I went back to Insilico, again, this morning. Yesterday I climbed as high as I’ve ever been, here, today I decided to descend as low as I could…

… Insilico, like my other two fave builds, has a truely vast scale…

… once again, I had discovered somewhere here I’d never been, before… a spaceport, complete with a docked ship… the bowels of Insilico stretching away, below…

… after exploring the docking area, I stepped onto the lift platform…

… and activated it…

… and down I went…

… to what I believe is the lowest accessible part of Insilico, or so it looked when I cammed out and around…

… it just impresses the hell out of me, the amount of work that has gone into this stunning place…

… the consistency and quality of the vision, here, is awesome…

… all of Insilico towered above me. It was wonderful.

So, with no interesting destinations in the destination guide, I decided to finally brave the lag, once more, and visit Tralala’s Diner… imagine my shock when I couldn’t do that because it doesn’t seem to exist, any more! I pulled up Tralala Loordes’s profile and used the LM in that, still got the ‘destination doesn’t exist’ message. I was stunned, Tralala’s Diner has been my most hated (for it’s rage-inducing lag) fabulous destination for years, I’d gotten used to it! I noticed in Tralala’s ‘picks’ that there was a diner in Insilico, something I’d never known, so I tp’d here, only to find an empty lot. When I re-checked the address in the profile, I realised it had ‘deleted’, or something, written at the end of the description. Oh, well, I was back in Insilico with nothing better to do, so I headed off in a random direction…

… I started heading up. I saw these stairs in the distance, and didn’t remember ever having climbed them (you can’t fly in Insilico), so I headed for them…

… up and up I went…

… and up and up…

… till I was as high as I’ve ever been, here. I could see stairs leading down, again, on the other side of the landing platform I’d arrived on, and headed back down…

… they took me to this elevator platform. As this is a ‘no-fly’ sim, these kinds of hieghts are pretty intimidating. Even though falling won’t kill you, knowing how long it would take to get back up to where you fell from adds a certain verisimilitude to the feeling of being dangerously high. I called the elevator…

… and rode it down, a very long way… to the empty lot I’d arrived in!

I visited Ravenport Reclaimed, today…

… this is what I can only describe as a verdant apocalyptic build, portraying a town whose human population is now zero, thanks to some kind of plague, but whose flora and fauna is thriving. Whenever I see dead helicopters I cannot help but think of zombie apocalypse games, ‘Left 4 Dead’ in particular, but more on that, later…

… the ruined town is on the verge of total destruction, due to what must be decades of reclamation by the plant kingdom, and, beneath all that foliage, are all manner of animal, escaped, I’m assuming, from a zoo, many of them, it would seem…

… I love the fecundity of all the plant life, and it’s gorgeous greenness…

… this is a very convincing representation of what a deserted North American, or European town would look like, a few decades later. It is very much in the tradition of so many excellent scifi games and films, depicting such collapse…

… and, returning to the ‘Left 4 Dead’ theme, and, of course, ‘The Last of Us’, it’s scenes like this, as well as dead helicopters, that really make me think of those games… the sense of being in the relative security of the dense regrowth, looking into the ruins…

… of such mundane things as motels and parks, never knowing what dormant horror is waiting in there, but you have to go in, for food, or shelter, or whatever…

… but, there are no ravenous hordes, here, just an abundance of plant regrowth, animals…

… and birds…

… this is a wonderful, beautifully decayed, post-apocalyptic destination, well worth spending the time to explore.

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.