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.

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.

A question of the ages...

Tonight I have been reworking my character information, I have done this several times now, and I am hoping that this will be the finali-sh draft. I have needed to do this for a long time. As a character grows and evolves, so does their information/character sheet.

^{Though I seem to have noticed I have done this more than anyone else. *cough* Not that I am self conscious about it, or anything *cough*}

But now that I am here again, I am reminded how you can get hung up on something as simple as an age, particularly with playing fantasy people and creatures.  There really is no book or science that has been able to put a set aging process of life span on any creatures. You can look at the animal half of models, which tend to age and go through life cycles much, much quicker than their human counterpart and try and balance them, and then you have to kind of find a space within the glamor of being fantasy creatures which are generally accepted to live longer, due to their fantastical-ness.

Ages, years and life cycles get spread all over the map, once you get us all together... you can be 6, or 106 and still be an elven or a fae child.  You can be 4, or forty, and still be a child faun. Then again,  I have seen adult elves at 80, and adult fauns at forty.  Even if it would be fair to force everyone to adhere to the same age scale for the species they are, it would be pretty hard to do!

So I sat here with this dilemma, trying to fill in that age space with something less ambiguous than what I had before, and less specific than a number, when it occurred to me, the most rational way of describing my character's age, was to do so by seasons.  Because as the revered Cherno once said to me,  years, calendars, time in the form of numbers probably are not things that nature creatures are terribly concerned with.  But being nature creatures would make them very in tune with the cycles of seasons.

And, it is a pretty easy scale to work out on your own, I know I am not the first to use this sort of scale, or define my own but I am going to do it anyway.

You can summarize most mammals in the various life stages, and even other animals in similar life stages.

Spring:
Infancy - toddlerhood  = Early
childhood = Spring
Adolescence = Late

Summer:
Young adulthood, = Early Summer
Adulthood  = Summer
Early Middle Age = Late Summer (tick tock, my harvest clock is ticking!)

Autumn:
Middle age = Early (my harvest clock is running out!)
Old age = Late

Winter:
Venerable old age.
Verging on death/rebirth (if you're into that sort of thing!)

Using these values, I, personally, am better able to describe the life phase of my character, without depending on years, or even using terms such as "The equivlant of a 35 year old in human years."  I think my previous, confusing answer was "Early middle age,"  which I define as being around 35 human years... but others define differently, and it doesn't really *explain* anything to anyone.

But, if I said "Corinda is in her late summer" or Corinda said "I am in my early fall," people would kind of get the point, with a lot of explanation, don't you think? If she said "In my late spring, I ran away from home." People would pretty well get the idea of a person in their late teens, about to grow up very quickly.

It's simple, and I would like to share this as an idea for people to use when defining their characters age, as an alternative, or even a way for people with numeric ages to relate to other characters that just don't have that frame of reference.  But I also tend to over complicate things which should be simple, and it has been my experience that the more information you give a lot of players to help them, the more confused they become. So I want to tread softly

But I think it is a worthwhile thought, and worth some exploring... and I am talking about it, here, now, because I am supposed to be finishing my character application/sheet/information.

But it also holds some potential for the way Fantastypeoplebeingtypes could celebrate certain rites of passage, instead of a birthday every year, someone could celebrate their own "equinox" or solstice.

Yup. Still workin on that damn notecard. No closer to it than I was when I started this.