Mopire City is my absolute favourite SL build. I have been coming here for years, and have blogged it many times (use the ‘search thingy’ on my blog to look up Mopire City) and had many adventures here. I have walked, driven, and even flown (in a UFO) this amazing place… you can’t actually fly here, but if you rez an aerial vehicle, you can. I have even seen a giant here. The level of detail and the quality and consistency of every component here is amazing, and the place is huge. It is actually several sims, I think… Mopire City/Rieri-Town in Tokyo/Tokyo-Windhill/Mitsumi-Town…

… I have always had an ‘in the twilight zone’ feeling here… no-one lives (that I have ever been able to ascertain) here, I have never seen a real shop here, and I almost always have the place to myself. None of those things make much sense in SL; how on earth do they finance a build like this if it generates no revenue? There is one revenue generating aspect to it, but I’ll mention that later. Over the years I have formulated a theory that this place is a huge, private playground dedicated to war games. There is an underground network here that is huge, and the first time I ever came here, when it was all new, I think, if you went into that network, the ‘life’ icon appeared in your HUD, that doesn’t happen, now, but it was a clue. There is fake advertising everywhere, but the only real, SL advertising, is for weapons. There is a shooting range in the subway. These were all clues for my theory…

… in all the time I’ve been coming here, I keep finding parts/things I’ve never seen, before. Yesterday, from the landing point, I went a way I’ve never been, before, literally just around the corner, and noticed these banners that totally confirmed my suspicions. I kept walking that way…

… and, once again, found an entire chunk of the city I have never seen…

… a little park…

… this lovely little area, all totally new to me…

… so, in a way, I wasn’t that surprised when I stumbled upon this place… a real shop selling shooty stuff. It was still very weird/jarring… this wasn’t the Mopire City I knew, I could almost hear ‘X-Files’ music playing, somewhere in the background. It vindicated my theory, but it was very weird that it took me so long to find this place, almost like it had been hiding, and had now, for some reason, shown itself…

… I mentioned a possible source of revenue before… R2 Fashion has always floated above Mopire City, and I’ve always thought it might be the financial wing of the operation. When I first started coming here, there was a physical elevator in R2, that would take you down to the city, but they took it out, and for years there was just a hole in the floor you could jump down, then I think even that got covered, for a while…

… I zapped up there to see what was there, now. The hole was there, but glassed over, but there was one of those teleports, that look like an elevator door, so I took it back down. I took a few steps from where I’d landed, turned around, and saw…

… this. I’m pretty sure this was not here when I used to take the elevator, or even when I used to jump down the hole. Surely I would have noticed, in this beautiful, empty city…

… a hanger filled with aerial war machines. Now I really felt like I was in the twilight zone, it was enough to make my spine tingle… I half expected to hear the rattle of small-arms fire, or the scream of a warplane going over the city… perhaps to see a column of oily smoke roiling into the sky. It was so weird that my theories had all been made real, so suddenly, in a single visit. I don’t know what to expect, here, any more.

*edit* I looked up ‘Second Life Special Operations Command’… it is a group with 8 members. And, if I had gone into that mall where I noticed the banners, there is another weapons shop, and more of those banners… none of those things used to be in there, so, perhaps, this is a new manifestation?

I visited ‘Silent Night‘, last evening…

… there was falling snow…

… and twinkly trees…

… some nice places to stand and think.

I decided to risk my sanity and try, once again, to get some interesting pictures at Tralala’s Diner. I came perilously close to madness during this experiment. This sim would have to take the prize for the most heart-wrendingly appalling lag and attendant technical problems of anywhere I’ve ever been in SL… which is really sad, because it is also one of the most amazing destinations on the grid…

… as I’ve said, before, I suspect that everything interesting ever created in SL, can be found somewhere in Tralala; every ramshackle building, broken bicycle, weird cat, dead vehicle, every single neon sign, burning tyre, animated piece of strangeness. Those last few make for a ridiculous amount of constantly running scripts, which create horrendous reductions in frame rate, causing mind-numbing lag. It took me about eight hours over two days to get these pictures…

… they are the pictures I could take, not the ones I wanted to take. I had to avoid any areas that had neon, and try to avoid areas with lots of animated objects. Sometimes, I would arrive, and stand in the same place for 45 minutes, and half the scene would not have rezzed properly, and I’d just close Firestorm and come back later, hoping for a better result. Other times, after 45 minutes, most things would have rezzed, and I’d go to take a step forward, and suddenly be running on the spot, like a lunatic, unable to stop running, stuck between two buildings…

… I eventually settled on exploring the most empty places, with the least things happening. I wound up seeing parts of the sim I’ve never seen, before…

… which wasn’t really my intention, as these places aren’t as spectacular as the more crowded, neon extravaganza in the centre of the place, but, that way lay madness…

… out here on the fringes there were places that were still not properly constructed, the grass all a meter in the air, random objects seemingly just dumped for future placement… it kind of added to the feel of the place. There is just so much stuff here, it is mind-boggling. It would be wonderful to have the kind of top-end network connection, and super-computer that could make it possible to actually enjoy this sim, rather than it always being a genuine struggle with my sanity trying to even move, here…

… but, out here, on the fringes, it wasn’t too bad, though it was still a near constant struggle…

… I eventually made it to the shore…

… and stood, looking out over the brooding ocean, wondering if this is the last time I will put myself through this amount of effort for a few pictures.