I visited ‘One More Light‘, today…

… of course, the first thing I noticed was the wonderful sky…

… this place is dedicated to that golden era when the children of old money could commit murder, and totally get away with it… oh, wait, they still can do that, can’t they!?… anyway, this place is dedicated to the ‘Gatsby’ era…an imaginary era set in 1920’s America…

… the creator has more than successfully recreated the feel of old wealth, but, to me, this place has also recreated the feel of colonial American empire…

… this excellent build feels more like it’s in South America, or the Philippines…

… but the fabulous sky also adds an element of surreality, so the whole place could really be anywhere, even in a dream…

… wherever it is, it’s really beautiful…

… I had a quick look inside one of the buildings, where I found the expected opulence…

… but it was the grounds that I was really taken by…

… this is an absolutely gorgeous build (:

To combat the increasingly bland fare on offer in the ‘Destination Guide’, I have taken to looking at the world map and going to random places…

… which is how I came to be wandering the perfect streets of Coin Toss…

… with it’s lovely homes, which I believe are called ‘Newbrooke’ homes…

… I actually chose ‘Womp‘ as my destination, because, with that name, who wouldn’t?…

… but Womp is actually empty land, so I walked to Coin Toss…

… I really like these homes. They have a very nice retro-contemporary look to them. Unfortunately, due to my not being ‘authorised’, I couldn’t go into any of them…

… if it didn’t mean having to give up some of my precious Mainland land, I’d very happily grab one of these homes…

… this is, by far, the Linden Homes setup that has most attracted me in all the time I’ve been in SL…

… it’s just right… stylish homes, nice lines, a nice spacious feel…

…almost all the homes are still empty, I’m not sure when people can rent them… I just can’t imagine there are that many premium members to fill all these new subdivisions of homes the moles seem to be churning out…

… which is part of the appeal, for me… the thought of living here with hardly any neighbours. There are plenty of nice common spaces, too.

I visited Isla del Mer, today…

… you actually land underwater, as this is a Mer hangout, but it was the images of what is above the water that had attracted me here…

… prehistoric beasties!…

… bellowing and roaring…

… on a couple of primordial islands…

… seemingly fresh from beneath the sea, still spewing lava…

… and causing atmospheric electrical discharges…

… all very dramatic (:

Last evening I visited Ars Vivendi…

… the lighting, here, is gorgeous…

… the scenery is somnolently dreamy…

… to the point of surreality…

… I just felt wonderfully comfortable in these rolling fields of gold…

… with these lovely, soft-textured buildings behind me…

… all beneath a a rich green-blue sky…

… very much like a dream landscape…

… well worth a visit.

I was cleaning the invisible pixel dust off my scifi toy display, today, at the Last Drop Cafe at Satori Park…

… I love my toys…

… I never get tired of looking at these wonderful pieces of art…

… come on a plastic trip with them…

… life is a foreign, alien surface…

… these guys are navigating it in the most robust way possible…

… safe in the warm, cosy confines of their machines…

… or they are actually purely digital, impulses inside powder-coated titanium and steel…

… almost as immortal as me…

… but only a fraction of the age.

I recently blogged a visit to Drune:BladeRunner City. It wasn’t till I read this post of Veyot’s, that I realised the landing point, there, provides access to another build, as well…

… this seems to be one of the earlier ‘Drune’ builds, but now totally overgrown…

… the palette here is only a couple of colours off being monochromatic…

… the main colours being orange and brown, with yellow/orange lighting…

… the effect is pretty stunning…

… one of the human’s all-time favourite books is ‘Dhalgren’, by Samuel Delaney, it’s about a contemporary American city that has somehow shifted into a parallel dimension, and there are sometimes strange celestial bodies in the sky… the light is always very odd, there… this place makes me think of Dhalgren…

… the light, and the lush overgrowth, make the place feel somnolent and surreal…

… even though there has obviously been been some pretty twisted violence here, the place now feels, somehow, sleepy and safe…

… like the world at the end of time…

… where everything is gently settling into entropy…

… waiting for us all to just go to sleep.

I visited ‘The Desire Realm‘, the other day. My initial reaction to the extremely muted sky and almost empty environment was fairly negative. However, after I’d wandered around a bit…

… I found myself not disliking it…

… it has the kind of big seascape scenes I enjoy, though they would look much better with a more interesting sky…

… but it has some cute little touches…

… and I found myself sort of admiring the simplicity…

… it takes courage and conviction to create something so bland and simple, without it just being boring, and I decided this place isn’t quite boring.

The phrase ‘DayDream Believer‘ will, forever, instantly evoke the song by the Monkees, for myself and my human, both of us being quite old…

… which I heard in my head as I did a little dance in this Faerie ring…

… this is a really pretty sim…

… with a gorgeous, rich palette, and a static sky with this wonderful sweep of cloud to use as a dramatic background element…

… there’s lots to see here…

… lots of beautiful scenes…

… I would easily have spent an hour exploring and stopping to take pictures…

… I ended my time here in conversation with this little cutie (:

There was a light in the sky at Lost Unicorn. It wasn’t the moon, but it was as bright…

… and it’s magical pull was very strong, strong enough to pull me off my feet, if I let it…

… the forest canopy let it through…

… creating gorgeous little, light-filled pockets…

… you can literally smell the magic, here… it smells like Fae and moonbeams.

When you transport to The Blade Runner Sim, you arrive in this subway train carriage. Like the whole sim, the colours are lush and rich…

… there is a velvety decay here, not as poisonous as I’d have expected for a BladeRunner homage, but very pretty…

… there were a lot of avi’s here, most just milling around in the same place. The streets, though disappointingly truncated, are beautiful…

… I found myself a high vantage point…

… on a wet rooftop with exposed steel beams extending from it. Everything was very slippery, and the beams looked like the last place a replicant detective, who didn’t know the only reason he even managed to do so was because he was a replicant, would want to be dangling from with a couple of broken fingers…

… I realised that…

… if I didn’t visually document my surroundings…

… all these moments…

… would be lost in time…

… like… tears… in the rain.