More SL12B snapshotting

More wandering at the birthday bash... I aimed for somewhere slightly familiar at first, the "Emphatic Eccentricia" build by Veleda Lorakeet.  I used to run with that crowd myself for a while.  Anyway, the build is typically creative and intriguing, and eventually I wound up standing on top of it and looking out on all the rest of the weirdness.

 

 

 

 There's a fair amount of the weirdness.  I mentioned that last time, I think.

 

This is all weird in the Electrify sim, by the way.  Which also contains an Avatar Basketball exhibit.  I was just made for avatar basketball.

 

Then I wandered out of Electrify and into Enchant.  I was looking for something specific, but chanced upon the 1920s Berlin exhibit along the way.

 

The place I was actually looking for, though, was "Dare to Dream to Fly", by Meg Madrigal, another person who's spent a lot of time on my f-list.  I remember her asking me questions about how to script those interesting lighter-than-air vehicles, and me being no earthly help to her at all.  Never mind.

 

The exhibit includes a cloud you can lounge on, while it carries you up to great heights.

 

Reasonably great heights.  High enough to see some more weirdness, including the fringe of the great four-sim Cake Stage.

 

 I passed on, and out, it seems, to Raglan Shire's exhibit.  I spent a lot of time lounging on clouds.

It's a civilised sort of place.

I ventured into a high-tech ziggurat - you can see it in the top-right corner of the first picture of Meg's place.  It is the "New World Enlightenment Fun House", apparently.  It is confusing inside, like being trapped in a spirograph.

I will pause there, so this post doesn't become unmanageable.  I haven't covered a tenth of what's there to see in those sims.  And they're only a small part of SL12B, too.  It's quite an event.

SL is twelve!

That's like 84 in people years.  (Internet years are like dog years, everyone knows that.)

And the birthday bash is on again.  I have been wandering around it for the past couple of evenings, in fact, seeing how far I can get before I crash.  Not very far, in some cases - in fact, a software conflict with another running application took me all the way out of the welcome area in SL12B Beguile and into a Blue Screen Of Death.  (Hadn't seen one of those on this machine.  The BSOD for Win8.1 is a much friendlier blue than it used to be.)

Beguile is impressive, but taxing on the client.  I crashed.  A guy was talking to me in a travel pod, and we crossed into Beguile, and, well, the sim crossing got him, like a sniper in 'Nam.  Tali TP'ed in to have a look at the place, and she was crashing out all the time, she was flickering on and off like she was in Morse code.  But... it is impressive.  I gather it's supposed to be a haunted train station or something, with a train crashing into it out of the sky.  Or something like that.

Photos.  I should have photos.  Wait a minute, I do have photos.  Let's see some.

Arriving at the arrival point

Helpful volunteer person in the train station

The train station has lots of information panels that I didn't read.

Anyway, we all know what goes on at SL birthday bashes, yes?  Lots of disparate builds creating high weirdness everywhere.

Here's me in the train station again, you can see the carriages going up into the sky.  I tried for a wider angle shot.  That was when I BSOD'ed.

High weirdness.  And lots of it.

 

This all happened last night.  I went around it tonight, again, and toured several different spots until I crashed.  But that may have to wait for another post.  I had some fun, anyway.  SL12B.  Get it while it's there, folks.

FFL 2015 - the epic conclusion

So last night we did the last four sims of  Fashion For Life 2015, starting out in FFL Berlin.  This centres on a not entirely authentic reconstruction of the Brandenburg Gate...

Engrish also spoken here

 

... surrounded by, well, enough Bauhaus style modernist architecture to make your monitor bleed.  We are talking straight edges here, people.

 

Several big stores in the glass and concrete boxes, booths for smaller ones under those big ramps.  I picked up some interesting-looking clothes at Ghee.  However, the Spartan design of the sim rather accentuates the fact that, well, the organizers didn't fill all of the available spaces.

 

Onwards and upwards - very upwards - to FFL Los Angeles.  Here, we find that the spirit of the city is epitomized - there's that word again - by, well, a giant skyscraper shopping mall with a rocket engine at the bottom, hovering over a beach.

 

 

The transparent column thing near me is a teleporter - it's the only way (well, apart from flying or point-to-point TP) to get to the flying tower, or to go from one level to another on the tower, unless there's an emergency stairwell or something that I didn't find.  It struck me as a bit of niggly restrictive design, that.  Especially as the teleport system is very trad-SL - I think the scripting is older than I am.

 

Anyway, once you get up, there are shops, and decorative palm trees.  That's kind of about it.  And then you get to the top...

