We recently visited Morris Code Studios…

… we instantly loved the lighting, and the wonderful, hand-crafted, organic feel of all the objects…

… there are amoeboid-like things flying around. They are playing wonderful music, and they emit light. I describe their flight paths as ‘cruising/loitering/zooming’… that’s what they do. Their passage is constantly lighting up different facets of the sculptural shapes in the environment, showing dimensions and perspectives that weren’t there a second before, and their music builds and recedes with their idiosyncratic perambulations…

… there are strange little critters…

… I liked these little penguin-birds, with their gently glowing eyes…

… but I loved these soulful, confused-looking dog-things… I just wanted to take them home and protect them (and I did!)…

… the plants are gorgeous, too…

… if you know me, you know I am proudly low-brow in my art appreciation, I tend to find ‘big-meaning, deep and serious’ art with a capital ‘A’ to be, well, bullshit, to be blunt. I never read the artists statement until after I’ve looked at the work, and I generally find the capital ‘A’ artist’s statements to be rubbish spun out of self-importance, then tacked on to their ‘art’ to give it ‘superior’ meaning. Generally I like art that has an obvious meaning, even if that meaning is just beautiful design. I loved everything I saw, here, just for itself, or, as with the critters, because of their cuteness/whimsy. I instantly identified these three woman as ‘muses’ of some kind, engaged in something to do with thread, so, also instantly, made the association of the ‘fabric of reality’, something the human, so, therefore, I, have been interested in for a very long time…

… there are lengths of woven fabric, and a loom…

… which, on closer inspection, we could see was hooked up to what looked like recording gear. We suddenly realised that the music the amoeboids were playing could quite possibly be the sound of a shuttle being drawn through the strands of a loom… which we thought was pretty damned beautiful, and totally relevant to the whole ‘strands of reality’, or ‘fabric of reality’ thing we had identified.

So we went and read Poppy Morris’s artist’s statement, and we had basically nailed it! Poppy is interested in the fabric of life, which is pretty close to being interested in ‘what is reality?’ The woman are ‘Fates’, not muses, but we are pretty sure she says she created the music from a weaving loom and a spinning wheel, which we just love the idea of, and the result is truely beautiful. The whole thing is beautiful, and totally appealed to our lowbrow comprehension (:

We visited ‘The Core‘, today. The landing point put us on a dark plane, in front of a dark pyramid with a neon door frame. There are large, black spheres rolling down the front of it at intervals… the spheres have physics, and shunt you sideways if you get in their way…

… inside, another sphere is discharging electricity into a neon pattern on the floor. You are prompted to ‘sit’ on the sphere, which takes you to the next level…

… which is dramatically more colourful than the entrance level. There is wonderful 1950’s scifi music playing…

… from there, you ‘sit’, again, to go to the next level, which is just as colourful, but the patterns are different…

… this level is like a 1960’s oil-wheel trip…

… there are particle geysers…

… we liked this level the most…

… the fourth level is pretty sweet, too…

… we don’t know what the deep, serious ‘art’ meaning of all this is…

… but we thought it was fun and beautiful, and we loved the music (:

I hadn’t realised it had been nearly 5 years since I last visited Serendipitous Sands!…

… well before Flutter, and even before I grew my horns out…

… I think there’s been quite a bit of tinkering, though the basics remain the same…

… the thing I loved most is the same, though, and that’s the gorgeous light, here… it’s so beautiful I don’t need to do any post-photo tweaks…

… I think a bit more of it is ‘private’, now, I don’t ever remember being threatened for ‘trespassing’, before, but it happened, this time, on what looked like a perfect little sand island, only a few meters across, kinda left a nasty taste…

… but I couldn’t stay miffed, it’s so pretty, here…

… and Flutter was having a great time…

… yelling at the seagulls in her tiny little psychic voice, that only I can hear… she knows that, which I think is why she was having so much fun doing it (:

We visited The Wastelands, today. It’s a couple of years, now, since my last visit (pre-Flutter), and things seem to have changed quite a lot. The place is still a wonderfully cohesive, sprawling apocalyptic wasteland, but there seems to be lots of new builds…

…we spent several hours here. The day/night cycle, here, is quite fast, so we went through several days and nights. Some sims, in SL, have a lot of cats… The Wastelands seems to have a lot of goats and chickens…

… initially, I thought it was just because I hadn’t been here for a few years, and just couldn’t remember the stuff I was seeing, then I looked up at the destroyed moon… that most definitely hadn’t happened a few years ago!…

… there are so many wonderful scenes, here. This one is straight out of ‘Borderlands’…

… we found ourselves a fabulous, scenic perch…

… from which to view the remains of human civilisation…

… there are plenty of explosions of incongruous colour in this desert of wreckage…

… and lots of gorgeous scenes of grimy decay…

… we found several entrances to underground places, something I don’t remember there being much, or any, of, previously…

… this one was the biggest…

… eventually coming up in this room, straight out of ‘Fallout’…

… that exits here, in a destroyed museum.

When I saw Cica Ghost’s latest creation was called ‘Butterflies and Ropes‘, I thought Flutter might like to see it…

… when I saw the ‘butterflies’ were actually flowers, I thought Flutter might be a bit confused…

… but I needn’t have worried… when she saw the flowers, she squeaked ‘Oh! Flutterflowers!’ and happily fluttered off to explore…

… I’m a bit overprotective of her, really… for a while, after she came to me from the future, and she realised I was the only one who could hear her, she was a bit despondent, especially after she realised organic butterflies couldn’t hear her, either…

… but she’s been here a few years, now, and she’s a tough little thing…

… and she’s smart and funny, and I love her to bits…

… plus, she pretty much likes anything I do, so we both thought this new Cica Ghost build was very photogenic, especially if your pictures have neon cybernetic butterflies in them.

There was a time when every second new destination in SL was a ‘dystopian apocalypse/future/theme park’, and I’ve even written that I was over it… however; for months, now, almost every new destination has been a bunnies and rainbows type of build, which was kinda cute for about ten minutes, and I found myself longing for some good, apocalyptic fun! Imagine my delight when I saw ‘Everwinter‘ was back…

… the place looks great, and is pretty much nothing like what it was last time I was here (pre-Flutter!)…

… it’s much more like Drune, now, which is fine by me…

… but then it morphs into the previous, spooky halloween theme…

… which is fun, and has some good photo opportunities, but it kinda feels gratuitous, to me… but that’s just my opinion, and it’s still well done…

… I prefer scifi to horror…

… and I really like the scifi part of this build…

… there are so many excellent potential backdrops, here (:

We have recently been hanging out in Bay City. Bay City can look a bit bland, at first glance, but it is actually filled with interesting, and often beautiful places…

… like this fabulous comic store! These are the most lovingly created comic racks I have ever seen in SL. Like all big builds, for me, with the human’s slow, bottom-of-the-planet internet connection, it takes aeons for anything to rez, here, which is why my dress is different, we had to give up, and come back the next day, between the last picture, and this one…

… just swinging the camera from the rack in the picture above, to the one here, which is only a few meters away, meant waiting ten minutes (often much longer) for it to properly rez, but it was well worth it for all these gorgeous comics…

… there are a lot of bland, formulaic buildings, in Bay City, but there are also some stunning ones…

… there was even a truck that matched our accents…

… Bay City is well worth exploring. There are shops and galleries randomly dotted through the build, too.