As my journey through the past of my travels continues, I visited ACC ALPHA. This place is one of the most surreal, unashamedly art-as-environment destinations I have ever seen in SL, and it’s been running for over ten years, now…

… the first time I came here, years ago, I have to admit I didn’t actually like it that much, I found it too abstract, and too confusing. This time is the first time I’ve really been able to spend a long time here, and it is really quite stunning, and very unique…

… I love the confident, avant-garde architecture. There are little galleries everywhere, here…

… I also discovered, this visit, that there actually are areas of more conventional beauty and looks…

… which are just as stunning as all the surreal stuff…

… of which there is plenty.

Basilique is the next place in my ‘landmarks’ folder that I re-visited. I have only the vaguest of memories of the first time I visited here, perhaps it was for the art gallery that is here, but I obviously liked it enough to landmark it…

… it is a very pretty place, and there are rental homes here, which possibly explains it’s still being here…

… but part of it I definitely had no memory at all of, was this mansion. To get to it, you use the sports car you find parked in the town, it’s a teleporter, which zaps you to this lovely place…

… with it’s gorgeous grounds…

… and regal architecture…

… with it’s sumptuous interior…

… which include a large ballroom, which has a mezzanine with a well stocked bar.

My continued journey through my ‘Landmarks’ folder took me back to the magnificence that is ‘Skye Neist Point‘, this morning…

… this entire sim is ‘Skye’s’ product showroom. It’s stunningly well made, a wonderful photographic destination in it’s own gorgeous right…

… ‘Skye’ (Alex Bader) has created everything you see, here…

… not just stunning landscape objects, but elegant, sophisticated architecture, too…

… ‘Skye’ is one of the best builders in SL…

… and probably makes the best castles.

I went to ‘Northern Shore‘, this morning…

… it was very atmospheric, there is an enormous amount of subtle detail, all beautifully interwoven…

… making for really beautiful, nautical/seaside images…

… unfortunately I couldn’t get past this landing area… the two times I tried to go further, in two different directions, I got threatened with eviction.

I visited ‘The Apartments‘, last night…

… a few years ago, SL seemed to be swamped with post-apocalyptic builds, now there seems to be a trend for BladeRunner-esque builds, which is far more interesting…

… the bulk of this build are the eponymous ‘Apartments’, which provide lots of views of the dystopian, neon, rain-drenched future so evocative of the ‘Blade Runner’ vision…

… internally there are some spaces that also reflect the ‘Blade Runner’ style… a kind of worn, slightly seedy, somehow 50’s looking, faded opulence…

… I liked the somehow muted neon palette, it adds to the ennui…

… as do the sound effects, which are also straight out of ‘Blade Runner’, with that repeating sound-bite that sounds like a call to prayer blended with a verbalisation of emptiness…

… it got a bit tedious navigating the floors of the building and fighting the lag, but there’s plenty to see here, and lots of cool photogenic stuff.

Listlessly searching for places to explore/revisit, I saw ‘Action Surf‘ in the SL ‘Destination Guide’, and thought, hey, I’ve been there, years ago, and I remember it having a really cool, empty, huge set, next to it, like someone started making a giant ‘Matchbox Toy’ play board…

… with a bit of David Lynch thrown in…

… excellent backdrops for all kinds of wonderful stuff…

…

So, as I work my way up from the bottom of my ‘landmarks’ folder, and reject the no-longer extant locations, I was delighted to find ‘The Clock Museum‘ still exists! I discovered this charming little place back in the day when I literally walked everywhere in SL, I’d spend hours and hours, just walking the public roads, far too timid to go onto anything that looked like I might not be welcome …

… the museum is full of a huge variety of working clocks, all ticking and tocking and bonging and binging together, it sounds chaotic, but is actually very soothing…

… the blue ‘information’ icons below each piece give a landmark to the creator… sadly, the museum is so old, and clearly not being kept up-to-date, that of the three landmarks I tried, two took me to the holdings of the dreaded Anshe Chung clone army, and one refused to take me anywhere, so I didn’t bother with any more, and just enjoyed the museum…

… there’s even a clock you can interact with, and be the hands of…

… there are plenty of clocks in the grounds, as well. I love these grounds, they are so evocative of that simpler SL, a decade ago, when everything was still simple prim construction… I guess it makes me nostalgic for those days of that naive little avi, wandering all big-eyed and curious, never knowing what was just around the next bend, always too shy to talk to anyone…

… I think this is my favourite clock, it has a cute flamingo going round and round as it’s gears gyrate (:

When I cannot find any interesting places to explore in any of the destination guides I follow, and there really doesn’t seem to be much that interests me, right now, I go to my ‘landmarks’ folder, and, starting at the bottom, look for somewhere to go, either to rediscover somewhere fabulous, or to discover it is a vacant lot, owned by an Anshe Chung clone, in which case I delete it… the destinations at the bottom of my folder are very old, some of them 10 years old, Cadenza was almost at the bottom…

… I honestly don’t remember what it used to look like, but I wasn’t expecting this cute, whimsical landscape…

… it was very pretty, and very relaxing, except when I either walked into some area that caused my viewer to crash, or my viewer just chose that time to do so, but THAT wasn’t soothing… the last few times my viewer has crashed, when I restart it, half the recent changes I’ve made to my wardrobe are gone, and I’ve got to do them all again, which is pretty irritating…

… but, this lovely place soon soothed my ire…

… this corner looks like the toy storage area (:

Hello, I’m Seraphim. When I first started this blog, nearly three years ago, now, it was called ‘Broken Hearted Avatar’. I started it as therapy for the damage that was done to me as a result of my first SL romance going horribly bad, as, I’ve since learned, they almost inevitably do…

… I was in such a shattered place, I couldn’t even bare to represent myself in the first person, it felt safer to communicate in the third person, like it was someone else’s sad little story that was unfolding. As therapy, this blog was excellent, even if it did chronicle the next several shitty relationships I then staggered through, before I learned that relationships in SL are nothing like relationships in RL, and that actual long-term ‘couple’ relationships are almost non-existent… but you have to try, and experience that, before you can grow beyond your experience. I eventually changed the name of this blog to ‘Kind Hearted Avatar’, because it was similar to ‘Broken Hearted Avatar’, in form, but totally different, and far more hopeful in meaning…

… anyway, a lot has changed for my human, and myself, in those nearly three years, and I now want to speak as myself, in the first person, so that’s what I’m going to do (:

Seraphim visited the new Digital Arts Gallery sim, last night. She’s not a fan of the work they always seem to show, there… she doesn’t consider RL photographs of flowers to be SL art… but she loves what they’ve done to the sim!…

… they have transformed it into an excellent scifi photo location…

… and done a really lovely job of creating the kind of scifi environment Seri really loves…

… one that is evocative of the vast distances and emptiness of space, and of the type of wistful little fringe colonies, where almost everyone has gone to the stars, seeking something/somewhere better, yet leaving behind…

… this wonderful place, with it’s fabulous vista of those stars and planets…

… and, beneath them, an environment that would be a perfectly nice place to set down roots, and stop this constant roaming.