I don't know what's going on here.  That central tower is just empty... there are a couple of decks inside, connected by spiral staircases, and there is a massive and impressive futuristic chandelier.  And apart from that, there is nothing.  My best guess is that it's a function space, which wasn't in use for a function while I was there.  I hope I'm right.  The alternative would be that someone bought the centrepiece space on the sim and then just didn't bother to fill it.  I don't know who or what "Zaoldyeck Kselva Magazine" is, but on past showing - as I pointed out to Tali - they could have been trying to spell "Los Angeles".

 

Anyway.  I TP'ed down to the southern exit, planning to make my way on foot into the next sim, FFL London, only to find my way blocked by a barricade of abandoned red telephone kiosks.

Only in SL... A few seconds and a point-to-point TP later, I had joined the other, cleverer catlady you can see in the middle distance, and was investigating what seems, to me, to be the stand-out build of this year's FFL.

 

What we have, surrounded by floating phone boxes, is London's Tower Bridge, basically.  The "main store" is the roadway of the bridge, and it is lined with a plethora of gacha machines.  I will confess to a faint irritation with the now-ubiquitous gacha thing.  I am old and tired and would prefer just to buy what I want, instead of playing a lot of silly games in the hope of getting it, or getting something I can swap for it.  Perhaps I'm in a minority.  I don't know.  I do know that there is nothing much in SL that I actually need, any more, so when I am attracted by something on a gacha's display, the irritation factor usually outweighs the attraction factor to the point where I don't spend any money.

 

But I digress, because you can, and probably should, avoid the ranked gacha machines, and instead follow some little floating arrows that lead up one tower and across the walkways at the top and down the other tower.  With occasional outbreaks of RFL and other vendors along the way.  And lots of Victorian ironwork on display.

To my way of thinking, we should have had more of this sort of thing.  This is an impressive flight of fancy using a very recognizable London landmark.  Excellent attention to detail, judicious use of invisible guiding prims so visitors don't fall off at inopportune moments.  (The sort of technique I've used on my own *ahem* landmark in Caledon Burroughs.)  I do not approve of the gachas, but I most definitely approve of this sim.

 

Though there was room, still, in those towers for more RFL vendors than were actually there... and this issue becomes even more apparent in the final sim, FFL New York, where there is an entire derelict street of empty brownstones...  and one more store where there is a sign over the door, but no trace of actual occupancy.

 

This sim's basically downtown New York.  There are skyscrapers.

 

At street level, there are shops.  There could be more shops, but the ones that are there are OK.

There are more of those trees with the twinkly lightbulbs in.  I like those.

 

There are other nice touches of sim decoration - there is a bridge in the distance, for instance, and there are eating places like that diner, too.

 

Just down the street from that diner is a sweet little stand-alone building that's a cake shop.  It's the sort of out-of-the-way, charming little spot you could imagine existing in the real New York.  Given the brief to summarize the experience of the real-world cities involved, the designers here have always at least made a creditable stab at it, and some of the building work here is truly excellent.

 

Having said which - it's depressingly empty.  I don't mean just the vacant storefronts, too.  Apart from that first night, when CentralPark North was frozen for me at about 2 fps, it's been very easy to get around, because there have been entirely too few visitors.  Possibly, the emphasis this year is on events, at the venues in the CentralPark sims.  But, frankly, the sims and the shops could use some loving, too.  There is some nice stuff to be had, here - I may have to post some piccies to prove it - and it's an excuse for me (and, dear readers, you) to buy nice clothes in a good cause.  (Gentlemen are not excused, there are several menswear shops around the sims too.)

 

This is worth a look, and RFL is a cause worth supporting.  FFL goes away on the 29th of March, and I'd urge anyone to stop by and check it out before it does.

FFL 2015

Last year, picking up on a post from Lindal Kidd's blog - still there on the right-hand side of this page, still full of good information - I visited the various sims of the Fashion For Life event.  The same event's on this year, running from March 21st through 29th, so I hied myself off to have a look around it.

Last year's event had a sort of travel theme, and the sims were all named things like Journey and Wander, and some of the builds were quite imaginative.  This year, the theme seems to be RL cities, and the builds - while very high quality, no doubt about that - seem to be rather more solidly anchored in reality. "Prosaic" can be a pejorative term, and so I hesitate about using it... it might, however, also be appropriate.

Anyway.  The touchdown point appeared to be in FFL CentralPark North, so off I went to that sim.  TPed in, materialized in mid air, and fell to the ground, just missing a rather alarming set of spiked railings.

The Glorf Who Fell To Earth

 

CentralPark North appears to be a reasonable simulacrum of, well, New York's Central Park (not wholly accurate, since I was wandering around it alone at night, and didn't get mugged once.)  It seems to be an events place, not a shopping sim.  It's all kind of nice, though, I'll give it that.  There seemed to be some meeting of RFL/FFL types while I was there, so there were lots of people and it is very detailed... so there was a lot of lag.  It was worth it for the scenery though.

 

 

One feature of the sim is this horse-drawn carriage ride - you sit on the carriage and it rezzes a mobile duplicate that takes you round the sim.  Slightly nerve-racking, with the lag I was experiencing, but in normal circumstances it'd be quite charming.  It also enabled me to spot some little coloured mesh ribbons along the path.  These contained freebies.  We know how I feel about hunting out freebies, right?  Right.



The sim also has a stage for events - specifically, it appears, the "Miss SL" competition.  This is obviously an outmoded tool of the patriarchy for the objectification of women, and also I wasn't nominated, so I disapprove of it.  Like that matters.

There's a much larger stage for what looks like the same event in the southern, adjacent, sim, called (with remorseless logic) FFL CentralPark South.  Seems to be basically more of the same.  Unfortunately, I picked the wrong time to arrive, and things had only just rezzed enough for me to take a single snapshot, when I was warned that I'd be getting the bum's rush as a private event was about to start.  Never mind.

 

So I picked up my little paws and toddled off to the first sim where I could do the important stuff: shopping!

This was FFL Tokyo, and the presence of some familiar names (Bare Rose, G-Field, Tukinowaguma among others) made me mention this to Tali, who joined me in scoping the place out.

FFL Tokyo is clearly trying to capture the spirit of the city, with some very, very traditional Japanese builds adjacent to thrusting 21st-century urban towers.  It's nice, in a schizophrenic sort of way.  I think I should point out that the builds themselves have been of uniformly excellent quality so far.

Arriving at the information point

Engrish spoken here

Modern and urban 

Less modern and urban 

Glorf can haz cheezburger

 

 

That little street-market thing there is a nice touch - it's off to the side of the temple, and those little booths dispense various kinds of Japanese snack food.  I have no idea what's in them - perhaps, being brought up on English cooking, I don't want to know.  But it's a very neat little area and adds to the overall realism of the build.

 

Anyway.  Pausing only to wipe my greasy paws, I followed Tali to the next sim, FFL Milan.

 

This one is dominated by the massive piece of Italianate architecture we see here.  Again, I think it's trying to sum up, or epitomize, the main aspects of the city.  I'm not sure I'm licensed to use words like "epitomize", but I won't let that stop me.

 

There's shops in that there building

Also a nice little bistro down one end

 

Oddly, even by this time, very little actual shopping had taken place (although Tali had been scarfing up demos, of which more anon).  Despite the presence of several familiar names and quality brands, nothing had leapt out at us screaming "buy me! buy me!"  I'm not saying my Linden balance had escaped totally unscathed, but it was by no means as scathed as it might have been.

 

(One practical reason might be that - at these events - I tend to head first for the RFL vendors.  This is, after all, the main point of the event.  The problem is that lots of the stuff in the RFL vendors tends to be variants on a theme of purple... and that's not really my colour.  As a human, I preferred cool pastels, or neutral tones; as a feline, I go for warmer browns and sandy colours.  Purple's just never been on my preferred colour palette.  So it goes.)

 

Anyway.  From Milan to Paris, where dawn had by now broken over the Arc de Triomphe.

 

 

Beautifully realized and detailed Parisian street scene - points, too, for avoiding the visual cliché of the Eiffel Tower.  Can I be all SL-nerdy and point out the specular maps on the cobblestones and the lacquered wooden doors?  Tali was impressed enough to comment on those doors, and it takes rather a lot to impress Tali.

 

Anyway.  At this point we decamped to sort through such loot as we'd accumulated - and, unfortunately, Tali had a rather unpleasant experience, which wasn't FFL's fault, but....

 

I mentioned that, while I'd been snapshotting and browsing, Tali had been hoovering up demos of various mesh clothing items.  Now, demos of mesh are kind of essential as a sales technique.  If you have a shape which lies outside the parameters of "Standard Sizing" - if you have a realistic female physique, or an athletic build, or depart in any other way from committee-approved standards of SL womanhood - you need to check mesh clothes in detail for clipping problems before you wear them, and no one wants to spend money on clothes they can't actually wear.  (Fitted mesh, though generally better, isn't a panacea for this problem, either.)  So, people like Tali - and me - collect demos of anything that looks nice, and sift through them later, winnowing out the stuff that looks nice but doesn't fit.

 

We found one store with stuff that looked nice, but there were no demos on display.  OK, fair enough, space at the FFL event is limited after all.  So Tali hopped off to their main store, to peruse the demos there.  The demos were dollarbies, rather than freebies, which is kind of not ideal, but still not an actual deal-breaker.  So she collected some of them, and we both chatted over Marketplace links to the clothes....

 

... and then the store's owner turned up, to deliver unto Tali an Awful Warning about the dire legal consequences of copybotting.

