Resting Place February 29, 2008

Baker Bloch was in no hurry to return to the lair of Mr. Low for his anticipated second task, so he decided to walk back and enjoy the underwater views. To his disappointment it took only 19 minutes altogether, leisurely strolling around the edges of 3 sims total. So that made it about a 256×3 meter walk, for a total of 768 meters, or around 3/4ths of a kilometer. It’s as close as he could get with the cemetery, he believed.

Upon arriving back at the temple ruins where he had been meeting Mr. Low, unlike all other times there was no Mr. Low about. Always he appeared floating, spectre-like, atop the cleared tile floor that Baker stares at in the snapshot below. Baker searched the entire ruins and the area surrounding it. He even went up to Isle of Baker to look around, although Mr. Low insisted he had never been above water in SL, and rarely even went away from the ruins.

After Baker had just decided to hunker down for the night in the spooky ruins to await his master, he turned around in his mind the possible reasons for Mr. Low’s request to build the cemetery. Do the 3 stones represent fallen comrades, perhaps those that landed on the SL planet with Mr. Low that he scathingly mentioned once before? And also Baker had the strong suspision that Mr. Low himself was not really corporeal within SL; he too was a ghost here. Baker jokingly pictured to himself Mr. Low requesting his own headstone, the 4th, for his second task. Then a series of thoughts rapidly culminated in the obvious: the a priori presence; the color; the lining up with the other 3 tombstones; the position higher than the rest. Mr. Low was lowest no longer.

The Orange Chair!!

Sans Fur ‘N Feathers February 29, 2008

Caught!

Lazy And Quick February 27, 2008

Mr. Low was not exactly a kind master. The task Mr. Low gave our new Baker avatar was the creation of a 3 stone graveyard. Mr. Low insisted that no Linden dollars be spent on this task, and also that the cemetery must be in as permanent and stable an enviroment as possible given the imposed limitations. Mr. Low also insisted that Baker must not begin his task until he spies, from his magic bench that he must otherwise hang around in the meantime, one animal on top of another animal. And it must be from this bench and no other vantage point. Mr. Low insisted the sight would be obvious.

Thus Baker Bloch resurfaced to his island (Isle of Baker) from the underwater ruins and sat on the bench to begin his wait. Unfortunately this baker does not have quite the patience of the Blinker one, and so when the sight did occur he was about to wander away from the bench. This was about 20 hours, SL time, after Baker had resurfaced. Baker shivered at the thought of what the creepy Mr. Low might do to him if the portent had been missed. Below is a re-creation of what he saw over the sim-wide sea to the east of the isle. Not exactly what Baker thought of when hearing Mr. Low’s descripition of one animal atop another, but, like he said, it was certainly obvious enough. His quest had begun.

Baker probably explored 15-20 nearby sims before finding a spot fairly close to Isle of Baker to create his graveyard. The trick was that he had to find *remote* property where the Object Return option was set to “zero,” yet which still allowed him to manifest the needed headstones from his inventory (freebies from SL Exchange Marketplace, once more). Just by chance, it seemed, an ordinary orange chair was already sitting atop a rock next to the place Baker had deemed best for his materialization.

Task completed, a satisfied baker sits in the orange chair, taking in the spectacular seascape around the new graveyard.

Another Baker February 26, 2008

As Baker Blinker is perhaps indisposed for a considerable amount of time, what with being merged with that same colored cup creature as seen in the last post here, and apparently on a different planet separate from the main Second Life grid even, it seemed necessary to create another baker avatar to replace the first. Thus Baker Bloch is born. Here Baker #2, hereafter just Baker or Baker Bloch, is seen just after materializing at the magic bench formerly visited by Baker Blinker. The multihued pea pod is nowhere to be found, but this Baker has a more specific mission than the first during his initial visit.

Having some time to kill before his meeting, Baker explores some of the underwater realm near Isle of Baker, including this scenic protrusion of rock at the meeting place of 4 sims.

