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…
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.
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 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!
… 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.
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