I returned to The WasteLands, this morning, my desire to re-explore this place having been rekindled during my last visit. I arrived just before dawn, but didn’t get into any decent pictures till dawn was rolling across the poisonous sky…

… this place isn’t small, and I couldn’t find my way to where I was last time, so was just wandering aimlessly, using the dead ferris wheel I’d seen in the distance as a landmark….

… the dawn light made for wonderful silhouettes…

… the sky slowly lost it’s pretty pink and started looking more toxic as I roamed through derelict neighbourhoods…

… finding all manner of interesting stuff…

… eventually heading toward the dead ferris wheel as the morning cloud layer parted…

… and the equally dead amusement park it was a part of.

I visited Alvion, today. Alvion is a water planet, seemingly almost entirely covered in a shallow, wadeable sea…

… as I’ve said, before, sims with huge, empty, oceanic horizons, are some of my favourite places for moody photography…

… where I can stand and stare into the vast distance, and feel perfectly at home, alone…

… Alvion is very pretty, and there is lots too see, from lovely birds to dinosaurs, strange little alternative-dinosaurs, dead cars, and lots of exotic flora…

… in some places, there is, literally, something wonderful around each corner…

… from beautiful floating plants…

… to strange, giant tentacular fungi…

… this is a very calm-inducing, meditative place to wander alone in.

I visited The WasteLands, today. It’s quite a while since I was here, last, possibly years. It was dark when I arrived…

… with a poisoned-sky dawn soon washing over this junk-yard landscape…

… it’s impossible, for me, to view this landscape and not think of ‘Fallout’, or any number of apocalyptic films and games…

… the sky, here, moves very fast, going from entirely covered in a toxic-looking blanket, to tearing apart and revealing blazing blue, to toxic sheet again…

… one of the reasons for my not having been here for years is that I just don’t remember it being this good! I don’t remember that it was this cohesive…

… whether my memory is accurate, or not, it’s a pretty stunning, post-apocalyptic landscape, now…

… with plenty of scope for photography…

… I was here for at least an hour, and got more than enough images for this post, but I’m sure I only saw a fraction of what there is to find, here, so I’ll probably be back (:

If you know much about me, you’ll know I’m not a social butterfly, and I don’t have many ‘friends’. I recently made a new friend! Her name is Fau, like me, she’s and artist, I actually met her because of the fact Veyot had put one of Fau’s works (which I really liked) next to mine in her ‘car’ exhibition at Xaraz gallery. Fau is 17 years old! One of the oldest avi’s I’ve ever met…

… despite being 17 years old, she had never heard of, or been to, Hangars Liquides! I had to rectify that! I took her to see my wonderful little apartment, there…

… she is very elegant-looking.She reminds me a bit of an elfin Freida Kahlo…

… of course, she was very impressed with Hangars Liquides. We talked for ages, possibly hours, there, till I asked her if she wanted to visit another of my top three SL destinations that she hadn’t ever heard of (she’d at least been to Insilico!)…

… so we zapped to Mopire City, which, of course, also impressed her. I took her to see the gorgeous hedgehog couple who are always sitting happily on the fence by the canal…

… Fau’s friend Stan dropped in. Stan, a 12 year old avi, had also never heard of Mopire City. I am constantly astonished how such an amazing place as this is so unheard of! We all chatted for a while, in the lightly falling snow, till Stan had to go…

… by which time it was dusk. The only thing, in all my years of coming here, I never liked about Mopire City, was the ghastly windlight that has always been here, like midday sun glaring off chrome, but now they have much nicer shared environments, here. This is also the first time I’ve ever seen weather, here… or snow on the ground. I always find previously undiscovered things, here, but this is the first time I’ve found something that is obviously new, it’s nice to see the builder gods have not abandoned their stunning masterpiece…

… we wound up in a cosy restaurant, where we talked for a long time. It was a lovely outing (:

It’d been a while since I visited Mopire City, so I decided I needed to do that, today…

… Mopire City, and it’s adjacent builds, is one of my absolute favourite three builds in SL, in case you don’t already know that. Not only is the detail and obvious care taken in it’s construction astonishing…

… but the sheer scale of the place…

… is actually intimidating!…

… and, hanging over it all, like an alien spacecraft…

… is R2, which has to be the coolest retail structure in all of SL!…

… every time I come here, I find something I’ve not seen, before. This time it was snow…

… although I know this isn’t a case of my being unobservant, previously, this is obviously a seasonal touch, as I actually ‘discovered’ this area several months ago, and it was not covered in snow, then.

I returned to Insilico Mars, today, to continue my exploration of this harsh, beautiful place…

… it’s a good thing I don’t actually breath, because the terraforming is far from complete, here, and the atmosphere is pretty bleak, not to mention toxic…

… but there’s all kinds of wonderful stuff to find here…

… so many compositional possibilities for photography…

… but, even I get sick of the gaseous air, and the abrasive sand storms…

… so it was nice to find a hidden mech bunker, out of the poisonous sandblaster…

… and in to this clinical, temperature controlled environment, which was totally silent, except for the whir of cooling fans, and some quietly muttering computer terminals.

I visited wonderful Insilico Mars, again, today…

… I love this place! I can spend hours wandering around, searching out stunning imagery. For someone whose human was raised on the awesome art of the likes of Chris Foss and Jim Burns, these backgrounds are like falling back into the scifi book covers the human fell so in love with…

… all that’s really missing is a huge spaceship, hanging in the alien sky…

… but that’s just to make them more like 1970’s scifi cover art, even without spaceships, these backgrounds create marvellous compositions…

… they could still, easily, be book covers, evoking wonderful tales of life on barren worlds…

… where the technology is all that keeps the harsh environment survivable…

… and people dream of lives in sweeter places.

I visited Drune: Giger City today, my first 2022 outing, and such a relief to have a non-Christmas-themed destination to visit! This time, Hera is paying fully acknowledged homage to H R Giger. However, the first thing I noticed, on the landing platform, was this wonderful homage (deliberate or not) to Jim Burns, whose organic, insect-like ships fit right in with the feel of Giger City…

… being a homage to Giger’s work, the main themes here are teeth…

… penises…

… and vaginal orifices, often with penises. I’ve said before, I often find the juvenile sexual obsessions in Drune to be gratuitous. However, when you are doing a homage to the steaming, sexually obsessed work of H R Giger, it’s fairly hard to be gratuitous. And, although the human and I find obsession with sexual themes pretty infantile, now, we certainly didn’t, 40-odd years ago, when we first discovered Giger!…

… also, being a Giger homage, most things are green/green-blue, and slimey-looking…

… although all the penises and stuff get old pretty quick, this is still a magnificent reproduction of Giger-like themes…

… and I could just roll around in the marvellous textures!…

… of course, no Giger homage would be complete without a slime-dripping…

… chamber of face-hugger eggs (: