The other day, I finally resolved to come to grips with EEP Windlights. I had only recently learned how to set the Windlight on my land, when they changed to the EEP system, and all my preset Windlights turned to custard. I couldn’t understand the new system, and found previous attempts to understand it confusing and annoying…

… I recently noticed people were selling EEP Windlights, but didn’t pursue it, because I had no idea how to install them, and they were usually pretty expensive…

… the other day, I searched them on MP, determined to get a handle on them, and I found two, ‘ColeMaries Windlight Set (Series #1)’, and ‘JuicyBomb EEP Settings’, which were both only L$1, and had rave reviews, so I bought them…

… there are only four Windlights in the JuicyBomb set, but they are all great, and L$1 is still ridiculously cheap for them…

… but there are are about 50 in the ColeMarie pack, and they are all excellent! It turns out installing them is as easy as unpacking them!… they go straight into your ‘My Environments’ folder, which is in World\Environments…

… from there, you choose a Windlight, and simply either choose ‘apply only to myself’, which you can do anywhere, and everything changes to that Windlight…

… or, if you are on your own land, you can choose ‘apply to parcel’, and you have set your lands Windlight! That’s way less work than it was to set pre-EEP Windlights for your land!…

… this is the ColeMarie Windlight I have set for my parcel…

… I love the clouds, but I also love the light, and how it affects the materials of my home, both outside…

… and inside. I’m so glad I finally decided to decipher the EEP mystery, and found it’s not such a big deal, at all… it actually IS an improvement! I highly recommend these two, near-free Windlight packs, especially the ColeMarie one (:

* Since this post, I have bought another, single EEP Windlight… it came in a folder, and couldn’t be ‘unpacked’, as it already was. As such, it has not placed itself in my ‘My Environments’ folder. As I’m new to this, I’m not sure if it is the anomaly, or the sets I bought were anomalies, in that they put themselves in that folder after I unpacked them. It still behaves the same, but I have to find it in my inventory, then open the folder, which isn’t as convenient as having it in my ‘Environments’ folder.

Today I visited… my place! My place is open to anyone who wants to visit, except for my house, which is well signposted as being private…

… I have two gorgeous little Pandume goats… well, that’s what I call them, anyway. My lovely friend, Pandume, gave them to me, shortly before, like everyone else I have ever gotten close to in SL, she vanished without trace, and I’ve never heard from her since…

… there’s lots of interesting sculptures and stuff to see…

… and, of course, my gallery. I own a quarter sim in Jormundgandr, half on either side of the Circuit La Corse…

… the grounds are quite spacious, but have many statues and sculptures in them…

… next to my house is my gorgeous Pegasus stargate. You can access this gate from any other stargate, by dialing ‘Serigate’.

This evening found me, once again, in Hangars Liquides…

… I’m not sure if it’s the sheer size of this place, with so much to see and discover, if the size just makes me forget, or what, but I always manage to find somewhere, here, that feels new to me…

… this vast, wonderful place is never crowded, and when you do meet other avi’s, they come in all shapes and sizes, because Hangars Liquides is very inclusive… I once saw someone riding a horse, here…

… the balance of neon and grunge, light and dark, is perfect, here…

… and the environmental sounds are more like ambient music than city sounds…

… I find it very soothing, wandering aimlessly through this futuropolis…

… I come here on a regular basis, just to re-immerse myself in this amazing place’s magic…

… Hangars Liquides is one of the great wonders of SL.

Today, I visited ‘Lana‘. I always use the ‘shared environment’ setting, so I get the experience the creator intended… my first reaction, here, was ‘Eeep!’; the comic-book colours and bubble-gum ocean were a bit of a shock, but I decided to run with it…

… and quickly grew to really like the colours, here! This is such a gorgeous place! For starters, it’s Halloween-free, which is so nice when 99% of current destinations are not. But, that fact aside, the island seems to be devided into a ‘winter’ side, and a more ‘spring/summer/autumn’ side, and the colours on the winter side are very pretty…

… reds/whites/pinks are most of my favourite colours, so I really loved the colours, here…

… but I didn’t dislike the colours on the spring/summer/autumn side, either! There are lots of deer and several dragons, in Lana…

… as well as majestic big cats, and several other beasts…

… there’s plenty of cuteness…

… and lots of wonderful, photogenic settings…

… so much to discover…

… a really gorgeous, life-affirming place to visit (:

Last night, I visited ‘Whitby-Birth of Dracula‘. Whitby is a beautifully made, medieval village, beneath a large church and some ruins, all on a dark and moody coastline. The lighting, here, is perfect, and the sky and roiling clouds couldn’t be better…

… the interiors are equally beautifully lit, and everything is in gorgeous, Rembrandt-like colours, dark and rich…

… the advertising blurb says this build isn’t a pedantic reading of the Dracula myth, but something looser, but anyone who knows their Dracula mythology will feel how evocative of all those tales this build is, it certainly has all the tropes…

… like the decadent, vampiric nature of the church, sucking the wealth from the peasants in return for a fantasy of eternal life…

… but the opulance of that decadence sure is gorgeous…

… this guy made me smile. He reminded me of the kind of thugs I came up against, back in the day, when I was fighting both the Holy Roman Church, and the Vampire Nation. Creatures like him were all very tough when dealing with peasants armed with ignorance and sticks, they didn’t know what hit them when they tried that crap on me… I’m still here, a thousand years later, and they are funny paintings on the wall…

… there are wonderful ruins for wandering in, and photographing, with catacombs and tombs beneath them, it’s all very subtle, which I really appreciate in this season of pumpkins and witches at every turn…

… it’s the fabulously rich interiors that I was most taken with…

… really well done, like you have stepped into a medieval painting…

… speaking of which, there are many exquisite art works in these interiors. ‘Whitby-Birth of Dracula’ is well worth a visit.

I visited ‘The Beckridge Gallery‘ for the first time, last night. This is another gallery in a Linden suburb!…

… I went to see the exhibition ‘Punkins: Digital Magic’. This is a display of gorgeous pumpkins of all shape and size, by many different creators. As far as I could tell, they were all gacha items…

… they ranged from the very small, to quite big…

… many of them quite exquisite works of art in their own right…

… it’s a really sweet show that left me feeling quite happy and smiley…

… there are more ‘punkins’ out the back, in the very neat suburban yard. Like ‘The 22 Art Space in Bellisseria‘, this is wonderful use of otherwise quite bland suburban, SL homes, in their pretty, but repetitive enclaves.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited an apocalyptic sim. Currently, however, the choice of new builds to visit is Halloween themed, or… Halloween themed, so when there was the choice of a Halloween themed apocalyptic sim, that’s where I went, to Everwinter…

… I was quite impressed. I stopped going to apocalyptic builds because they all became such cookie-cutter, cut-and-paste affairs, with the same rusty playgrounds, burning vehicles, all that stuff. While Everwinter is actually, pretty much, composed from the same items, that composition is quite nicely balanced. The lighting is gorgeous, which is always a major draw, for me…

… the place is very cluttered, but with just the right amount of clutter…

… there is some nice, ironic, whimsical humour, here…

… and some wonderful 1920’s music…

… to counterpoint that 1950’s design collateral that is the go-to skin for ‘post-apocalyptic’, post-Fallout…

… there are nods to many themes, here, from ‘War of the Worlds’…

… to ‘Fallout’, which is not only blatantly referenced, somewhere in the sim, but subtly referenced everywhere… this scene under an overpass, is straight out of Fallout, including the lighting…

… so, even though it is all fairly cliched…

… Everwinter is still very photogenic, and well worth a visit.

This morning I visited ‘The 22 Art Space in Bellisseria‘, to check out the new exhibition ‘Duet’. I won’t offer an opinion about this exhibition, I’ll let you decide for yourself, should you choose to come and see it. My artistic tastes are predicated on those of my human, of course… my human has a degree in Computer Graphic Design. Like many people trained in design, the human’s taste in art is lowbrow/populist/illustrative, not highbrow/elitist… I feel this exhibition is aimed at the highbrow, capital ‘A’, art elite, and therefore I am not a suitable judge of the work or its meaning. I’m sure Ricco won’t be offended by my saying this, and will continue to send me exhibition updates! While I was there, however, I also checked out, as I always do, the amazingly uniform, stunningly well presented neighbourhood the gallery is in…

… forgive my naïveté, but this place has always intrigued me with it’s glorious, wealthy, suburban charm. I often speculated on how it was so uniform, supposing there must be some kind of building covenant, or constraints… you see, although I have always been a ‘premium’ member, I have also always only ever lived in the unregulated wilds of ‘Mainland’, and never felt the need to deplete my land usage ability by getting a Linden Home…

… it wasn’t till I visited ‘Mirror Pond‘, a few days ago, after reading this article, by Daniel Voyager, that a seed was sown for a revelation about the suburban paradise around the 22 Art Space. When I first landed in Mirror Pond (literally… you land IN the pond), I thought ‘Wow, what a pretty sim, so uniform and well set out’…

… but, as I wandered around it, miles and miles of it, all exactly the same, it started looking less amazing, and, actually, well… bland and repetitive, though still pretty…

… back in Bellisseria, which is slightly less repetitive, I suddenly realised ‘This is all Linden Homes, too!’… I clicked on a house and, sure enough, it was a Linden Home, they all were. And, like ‘Mirror Pond’, and all it’s neighbouring sims, this place just goes on and on, all lovely and tidy and well-manicured… all, really, the same. There is hardly any sign of individual expression, here… the odd flag on a building, but almost nothing else…

… mile after mile of pretty, perfect homes and sections on perfect, empty streets of lovely pavers…

… as I said, forgive my ignorance if all this was perfectly obvious to you from the start, but I am a child of the SL wilds, where the beautiful and the ugly and tasteless, as well as just miles of abandoned land, side by side, is the norm. I hadn’t realised it, but I far prefer the expressions of individuality I’ve always seen there, to this candy-coated, safe, suburban blandness.

I returned, after several months, to Missing Melody, last evening…

… the place was even more beautiful, but darkly so, now…

… but dark in a hauntingly lovely way. There are lots of animals here, and several gorgeous little tableau, like a baby fox cautiously sniffing at a sleeping bambi, a bambi cautiously looking at a sleeping fox, this one of an adult deer nuzzling a fawn, and several others, they are all delightful, and make the leaning toward darkness a cosy leaning, rather than a melancholy one…

… the autumn colours are glorious…

… here, a mother bear has caught a fish for her cub…

… there are areas where it is constantly raining and lightning flashes…

… like I said, kinda dark, but not maudlin…

… above everything is this wonderfully brooding sky.