OK I don’t want to get too far behind in my post text generation, so here goes. First snapshot is of the new Hibdon digs, next to the already much discussed Kerchal Forest. What a chatter he or she or it is! Here you have the second structure on the land — I’ve tacked on a 512 parcel to the immediate west to my rental fees on top of the original 2048. Unlike about all my other rental spaces I’ve acquired since the beginning of February, when my rental spree began, I can see keeping this for a long time, perhaps buying the property at some point. The only other land I can say that about is perhaps the Yapland rentals, which I now have *3* of: 1 1024 equivalent parcel with the Edwardston Station Gallery and the 100 collages of the 10×10, and then 2 on her famous art walkway, or my old space and then the most recently aquired space formerly owned by photographer Graham Guru, who has decided to focus on more rl projects for a spell. I don’t blame him — I think you have to have strong, specific reasons for keeping involved in SL and the art movement there. For strict photographers, it’s tough, because anyone can download innumerable photos from the Internet now for the base 10 lindens and slap it on a prim. As much as I like Edna’s photographs, sales have been low in SL, yea, admittedly almost nonexistent. Granted they haven’t been much better for my collages, but I think the differences are several. First off, I don’t allow people to download high rez images of my collages online, and in most cases I don’t offer any type downloads. So the collages you see in SL are sometimes the only way you, the viewing public, could view them in the first place. Plus I can’t house all 100 of my collages in an amazingly appropriate gallery space in RL like I can with the 10×10 in the Edwardston Station Gallery in SL. In that case, the gallery is now intimately tied into the art, enhances the overall work.
But I’ve gone on long enough about that.
The second and newest structure (greyish building to the lower right) is presently an empty gallery, again based on an Arcadia Asylum structure called slum econo apartments, which has a small 10×10 base but shoots up about 40 meters. Although I’ve put in new wallpaper, I haven’t decided what to put in this space yet.
I’ll get to the soon-to-be-opened exhibit in the Something To CHRO About gallery soon, whose pictures *may* be eventually moved into this space, or some other space on the Hibdon property. We’ll see.
But to Wilsonia’s explorations now. As Hucka D. and I have talked about in one of the more recent of those “We Better Chat” posts, Wilsonia is attempting to retrace most of Baker Bloch’s Sansara continent explorations from past times, a project created to reinforce the past to act as a pointer to the future, i.e., future Sansara explorations/mysteries/general experiences — now that the family seems rather firmly entrenched on this oldest of SL continents for the first time. It’s pretty exciting, really. Living *right next* to the Kerchal Forest might even be better than living *one parcel* down from the otherwise only slightly smaller Rubi Forest. It’s probably an apples and oranges decision whether one of these forests is better than the other, but I’ve done one; why not try the other when the opportunity arises. I couldn’t resist — we’ll see how “long term” the arrangement is, though. But I feel like I’m at least just as settled in as I was at Otherland, for example.
So here’s Wilsonia at what may just be the eye of the hurricane that is the Sansara continent experience, or else the center of the labyrinth/maze unwinding all around this calm eye. This is the center of the Sea of Solomon, also at the exact center of the Solomon sim. It is also the most shallow part of the sea outside the immediate shoreline. The water level here is *just* above Wilsonia’s head, or about at the 2 meter level above the sea floor at this center. Perhaps interestingly, unlike most Linden sea or ocean sims, this one has a default landing point attached, which is this centerpoint Wisonia is standing on. This means, for those who don’t know, that anyone attempting to teleport into the Solomon sim at any location will automatically be rerouted to this center. This seems to reinforce the eye symbol… I’ll have to study that more in detail later, also keeping in mind that the symbol for Linden Labs itself is an eye in a hand, as famously depicted in the Omidyar glyph here, and in even another Linden owned water sim. Hmmmm… For the record, the Solomon sim is about 5 sims to the west of Omidyar and then an additional 2 sims to the south. Not too far, then.
As one learns in the first month of posts from the Baker Blinker Blog, Baker’s Island and accompanying Baker sim lies to the immediate west of the Solomon sim. In revisiting this “historic” island or isle, Wilsonia finds it much different from the way it’s pictured in the early part of the blog, though. It’s about here it begins to sink in that she cannot *really* retrace Baker Bloch’s Sansara explorations but merely go to the same locations on the grid that he was at… same coordinates that is. Baker’s Isle, or what’s called Isle of Baker at the time, I believe, is essentially no more, having been incorporated into this huge, temple-like structure of purposes unknown for Wilsonia. It’s impressive, but it certainly doesn’t have the same type of mysterious ambiance of the underwater ruins that use to occupy this same grid space, the site of Baker Bloch’s and the seemingly sinister Mr. Low’s several liaisons.