 

As a piece of customer relations, this, well, sucks.  Yes, copybotters exist, yes, infringements happen.  But treating customers who are legitimately interested in your wares as potential criminals... well, it is not on.

 

I am purposely not naming the store, or which sim it was in.  But, well... it's one that I won't be buying anything from.  There is plenty of nice stuff in SL made by people who don't treat customers that way.

 

Some of it may well be on the remaining FFL sims, which I will get to in my next.  You have been warned.



 



More FFL meandering

... wandering, journeying, perambulating... well, we shall see all sorts of synonyms!

I'm going to do the lot in one bumper instalment.  Consider yourselves warned....  Anyway.  The next sim around my path was FFL Wander, and it was kind of fun.  A simple pathway over the open sea, and the shops were just basic boxes, held up by balloons.

All very nice, though it pays not to lose your footing, since - what with the sims being no-fly and having a set landing point - falling to the bottom of the sea gets very frustrating.  I bought a hat at the store in that last picture, by the way, because they were donating all their proceeds to RFL.  I approve of that.  If you're going to be in a charity event, you might as well go the whole way.

 

The souvenir item for the passport game, in keeping with the build, was a simple hand-held balloon on a string.

 

Moving on, to a very trad-SL spaceport at FFL Promenade.

It was rather old-school, true, but it was also the most fun to explore - I couldn't open that red door you see in the last picture (it led to a boarding tube to a waiting spaceship), but there was a transporter room in one corner which took you to another section where there were things to look at.  Not many things, I grant you, because most of the sim was dedicated to the RFL vendors.  But enough to hold my interest.  Of course, I'm easily amused at the best of times.

 

The souvenir item?  A ray gun, naturally.  The only souvenir item that came in a box, since you wouldn't want people brandishing guns at FFL.  Especially not with those security robots around.  But wearing that box gave me my passport stamp, so that's OK.

 

Next up, a change of pace at FFL Amble.

 

Get your kicks on Route 66! This is an intensely realistic build, a slice of roadside Americana where you can smell the asphalt and hear the tumbleweeds rolling.  It's extremely atmospheric.  It stressed out my client no end, too.  I think it's pretty good, actually.

 

Souvenir item... I'm not entirely sure.  It looked like some sort of ice-cream sundae, but with a strip of roadway underneath it, and when I wore it, it appeared on my head.  I'm not sure I'm the sort of person who wears ice-cream sundaes on her head.  But the thing worked, so that's good enough for me.

 

On to FFL Meander.

 

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside!  With boardwalks, and yachts in the harbour, and... well, shops, I guess.  It's bright and breezy and clean and peaceful.  No brass band playing tiddley-om-pom-pom, though.  Well, you can't have everything.

 

Souvenir item: a pair of sunglasses.

 

Next up, FFL Perambulate.

 

Sort of a formal garden thing, possibly Asian, possibly not.  It has lots of detailed foliage, and those paths which loop and wind and cross over each other.  I liked strolling around it, it was kind of restful and peaceful.  I think it would have been nicer if there hadn't been any shops to distract me, but I suppose that would have been counter-productive, really.

Souvenir item: a skateboard.

Next, FFL Excursion.

Well, they can't all be brilliant.... This was very trad-SL, but not in a good way.  Oh, yes, it had canals, and a balloon tethered in the middle, but it was all very unengaging, on the whole.  I mentioned to Tali that it put me in mind of Helfell Infohub, which is not somewhere you'd want to be reminded of.  There wasn't anything actually wrong with it, I guess.  Just... nothing outstandingly right, either.  I was more excited about the airport sim, which tells you something.

Souvenir item... I've actually forgotten what it was.  I mean, I got it, so it must have been something, right?  But it honestly eludes me.

And so, I completed my great circle of FFL with FFL Voyage.

Tali and I couldn't really figure out the theme for this one.  My first thought was that it was mediaeval, what with the timbered buildings and the watchtower by the cliffs.  Then I found mopeds, which rather put paid to that idea.  Then I noticed the giant wooden moped parked on a roof, so I just decided to let it slide and went shopping.  It's a nice enough setting, if a bit baffling.

Souvenir item: a small wild boar, very realistic in shape and texture, apart from the "Go Hog-wild For Fashion" message stencilled on its hairy flank.

That actually completed my set of passport stamps, so I trundled off to the gift reclamation centre, and after some deliberation got myself a decorative mobile of airplanes and things, by way of a memento.  I picked up some other stuff along the way, too, including that hat I mentioned, and a pair of shoes which I may have to draw a line under, and some stuff from favourite stores of mine like MEB and Spyralle which have a presence here.

So there we are, then.  Fashion For Life.  Worth a visit, I think.