-hum .. What? Starax!

The landscaping is ho-hum. The quality of most of the build is pedestrian. The club is fairly typical, but "Club Extreme Gaming Waterfall Store Dancing Zyngo Like Games" (SLurl) has three sculptures from the legendary Starax Statosky. Go figure. There are other nice pieces in the sim but three rare finds like this demon, orca, and Kong all in one place? Wow.

Next door is Osiris with some amusement park activities and other sims to zip around. If you don't go to see Starax's work you might as well stay home. But go see Kong! Go see the orca fly! Go see the demon :)

Die, Zombie, DIE!!

I don't exactly know the name of where I was in Nipponbashi (SLurl), but my friend Serenity found the place so it is a Japanese sim and I took a while to figure out some things. But after you grab a free gun and free HUD that seems to be of little use, you get to kill ZOMBIES! Or be killed by them. Or, as I managed, kill yourself.

um .. yah .. I tried to use one of my own guns a few times and found that if I shoot anything close to me I somehow hit myself and .. um .. Anyway, the game can be fun, especially playing with another shooter. My wife, Angela (shown above trying to rescue me from zombies in a staged scene outside the game area), and I made a great team. We managed to kill nearly a hundred or so over all with relative ease.

At first Ange died right away, not realizing that she couldn't really use her katana. I suppose we were pretty lucky that the guns could do no damage to humans as a 3rd party joined us for a while. He insisted on hand-to-zombie combat while Ange and I shot away from the perimeter. A later strategy should have left me bullet-riddled, but worked: I ran around like a chicken while Ange shot at the top, evil, hard-to-kill zombie. Then we hugged and kissed amid the bloody carnage, me thanking her for saving my life, before lovingly walking hand-in-hand to the first level where Ange killed one last undead.

Then we went outside and took the pics in this post. The one at top is mine and is titled Ange to the Rescue! Hers (click for larger versions) are titled, in order, Too Late to Save Her Wife and Trying to Get the Zombies Off Her Love. Should I worry about the tenor of her titles?

Rezzable: Tunnel of Light

Silly me, I didn't grab any shots of the actual entrance for Tunnel of Light, another great Rezzable sim in the Second Life™ world. When you first arrive you are in a pleasant, park-like setting where signs direct you to click a paper boat floating on a small pond. Suddenly you find yourself plummeting down a shaft of lights (a vertical tunnel ... get it?) and you land at this amusement park-style dark ride staging queue. From here you summon a teacup in which you (alone, with friends, or in a special cup with a sweetie) ride through various marvelously lighted tunnels. As you are told in several places, the viewer feature glow (sometimes called renderglow) is the highlight (pun intended) in all it's neon-y glory for the next six or so minutes.

The teacup floats on a ribbon of shifting light from the departure area to a fantasy pond of Lilly pads and dragonflies. Use this interstitial time to try the big red button in the teacup. It lets you pause the ride so you can take a look around. You can cam as you normally do but mostly you'll find yourself enjoying the default view, occasionally using the left and right arrow keys. If you are like me, you'll take several rides to look around in different ways. Next time I visit I plan on using Mouselook for the whole trip.

The pond is very pretty and quite relaxing especially after the anticipation in the first tunnel. You'll find yourself wondering which elements are particles and which are prims with glow. This area is rather tame but it is a nice introduction to the attraction. Unlike the initial fall when you touch the paper boat surface-side, this is not "in your face" spectacular, rather merely spectacular in scope and design. Like all Rezzable sims, art is the clear focus at the Tunnel of Light.

After another tunnel the stream of light takes you into a forest where you will again wonder where glow ends and particles begin. Don't worry about it. Enjoy the view and look for the little froggies on the tree's trunks. If you don't see them, try the teacup's pause button and look around. If you would rather just enjoy the ride there are several ways to come back to this area (or other areas) for longer explorations. I haven't tried leaving the teacup, but I imagine the vehicle would disappear if I did and I'd have to use the room's teleporters to get out.

Each part of the attraction has a set of teleporters (just touch to go) that will take you to the room of your choice or to the ride entrance. As you see in this picture it is easy to tell which room is which, the glowing mini-worlds cleverly representing a location. It is hard to see here, but that is a paper boat on the far right pillar. Second from the left takes you back to the dragonfly pond. Wandering around on foot while others float by in teacups is strange and I worried that I was marring their experience, but no one complained. Actually, most everyone was friendly and at least said "hello." But who doesn't like an adorable lioness?

The stream of light takes a spectacular ride to the stars and if you ever get vertigo in-world, this is a place where you might want to be careful how and where you look. I rather enjoyed it, though, and often paused the ride at this point just to "float" about. When I come across virtual engineering like this I tend to toss my head into my hands crying why can't I be this clever? This is a ton of scripting and planning and my hat is off to the builders.

As you might guess from the motion of the teacup and the background becoming a starry sky, you are headed into space. This is my favorite part of the whole ride. I pause and cam about eagerly and then I use the teleporters to come back and hang out for long periods, usually flying around. The teacup seems to spend more time here than in the other parts of the ride, either in my imagination or by design, but either way I'm very pleased. I liked this room so much I used it for the backdrop of my Iron Man Fan Art Contest entry (seen here).

The next destination, the last part of the ride, is also fun to fly around in but it can be very, very disorienting. A friend went with me on one trip and she couldn't spend much time in this room. The glowing lines spin and sway and seem to pulse all around you. I can see why this was not the the introduction to the ride. The far less intense dragonfly pond is a better start, but this is far more spectacular. Not immediately apparent ... perhaps because of the visual overload ... is that one can pass through the arch marked Haze (shown here).

It takes you through a somewhat disappointing hallway with some neon-like art and eventually into a dance club filled with glow - Club Haze. Look around carefully for a box of free dance attachments. Some are the usual particle sticks that you can get most anywhere, but some are (at least to me) new items and use glow. You will find a paper boat here that takes you to a nice little store and from there you can go back out to the first paper boat and take the ride again.

The store features artwork created to emphasize the glow feature and some really great wings that also use glow. I'm eyeing up a great pair in this picture and looking through my inventory all while asking myself do I need another pair of wings? I still haven't bought them as L$500 seems like a lot of money to me. And with all the face lights, body lights, and poor lighting designs in Second Life it would be hard to enjoy these as much as I think I could. But, you never know. I might get them on my next visit.

From what I found "outside" the planned visitor area, I will need to stop back again and again. The builder area has some really spectacular in-progress items and I hope that they find their way to the store as well as the ride. Explore Explore Explore! You might be surprised (and quite pleased) with what you will find.

Grendel's Children

There is no way on Earth or anywhere that I can cover Grendel's Children in a single post. Like the Isle of Lesbos, you will probably see me writing often about this amazing place. Despite covering four sims, Grendel's can be though of as three places: The airborne store, with it's amazing array of affordably-priced, high-quality avatars; the community structure, not to be confused with the loyal following called "Grendel's Wanderers," I refer to the wonderful places to explore around the store, such as the library, the greenhouse, and the art gallery; and the desert eco-system at ground level and below.

When I was dashing around looking for Shansu (more later) I ran across this, er, wall, for lack of a better term. Flea Bussy and crew have created an amazing space to hold the store and then gone beyond that in several ways. First of which is the highly-detailed and unique style. To me it is tribal, tech, and inspiring. You will find examples of these -- I guess they are horns -- everywhere, but this is the largest collection. These folks build for effect, not just utility. The rock walls you see extend down and are the base for the hovering collection of buildings that make up the store and community environment. And all around you will find places to sit but likely you will want to keep moving to see it all. Don't. Take it slow and see everything. You can -- and will -- come back.

In the center of what I call the greenhouse is this great statue. Seeing it I know in my heart that someone sat down and wrote a mythology to explain everything. This is no rez-and-texture build. Inside the greenhouse is a nice pond you should explore. Just remember to bring a dive buddy. Safety first and sharing the fun is always good. You may also find a hatching spot for the fabled Drakelet Hatching activity that crosses all four sims and leads you to great places like this.

While I was outside, setting up my next picture, I crashed, but I took a screenshot to preserve at least a little of the view. I was setting my draw distance to show all the "boats" when I went boom, but as you can see here some wonderful builds are outside the buildings, too. If you go in only to buy avatars or accessories and don't explore you will miss many great things. Click the picture for a larger view and you will see me floating some 250 meters above the ground. That means these sailing ships ride the air! Well, I'm guessing they never leave port, but it is almost as much fun to climb around them as real life boats. When you first enter Grendel's you will receive a rules card and inside it is a "flight feather" to help you fly at this altitude.

But I went to see Shansu the dragon. I think that is her name. It is a complete guess based on a bottle of barbecue sauce I bought in the store there. This is a picture of me with her from last year. It was pure luck that led me to her then and I was awestruck. Sadly I didn't find her today, but I'll keep looking. The Second Life™ environment means that change can come swiftly and drastically so she might be gone. That would be a shame, really, and if so I certainly hope she is locked safely in someones inventory.

Future posts will have more pictures from inside and around the store, but I will also post some of ground level. The desert and caverns below are magnificent, so whenever you are inside Grendel's, look for a window or a ledge and jump.

Information Center (I guess they have info there)

Pachinko, the Sport of Kings! Okies, it's not a sport and I have no idea if kings play it, but the few times I've played have been fun. I can see how it can become addictive. For those who might agree, you can now visit the Informtion Center (SLurl) to play. The island is made to resemble a pachinko machine, as you can see, but you don't play on the sim.

You play in a giant pachinko machine at the northern edge. Essentially, you become the ball that is thrown to the top of the board and then you bounce downward. If luck (and a little skill) falls in your favor then you will win one of several prizes, including an avatar. Most signs in the sim can be changed to English if you don't read Japanese.

Explore around and you'll find some free shirts and a place to "camp" for other goodies. As you go around, at some altitude in the south-west corner is a cool sculpture and a shopping cart that zooms around a platform. Don't ask me why. Just be amused.

On a side note, some the pictures were taken with the Advanced Sky Editor on "other than normal" settings. I like to play.

The Isle of Lesbos: Part I

In Second Life, I work at a wonderful place called the Isle of Lesbos (SLurl). Well, work is not entirely correct. Really I play there and the results usually appear that I had actually worked.

This first picture, for example, shows me working. I'm fine-tuning the 7Seas fishing setup for the mall. It took over an hour of hard relaxing to make sure everything was just right.

In the next picture, Janeforyou Barbara, the sim owner (and Miss Jane to all us who love her) is reviewing my work right around sunrise. She, too, was tireless in her quest for perfection.

Sunrise is the key to the Isle's dance club, hence the name Sunrise Dock and Club. Events are held here almost every day, often a couple times each day, and everyone has a chance to walk away with at least L$500. On Saturdays the prize is L$3000!

Another view of The Dock with the sun position changed. That is me on the left. I'm not hosting this event, but I do host the Saturday events. This is the only "job" I have at the Isle that has regular pay. Bouncing in the air there is DJ Kuthola Homewood. She rawks!


Another 7Seas fishin' spot has been put on the beach. If you look in the water you'll see some fishies! I hope to hold tournaments here and build the traffic to the Isle. Well, that and build traffic to other parts of the Isle, too. Many girls (yes, it's an all-female resort) visit The Dock and nowhere else. Yet there is so much more to see.

Like the Jungle! When the Isle was remodeled last year I was honored to be asked to help. This waterfall and the basic landscaping for the Jungle was one of my first projects. Recently I was asked by "Chief Architect" Threshin Barnett to enhance the waterfall. If you get a chance to visit, try walking through the falls. Near the Jungle is a bath house with some nice animations for those inclined to be intimate. Mostly, though, this area is designed to be romantic and relaxing. And you can even fish here.

Above the falls is my pride and joy. Really, it isn't much if you are looking for spectacular, jaw-dropping, or an engineering marvel. But it is (IMHO) a really nice Winter skating pond. I was given free reign to terraform (so long as I added the waterfall to the Jungle) and even encouraged to expand. What I really love is the ice. Again, not a difficult build but so few people make seamless semi-transparent ice when they make frozen water. Look around for the hidden wolf's head. And the sunken boat for a tribute to an Isle friend. Eventually I'm going to upgrade the trees, if I'm permitted, but I rather like the look right now as I skate around or make snow angels.

The beach (Sappho's Point, but I'm the only one that calls it that) was not my creation but I hold a monthly "Nakie Beach Party" there. At other times it is simply a great place to relax. A steam house and a spa are nearby and it is just a short climb to the forest or castle.


On part of the beach is Tikachu's! This is a little bar I made for a previous remodeling of the Isle. It is fully stocked and has a great sunrise view. In the pic here you can see one of the many signs/posters I make for the Isle.

The forest above the beach is filled with wondrous things and leads you to the dark castle. Like the rest of the Isle of Lesbos, if you explore the forest you will find places to cuddle and "play" with someone special. Heck, if you wander the skies you'll find similar places ... we have airborne gazebos!

Miss Jane would have my buns on a grill if I forgot to mention the mall. It is one of the largest and certainly one of the best in all of Second Life. Threshin is the chief architect here, too, though I was asked to make all the domes (the one in the back is complete, but it doesn't show in this pic), the center hub, the teleportation system (for both sims), landscaping, the fashion show area, and little things. I'm really proud of the work I did on the mall.

You will probably read more about the Isle of Lesbos (provided you come back) as I spend a lot of time there and things are always changing.

Another Attempt

I've had many blogs prior to this one. In fact, I just finished deleting one so I could start afresh. What i would like to do with this blog is report on things i do in what seems to be my primary life, the Second Life™ world (*SL). So this won't be so much about me as about who I am through what I do and where I go.

One of the things I do is to build things in SL. The picture above is an example. I made a throne set for a friend. That is me lying on the couch to picture-left of the king's throne.

Landscaping in SL is also fun. Here is a seascape I created for my home. That is me in the middle. Yes! I'm a nautilus! Second Life gives one the opportunity to be ... well, not more than one is, but other than what usually shows. So I frequently change my avatar to suit my mood or surroundings.

Of course, anyone can be creative in SL and one of my joys is finding fun and interesting things in the world. This picture is a beautiful view of the Lost Gardens of Apollo (thanks, Torley), one of the many, many wonderful places I like to visit (click here for an SLurl to visit).

So check back if you wish and I'll post when I can. Here's to hoping this will be something we can all enjoy.

*All references to Second Life (sometimes abbreviated as SL), Linden Labs (sometimes abbreviated as LL), and trademarked terms of same such as SLurl should be considered trademarks used in compliance with the instructions given by the trademark holder. All pictures posted belong to the copyright holders and will be properly credited. My original pictures are © per Creative Commons and rights will vary. Mostly, no derivative works and attribution must be given. Gawd I hate this legal crap.