As an added comment to the Sea of Solomon information given here, I’d like to say that at the time of Blochs’ initial explorations in this area, the autoreturn for resident’s objects was set at a rather generous 60 minutes. Baker Blinker used this large window to rez a number of early structures to test them out, perhaps including the Misty’s Big Blue House that became the original dwelling for the Bakers on Azure Islands in the following months. Now the autoreturn is set at a much shorter 5 minutes, not long enough to use the sea for any kind of similar purposes. A shame. And the same thing happened in the Haworth water sim off the east coast of the Atoll continent (Heterocera), which use to have the same 60 min. autoreturn window but has now been shortened to 10. In fact, as Baker Bloch is testing it out now (as I write), one can’t even rez objects in the latter sim at all now, although they still can in Solomon. But after 5 mnutes — poof, they’ll be autoreturned to the creator. It’s perhaps a trivial fact, but still it seems to me to represent a general *regularizing* — almost a *demystification*– of SL to get rid of the little kinks that make it so interesting to me at least, and probably others as well. If it was just this inability to effectively rez objects in water sims alone, I wouldn’t bring it up. But other things factor into this decision as well, one obvious, blunt Coup de grace in the matter being that the new continents created after Heterocera and Sansara are simply not nearly as interesting. I tried to become involved in the Gaeta continent (newest one to rise from the sea bed) recently, but nothing really held me. Nothing mysterious, nothing eye popping at all. Let me know if you think differently, because I would like to understand the viewpoint of someone whose opinion leans otherwise. Not talking about estate property here, but mainlands — Linden owned. To me, and apparently others as well, Sansara, the oldest, is the best, and perhaps by a big margin over, especially, the ones past Heterocera.
Anyway, I diverge again.
Below shows Wilsonia at a rather prominent underwater peak at the corner of four sims to the southeast of the Solomon Sea (Kaminari, Cresent, Epimetheus, and then Baker itself), or in the only waterway leading out of that sea into other Sansara seas. To me, this is reminiscent of the center of a traditional 7 circuit labyrinth, with only one way in and out. I’ll have more to say about this comparison later, most likely.
Wilsonia also rediscovers another prominent underwater peak that Baker Bloch didn’t speak about at the time of its discovery in this blog, but one that Wilsonia supposed could have some attachment to the Ancients as well, since the top of it *just* juts out above the water level here. Is this some kind of related peak, then, to Hilo Peak?, she ruminates.
Then there was the inevitable revisit of the Okinu sim and its perhaps inexplicable, sharp edged and geometrically tailored glyphs of innumerable sizes and shapes. Wilsonia thinks back to the time when Baker Bloch found these glyphs (she has vague access to these memories, probably because they have the same user, baker b.), and the fact that the first two on the edge of the sim he encountered were both “L” shaped and in an isolated pair with each other from the rest. L + L then. Perhaps it stands for “Linden Labs”? she hypothesizes again. Were the glyphs trying to tell Baker Bloch something at the beginning of their relationship about the controlling ownership of Second Life and the inclusive grid? She also thinks of the heart shaped glyph Baker Bloch immediately came across upon beaming into Okinu briefly before heading to the newly risen Gaeta continent, a place his counterpart Baker Blinker was soon to visit as well. She thinks how Baker Bloch realized this was a symbol of the “love” between Baker Blinker and himself, and how it had been misconstrued by them as being intertwined with some kind of “physical” love, at least in a virtual sense of the word. Blochs and Blinks soon realized (as Hucka D. had to learn the same, afterwards, about Hurla Dontbee) that they were actually two aspects of one thing, and that while they would never be separate, they could also never be together in that way. They acted in unison in everything they did already, and still do for that matter.
Here is an example of a more typical merger of two sea bottom textures, without the sharp edges of the Okinu glyphs or the self contained, regular shapes. The Okinu glyphs, at least from my explorations, seem quite unique in that way in terms of mainland waterscapes.
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