When I saw Cica Ghost’s latest creation was called ‘Butterflies and Ropes‘, I thought Flutter might like to see it…

… when I saw the ‘butterflies’ were actually flowers, I thought Flutter might be a bit confused…

… but I needn’t have worried… when she saw the flowers, she squeaked ‘Oh! Flutterflowers!’ and happily fluttered off to explore…

… I’m a bit overprotective of her, really… for a while, after she came to me from the future, and she realised I was the only one who could hear her, she was a bit despondent, especially after she realised organic butterflies couldn’t hear her, either…

… but she’s been here a few years, now, and she’s a tough little thing…

… and she’s smart and funny, and I love her to bits…

… plus, she pretty much likes anything I do, so we both thought this new Cica Ghost build was very photogenic, especially if your pictures have neon cybernetic butterflies in them.

There was a time when every second new destination in SL was a ‘dystopian apocalypse/future/theme park’, and I’ve even written that I was over it… however; for months, now, almost every new destination has been a bunnies and rainbows type of build, which was kinda cute for about ten minutes, and I found myself longing for some good, apocalyptic fun! Imagine my delight when I saw ‘Everwinter‘ was back…

… the place looks great, and is pretty much nothing like what it was last time I was here (pre-Flutter!)…

… it’s much more like Drune, now, which is fine by me…

… but then it morphs into the previous, spooky halloween theme…

… which is fun, and has some good photo opportunities, but it kinda feels gratuitous, to me… but that’s just my opinion, and it’s still well done…

… I prefer scifi to horror…

… and I really like the scifi part of this build…

… there are so many excellent potential backdrops, here (:

We have recently been hanging out in Bay City. Bay City can look a bit bland, at first glance, but it is actually filled with interesting, and often beautiful places…

… like this fabulous comic store! These are the most lovingly created comic racks I have ever seen in SL. Like all big builds, for me, with the human’s slow, bottom-of-the-planet internet connection, it takes aeons for anything to rez, here, which is why my dress is different, we had to give up, and come back the next day, between the last picture, and this one…

… just swinging the camera from the rack in the picture above, to the one here, which is only a few meters away, meant waiting ten minutes (often much longer) for it to properly rez, but it was well worth it for all these gorgeous comics…

… there are a lot of bland, formulaic buildings, in Bay City, but there are also some stunning ones…

… there was even a truck that matched our accents…

… Bay City is well worth exploring. There are shops and galleries randomly dotted through the build, too.

Port of Sparquerry is next to Queddoq, which is next to ACC Alpha.

I took Flutter to see ACC Alpha, somewhere I’ve not shown her, before…

… she was delighted, of course…

… if you are familiar with my travels, you’ll know I’ve been here many times, but, obviously, not since Flutter came to me from my own future (still not sure what that’s about)… if you don’t know ACC Alpha, you should check it out…

… it’s not all ACC Alpha… in these images I go from there to Qeddoq, it’s a huge area, not sure how many sims, but the aesthetic is the same across all the different areas…

… the whole place is like a watercolour fantasy dream. ACC Alpha, itself, is quite surreal, but Qeddoq is more like some timeless Mediterranean dream city…

… the whole place is very beautiful…

… there is a rail system, you can ride it across all the various, different parts of the whole place, it’s a great way to get a feel for just how big and amazing it all is…

… you can spend hours here, and still not see everything…

… I don’t believe there is anywhere else like this in SL…

… it’s why I keep coming back (:

We recently visited ‘Sainte Rose Sur Mer‘…

… we loved the sky and the soft, mostly blue palette here…

… the sombre Mediterranean sea crashes and foams at the shore…

… this is a very pretty, very relaxing destination…

… there are friendly cats…

… delightful splashes of colour, goats, a donkey, pigeons…

… wonderful photographic opportunities… we spent a lot of time, here, and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it (:

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 (: