Whichever angle you view it from…

… the Arboretum at SL19B is an enormous building…

… back in the day, the societal manipulators used to build their edifices at massive scale, in order to cow the masses and make them in awe of the ‘god’ these buildings were supposed to represent… the doorway to the Arboretum is kind of like that…

… the inside is equally grandiose…

… ‘wow’ whispered Flutter…

… ‘Yes, it’s kind of over the top, isn’t it, baby?’ I replied…

… I’ve been exploring the SL19B event for the last few days, and I find the lag here absolutely crippling… my exploration of the Arboretum was cut much shorter than I would have liked because, with a frame rate of 1.2, it became virtually impossible to move/control movement, and scream-inducingly impossible to get pictures of exactly what it was I wanted if what I wanted was to include a certain little person from the order Lepidoptera family.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SLB%20Exhilarate/118/118/24

Flutter and I went for a wander in the WasteLands, last evening. We arrived as the sun was going down…

… and the moon sprang up over this broken, fascinating landscape…

… we gamboled about in the midst of long-dead petroleum storage…

… climbing a rusty ladder…

… for a better view of this slow-rolling apocalypse…

… ‘Very pretty, Seri’ said my little companion…

… ‘Yes, sweetheart, it is, isn’t it?’ I replied…

… as the moon went down, again…

… we found ourselves at a tiny oasis (:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Wastelands/135/151/76

Flutter and I visited ‘The Shambles’, the other day…

… ‘Are you saying that ‘me’ in the future, sent you back to ‘me’, in the present?’ I asked my little friend…

… ‘That is correct, Seri’ she replied, all the while continuing her silent perambulations of my head…

… ‘How far in the future are we talking about?’ I wondered allowed…

… ‘Several thousand years’ she answered…

… ‘Oh, so not that far’ I mused…

… ‘Certainly not by your standards, my love’ she concluded…

… the fact that I am still around, several thousand years into the future, is, of course, no surprise to me, given that my planetoid mother is actually billions of years old, and I seem to have inherited her indestructibility…

… why I would be sending pretty little butterflies who love me, back in time to myself, now, is a matter for further consideration. We eventually found ourselves in a cafe/bar… the huge bong and smouldering joints on one of the tables went some way to explain the colourful eclecticism and shambolic clutter of this place (:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Hidden/130/125/30

I took Flutter to see ‘alpha.tribe’, today…

… to show her all the strange and beautiful stuff, there…

… she was delighted, particularly with all the cats… like me, she loves cats…

… we looked at all the little gatherings of feasting cats, card-playing inter-dimensional beings, computer game playing aliens…

… ‘Is the future weirder than this, Flutter?’ I asked her…

… ‘The future is empty, Seri, you know that’ she replied…

… ‘How can I know that?’ I asked ‘I’ve never been there’…

… ‘Yes you have, silly…’ she answered ‘Who do you think sent me back to you?’

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/alphatribe/114/236/21

I recently visited ‘Cloven Forest’…

… I have a new traveling companion, I’ve named her ‘FlutterBye’, Flutter, for short…

… she’s a mechanical butterfly from the future…

… she told me she came back to my time, to be with me…

… because she loves me. I have no reason to disbelieve her… hell, I’m a 4000 year old alien, whose mother is a sentient planet, who am I to disbelieve a little, machine being, who tells me she came to me from the future, because she loves me?…

… besides, I have very quickly come to reciprocate that love…

… it is so wonderful, having this gorgeous little being silently fluttering around me on seemingly delicate wings…

… ‘it’s so pretty, here…’ she said… ‘I love the light’…

… ‘You took the words right out of my mind, sweetheart’ I replied.

* Irritating, glitchy WordPress has suddenly decided, despite the fact I have a paid subscription, I’m not allowed to imbed SLURLS in words, so I’ll have to just give you the whole thing:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cloven/202/219/31

I visited ‘Dystopian Night‘, tonight…

… this is meant to be ‘…inspired by Blade Runner and Fifth Element…’. Someone obviously had fun building this destination. It is filled with a seemingly random collection of NPC’s, some of whom fit into the ‘dystopian, Bladerunneresque milieu’, and some of whom simply do not…

… there are many menacing characters…

… doing threatening things…

… no attempt has been made to make any of these characters a uniform size…

… some of them are extremely large, and many of them are pointing guns…

… if there’s a coherent story in this little assembly, I sure couldn’t figure it out…

… this Amazon from a 1950’s drive-in must have gotten herself stuck in a time anomaly, then just kept on delivering junk food in the gear she arrived in…

… this future isn’t so much dystopian as it is dysfunctional.

I visited ‘Wind River‘, yesterday. While the buildings were convincingly ‘Wild West’, I didn’t really come to pretend to be a cowgirl…

… it was the minimalist scenery that had attracted me…

… the rustling, dry grass, and the vast, empty sky…

… perfect for the kind of wide, empty backdrop I love so much…

… the landscape here is almost Martian in it’s dry, wind-sculpted beauty…

… and the sky is wonderfully dramatic…

… I adore this kind of scenery…

… and the colours are gorgeous…

… here, cowgirls can have the pinks as well as the blues (:

I visited ‘Oxygen o2‘, last night…

… it’s a gorgeous, oil-colour-lush destination…

… with lots of dramatic lighting…

… that offsets the dark moodiness of the place…

… the theme is medieval Japanese…

… everything is rustic and beautiful…

… and dramatic…

… there are so many echoes of journeys begun, and adventures crushed by grim reality, here, that the crash and roar of the sea cannot drown them.

These days, I mostly dress out on my balcony. My bedroom is a gorgeous, very cluttered nest of cuteness, actually too cluttered to really move around in…

.. the balcony is far less cluttered…

… and I enjoy the view…

… aware that you never know when you are being watched in SL, I’m seldom naked out here, or even in my room, having had creeps actually materialise beside me in my bedroom on more than one occasion, despite having excellent security, which I can’t quite bring myself to set to evict instantly, not wanting to do that to accidental trespassers…

… so I like to get dressed as quickly as possible. Then I’m all set to either stay home, or go exploring (:

I visited the ‘Island of Jahesa‘, yesterday…

… this is one of those magnificent, ancient places…

… where the scale of the architecture, and the mind-boggling effort and organisation it took to create it…

… was meant to show the little people how insignificant they were, before the might of the ruling elite and their supposed association with whatever fictional deity that elite claimed to be the representative of…

… and, of course, despite those deity being purely the invention of that elite, that elite really did have the power and organisational skills to create these staggeringly awe-inspiring monuments to their own arrogance and cruelty…

… and the little people would have been out of their tiny minds to be anything less than totally cowed by such grandeur on such a colossal scale…

… so it didn’t matter at all that the bloated aristocrats sucking the life from the people and the land represented nothing more than psycopathy and greed…

… their drive to create such monuments to their own hubris had the same result…

… as it would have had, had their invented gods been real. These assholes rose the top of the heap, forced their minions to create these astonishing places, ruled as though they, themselves were gods… until, one day, they didn’t.