Thursday, May 31, 2012

zomg

My dream tree village is real!

6 Fictional Places You Won't Believe Actually Exist

Where's my passport?!

Monday, May 28, 2012

Giddy

Giddy is the only word to describe how I feel at this very moment.

After rambling on and on, I decided to give myself permission to go ahead and do a tree village build. I have enough prims, why the fuck not? While it is far from finished (it has barely begun!) I have had my first taste of that tree village of my dreams, and it feels so good. Not only that, as I tried to ambulate through the foliage and platforms of the prefab Oiolairë Tree House I am modifying for the village, I got lost and disoriented.

Exactly what a new comer should feel! What a giddy feeling. Like stepping into your best dreams and getting lost in them.

The road and the under water tunnel look a little silly, but I don't care.



At the moment, nothing is connected, everything is a mess of miss textured prims and wonky trees. But all that will change, and I want to do it as close to how my tree dwellers would have done it themselves.

I reckon, that buildings would be placed in the most suitable location of the tree for adequate support of the structure. The Oiolairë Tree Home (which Eaken purchased nearly three years ago) already does that for me. So by rezing multiple trees, scattering them around, and rotating them, that much is provided for me.

However, this does not make for neat little rows of suburban cookie cutter buildings. (and who would want that anyway?) Thus, bridges and lifts would be put in to accommodate the houses, not the other way around. Making for the feeling of winding paths high in the sky.

Tree dwellers, loving their trees very much would want to save as much of it as possible... so the foliage would only be removed as needed to clear the walk ways and the homes.

So in essence, I am rezing tree houses, building bridges to connect them, and picking out the plant prims and moving them to where I need them to be.

One thing I am surprised with (so far) is that the trees provide a pretty good privacy screen on their own. They will of course, be aided by more landscaping on the ground to help hide the uglyness of mainland, but that alone is a boon I had not expected!

Perhaps, if this all goes well, I shall also be able to use my tiny bay of water. Water on the Mainland is hard to come by. I am lucky to have it, how grand would a majestic ship look next to a tree village? Pretty fucking grand. I know people with majestic ships, but whether or not they want them on the mainland, I do not know.

My inspiration for laying out the trees, was the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.





Because a build like this could only be better with some Esoteric elements. Unfortunately, I found that I would need a much larger piece of land and more prims to do that well, so I made a template of the Tree of Life, and used it as a rough guide for placing trees and future platforms. Even though it is not my initial plan, it has served me well so far.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

For you tread on my dreams...

Ever since my husband described a special town during a D&D game, I have been in love with the images it left in my mind. Soon, this place became the birthplaces of nearly all of my D&D characters.

It was an elven tree village. The concept of an Elven Tree village is not a unique one, from it's beginnings in modern fantasy fiction in Lothlórien, to the cliché it has become in many Fantasy stories. However, one could say that humans in cottages is a little cliché too. So why shouldn't elves live in trees as a stereotype?

There is something about this elven tree village that is close to my heart though. In my early days of Second Life, before I settled in the sim that would become my home, I had a little dream of building a tree village on a parcel. Not just a tree house, but a full tree village. We had a tree house for a while, and I loved it but it also stuck out like a sore thumb in the sim we lived on, and as many people pointed out, Centaurs don't climb trees. I always wanted to put Tree houses in TSI, but there really wasn't a good place to put any of them except in Skyboxes. A few people did enjoy renting them. But when it comes to RP housing most people want to be on the ground level, where the action is. Skyboxes are for people who seek solitude.

I thought of putting tree houses in the new RP skybox of odd proportions (that yes, I am still waiting to reveal to the world. I'm busy these days.) but they couldn't be very high with our enclosed ceilings.

But, I do have this hunk of land on the ground just sitting there doing nothing. And I have some prims to burn. Sure, it's also mainland, and one of my neighbours is a big ugly mall in a big ugly box you could not miss if you tried. There is a modern road beside the parcel with tanks, cars, and hover craft that drive over it all day long. Not exactly in tune with the theme of a remote elven tree village.

But even if I never used it for anything, I think maybe I would like to build that tree village anyway. Just so I can fulfill that little dream. I am a capable builder now. The difference between now and then is I can actually do it. So why Shouldn't I?

Truth be told, I don't like the majority of elves in Second Life. My philosophy on elves is, that age brings maturity and mental and spiritual growth. Maturity brings acceptance, and love, and humility to those who posess it. Thus, the lofty, effete nature of most elves (particularly the ones in second life) don't make sense to me. How is it in touch with nature to think you are better than someone, or never be willing to get your dress dirty?

I like my own elves. Humble, wise, tribal, good humored and skilled. So given the reasons I dislike most elves in Second Life, perhaps it is best that I should have a quiet, undisturbed place to think of my own.

And I can have the other sim setting too. I don't see the point in having a cake if you are not going to eat it.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

There's No Place Like Home.

So that other thing I was going to get to.

Why, when we can only afford a 64 x 256 metre of mainland, would we want to continue. When everyone (who belonged and RPed in more than one sim) had a place to go, why would we even bother trying to keep the dream alive?

