Continental Divide… November 16, 2009

“Hucka D., I think you’re not telling me the full truth about Karoz’s hexagonal continent outline. (pause) I think it might be related to the Trivia Ratsuit game now, specifically this pie holder. I’m going to set the two side-by-side for a comparison.”

“This is more complicated, then, than a simple red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet circle of relationships, Hucka D. I think the color brown is involved, which may represent Sansara. Orange is Heterocera still, but no red. Then pink is the Nautilus continent above Maebaleia, separated from it by the Nautilus Sea now and its famed Atlantis-type island/city. Then blue above that is Corsica. The only 2 “pieces” that remain the same between the hexagonal twins are yellow, Jeogeot, and green, Maebaleia, the 2 you, Hucka D., claimed to have own or perhaps still own, in some kind of variant virtual reality.”

Hucka D.:

Lemon World. Yes, you are correct about Sansara. And now you must look to Nautilus, the continent, for more answers, you see. Yelloo is a good starting point. You thought you saw a yellow submarine there a while back, but you were mistaken. But it was a mistake worth making. Bob Too.

bb:

I’m going inworld to take a couple of snapshots of the map, then.

“*That’s* where the Trivia Ratsuit game was held, not Pudding Hole or Pudding Hollow in Big Sink.”

Hucka D.:

Correct. One game anyway. The current SL grid was molded from that game between Chesaw and Saw-chee. Pieland became Second Lyfe, Linden style. Lemon World became Lime Globe — something. Lemon-lime. Dilution. Not as sour, taste buds dulled a bit. Degeneration. Yes, you must include the heretofore overlooked continent of Nautilus in your overall equations. Trivia Ratsuit. Ratzenberger.

bb:

Hold on another second, Hucka D.

Hucka D.:

[delete explicative]

*****
“Um hum. The original Hammer of the Gods store is located in the Leemington sim, Hucka D. And Robert Plant Variant was just talking about lemons. Can’t be chance, most likely.

Hucka D.:

Lemon Days. Good days. Real lemonade. Real taste buds. Good times.

bb:

Can I bring in “Introducing Lemon.”

Hucka D.:

Think you have to (!)

bb:

Ok. Here…

Hucka D.:

*Not* accident, but Lemon has shifted to Ringor. Ingor.

bb:

Yes. Ringo is the one holding the trumpet, like Lemon.

Hucka D.:

You can explore details on your own, but association is obvious, just shifted.

bb:

Leemington as well. Should we bring in Plant?

Hucka D.:

As you wish…

Plant:

More connections, I see. Lemon Days, good days. Backyard burgers and bbq’s. Real meat, then. But you have questions [as usual].

bb:

Excuse me, Mr. Plant. I meant to ask Hucka D. what this means tonight, if he can. Hopefully he can.

Hucka D.:

Lime-lemon.

bb:

Is… you can’t tell me.

Hucka D.:

Think UP.

bb:

GreenUP?

Hucka D.:

*Yes.*

bb:

And “yellow down”.

Hucka D.:

Exactly. Right. Good. Think “yellow down” but, most importantly, GREENUP.

bb:

Linden World. Then Linden Grid. Lime, um, Globe.

Hucka D.:

Green is good. Green is UP.

Hucka D.:

Above Rat… Ratzenberger. Beyond… up.

bb:

Thank you for that, Hucka D. I feel better. Lemon down, then.

Hucka D.:

Lemon in past. Lime is present. UP. Lime. Greenup.

bb:

I need to ask about Winesap, obviously, but… another night. Thank you both.

Random Pics… November 13, 2009

TEXT SOON.

Changes, Updates… July 5, 2009

Below is the poster Plant and I were talking about that I didn’t want to show in this blog. Changed my mind, just to remember what I’m talking about when I read this stuff years down the road for fun.:-)

The other day I teleported into the Chromex sim for specific reasons I may get to in a moment involving my SL friend Flynn. I was quite surprised to see these gearchair automatons on the small peninsular of a beach in the southeast part of the sim, which I immediately recognized from Chilbo, particularly the factory on the northwest of town that Karoz visited on his second or third trip to that village, I believe. His tour of the factory is recorded in this May post.

