Today, I visited ‘Lana‘. I always use the ‘shared environment’ setting, so I get the experience the creator intended… my first reaction, here, was ‘Eeep!’; the comic-book colours and bubble-gum ocean were a bit of a shock, but I decided to run with it…
… and quickly grew to really like the colours, here! This is such a gorgeous place! For starters, it’s Halloween-free, which is so nice when 99% of current destinations are not. But, that fact aside, the island seems to be devided into a ‘winter’ side, and a more ‘spring/summer/autumn’ side, and the colours on the winter side are very pretty…
… reds/whites/pinks are most of my favourite colours, so I really loved the colours, here…
… but I didn’t dislike the colours on the spring/summer/autumn side, either! There are lots of deer and several dragons, in Lana…
… as well as majestic big cats, and several other beasts…
… there’s plenty of cuteness…
… and lots of wonderful, photogenic settings…
… so much to discover…
… a really gorgeous, life-affirming place to visit (:
Last night, I visited ‘Whitby-Birth of Dracula‘. Whitby is a beautifully made, medieval village, beneath a large church and some ruins, all on a dark and moody coastline. The lighting, here, is perfect, and the sky and roiling clouds couldn’t be better…
… the interiors are equally beautifully lit, and everything is in gorgeous, Rembrandt-like colours, dark and rich…
… the advertising blurb says this build isn’t a pedantic reading of the Dracula myth, but something looser, but anyone who knows their Dracula mythology will feel how evocative of all those tales this build is, it certainly has all the tropes…
… like the decadent, vampiric nature of the church, sucking the wealth from the peasants in return for a fantasy of eternal life…
… but the opulance of that decadence sure is gorgeous…
… this guy made me smile. He reminded me of the kind of thugs I came up against, back in the day, when I was fighting both the Holy Roman Church, and the Vampire Nation. Creatures like him were all very tough when dealing with peasants armed with ignorance and sticks, they didn’t know what hit them when they tried that crap on me… I’m still here, a thousand years later, and they are funny paintings on the wall…
… there are wonderful ruins for wandering in, and photographing, with catacombs and tombs beneath them, it’s all very subtle, which I really appreciate in this season of pumpkins and witches at every turn…
… it’s the fabulously rich interiors that I was most taken with…
… really well done, like you have stepped into a medieval painting…
… speaking of which, there are many exquisite art works in these interiors. ‘Whitby-Birth of Dracula’ is well worth a visit.
I visited ‘The Beckridge Gallery‘ for the first time, last night. This is another gallery in a Linden suburb!…
… I went to see the exhibition ‘Punkins: Digital Magic’. This is a display of gorgeous pumpkins of all shape and size, by many different creators. As far as I could tell, they were all gacha items…
… they ranged from the very small, to quite big…
… many of them quite exquisite works of art in their own right…
… it’s a really sweet show that left me feeling quite happy and smiley…
… there are more ‘punkins’ out the back, in the very neat suburban yard. Like ‘The 22 Art Space in Bellisseria‘, this is wonderful use of otherwise quite bland suburban, SL homes, in their pretty, but repetitive enclaves.
It’s been a while since I’ve visited an apocalyptic sim. Currently, however, the choice of new builds to visit is Halloween themed, or… Halloween themed, so when there was the choice of a Halloween themed apocalyptic sim, that’s where I went, to Everwinter…
… I was quite impressed. I stopped going to apocalyptic builds because they all became such cookie-cutter, cut-and-paste affairs, with the same rusty playgrounds, burning vehicles, all that stuff. While Everwinter is actually, pretty much, composed from the same items, that composition is quite nicely balanced. The lighting is gorgeous, which is always a major draw, for me…
… the place is very cluttered, but with just the right amount of clutter…
… there is some nice, ironic, whimsical humour, here…
… and some wonderful 1920’s music…
… to counterpoint that 1950’s design collateral that is the go-to skin for ‘post-apocalyptic’, post-Fallout…
… there are nods to many themes, here, from ‘War of the Worlds’…
… to ‘Fallout’, which is not only blatantly referenced, somewhere in the sim, but subtly referenced everywhere… this scene under an overpass, is straight out of Fallout, including the lighting…
… so, even though it is all fairly cliched…
… Everwinter is still very photogenic, and well worth a visit.
