We visited ‘Between the Worlds‘, this morning. This is a gallery of AI-generated art…
… this is, by far, the coolest such venue we have seen in SL, since AI art made everyone an ‘artist’, and some of the best AI art we’ve seen here, too…
… there is a lot of lady-boy imagery, here (sorry… non-binary) which is fine if that’s your speed, but I prefer my pretty girls to be girls…
… images like these are totally my speed! As someone who was addicted to producing AI art for a year or so, I appreciate that these images are more than just someone using an AI art generator as a paint-by-numbers exercise…
… this was my favourite… really gorgeous… this is, for me, the epitome of the level of AI art you can create, if you put the work in; it’s not cliched, there’s a story here, and the whole thing is beautifully cohesive…
… wonderful stuff…
… the gallery, itself, which is advertised as a ‘hangout space’, is really pretty.
… now we know why the Baja Coast and Hillvale builds all look so similar… they are all part of the same real estate venture…
… we particularly liked the well-signposted rentals, here; no nasty, sudden, unexpected evictions…
… we love this Fallout/Bio-Shock vibe…
… these are beautifully crafted builds…
… at Hillvale Beach you can access the beach via a path between rentals, without fear of petty, spiteful evictions that don’t give you any time to work out where the fucking line you crossed was… which is always nice…
… the sky, here, makes me think of Dhalgren (by Samuel Delaney), not that this particular celestial display occurs in that story, but strange things do happen in the sky, in a nameless city where reality collides with… well, with something…
… I suspect genuine design skill behind these builds…
… none of them has a single miss-placed element, and they all form a wonderfully cohesive whole.
… just as I think Mopire City is the most fascinating build in SL…
… so I think R2 Fashion is the coolest store premises I’ve ever seen, here…
… I discovered R2, then Mopire City, when I used to hang out with Gynoids, the coolest of whom were always dressed in R2 fashion…
… I seldom wear R2, myself, as they don’t make anything for Petite…
… but I have very fond memories of shopping here with glittering, beautiful Gynoid friends… and, of course, that was how I discovered Mopire City, so this gorgeous spaceship of a retail structure has a permanent place in my heart (:
So, about half an hour after I published my last post, I went back to Mopire City (I have an addictive personality (: ) and within seconds another avi crash-landed in front of me in a little space-craft, ejecting onto the ground at the last second, her craft evaporating… I said ‘Hello’, and we got talking. She said everything about Mopire City I have been saying for about a decade, now! She was very surprised to see another avi, she thinks Mopire City is amazing, she comes here because it’s so strangely empty… we had a lovely conversation, then she had to go… it was really nice to not only run into another avi, here, but to run into one who has clearly been coming here for the same reasons I do…
… after she left, I continued re-exploring. One of the many amazing things about Mopire City is that a surprising number of the buildings here are actually real buildings you can enter, many of them are lavishly decorated, with working elevators, and stairs, and you can climb all the way to the top of many of them…
… I just adore the wealth of architectural detail, here…
… I’m a huge fan of using structures to create depth and interest in my photography, and Mopire City, though it has no clouds, has structures in spades! The light here used to be a horrible, metallic glare, but they have changed it, sometime in the last year, or so, and it now isn’t so horrible…
… always, where-ever you go in Mopire City, if you look up, you see the beautiful structure that is R2 Fashion, floating in the sky. When I first started coming here, it was attached to the city by an elevator, but they did away with that several years ago…
… I never get tired of the wonderful, rich detail, here…
… and will continue to try making more people aware of this astonishing SL jewel, even though its makers seem perfectly content for their creation to be empty and unknown.
If you are familiar with this blog, you know my absolute favourite place in SL is Mopire City. I have blogged about it several times (check the ‘search thingy’ on my blog), and will probably blog about it several times more. Mopire City (part of the Mopire City/Rieri-Town/Hiraya-Town/Tokyo-Windhill City/Mitsumi-Town complex) is HUGE, and exquisitely constructed… the best build in SL, as far as I’m concerned… yet hardly anyone I meet has even heard of it. I’ve been exploring it for a very long time, and I, still, always find places for the first time… like this tunnel…
… which leads into this underground tube station. I’ve been down here, before, but from a different access point… it’s a bit like a video game, lots of similar environment, almost designed to confuse. The level of detail in all of Mopire City is simply astounding… the prim count must be staggering…
… the station is two levels, that I have discovered, so far, but could be more… there is a vast underground road network here, too…
… this platform is mirrored on the other side… I’ve been down to the other side, long ago, where I found a shooting gallery (the only real shop in all of the Mopire City complex, apart from R2 Fashion, which hovers above it all, is a gun shop)… but have never been able to re-find it. Mopire City is one of those sims where it doesn’t matter where you create an LM from, it only ever takes you to the official landing point, so it’s extremely hard to explore here and not get lost, because you can never do it methodically, you have to always start at the beginning, and get lost, again…
… we got lost down here, the other night, after finding the tunnel, and had to TP back to the landing sight, then find our way back here, and try not to get lost, again! We found this little guy, waiting for a train… I’ve found these guys dotted around the whole, vast complex; the only, obvious, humour in the whole, clinically perfect build…
… the most amazing thing about Mopire City is that in the ten-odd years I’ve been exploring it, I would have seen 10-15 other avi’s… at the most! No-one lives here, that I have ever seen, there are no rentals, no ‘tip’ jars, and only the gun shop and R2 Fashion to finance this amazing, complex, beautiful build… though I’d imagine a top-end SL weapons dealer, and R2 Fashion would pull in a good monthly income…
… we eventually found some stairs that lead us up to the surface. This is a wonderful, mysterious place, well worth a visit but, be warned, you will get lost!
We enjoyed our trip to the Baja Coast so much, we decided we’d check out Baja Coast 2. We were straight away struck by the more built-up feel of the place, but also by it’s decidedly post-societal-collapse vibe…
… we love this vibe! Not an ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ kind of thing, but a sense of civilisational ennui, everything shabby and running down, but no-one has resorted to cannibalism… yet…
… but it was the wonderful coast that we came to see. This proved harder to access than at Baja Coast, due to the greater number of rentals, and running into shitty security that not only doesn’t give you time to walk away, but actually evicts you into the ocean, rather than back to the landing point, which I found pretty petty/nasty…
… I even considered renting a place, so I could get better access, but at nearly L$900 a week, I gave that idea a miss! Then I realised I could safely access the unrented sections, so I wouldn’t need to pay for decent images, so that was all good…
… once again, it’s the gorgeous sky that, for me, makes these images. The light, here, is constantly changing, something I’ve not really seen in other sims, but I really like it… you just have to wait a few seconds, and it usually gives an even deeper/darker/brighter/richer/whatever-it-is-you-want variation…
… I love clouds! I am absolutely not a clear-blue-sky photographer, I consider clouds to be at least a 25% major component in my photography… they create depth and perspective that just doesn’t exist with a clear, blue sky…
… the clouds, here, are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen in a sim… I love their almost oil-painted look…
… so, apart from the crap eviction experience, our visit here was just as fruitful as our visit to Baja number one (:
I liked the ruined gallery building I saw at the Gallery Asaki Yume Mishi so much that I tracked down where to get one for myself, and whether it was editable, which it was…
… as soon as I saw it, I’d thought ‘Hmmm, that would look great as an extension for my gallery…’…
… I had to move my fibreglass Brontosaurus, plus some smaller things…
… but I’m really pleased with the result…
… it creates a perfect transition from the back of my gallery (just had to remove a wall panel) to the area behind it, which was kinda removed from the gallery, till now… more part of the garden… now it’s more part of the gallery.
I was thinking of somewhere suitable to use as a backdrop for some pictures of myself in my new bikini, when I read about an exhibition of golden architectural models…
… I thought they’d make a gorgeous backdrop…
… with their golden light and the beautiful, golden-brown/chocolatey-black shadows against which they are set…
… the models/sculptures are exquisite…
… and the space in which they are set is perfect for displaying their golden splendour…
Avatar Life 