I also decided to pop over to the recently opened adult continent known as Zindra. There are considerable expanses of forests, but all the ones I was able to check contain these 2 types of cypress trees first found in Nautilus City, I believe. And grass in places. Overall not too exciting a landscape, although I assume more trees may be added in the future. Some nice mtns. in areas, and I may change my mind on this, but for now I don’t see Baker Bloch spending a lot of time exploring muchof this continent. And Karoz is out of luck in that department since he has no pay information that Linden Labs can check to make sure he’s an adult. But he doesn’t seem upset about it (he’s still miffed about the same restrictions keeping him from exploring Nowtown, though — don’t think I’ve mentioned that in the blog yet).

Then it’s over to the Noru galleris to check out a couple new additions, including a rotating version of the Blue Feather Sea cube that first appeared, in non-rotating form, in the Something to Chro About Gallery as part of the “E” exhibit (more on that just above). Although I did delete the small, empty gallery #5 on the property (a modified Arcadia Asylum slum econo apt building, pictured here), I decided to hold of any more major changes to Noru until after the “E” exhibit is over in mid-to-late August or so. At that time, I will probably move the giant E that now hangs in the sky above Healy to the Noru complex.

Red cards… Redbirds… Cardinals May 10, 2009

When I first got a chance to fully absorb Nish Mip’s most excellent Fuchsia sim post, one I think should become a model for all future single sim examinations anywhere, I immediately hopped over to both Fuchsia and also Extasia (possible “twin” to Fuchsia, according to this post) to see with my own 2 virtual eyes the various mysteries and otherwise observations she had written about. I quickly summarized my follow up finds in 2 identical comments on both this blog and Nish’s own Big Orange blog.

Nish also mentioned the Okinu sim glyphs in her Fuchsia post, and compared them to the shifting textures she also found in Fuchsia. As a more concrete attempt to build upon her wonderful research after making my aforementioned comment, I decided to trek the ne-sw diagonal of that sim, as I had previously done in other locations, especially the Rubi sim that I use to live in with its mysterious TILE resonations. My idea was to walk this diagonal at least every couple of days, and to take snapshots of what had changed or perhaps even remained the same. However, let’s talk about a discovery I found on what I envisioned as only my initial walk in this study…

First I should mention that, just prior to this, I had Baker Bloch teleport around the interior Nautilus continent water sims to see if any were worthy of a similar study. I knew from my visits last fall that the underwater scapes of these sims contain interesting texture patterns; each sim also has its unique style of patterning. The closest to Okinu in this respect seems to be one called Quidd, at least among the ones that I checked (there are many). But still they’re not as sharp nor distinct as the ones in Okinu. So having retested the, er, waters out in another spot, I decided to give the Okinu sim all my attention in this direction. It still seems unique.

So about 2/3rds the way down Baker Bloch’s subsequent walk of the Okinu ne-sw diagonal he found this glyph that you just skirt the edge of to the west. This one attracted me more than the several others also seen from the diagonal because of 2 proximate, smaller glyphs off its southern end.

Somewhat surprising me (and Baker Bloch) in this area was a heart shaped glyph Baker Bloch had notably stumbled across before in this sim (recorded in this post), but with the color switched with the ocean floor backdrop in respect to that one, the heart being beige against a blue-green background now. Then next to it was a somewhat larger, regular diamond pattern. I immediately thought: hearts and diamonds — the 2 red suits of an ordinary deck of cards!

It was at this time that I began to think about that dizzily spinning bird in Extasia that I mention in my comment re Nish’s material, not only because it was a *red* bird but because it was also a particular kind of red bird according to its description: a *card*inal.

More to follow.

New Island! (Very Atlantean), 1 October 20, 2008

Have come across several new Linden builds in SL and have admittedly given them the short stick in this blog at times, like the Moonbase just off Jeogeot and, going further back, the Magellan Linden landing site on the western tip of Gaeta. More significantly, I also didn’t visit Burning Life (just completed) nearly as much as I expected, since that’s one of the things that drew me into SL in the first place and I’ve had the week long event circled on my virtual calendar for months and months. So I’ve decided to change my tact a bit on this new find and cover it quite extensively, or as much as my energy will allow. I’ll treat it like one of my own builds, let’s say.

