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 (:

Flutters and I have recently spent some time re-discovering ‘The City-State of New Babbage‘…

… we don’t come here, much, and certainly have not been here for a long time… we usually find the lag and the rez time, here, to be soul-crushingly depressing…

… but this time, over two visits, we found those things to be as good as they’ve ever been, though, on the second visit, we still had to wait, literally, 20-30 minutes for a scene to fully rez…

… New Babbage is a huge, extremely consistent build, with a Victoriana/Steampunk theme…

… there’s a lot to see, here…

… with wonderfully photogenic architecture and structures…

… like Bay City, it’s one of those ‘old’ SL communities where you get the sense that a lot of people care for the place, and possibly live here…

… but you seldom see another being, here.

It’s been six months since my baby and I visited Natthimmel…

…there is a new build, there, the same, but different to what was there when we last visited…

… I say ‘the same’, because it is a similar style, a similar mixture of hard structural objects and strange, organic-tech objects…

… and ‘different’, because, well, it’s not the same, is it, it’s similar, but different… but still wonderful…

… there are flashing lights that add dramatic depth to the structures, excellent textures, weird audio and noises, and drifting spores…

… everything here is fabulous in a 1950’s, Virgil Finlay-on-acid kind of way…

… there is a lot to discover, here, we highly recommend this destination, especially if you want some intelligent, real art to look at, instead of snow and xmas decorations.

We visited ‘Little Town‘, the other day…

… this is a clean, pretty little build…

… it has a variety of different environments…

… and a lot of cats…

… it would provide plenty of colourful, mostly non-grungey backdrops…

… for your next photo-shoot (:

My baby and I hung a new set of work, today. The human and I have called these works ‘Quantum Longing’…

… they are from a recent series of images we created in Mj, exploring the concept of quantum entanglement, and exploration in the quantum realm…

… we love the style we achieved with these…

… as always, Flutters was a delight, wafting around me, chattering away about how good my art is, how clever I am, how much she loves me… her adoring, upbeat personality is indefatigable, and wonderfully infectious…

… I don’t spend enough time here, these days…

… I’ve had this iteration of my gallery for a few years, now and, like being with Flutter, I find being here an extremely positive experience.