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.

Port of Sparquerry is next to Queddoq, which is next to ACC Alpha.

I took Flutter to see ACC Alpha, somewhere I’ve not shown her, before…

… she was delighted, of course…

… if you are familiar with my travels, you’ll know I’ve been here many times, but, obviously, not since Flutter came to me from my own future (still not sure what that’s about)… if you don’t know ACC Alpha, you should check it out…

… it’s not all ACC Alpha… in these images I go from there to Qeddoq, it’s a huge area, not sure how many sims, but the aesthetic is the same across all the different areas…

… the whole place is like a watercolour fantasy dream. ACC Alpha, itself, is quite surreal, but Qeddoq is more like some timeless Mediterranean dream city…

… the whole place is very beautiful…

… there is a rail system, you can ride it across all the various, different parts of the whole place, it’s a great way to get a feel for just how big and amazing it all is…

… you can spend hours here, and still not see everything…

… I don’t believe there is anywhere else like this in SL…

… it’s why I keep coming back (:

We recently visited ‘Sainte Rose Sur Mer‘…

… we loved the sky and the soft, mostly blue palette here…

… the sombre Mediterranean sea crashes and foams at the shore…

… this is a very pretty, very relaxing destination…

… there are friendly cats…

… delightful splashes of colour, goats, a donkey, pigeons…

… wonderful photographic opportunities… we spent a lot of time, here, and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it (:

Oubliette (:

Flutters and I visited Ridge Crest City, today…

… a light rain started to fall, not long after we arrived…

… this is an urban role-play sim…

… it’s neither too slick, nor too grungey…

… it’s well laid out, quite big, and very consistent…

… the carpet in the picture theatre foyer is a bit scary…

… there are places to rent, and it looks like there are several interior spaces to hang out in…

… we spent hours here, patiently waiting for textures to rez. The longer we were here, the more we liked it…

… there is a whole range of locations, from sleazy trailer park to upmarket tenements…

… and we really liked the sky, which seems to change at regular intervals.

We went to look at ‘Silence’, by Magda Schmidtzau, in a very beautiful space, at the La Maison D’aneli gallery, today…

… these works are gorgeous. Given the eclecticism of style, and based on our recent, year-long submersion in Mj, we surmise that some, if not all, aspects of these images were created using an AI art program…

… of course, that in no way detracts from the work… given our infatuation with the potential of the medium, that makes us appreciate them even more, because, if they have been done using AI, they are very good…

… we could be wrong, but when you have lived AI-generated art, and it’s wondrous potential for genuine, original work, for a whole year, as we just have, you recognise a certain feel. I tried contacting Magda (in the process discovering I’d bought one of her works, seven years ago), to ask her, but she was offline… I look forward to finding out if I am correct (no, I didn’t jump from third person, to first… when I say ‘we’, I mean the human, Flutter, and I)…

… however they are created, we were very taken by them, and loved this space, somewhere we don’t remember ever having come to, before…

… the works are very reasonably priced, for what we consider to be top-level SL art…

… and we had to stop ourselves from buying more than the two we did (:

As you know, our (the human, and I) passion is art-as-design (love of art for it’s visual impact), and not art-with-a-capital-A, art as an explanation of the cosmos, so we don’t really bother with the art-speak explanations when we look at art. For a great art-speak explanation, though, go here… this is an excellent publication I recently discovered (this article is, in fact, how I learned of this exhibition) that is dedicated to all things wonderful in SL (:

It’s a long time since I visited ‘Innsmouth‘, and it’s the first time, for Flutter…

… I’d forgotten how beautiful it is…

… the place has a definite ‘Silent Hill’ vibe…

… everything is shrouded in thick fog…

… creating wonderful, faded perspective, and muted colours, wherever you look…

… we strolled around for hours… Flutter was a bit nervous because Innsmouth has a bad history, but one of the advantages of being a 4000 year old ‘Demon’ is that there’s not much that scares me (:

My darling lepidoptera and I decided it was time to go and see ‘Skye Neist Point‘, again…

… believe it, or not, this is a shop display!…

… you can buy everything you see, here…

… Skye makes some of the best landscaping materials in SL…

… and this gorgeous place is testimony to what you could create with those materials…

… the scale of some of this stuff is brobdingnagian…

… and you are free to wander around and take pictures. There is so much potential, here, for fantasy photography…

… we might blog the castle, next post, although we have already done so, but it was a while ago, now… we’ve also already used this whole sim for posts (:

Over the past 5 days, Flutter and I have been spending hours standing in the same place in ‘DownTown‘…

… that’s because the lag/rez-time, here, is even worse than it is in New Babbage… here, we literally have to wait for an hour to get a fully-rezzed scene, and sometimes, even that isn’t enough time…

… we’re becoming quite adept at the zen art of standing still whilst reality coalesces out of the chaos…

… it’s actually very rewarding, these type of incredibly detailed builds are usually worth the wait to discover, something I seldom have the time to do, or, we just never really enjoyed this kind of shooting, but, now we are older, we are slightly more relaxed?…

… anyway, DownTown is a very well made ‘role-play’ sim, a grungey, post-something concrete jungle of quite despair/decay…

… with plenty of potential…

… for dramatic imagery (: