Seraphim visited Aurora City, today. Aurora City is billed as ‘ …a British, Dieselpunk, and Sci-fi themed region with retro-futurist elements…’. Seraphim found a fairly cheesy mish-mash of cliche scifi themes (starwars/doctor who… that kind of thing) with a very nice, cartoony windlight, which made for pretty pictures…

… un unabashed Stargate owner/lover, Seraphim was initially delighted to see several different gates here, all models she’d never seen, before…

… her delight quickly became disappointment, however, when she discovered that not a single one of them…

… was a working Stargate! They had either been set so no-one could dial out through them, or they were purely decorative… something Seraphim found bordering on offensive! She thought she better check, in case the entire gate network was down…

… so she TP’d to Eisa, and, from the gate, there, dialled her own gate… the Eisa gate was working fine, and accepted her address…

… and she was re-united with her big, gorgeous, Pegasus Alteran Stargate, and basked in it’s pure beauty, as it soothingly bubbled and glooped, all it’s symbols and lights lit up, before it whooshed the plasma, through which she had just arrived, away, and powered down. A working Stargate is a wonderful thing to see, and even better to own.

Seraphim visited Valmoor, today. She went with the recommended wind light of ‘midnight’, and found the place to be richly lit in colours that could have come from a Rembrandt painting…

… there were shooting stars constantly hurtling silently through the firmament over the ‘village’…

… Seraphim thought it felt more like a ‘manor’, than a ‘village’, but, hey, whatever…

… it was nicely made, with much of the graveyard, or mausoleum about it…

… all filled with gorgeous, rich, oil-paint-like colours…

… from the words used in the places’s description, and various hints around the place, Seraphim deduced the owners had some fairly sleazy pastimes in mind, none of which Seraphim has the slightest interest in, so she stayed out of the basements…

… somewhere near, she could hear what sounded like a bear with a belly-ache, but it takes more than sick animals to frighten this alien explorer.

Seraphim went to the latest Uber event, yesterday. She bought several fabulous items of clothing, including the gorgeous boots and pants she is currently wearing. She also bought, to go with her new clothes… the train station she is standing on…

… because, well, a girl needs a nice train station… and, if you have a nice train station, you also need…

… a gorgeous, huge, smoking, steaming, huffing…

… Russian locomotive, you just do, ok? She put the new acquisitions in the Bunny Field, next to her Gate Platform…

… they look as though they were always there…

… and the bunnies barely stopped hopping.

Seraphim visited Montmartre sim, yesterday…

… the sim is beautiful, filled with gorgeously detailed architecture…

… and park-like areas…

… wonderful spaces waiting to be be found…

… regal streets and stairs…

… and interiors just as richly detailed as the exteriors…

… all the while she was exploring, Seraphim was talking to the sim’s owner/builder, Nicholai Laval. Seraphim found Nicholai very easy to talk to. Their conversation went from how beautiful Seri found the sim, to their mutual love of Photoshop, with Seri explaining that she used it to create her digital paintings…

… some of which she showed Nicholai, who was so taken with them, she suggested Seraphim might like to use a space in Montmartre as a gallery. Nicholai showed Seraphim a space she thought might be good… it was perfect. Nicholai is going to set it up and get back to Seri. This was one of the nicest adventures Seraphim has had for a long time (:

Seraphim visited the ‘Hazardous’ sim, today…

… it’s another SL sim in the minimalist/almost monochromatic/dead grass/lamp-posts/lighthouse/windmill tradition…

… quite nice.

Seraphim visited her first freak show, yesterday. She found the horror-story-clown gate slightly off-theme…

… but, once through the gate, it was pure freak show…

… the constant, deranged circus music that was playing was pretty depressing…

… it was the perfect accompaniment to the sad, exploited, ugly creatures that peopled this sleazy, broken-down show…

… some of the other visitors provided very welcome brightness…

… the girl on the rotating target was more ‘circus’, than ‘freak show’…

… but the beautiful, sad mermaid, imprisoned in her tiny, glass cage, was the epitome of this sad world where strange people do what it takes to make a living. But, perhaps the saddest thing Seraphim saw there, was the broken carousel she noticed behind the mermaids cage…

… the discarded, wooden horses, looked like they’d been shot in some cruel, inhumane rampage. The scene was like an anti-circus scene, where the joy and fun that should be associated with a circus, had been replaced by this vampiric freak show, sucking the joy from the trappings of fun. Seraphim found the whole thing pretty grim… she didn’t come here with any expectations, but now realises she loathes this kind of thing.

Ever since her friend, Pearl Grey, introduced her to gatcha, several years ago, Seraphim has been a collector… especially of dolls/figurines. There are a few extremely talented creators of such things, Maru Kado is one of Seraphim’s absolute favourites. She visited his store in SL, a few days ago, and saw he had exclusives at Neo Japan, and at The Epiphany, so she zapped to neo Japan and bought what he had there, which was a very cool Japanese cyber-mannequin welcome sign, which is now in her gallery… she also bought the extremely lovely outfit she is wearing… quite a change from her usual pants and jacket… she bought the boots, there, too, she loves being able to make one outfit from different ones…

… then she went to The Epiphany, where these ‘Zombie Cyclops’ gatcha were… over two days (with a rest between the spending) she spent several thousand lindens, and now has the whole set, including 3 ‘rares’, and, of course, multiple double/triple-ups. When she finds products this beautiful, she just has to get them all. Fittingly, she has displayed them beneath her ‘Zombie Princess’ series she took last year of s4nura when she had her gorgeous, dead eyes…

… Maru Kado has reached a new level of exquisite, with these beautiful creatures… the hands, especially, are gorgeous, but the strange faces are also quite beautiful in their one-eyed way…

… the ‘rare’, which is the one eating intestines, is the only ‘unsettling’ one, in Seri’s opinion…

… after she’d bought about 10 in a row, during her first bout of spending, Seri won (at no cost) this one, which is holding a picture frame that you can put your own picture in… unlike other gatcha, this one is non-transferrable, but is copyable… there are two versions, but Seri apparently didn’t spend enough to win the second, even though she did keep buying after she’d won the entire set, in the hope of triggering whatever criteria she’d initially triggered to win the first one, that’s how she won her third ‘rare’…

… this one has the cutest face. Seri put a photo of herself, pre-mesh, in the frame… it’s one of her favourites from back then… you can just see some of the tattoo she had, back then, one that, sadly, would not transfer to her new, mesh body, it’s the only time she has changed her ink, as she has a thing about consistency.

In case you think Seri is insane spending all that money to get a set, she sells all the extras on Marketplace… especially having 2 extra ‘rares’, she often makes a big chunk of the outlay back, even if it takes months for them to sell, they usually do. She never makes all the money back, but considers the rest well worth the outlay for such exquisite objects, objects that actually accumulate value in SL, and can be sold, though she has no plans to do so.

Seraphim was pottering about at home, when a 4-day old, male avatar dropped into her ‘Bunny Field’. Seraphim is extremely wary of male avi’s, having only met one who wasn’t either a total creep, or a clingy bore, but she is always friendly to anyone visiting her place. What was interesting with this encounter was the fact that, about a year ago, she met a 1-day old male avi, at the gallery she had for a while in Eisa… and he looked exactly the same as this one… she thought he was the same avi, for a few seconds, which would have been a pain, as that avi had seemed sweet to start with, but had quickly become a clingy bore, and Seri had had to ignore him for a while, till he stopped coming around…

… not only did this avi look exactly the same, he had the same multi-part drone hovering off his left shoulder… the one she met a year ago had had a name for his drone, and called it his ‘pet’, which was one of the sweet things about him that made Seri give him more time than she normally would have. Seri realised that this must be an off-the-shelf, standard newby avatar, drone and all. But the sense of deja vu went deeper than that, though… the avi had the same AO, a kind of vulnerable/nervous AO, which was also one of the things that made Seri be nicer to the first version of this avi she met… but the similarity didn’t end there…

… both versions of this avi obviously had English as a second language, they were also both quite naive/open, unlike most creepy, slavering-oaf male avi’s she’s encountered, all of which made these avi’s seem sweet and vulnerable, bringing out the protective sweety in Seri…

… as Seri always makes perfectly clear, she is not her human, she is in no way a representation of her human, and the two of them are very seperate… Seraphim is a SL avatar, SL is her life, she has no other… so, she never looks for the human beneath other avi’s, she judges them by their behaviour and, of course… their looks. She found it extremely strange seeing the first version of this avi in every action, mannerism, and physical aspect of this new newby… she’s never met two different avatars who look exactly the same, and have exactly the same AO, and even the exact same speech mannerisms… usually people individualise their avatar.

The whole episode was like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or something like that. Just another interesting day in SL.

As a reward for her donation toward keeping Hangars Liquides running, Seraphim received a ‘perk’… an apartment in Hangars Liquides! She can live here, for free, for a year! Seri spent today setting the tiny apartment up…

… in a style she feels is in keeping with the sim. The apartment is super-tiny, compared to Seraphim’s own apartment… you could literally fit dozens of this apartment into Seri’s home… which made it a challenge to decorate…

… you could only just swing a feline in the mezzanine bedroom…

… but Seri thinks she made it super-cosy…

… she spent a while just sitting on her new balcony, listening to Angel Olsen’s gorgeous new album…

… while she contemplated how to decorate the balcony…

… Angel’s ‘All Mirrors’ will, forever, remind Seraphim of this day…

… the day this became the view from her apartment balcony.