I love my SL home, I spend hours pottering around in it, rearranging things, adding things, moving things. One of my favourite rooms is my work/play room, these are some of it’s corners. This one has the closest to a ‘theme’ about it, it’s where I’ve put several of my ‘nautical’ treasures…

… this is the prettiest corner…

… and I guess this is the most ‘practical’ corner…

… I need to put those comics back in their box.

My continuing journey through my past took me back to Linden Memorial Park, yesterday. When I was a noob, I spent a lot of time wandering around places like this, because they were generally empty, and felt safe to a new-born avi afraid of her own shadow. I’ve not been back here for years…

… I was straight away struck by the simple beauty of the place, especially in the dawn light…

… Linden Memorial Park is ‘dedicated to the residents of Second Life’, and, as the name implies, is a huge memorial setting…

… it is hard not to feel emotion, here…

… the structures have a monolithic weight and simplicity…

… that is elegant and timeless…

… as you roam around this huge, soothing space, you come across many poignant memorials…

… eventually I have to stop looking at them, they make me too sad, it breaks my heart that death is as much a reality, here in this virtual escape from reality, as it is in reality… we can’t escape it, and, as you travel around SL, you see memorials everywhere to much-loved avatars whose humans are deceased. For some reason I find these memorials much sadder than my human ever finds grave stones in RL.

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 (: