New Island!, 13

As I’m writing the text for these posts, more pictures are showing up on the web concerning Nautilus City. I’ll get to that in a moment.

I did have a chance to peruse the large amount of comments made concerning the announcement of Nautilus City and the upcoming auction of land on the official Second Life blog. Interesting that by far the largest percentage are negative in tone, although many do speak admiringly of the builds themselves. I think one common error in the the comments speaking negatively on the subject is the actual amount of land for sale. It might be 80 sims total in the complex (which I doubt), but there are only about 20-25 *land* sims (adding all the land up together), and of that, less than 1/2, if I’m estimating right, will be up for sale. So as others point out, this is just a drop in the bucket of total mainland property. Setting aside political and economic necessities for a minute, I do believe that Linden Lab is looking toward the future in this build, and attempting to correct obvious mainland problems (plus, as I’m understanding now, some of those connected with the fairly recent opening of the smaller Bay City area attached to the old Sansara continent). Admittedly, even in my limited experience in SL I can tell this is not going to be a perfect situation. Personally I would not buy property that doesn’t allow any type of terraforming, especially if the land is totally flat. I understand this option has been greatly abused on the mainlands but I would instead favor more an approach taken by Azure Islands, and only allow terraforming to a certain height and depth. Also making each and every piece of land the same size, and all square, in combination with the flatness, is going to take away additional possibilities of creativity and diversity among the resident’s builds. Plus the inability to join land. Double prims is a certainly a nice benefit, though.

But in saying all this, I still applaud the effort. I have much less problem with the Lindens creating a built in mythology around the sellable land. I think that’ll be one of the more interesting things to see develop: how the resident’s builds blend in with these already existing and quite marvelous builds. I would find it to be a challenge to erect something next to what I’m calling the crystal temple on the eastern end of the island — how would you compete with that? And, perhaps most importantly, you have *more protected land* because of this. What’s really to complain about in this respect? No, I don’t think creativity will be limited in that way, but just in the way the sellable properties are set up, and the restrictions involved. I will also be interested to see how skyboxes develop in the region, or if people do their more creative work up there while remaining more conservative on the ground level.

I do think they either need to rename the island or the continent immediately to the north, though. One should not be Nautilus. 🙂

So let’s take up where we left off in Baker Bloch’s island exploration. He’s now just past the harbor area, heading north along the coastline again.

This is the second lighthouse of the harbor area, the one immediately east of the 2nd, more dilapidated Poseidon statue (not seen in snapshot).

A nice, if narrow strip of woods leads Baker Bloch to this northwest corner of the island.

SNAPSHOT NEEDED.

But here’s where this particular leg of Bloch’s exploration gets quite interesting: on the seabed off the northern coast he’s now hiking around. Looking from a deck on this coast, Baker Bloch spied an spot of unusually diverse colors and activity on the seabed not too far off the shore, and goes to investigate.

But it is not until a number of snapshots are taken of the spot that Baker Bloch discovers, in its midst, almost hidden amongst the various swarms of fish and waving plants… another Poseidon statue! This is more a man-sized statue, like this one found before in this northern sea, but several sims to the east. But this one is in even more disrepair than any Poseidon statue found previously in his island exploring, whether man-size or giant size, because this one lacks a head. “Knocked off, never to be seen again I suppose,” Baker Bloch then thought.

He was about to leave and happened to turn around again to see another spot of emerald green just below the head-less statue. He went back and checked: yes, the head! He admired the way the Lindens postioned this head and torso in such a way that you had to be paying close attention to find both.

Next: Baker Bloch dries out again.