I have asked myself this a lot. The only thing I did know is I felt a nasty gap in the place my Second Life once was. While everyone else was moving on, I had never felt so alone in-world. You would think I would log out and do something else. But when something has been part of your daily life for so long, it isn't so easy to do. Home is a complicated issue for me in both on and off the Grid, and I admit that this is factoring heavily into my real life at the moment.

So I went looking, at all the many fantasy sims that I could find. (Fantasy is the only thing I am interested in when it comes to Second Life) I found plenty of good RP sims, maybe a couple where we could fit. Either with alts or with seriously modified story lines.

But the reasons I couldn't settle was more than my snobbish frowning upon sims with furry and child avatar hatred. The reality is, I don't have any alts so crucial to my happiness that I could depend on them solely. And editing people out of our main's joint storylines was sort of like erasing parts of their own character's core personalities. Basically, making them different characters.

I don't think it is a secret that the conception of The Seven Isles and it's vision predated me, nor was the philosophy of family and acceptance my own. Except I knew when I found it I had found home. Because I knew when I found it, that this is what I would do, if I were to start a community in Second Life. You could say, that is why I joined up on staff when the opportunity was offered to me. The Seven Isles wasn't just the perfect sim, it was practically my real life dreams of Utopia.

A simple life, something no one has in the real world. Epicurus called it Ataraxia. Ataraxia is very important to me in my personal life as well. I have mentioned before that RP was my Ataraxia.

What I have learned is that out of all of these good RP sims, We actually did provide something unique. No classes, no cliques, no guilds or factions. Instead we had equality, families and trades that helped us express and celebrate our individuality. I have always known that we were never a big and as bad ass as a lot of these other sims, I never really wanted to be.

Uniqueness is not what people usually want, no matter what they say. People want familiarity and mainstream for a reason. One knows what to do and what to expect in those situations, and that is understandable. People like structure and leadership. But for me, those are "chains" in a way. there is a Jim Morrison quote that sums it up for me,

"People are terrified to be set free – they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security"

What he is saying here, is people can not always feel safe enough to do something with out some firm parameters. Perhaps that is why our community in itself, was unique people without parameters. I can not speak for anyone else but myself, but this is why I felt so lost.

So I guess you could say, our very humble (and perhaps doomed) desire to rise from the ashes are for selfish reasons. However knowing that we had something that others did not, I can not help but think there are others out there seeking what we had. Perhaps it *is* a minority (and Gods know lower numbers don't pay the bills) but I think it is a minority worth at least trying keeping alive.

I just need a world where things made in imagination are flesh. I need a world where children play and explore. I need a place of growth, and intrigue, and peace. If I want to beat the shit out of something I'll play Dungeon Siege

Monday, May 21, 2012

What's new with me?

In reviewing my last post, I realise that there are a number of items that deserve updates.

I am no longer at my adorable little Mainland parcel I wrote about before.  Instead, Eacen and I have secured a much bigger parcel, with more prims, just down the road. What are we going to use it for?  Why, RP of course!

It is no small challenge, however, to build a space suitable for RP with friends in a skybox.  It takes forever to rez all those scultpies.  And if your draw distance is set below 256, all of our smoke and mirror tricks become glaringly obvious.  Mind you, we could build on the actual land below... but being next to a modern road, and most of it being submerged under water is even more awkward than a skybox.





Working on this much more humble project (yet to be announced) is not the only thing I have been up to. As you probably know I have a Second Life Toddler (who I alt. A challenging but drama free way to SL parenting).  Her name is Kraneia Taurus, though her nick name is twig, since she too, is an Epimeliad. I have always done the best I could with her, with limited options in Second Life.  Most prim babies wouldn't work for something that needed custom body parts and clothing. I went through a lot of work and lindens to make her prim baby as acceptable as possible.  But, when it came time for her to be less script-y and inanimate... I put her in a tiny avatar.


Beautiful in her own way,  but Tiny avatars have a lot of limitations.  Crunching an avatar into a bunch of sculpted prims, and then trying to animate is a nightmare.

But now, thanks to mesh, and the wonderful Yabusuka Baby Avatar I "Got myself a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, living doll"

I am truly sorry for the terrible song quote. Thankful, these wonderful baby avatars that allow for (almost) regular animations, and proper proportions and moving parts. It's also mod so I was able to do something that I love to do; customize the hell out of her.  I'll let the final product speak for itself.


I made her skin so she has a good family resemblance, and she gets curly hair like her mama.  She gets to wear real Greek-inspired clothes. The only way this could be more perfect was if Radegast (the program I use to double log my child avs) supported mesh. There is no logical reason for a text based viewer to support mesh.  I just never realised that the viewer you log in with is as important as the one you view through.  I suppose both have to be enabled. (It's still a great program, and useful for when I need Alekos to tag along.) I need to find a second lo-resource-using mesh enabled viewer if I am to double log.  I have a good computer, but it just doesn't handle two instances of Phoenix at the same time.

So anyway, that is what I have been up to the past few weeks. I have more I would like to discuss, but I think this post is long enough.