First off, let me get this out of the way on another topic. Ross Falls is an “official (SL wikia) name… nifty.
http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Ross

The island has surfaced, Atlantis-like (except the opposite way, I suppose, coming out of the water instead of sinking into the water — more on Atlantean parallels later, though, when I get my writing warmed up a bit more), out of the sea between the continents of Nautilus and Mãebaleia, or the two southernmost of the 4 eastern continents (east of the 3 “western” continents of Heterocera Atoll, Sansara and Jeogeot, that is). It really just appeared, as a whole, overnight, because I was teleporting around the edges of Nautilus Friday night, maybe even Saturday night — didn’t see hide nor hair of it. But by Sunday night the island was there in full force. I was actually teleporting and running around the sea interior of Nautilus (as I’ve been doing for a couple of nights) and then teleported over into a slightly more southern, greenish water sim which I didn’t remember before. Cool, I thought, seeing actual ocean plants and fish and hills… why didn’t I find this before in my extensive explorations of the Nautilus water sims? Then I pulled up the SL map… and saw the island. This was pretty big news I realized, and it was the ocean floor around it that impressed me first. It seems the Lindens have really gone all out on this one. We’ll see how it develops, though — I hope they aren’t planning to divide most of the island into sellable property. It would indeed be very unique if they didn’t, then, and quite a reverse, in this limited scope admittedly, from the decrease of Linden protected land we’ve seen in these newer continents in comparison with Sansara and Heterocera.

So I’ll begin a shot from the interior sea of Nautilus, which has some quite interesting patterns at the bottom — very Okinu-like. I also liked how there are actual hills on the sea floor to help highlight the patterns further.

Moving again to the new island, it seems to be about the same size as the Burning Life island just derezzed in the ocean beside Heterocera, which covered precisely 22 land sims. Most of the sims here are a mixture of land and water, so this is just a guess. But it’s big. It’s maybe not quite the size of the main Azure Island where I lived, (I’ve called this island AI1 in my blog, or Azure Island #1) but it’s clearly somewhat bigger than the second largest of these islands (AI2).

Just to get my nomenclature straight, I’d personally call the main Azure Island landmass an island and not a continent, as some people do, although it could be the largest such island that’s not a continent (unless it is matched or surpassed by the main Dreamland landmass?). Kind of like an SL Greenland, I suppose. Either Gaeta or the Heterocera Atoll, then, would be the smallest currently completed continents using this standard.

I don’t know what most of the things I saw really are yet, and I’m sure all this will be cleared up more in official Linden releases coming down the pike. But here’s a snapshot of a particle, sculpture thingie that gives you some idea about how well done some of this stuff is.

The centerpiece of the whole island seems to be this large circular area that I haven’t explored yet. The door to the interior is certainly impressive enough, though, and Baker Bloch was mildly surprised that he was allowed to open and close these huge doors himself. The doors come at the end of a *long* canal that runs through about 1/2 length of the whole island up to this point, and continues another sim-length to a central pool inside (according to the map).

As I said, Baker decides to leave this central part of the island alone for now, and teleports instead to this quite interesting and picturesque hill on the eastern side of the island.

I’ll continue this exploration in the post above… see you there.

Off-Sansara Again… October 15, 2008

Continuing the oddities found in association with SL’s Ross Sea, Baker Bloch finds this cat (leopard) walking around, then finds he has just crossed over into a sim named Cowardly. Cowardly Lion (Lion=Cat) again! And now I think it might reference both lions and tigers of the famous chat “Lions, tigers and bears, oh my,” from the 1939 Oz movie. Both are cats, you see, like this spotted leopard. This was on the continent below what I now know as Corsica, or what on the new SL map is called Nautilus.

Baker Bloch also has the pleasure the same night of exploring a moon base just created, apparently, on an island off the coast of the southernmost continent of SL (Jeogeot). I wonder if they found this alien on the moon as well? Guess they did, actually.

Interesting to contrast a high profile “mystery” with one so low such as this totally inconspicuous floating rock near my gallery. I think the old alchemists said it best: to find the highest, the gold, silver and diamonds, you must look in the lowest, the garbage, the base metals, the gutter.