A 1 minute late baker baker shows up at the prearranged rendezvous area after 3 hours and 20 minutes of exploring. A mysterious, pointy orange entity, whose shape should be familiar to the reader by now, waits impatiently atop an exposed area of tiled floor within the ruins.

“Mr. Low I presume,” Baker says in greeting.

Shake ‘N Bake, I suppose February 26, 2008

TEXT SOON.

Baker Blinker was halfway across the Sansara continent when his faux Mysti HUD alerted him to a presense in the [delete name] sim. Knowing few visitors traversed this lonely region, baker was well aware that a new contact/clue may be awaiting him upon teleporting in, like the stone hand and pointy bushes before this. baker’s first flyover produced a visual, surprising him a bit since objects in the forest tend to be rather difficult to spot in this manner. The visitor appeared to be a gleaming white cylinder of some kind, roughly the same length perhaps as himself/herself, and with a smaller, purple tube, it appeared, protruding from the slightly wider end. The appearance was one of a small, crashed ship of some kind, and thus, logically enough, baker wondered if this was not the visitor he expected, but just a vehicle of locomotion for such a stranger. But even at this beginning point in their relationship, when baker even doubted the object was a living, breathing creature, he couldn’t help but notice that the colors were exactly the same as his own, and in roughly the same proportion body-wise.

First things first, though. baker landed a safe distance away from what he then thought was probably a craft, wondering if the visitor was perhaps still inside. Using a tree as a shield he crept in closer…

Too late! The object, suddenly animated, moved swiftly and enveloped him (her), then quickly ascending into the sky, and dragging poor, hapless baker with it in its bowels — like a misfitting attachment gone hideously wrong. Far above the tree line, Baker, now both Baker and Not Baker, looked around and also realized this was no faux planet any more. Up and down his line of vision were acres and acres of forest sandwiched between two vast swaths of sea, and with a high end and low end. Baker’s Island truly revealed!!

Sorry!!! February 25, 2008

I didn’t mean to do it at all but I apparently messed up Edna’s (wife’s) avatar tonight. I was visiting the SL Exchange Marketplace for the first time and raking in freebies right and left. In the gathering process, I scooped up a couple of free avatars, including a giant eyeball. Long story short, I screwed up my own account and had to use Edna’s name and SL login to “buy” the stuff. Went to my usual rezzing spot to open the bought inventory boxes, but could not physically enter the sim for some reason. So I resorted to my older spot in the corner of Rodeo. Didn’t realize it at the time, but I think it was fate that it happened in this hot corner, since I’d made the collage with the shut eye there as seen in the “To Back Up A Bit…” post on this blog. I now think this collage at least partially prefigured the later faux pas. Anyway, unpacked the box there and chose “copy and wear” when prompted. Admittedly the eyeball avatar was pretty cool, but then I thought I could just hit detach and it would all go away and Edna Blinker as himself/herself would be back, but it didn’t work! Instead left behind was what looked like a small African-American child, not higher than 3 feet tall, relatively speaking. I was shocked. And I couldn’t get Edna’s former looks back no matter how hard I tried. So I thought, we’ll I’ve screwed up anyway, let’s see what this free Space Ghost avatar will look like on her. So I copied and wore that as well and then Edna looked like a midget Space Ghost, essentially without any legs. So I kept fiddling and finally restored Space Ghost’s full figure, and even returned the original Edna’s faded jeans and tie dye shirt. But I couldn’t get back the face or body.

Edna was out of the house at the time of of the crisis, but when I told her I ruined the Edna B. avatar upon her return she was fairly upset. She’d had a rough day anyway. Told her I meant well and that I was gathering up freebies for her and me both. Luckily she had no real ties to SL using this avatar, so she can start anew with little trouble. Her appearance was just a modification of one of the Linden pre-sets, so she can basically recreate her look under a new name. The freebies were pretty cool and all, but they don’t make up for the sadness I feel.

Maybe I can figure out a way to get her Edna Blinker back. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Isle of Baker/ Magic Bench of the Pod Peaple February 23, 2008

The inspiration for this particular post was the discovery of yet another “Baker’s Island”, this time in SL itself. To avoid confusion I’ll call this particular landmark “Isle of Baker”. Again, no details, but it’s very close to the new rezzing spot I mention in the post above this (yes, I’m writing these in backwards order). I thought it comical and mystical that this island was so close.

Then I quickly moved on to a comparison with the Rodeo corner island that is also brought up in the above post. Hmmm. The Rodeo isle is smaller but somewhat similar in size. Both isles contain two distinct buldges at either end, larger and smaller, with a bridging, middle neck. In both cases, this neck is crooked or bent, and inside the crook we have the remains of a ruin. I’ll get back to the ruins shortly. But the most important comparison to make here is between the equally long, gray objects on the respective smaller buldges. Click the pictures below to see enlargements. I cued the two pictures together directly through these objects; open each in a separate window and toggle between the two to see this effect.

The elongated gray object on “Isle of Baker - Not” is in fact a quite valuable historic relic in the shape of an obelisk, half buried in the sand. I’ll shortly refer you to other locations that talk about this relic in more detail. The companion object on Isle of Baker is not an obelisk or anything remotely magical on the surface, but merely an ordinary wooden bench, faded to gray over time. But I could not dismiss the connection so easily. I checked out this “ordinary” bench in some detail…

On the ground beneath I found the peculiar object pictured below. It was a pea pod with 5 individual peas partially protruding out of their protective shelter. Each had a different color. I could not help noticing that these were the same 5 colors illustrated in the “Brainstorm” post below. Further moving it beyond coincidence is the fact that the red and green shapes here were squares, mirroring the red and green square pillows. Also the olive and orange colors between them were round but also contained slices, making a number of angles at each “pole”. These had to be representations of one and the same idea. But what was it??? Peas… why a pea pod??

Brainstorm February 23, 2008

I’m sure many of you hard core and/or long in the tooth Second Lifers remember LL’s promotion of the great, second continent to follow the first (Sansara) in 2005, which turned out to be the Heterocera Atoll. In studying up on SL history and this atoll in particular, in trying to broaden my knowledge of SL beyond just the first continent that had dominanted my explorations up to that point, ran across these promotional items heralding the event on SLebay. One or two of you reading this may even have a set of these at your RL home, perhaps laying forgotten in the back of a basement closet. Have to check how many were sold. I just love the way the pillow representing Sansara holds up a 1 and the smaller pillow, shadowing the new, then planned-to-be interlocking continent, flashes a 2 with its tinier hand. The actual relationship turned out to be a little different — they are actually separate land masses, divided by a strait several sims wide.

When I saw the oddly pointed bushes in the faux Baker’s Island forest, my mind shortly returned to these promotional items. What was it that made me relate the two together? I kept asking myself. Last night, in trying to think of a follow up post for “Chance Upon Bushes”, it hit me: ragged, triangular jags verses smooth, rectangular lines. The bushes were all about the former, these pillows the latter. But there was more; the interlocking part. The bushes I captured in my snapshot below did not overlap, but somehow I knew they did nonetheless. I used the paint program that came with my windows system to isolate these bushes from the background and then color them differently. I chose orange and yellow-green because they lie between the red and green of the pillows. It seemed to fit. When I did this, and then combined the two shapes in a logical manner, merging one common, prominent angle to form a new whole, the following resulted…

A simple 50% reduction of the width of this image gives us the outline of something that looks a whole lot like our Baker’s Island.

I don’t think I’m reaching here, but to clarify further I’d have reveal preliminary conclusions that would make me seem quite mad to some. One obvious link is the keyword “Low”. Small steps with this, but I will say that I am now convinced my chancing upon, as well, the Baker’s Island image in the telescope at the 8-worshipping island was no accident. Not in the least.

