I visited the Lost Unicorn Gallery, this morning. As it was March when I last visited, all the work was new. As always, the standard of work here was extremely high…
… I particularly loved this one, would even have bought it, had it been for sale…
… all the work here is fantasy art, but really good work, not the usual, cliched ‘fantasy’ art you usually see in SL…
… there’s lots of wonderful imagery here…
… not all soft-edged fantasy, either… this one has, for me, a bit of a ‘The Dark is Rising’ feel…
… and this one makes me think of Sir Frederick Leighton’s absolutely gorgeous ‘Flaming June’…
… I don’t think I’ve ever visited an SL gallery that has so much work that I like…
… it’s just as well none of it is for sale, or I’d blow far too many Lindens here!
… it’s a wonderful utilisation of a small space to create an interactive adventure in…
… I stopped for some tea with the anti-social hatter…
… before making my way to this portal…
… to be zapped to a maze. The maze is quite good, if you don’t cheat by camming, you can actually get lost in it, but there’s lot’s to see, so it’s all good fun. You have to read the note on the floor, when you first arrive, and pay attention to all the notes, which read out in local chat. I don’t normally do these formal ‘quest’ adventures, and just try to figure my own way through them, but I got totally lost in the ‘quest’, later, because I wasn’t paying attention to the hints…
… you find the ‘drink me’ in the centre of the maze…
… which takes you here…
… where you have to find the Mad Hatter’s bedroom by following the clues. I needed a rest, because it actually wasn’t easy for me to find the clues. The ‘drink me’ in here is a red herring, it doesn’t do anything…
… you find the Mad Hatter’s dressing room, then have to find his bedroom…
… there are hidden passages…
… I finally found his bedroom, then you have to figure out how to get out…
… when you do, you are TP’d back to the landing point. I enjoyed this adventure, something I don’t normally do. Jayden Mercury has done a lovely job, here (:
This morning, I got up, and stumbled sleepily downstairs, to wish my animal family a lovely xmas day. My little, manic kitty-in-a-balloon, my lazy pink bunnies, and my always somnolent sphinx cat. We had all agreed not to give gifts, so there were none to open, just the warm glow of our love for each other. Later I would wish the bunnies in my yard the same…
… I put on something more practical, and went to spend a happy few hours changing the exhibit in my gallery…
… the current exhibit is called ‘Time and Stone’…
… consisting of some of the images I took on my recent visit to ‘Endless 58-58N‘…
… I have always been fascinated by standing stones, they call to my soul, somehow…
… I installed some in the gallery, because they are so beautiful…
… I really enjoyed my xmas morning, and I hope you enjoyed yours, too (:
I decided to visit Endless 58-58N, again, today. Just as well, because, scattered all over the sim, there are these pictures, announcing the closure of the current iteration at the end of the year…
… although this landscape is based on the Orkney Islands geography, it is also very similar to parts of the West coast of New Zealand’s North Island, where my human lives, which makes me very fond of this landscape…
… I adore these wild, empty places…
… there are, however, no standing stones in New Zealand, much to the humans chagrin. The human has loved standing stones all it’s life, often painting/drawing them…
… their age and mystery is palpable…
… they are the immortal embodiment of the ancient people who erected them.
… I’m normally not that attracted to abstract sculpture…
… but I think this is stunning. It makes me think of the work of the incredible artist Moebius (Jean Giraud). I find this work gives off an aura of peace and tranquility, but also, hope.
Mopire City seamlessly blends into Rieri Town in Tokyo, which, in turn, seamlessly becomes Tokyo-Windhill, which blends into Mitsumi Town, which becomes Mopire City. These towns are far more suburban than Mopire City, and much more traditional…
… gorgeously so…
… with beautiful parks…
… which, though tucked into modern surrounds, are like places from another time…
… it’s almost a surprise to come back out into modern suburbia…
… but even that feels, in places, almost semi-rural…
… all through this stunning sim, you will find these wonderful little hedgehogs. On this canal was the first time I ever saw them, and there were several of them, on a boat, I fell in love with them, and now have some of my own. Their happy little faces just turn my heart to mush…
… the canal runs into an even bigger body of water, with an unattainable far shore…
Walk into any tower block in Mopire city, and you are likely to find this level of interior decoration. Some have minimal furniture, some are even empty, but most of the buildings you can enter have a surprising level of interior decor…
… it even looks like corporate/commercial decor, tasteful, yet bland. There are always stairs, and often working elevators in these buildings. One building I went into, the ground floor elevator didn’t work, but when I tried the second floor elevator, I was able to ride up, to my amazement, nineteen floors! I came out, on the roof, level with the R2 building…
… even on the second, third, however many floors, of these buildings, you can find this level of attention to detail…
… I find this astonishing, not just because it’s all empty, and no-one actually uses these spaces, but because I can’t help thinking about the amount of work that all this involved. These spaces haven’t just had a few bits of decor scattered in them, someone has put a lot of work into making them believable corporate/commercial spaces…
… the subway is just as impressive…
… there is even humour here… deliberate…
… and accidental…
… but the level of detail, here, is stunning…
… the signage is even reflected in the ceiling tiles…
… all this in an ultra-realistic build that no-one seems to use for anything…
… even wandering around down here, you can actually get lost, the network of corridors is so complex. From the platform with the train, you can take a corridor beneath the tracks, and come up in another, empty platform. I was actually wandering around, down here, trying to find a shooting range I once found, in a subway, here, but it was either another subway, somewhere else in the sim, or I completely missed it, if it’s in this one. I would imagine that the boys in my theory about Mopire City would be able to spend many happy hours, running around, down here, with guns.
My interest in Mopire City has become reinvigorated. I realised that all this time, because the place is so huge, my attention has been on the macro aspects of the place, all the wonderful external elements… I haven’t really looked inside, at the micro details… there is a lot to see, there. I went back and started looking more closely, in the area I discovered, the other day. I quickly found a parking building I had never been into, and, on the third floor, I found something interesting. All the vehicles you see in the city are prop vehicles, bland looking, generic urban vehicles, probably not even drivable, but, parked in this building, I found four vastly different beasts; an SUV, a muscle car, and two lovely little, vintage sports cars, all clearly drivable. These totally reinforce my theory about Mopire City being someones private playground. You can rez a vehicle in the city, as long as you get straight into it, and stay in it, but if you get out of it for a few minutes, it is returned to your inventory… that is clearly not what happens for the owners of these vehicles. A new theory began to formulate in my mind…
… I decided to go and have a look in the underground tunnels, a place I don’t actually like going. I remembered I’d seen an entrance, just around the corner from the parking building, in the area I only explored for the first time, the other day. My new theory was reinforced by the nearness of the parking building to the tunnel entrance… now I didn’t so much feel I was in the ‘Twilight Zone’, as much as in ‘Grand Theft Auto’…
… in the tunnels I quickly found various coloured spheres containing mysterious scripts, and some little blue pyramids, with no scripts, that were ‘transfer only’. I suspect that the spheres are lap-counters, or something of that nature, and the pyramids are, perhaps, trophies to be collected? I think these tunnels are a racetrack for the little boys club who must hang out here, in their own private world of cars and guns and a huge, beautiful, empty city. I could be wrong, of course, but the evidence is compelling. These tunnels are a big network, and I don’t actually enjoy being in them, they feel like you could actually get lost, down here…
… so I found the nearest way out. It was nice to be back in the fresh air…
… almost beneath R2. I straight away noticed a very colourful floor on the building beside the overpass, it jumped out because nothing in Mopire City is that colourful. I had to go and see. I jumped off the overpass, made my way to the building, and climbed five floors up, (Mopire City is one of those places where you actually have to physically make your way… if you try to ‘double-click TP’ somewhere, you go straight back to the ‘landing area’) and went inside…
… it was, by far, the most personal/unique interior I have so far seen in Mopire City (this part of the city is actually called ‘R2 Fashion’)…
… I climbed the rest of the way to the roof…
… for the view. Then I jumped off, but only made it 3 floors down, to this area, which still had a pretty nice view…
… the quickest way down, of course…
… was to jump, again…
… I hit the ground in a crouch, sprung up, and set off in search of more Mopire fun.
Avatar Life 