‘Nother…

The new location of the Otherland archipelago, after its apparent move halfway across the grid last summer, is on the extreme southern edge of the SL grid, below about everything else. One noteworthy exception to this rule is the presence of another large set of contiguous sims just to the east of Otherland, with almost all containing the first name of “FairChang”. We’ll call this, then, the Fairchang archipelago — or just FairChang — for lack of a better appellation now.* Baker has been making some tentative forays into this quite large cluster of sims, which, unlike the more sprawling Otherland archipelago, are bunched tightly together in a rough circle-ish shape. Although one must also call the FairChang group of sims an archipelago like Otherland, another obvious difference is that there are fewer multi-sim islands in the Fairchange complex, and none at all close to the size of the largest Otherland island, or what I’ve been calling Otherland Island #1 in this blog. The Fairchang archipelago is currently made up of 67 contiguous sims, and contain many hundreds of islands.

In what’s called the Fairchange Lost Isle sim near the northwest corner of the archipelago, Baker Bloch comes across this huge steampunk looking — well, what’s really a small, enclosed city I guess you could call it. Baker walks around inside a bit, but shortly suffers from a bit of claustrophobia and has to teleport out. It’s very “cagey” feeling in there… not the kind of environment he prefers. But it apparently is an interesting space to some, because according to my map there were quite a number of avatars on the sim at the time, although Blochs didn’t run into any of ’em during his brief visit.

Back in the Otherland, Baker decides to visit what turns out to be the only other registered sl art “gallery” in my home archipelago, called the Normanisan Strait Gallery and run by a Danish woman named Betty Tereaud. The setting is an underwater location in a sim directly south of my home sim of Stephen, near what I call Otherland Island #2. After Baker Bloch’s visit, he im-ed Ms. Tereaud, complimenting her especially on the outside sculpture. Below is a snapshot of how some of the art appeared to Baker Bloch at the time.

Weird thing is, I didn’t discover this only Otherland “gallery” by sheer chance. It’s name appeared on the kiosk located at my own, er, Baker Bloch’s Otherland gallery. Hmmmmm… “Normanisan Straits” I found myself saying aloud. Isn’t that the name of an Otherland sim? Sure enough, a glance at the SL map gave proof that this was so, leading to my immediate visit. Ms. Tereaud was nice enough to repay the visit later on that night with a trip to my own gallery.

Returning to the subject of the FairChang archipelago, Baker Bloch found this underwater series of passes in FairChang Laguna and couldn’t help but take a couple of snapshots, such as the one below of the main entrance…

…and this one of the central “pirate ship” of the complex, complete with a giant squid (!)

In yet another FairChang sim — can’t remember which one — Baker Bloch comes across this interesting rectangular shaped gorge filled with sea shells.

Finally, that same night Baker Bloch finds himself looking for the estranged Esbum all the way out on the now almost deserted Burning Life island. I’ll have more on that search very soon.

* a small bit of research turned up this website on the archipelago