Chance Upon Bushes February 21, 2008

So I decided to return to the faux Baker’s Island, as I’m calling it in part, to investigate the grounds further. My recent research of this particular sim via google search highlighted its special nature. Although, again, I won’t go into detail here or specifics, save to say that it really does seem to be the closest thing SL has to the forest of Baker’s Island, albeit only a small fraction thereof. As I also said before, it’d take 32 of these “empty” sims to cover Baker’s Island. Let me add that up. Even subtracting any upfront costs, like you would have w/ regular SL islands, that’s still $9400 of land fees every month ($295 per sim). Bet humble Bill Baker, RL owner of Baker’s I./Henry I., doesn’t pay that much a month on his low interest loan used to buy his island! Back to the investigation.

Found these 3 translucent cubes in the south-center of the sim, and couldn’t resist the temptation to sit on ‘em. Creator’s name is Torley Linden of SL video tutorial fame. So that didn’t seem so mysterious since this is Gov. Linden land after all.

Here’s something I ran into early on in my investigation of this sim but had a hard time re-finding, perhaps because of all the trees surrounding it. We’ll say that anyway. Eventually I did spot it again several days later (or several hrs. later, SL time), and discovered it to be the creation of another Linden, Ben this time, who claimed it to be a tree planter, 1.1 version. But all of the trees of this forest seem to be the spawn of yet another Linden, Eric this time, who I later learned had long left Linden Labs but remains famous inworld for his many notable creations thoughout the metaverse, including terrain and landscape work. Again, this didn’t seem very mysterious, but I still wasn’t sure.

He ho, what’s this? Two pieces of vegetation that weren’t trees — the first I had found of this kind. I quickly scanned for creator/s, and found both to be the product of a non-Linden simply called “Chance”, with the objects titled “Pointy Bush, High” and “Pointy Bush, Low.”

Here was my next lead!

This Is Not The 9th February 21, 2008

I was island hopping in the vast archipelago of SL the other night when I came across this queerer island devoted to the worship of the number 8, it appears. I won’t give the exact coordinates [3/28/08: yes I will now], but it’s real enough in SL dimensions. I created a landmark upon this visit to come back to later, and when I did, for some reason I teleported directly into this observatory at the top of a building that I’d missed before, although I thought I’d taken in the whole island in cursory form at the time.

So of course I had to look through the telescope. Amazing spinning cosmos above! I had only viewed the sky through the telescope perhaps 20 seconds or so when I spotted a tiny bit of cosmos that was a little less blurred, a little sharper edged compared to all else spinning around so quickly within the lens. I used my focus tool in combo with the telescope’s “natural” magnification to zoom in closer. In this way, I could lock on a particular portion of the sky and stabilize the rotation. It couldn’t be, but there it was: Baker’s Island — in the sky! So I was right about it being a moon of SL, or perhaps a moon of the SL system as a whole, thinking of Pluto again as possibly just an escaped satellite of the 8th planet Neptune. Hard to tell how far away it was with this crazy ass telescope, and the fact that the roof itself seemed act as an additional, giant lens to the configuration. Did this rotating cosmos above me only represent a tiny fraction of the sky above SL? And, if so, why did it just happen to contain the part with the teeny weeny Baker’s Island?

I used a bit of synchronicity to make the determination that Baker’s Island was, in fact, not a planet within the SL system, but a moon or sub-planet at best. Let me google the latest term for former planet Pluto to check. Yes, the politically correct term for Pluto, Eris, and other, similar sized bodies orbiting our RL sun is “dwarf planet”, which I gather is not much better than moon status.

But the reason I determine this was that, after all, I just happened to find this planet using a telescope owned by a group that worships the number 8. Then it came together for me: someone here, perhaps the group as a whole, was studying the “9th” just to argue this very point. The SL solar system stops at 8, just like our RL solar system. Neat and tidy, an octave of completion. So Baker’s Island is the Pluto of this particular system. Is it the actual Baker’s Island off the coast of Cape Breton, or at least an exact replica? I had set up a faux Baker’s Island using a extensively wooded, flat sim in the southwestern part of the Sansara continent. Did I need to find a way to this perhaps much more real Baker’s Island? I had some pondering to do.