Month: June 2022

Dream of Memento mori

Last night I dreamed that Flutter and I were exploring Memento mori…

… everything was shrouded in mist, and silent…

… it was so quiet that I could hear Flutters wing strokes…

… ‘Where are we going, Seri?’ she asked me…

… ‘I think this is it.’ I replied…

… there was a growing roar, like distant waves crashing on a rocky shore that was somehow drawing closer…

… ‘The dream is over.’ said Flutter.

CandyLand

My mechanical Flutterbye and I visited ‘Pride CandyLand‘, yesterday. This place is like Willy Wonka on acid!…

… there is a chocolate stream running through a chocolate landscape, with chocolate trees… it is all incredibly saccharin, in a cute way, of course, but, still, sugary enough to induce a mental toothache…

… the chocolate area is the exception, though, everything else is, of course, rainbow, candy colours…

… pink (one of my favourite colours!) being everywhere…

… of course, there’s a beautiful rainbow…

… and the sky is gorgeous…

… really gorgeous, and far more surreal than any Willy Wonka sky…

… this is a sweet, joyous destination, and it’s quite big, too, and fun to explore (:

Fadet

I realised the truth of something, today, that I’d been suspecting for a few days, now, which is that I am the only person who can hear Flutter… it’s not just other butterflies, it’s all other beings…

… I realised this today, when Witchy said hello, specifically to Flutter. Flutter really likes Witchy, and she excitedly replied ‘Hi, Witchy! How are you, today?’… after a while she asked me ‘Didn’t she hear me?’… I replied ‘Oh, you know Witchy, when she gets tired, she gets a bit vague…’, but I knew Witchy really likes Flutter, too, and when she still hadn’t replied to her after about 20 minutes, I accepted the sad truth… no-one else can hear her…

… ‘Do you know who made you, Flutterbye?’ I asked her…

… ‘You did, silly!’ she replied. ‘Oh, sorry, Seri, I keep forgetting you aren’t future you!’. ‘Ah…’ I thought ‘That explains why only I can hear her…’. ‘What do you mean, only you can hear me?’ she asked…

… ‘Can you hear my thoughts?’ I asked in reply. ‘Um… yes…’ Flutter answered ‘… I thought you knew… so, no-one else can hear me? Poo!’… we were having this conversation in front of a store I discovered during my recent, annual culling of my Teleport History LM’s. As often happens, when I followed an old LM to this location, the place that had been here no longer existed, but, instead of empty/abandoned land, there was this really slick store with a really nice landing area, the kind I totally love, where someone has obviously put a whole lot of very excellent work into it…

… the store was empty, though, so obviously quite new. I IM’d the owner, complimenting her/him on their very cool store, and asked when there would be any product in it…

… I often reach out to creators in this fashion, but they don’t always reciprocate the gesture, some being too far up themselves to communicate with the likes of me, but ‘FadetOwner’ replied within a day, this was a week ago, and said they hoped it would be in a weeks time, but they were very busy. Obviously, they haven’t managed it, yet, but we’ll keep coming back, we’re really interested to see what their clothes look like (:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Fashion%20Boulevard%20II/102/96/2502

Snuggles Forest

We were so desperate for somewhere new and interesting, that wasn’t SL19B-related, that we decided to visit the ‘Snuggles Wedding Chapel’, which was apparently surrounded by the ‘Snuggles Forest‘. We were instantly struck by the beautiful sky, here, which makes everything feel like it’s in an American Pastoral Landscape painting…

… it’s so nice when you don’t expect much, but you find something beautiful! Leading away from the chapel are several paths through woods and alongside streams and ponds and the sea. There are many animals and birds, and many places to sit and rest, or just…

… look at the animals and ponds and things…

… we came across a clearing filled with monarch butterflies. Flutter was chattering away to them, introducing herself and me, when I suddenly realised she didn’t know they weren’t sentient to the degree that she was. ‘You realise they can’t understand you, or talk to you, don’t you, sweetheart?’ I gently asked her. ‘What…?’ she replied in a little voice…

… she was very quiet for a while, after that. “You ok, baby?’ I eventually asked her…

… ‘I feel sorry for them’ she replied ‘I could sense their happy little thoughts, but didn’t know they couldn’t communicate with me.’…

…’They have ‘happy little thoughts’?’ I asked…

… ‘Yes, you can’t sense them?’ she answered and asked in return ‘Nope’ I replied ‘But, there you go, you CAN communicate with them, in a way, if you can sense their thoughts… perhaps they can sense yours?’… ‘Yes, perhaps they can… thank you, Seri’ she said…

… we continued our amble through the Snuggles Forest…

… ‘There’s no other life, apart from you, in the future…’ she eventually said… ‘… so I’m not that experienced with how other living things communicate.’…

… ‘You’re doing fine, my darling’ I told her…

… she radiated so much happiness, I could tell her little, mechanical face was smiling (:

Cherry Picking the SL19B Exhibitors Showcase

We began our exploration of the SL19B Exhibitors Showcase at the perpetual motion machine…

… the bulk of this beautiful creation is below the surface of the water, where the mysterious, magical machinery is…

… my guess is that the faceted sphere somehow pulls the smaller, smooth spheres from another dimension, thus conserving energy in our dimension… the spheres occasionally give off these pretty ‘rising sun’ patterns…

… it’s all wonderfully mysterious and kind of Victorian, as befits a ‘perpetual motion’ device…

… we enjoyed watching the dance of the spheres…

… the next marvel that drew our attention was this build… Flutter was particularly intrigued by the silhouetted lepidoptera coming out of the top…

… this building was equally as beautiful as the perpetual motion machine, but where as that felt grounded in Victoriana, this building has a definite futuristic look…

… reminding me of many science fiction book covers that depicted ancient civilisations being influenced by beings from other, far more advanced, planets.

The Arboretum

Whichever angle you view it from…

… the Arboretum at SL19B is an enormous building…

… back in the day, the societal manipulators used to build their edifices at massive scale, in order to cow the masses and make them in awe of the ‘god’ these buildings were supposed to represent… the doorway to the Arboretum is kind of like that…

… the inside is equally grandiose…

… ‘wow’ whispered Flutter…

… ‘Yes, it’s kind of over the top, isn’t it, baby?’ I replied…

… I’ve been exploring the SL19B event for the last few days, and I find the lag here absolutely crippling… my exploration of the Arboretum was cut much shorter than I would have liked because, with a frame rate of 1.2, it became virtually impossible to move/control movement, and scream-inducingly impossible to get pictures of exactly what it was I wanted if what I wanted was to include a certain little person from the order Lepidoptera family.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SLB%20Exhilarate/118/118/24

WastelLand Wanderers

Flutter and I went for a wander in the WasteLands, last evening. We arrived as the sun was going down…

… and the moon sprang up over this broken, fascinating landscape…

… we gamboled about in the midst of long-dead petroleum storage…

… climbing a rusty ladder…

… for a better view of this slow-rolling apocalypse…

… ‘Very pretty, Seri’ said my little companion…

… ‘Yes, sweetheart, it is, isn’t it?’ I replied…

… as the moon went down, again…

… we found ourselves at a tiny oasis (:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Wastelands/135/151/76

The Shambles

Flutter and I visited ‘The Shambles’, the other day…

… ‘Are you saying that ‘me’ in the future, sent you back to ‘me’, in the present?’ I asked my little friend…

… ‘That is correct, Seri’ she replied, all the while continuing her silent perambulations of my head…

… ‘How far in the future are we talking about?’ I wondered allowed…

… ‘Several thousand years’ she answered…

… ‘Oh, so not that far’ I mused…

… ‘Certainly not by your standards, my love’ she concluded…

… the fact that I am still around, several thousand years into the future, is, of course, no surprise to me, given that my planetoid mother is actually billions of years old, and I seem to have inherited her indestructibility…

… why I would be sending pretty little butterflies who love me, back in time to myself, now, is a matter for further consideration. We eventually found ourselves in a cafe/bar… the huge bong and smouldering joints on one of the tables went some way to explain the colourful eclecticism and shambolic clutter of this place (:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Hidden/130/125/30