I visited wonderful Insilico Mars, again, today…

… I love this place! I can spend hours wandering around, searching out stunning imagery. For someone whose human was raised on the awesome art of the likes of Chris Foss and Jim Burns, these backgrounds are like falling back into the scifi book covers the human fell so in love with…

… all that’s really missing is a huge spaceship, hanging in the alien sky…

… but that’s just to make them more like 1970’s scifi cover art, even without spaceships, these backgrounds create marvellous compositions…

… they could still, easily, be book covers, evoking wonderful tales of life on barren worlds…

… where the technology is all that keeps the harsh environment survivable…

… and people dream of lives in sweeter places.

I visited Drune: Giger City today, my first 2022 outing, and such a relief to have a non-Christmas-themed destination to visit! This time, Hera is paying fully acknowledged homage to H R Giger. However, the first thing I noticed, on the landing platform, was this wonderful homage (deliberate or not) to Jim Burns, whose organic, insect-like ships fit right in with the feel of Giger City…

… being a homage to Giger’s work, the main themes here are teeth…

… penises…

… and vaginal orifices, often with penises. I’ve said before, I often find the juvenile sexual obsessions in Drune to be gratuitous. However, when you are doing a homage to the steaming, sexually obsessed work of H R Giger, it’s fairly hard to be gratuitous. And, although the human and I find obsession with sexual themes pretty infantile, now, we certainly didn’t, 40-odd years ago, when we first discovered Giger!…

… also, being a Giger homage, most things are green/green-blue, and slimey-looking…

… although all the penises and stuff get old pretty quick, this is still a magnificent reproduction of Giger-like themes…

… and I could just roll around in the marvellous textures!…

… of course, no Giger homage would be complete without a slime-dripping…

… chamber of face-hugger eggs (:

Out of gas at a deserted, gas-less service station, in the middle of nowhere…

… it’s very hot, and dry, here, and I needed somewhere cool to rest. Luckily, I’d passed through this same valley, about 500 years ago, on the trail of some vampires…

… I remembered tracking them to an ancient, hidden cave system, somewhere over this way…

… my memory was correct, and I was soon in the delicious, damp coolness of this lost place. The vampires, of course, are not here…

… there had been 13 of them, all ancient and powerful. We had fought a ferocious, hand-to-hand battle…

… which was over far sooner than any of them had expected, and, also contrary to their expectations, I was the only survivor. All my battles with the Vampire Nation ended that way, they had never encountered anything like me, and should never have declared war on me…

… by the time they realised that, of course, it was too late for them.

Shot in the wonderful little landscape build at ISON.

Shot in the cute little theatre at Rosehaven Valley.

I serendipitously discovered Rosehaven Valley, this morning. Rosehaven is a loving homage to how the deco style of the 20’s and 30’s informed the 50’s in America. The pastel pinks and blues are super-gorgeous. I found this really pretty diner…

… I thought some 1950’s food might be nice, so I went in and sat at a table. I waited patiently to be served…

… I waited and waited, but no one came to serve me. Perhaps American diners, in the 1950’s, didn’t serve people with coloured horns?…

… undeterred, I continued to explore. There are some wonderful interiors, here…

…

… if you are familiar with the SL creators who make awesome 1950’s stuff, you will see plenty of their work in Rosehaven…

…

… although it says there are shops here, in ‘search’, I only found replica shops… these are all very sweet reproductions of that imaginary time, when life was pleasant and people were always kind and fair, as long as you were white and middle-class or better…

…

… my favourite place was this beautiful, fantasy trailer park…

… with it’s absolutely gorgeous 1950’s colours and style…

… and these dream trailer homes…

… with their perfect, dream gardens, where dreamers live in a wonderland that never really existed.

Placebo Gallery is now in Soho (:

Elvion.

I turned 12, the other day (: As I personally know some 15 year old avi’s, I realise 12 isn’t such a big deal, but I’m still really proud to be 12! Apart from several months, one year, due to crap internet connectivity, I have been a constant dweller in SL. Even during those crappy few months, I’d log on occasionally, just to see if things had improved, then log off in despair, unable to even walk across a room without being lagged so badly I would get lost…

… this rezday, LL sent me a little list of my stats for the year, comparing them to those of the ‘average’ avi. I was totally blown away by them!…

… apparently, the ‘average avi’ visits 87 regions in a year… I, on the other hand, visited…998!!… the ‘average’ avi does 220 teleports a year… I did 3,580!! I find this information astonishing! I realise that my thing is exploring, and visiting galleries, and, um, a bit of shopping, and that those things entail a bit of teleporting, but those stats seem to say that the ‘average’ avi, basically, hardly goes anywhere! Do they just amble about in the same sim, perhaps occasionally going somewhere new? I’m sure these stats would be accurate, as they come from the part of LL that tracks all that stuff.

Anyway, not only am I proud to have been here 12 years, but I’m even more proud that I seem to be getting far more out of my experience, here in SL, than the ‘average’ avi!

The Borderless Project.