This morning I visited ‘The 22 Art Space in Bellisseria‘, to check out the new exhibition ‘Duet’. I won’t offer an opinion about this exhibition, I’ll let you decide for yourself, should you choose to come and see it. My artistic tastes are predicated on those of my human, of course… my human has a degree in Computer Graphic Design. Like many people trained in design, the human’s taste in art is lowbrow/populist/illustrative, not highbrow/elitist… I feel this exhibition is aimed at the highbrow, capital ‘A’, art elite, and therefore I am not a suitable judge of the work or its meaning. I’m sure Ricco won’t be offended by my saying this, and will continue to send me exhibition updates! While I was there, however, I also checked out, as I always do, the amazingly uniform, stunningly well presented neighbourhood the gallery is in…
… forgive my naïveté, but this place has always intrigued me with it’s glorious, wealthy, suburban charm. I often speculated on how it was so uniform, supposing there must be some kind of building covenant, or constraints… you see, although I have always been a ‘premium’ member, I have also always only ever lived in the unregulated wilds of ‘Mainland’, and never felt the need to deplete my land usage ability by getting a Linden Home…
… it wasn’t till I visited ‘Mirror Pond‘, a few days ago, after reading this article, by Daniel Voyager, that a seed was sown for a revelation about the suburban paradise around the 22 Art Space. When I first landed in Mirror Pond (literally… you land IN the pond), I thought ‘Wow, what a pretty sim, so uniform and well set out’…
… but, as I wandered around it, miles and miles of it, all exactly the same, it started looking less amazing, and, actually, well… bland and repetitive, though still pretty…
… back in Bellisseria, which is slightly less repetitive, I suddenly realised ‘This is all Linden Homes, too!’… I clicked on a house and, sure enough, it was a Linden Home, they all were. And, like ‘Mirror Pond’, and all it’s neighbouring sims, this place just goes on and on, all lovely and tidy and well-manicured… all, really, the same. There is hardly any sign of individual expression, here… the odd flag on a building, but almost nothing else…
… mile after mile of pretty, perfect homes and sections on perfect, empty streets of lovely pavers…
… as I said, forgive my ignorance if all this was perfectly obvious to you from the start, but I am a child of the SL wilds, where the beautiful and the ugly and tasteless, as well as just miles of abandoned land, side by side, is the norm. I hadn’t realised it, but I far prefer the expressions of individuality I’ve always seen there, to this candy-coated, safe, suburban blandness.
I returned, after several months, to Missing Melody,last evening…
… the place was even more beautiful, but darkly so, now…
… but dark in a hauntingly lovely way. There are lots of animals here, and several gorgeous little tableau, like a baby fox cautiously sniffing at a sleeping bambi, a bambi cautiously looking at a sleeping fox, this one of an adult deer nuzzling a fawn, and several others, they are all delightful, and make the leaning toward darkness a cosy leaning, rather than a melancholy one…
… the autumn colours are glorious…
… here, a mother bear has caught a fish for her cub…
… there are areas where it is constantly raining and lightning flashes…
… like I said, kinda dark, but not maudlin…
… above everything is this wonderfully brooding sky.
I visited Drune Gotham, last night. The place is a delicious confection of rich, velvety darkness and equally rich light and colour…
… there is wonderful 1920’s-era signage everywhere…
… the whole place has a stunningly well developed alt-20’s feel…
… if you know me, you know I’m not into RP, I’m all about photographing the environment. This iteration of Drune is billed as an RP sim, which might mean it will be up for a while? There were several avi’s here when I was here, but they all seemed to be milling around in the landing area… there are plenty of little, hidden spaces to explore, too, but they were all empty. The feeling of this area, like it had just been deserted…
… had a definite ‘Silent Hill’ vibe, for me. All the interiors are beautifully rendered…
… back outside, and the ‘Silent Hill’ vibe was displaced by the ‘Batlight’ in the sky, and marvellous Bettie Page…
… as with all the ‘Drune’ iterations, the sumptuous lighting and textures are impeccable…
… but it was the flora and the light that bedazzled me the most…
… the light is constantly shifting, here. You can literally take two pictures a second apart, and the lighting in them will be totally different…
… almost everything here that is lit, or emits light, has been set to cycle through its colours… that and the rapidly changing sky create a constantly shifting scene light. This isn’t jarring, though, in fact it is surprisingly subtle…
… but once you become aware of it, it can be hard to choose a ‘better’ image of a single scene, as that scene, photographed several times in a row, is always differently lit…
… which just meant I took hundreds of pictures, which is pretty normal for me, anyway (:
It was raining when I visited Luane’s World, this morning, raining and misty and autumnal…
… the rain cleared, though, and everything was fresh and clean, and the light was soft and beautiful…
… I hung out, for a while, on a small jetty, observed by gulls…
… before resuming my wandering. The colours and scenery here put me in mind of American Romantic Landscape paintings…
… and, depending on view angle, Maxfield Parrish paintings…
… this is a really beautiful sim for nature photography…
… and just, generally, delightfully pastoral/bucolic scenes…
… I loved it, here, just wandering and stopping to take pictures. There were lots of other avi’s doing the same thing, some on horses, one on some fabulous lion-like beast… all were courteous and considerate, there were no assholes, which is always lovely (:
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