Fantasy Faire 2013: The Adventure Continues

Moving east from Crimson Fields, we come to that enormous tree-y thing you might have noticed in the snapshot of the tower.  This is Evensong Woods, where everything is built into, well, an enormous tree-y thing.  Like Tolkien's Elves in Lothlorien.  Sort of thing.  The sim sponsors are Roawenwood, a familiar name if you move in the circles I do.

If you walk in from Crimson Fields, you ascend via stairways from platform to platform, passing by those Gothic-Elvish shops (or, ideally, stopping in and buying something, but more of that anon.)

If you teleport in, the arrival point is up in the crown of the tree.  Not that it's easy to tell, with all the wintry foliage about.  (The one I felt sorry for was the shop selling skimpy silken outfits.  I think I saw them in the desert-themed sim last year... the wintry look of Evensong Woods does not encourage me to buy skimpy silk things.)

Anyway.  If you're walking, you go up, you get to the top, you climb down again... and then you get to go to the next sim, Titan's Hollow, and you find yourself climbing up again.

Titan's Hollow, sponsored by Cerridwen's Cauldron (who did the standout Nu Orme build last year, and whose products grace some corners of Caledon Burroughs as a consequence), is undoubtedly the most imaginative setting in this year's Faire.  The shops are all in giant hanging... lanterns, I guess... strung out among the trees, with a glass walkway linking them all together....  It is imaginative, and by night especially, it is truly beautiful.  One of those things that makes SL a Good Place To Be.

Here it is seen from the Evensong Woods side of the entrance.

I started hitting the snapshot button rather a lot at this sim... I've always had a bit of a thing for coloured lights at night, and this is, well, really something special.  I like it a lot.  I mean, OK, I went into some of the shops and bought stuff, but I could have wandered for a long time, just drinking in the view.

You can see what I mean, can't you?

Unfortunately, while I was drinking in the view, something in my computer - my client, my connection, my graphics driver - was not so much drinking as choking and spluttering.  It was as I advanced towards The Dragonspire, the next sim over, that I started having real problems with frame rates crashing and ominous moments of complete blackout.  More of this in our next.  (Will our glamourous blonde heroine survive?  Tune in next episode!  Same bat-time, same bat-channel! )

(Ahem.  I will stop doing that, at least.)

Fantasy Faire 2013

... post one of several.

I have been fighting my way across Fantasy Faire, which some of the readership-at-very-small will remember from last year.  This RFL-based fantasy-themed shopping event runs until the 28th of this month, so there's still a few days left.  There is also a hunt, of some kind, going on there, but I'm not participating in that, for reasons which may or may not become apparent.

I say "fighting" my way across, because I am using the current version of the LL viewer, and having many and frustrating difficulties with it.  There may be more on this topic: consider yourselves warned.  And, of course, a bunch of sims with lots of visitors and lots of vendors and a bunch of stores where SL's content creators have gone hog-wild trying to make impressive stuff... well, this all taxes the viewer, rather a lot.

On the plus side, last year I went through Fantasy Faire on my clapped-out lappy, and this year I have a proper one, so that should be better.  So, let me (grudgingly) put complaints to one side, and talk about what's actually there.

If you go via the official link, you will start off in the Fairelands Junction, which offers portals to all the other sims.

Unlike the big building last year, this time we have a forest glade, with huge trees containing mystical portals to other realms.

Mystical, but not actually all that special - touch one, it brings up the world map for you to teleport from; there's no use of the "experience tools" here to TP you directly.  It's the first sign that this Faire, though visually impressive, isn't really at the cutting edge of SL.  Never mind.  The setting is idyllic.  Bucolic, even.

That's me being idyllic and bucolic, that is.  Also, resetting my jangled nerves after an incredibly botched sim crossing... ahem.  I said I'd stop complaining, didn't I?  But I'm afraid it's going to creep in.  The complaining thing, I mean.

Anyway.  The Faire sims are laid out in a hollow rectangle, with the Junction in the bottom left corner.  I'm going to go around them clockwise, because that's how I visited them.  So, heading north, we come to Magnificat.

This is sponsored by Fallen Gods, who did that rather elegant build with the classical temples sticking out of the water, last year.  This is still classical, still elegant - and, in fact, uses mesh buildings, so it's rather more modern - but it somehow didn't grab me as much.  It is a sort of peaceful, Mediterranean kind of a sim, with an aura of decaying gentility about it.  It's nice.  I was pleased.  But I was, somehow, not impressed.

(Also, see those grey squares in the air?  In the first pic?  Particle effects whose texture obstinately refused to rez.  I had some terrible troubles with rezzing... ahem.  Complaining again.  Bad Glorf.)

The stand-out feature seems to be that sort of river mouth with an endless succession of sailboats gliding down it, out into the distance to commence an endless voyage.  Or to de-rez quietly.  One of the two.

So there we are.  Magnificat.  Moving north, we come to the next sim, Crimson Fields, sponsored by Trident... Again, they did a captivating build last year, and this year they have marvellous modern mesh buildings, so it should be something utterly special and wonderful... and somehow it isn't.

The main feature here is that big stone tower, which - well, you can see how far I had to pull out my draw distance to get the whole thing in.  I think the problem, here, is unimaginative layout.  There is that big tower in the field of red flowers, and the shops are all in a horseshoe around it, and... that's all there is to it.  The individual shop buildings are lovely; beautifully textured crumbling ruins in the sort of Viking idiom I've come to expect from Trident.  It's just the layout which is a bit blah.

There is something going on at one corner of the sim - there's a smaller tower with a sort of prison cell at the top.

Dunno what that's all about.  I remember last year they did that stunt where you had to pay to get various SL worthies bailed out of prison.  (I paid quite a bit to stop Perryn Peterson being boiled in chocolate.)  Maybe they're doing the same thing this year?

Anyway.  I shall break this up here, I think, and continue around the ring in my next.

Plus ça change...

I celebrated the feast of Saint Stephen by getting my foot crushed between a very heavy church door and a similarly solid piece of ecclesiastical architecture.  Various complications, too tedious to record, duly set in, with the result that I haven't been taking much of an interest in anything for the past three months.

I did, however, manage to get back into SL for my third rezday, and was welcomed back by several...

... including SL itself, in its own inimitable way.

I installed, as is oft my wont, the latest dev version, and duly reappeared inside the hallowed halls of Oxbridge.  There followed a quick tour of my properties (still, amazingly enough, all going strong), at the end of which I decided to change outfits.  Bad Idea Glorf.

It seems that there are changes afoot in the world of baking avatar textures; more is being done on the server side, less on the client side.  In theory, this should be all to the good.  In practice, I changed outfits, went to visit Caledon Burroughs and the much-missed Tali Rosca... and found that, though I looked fine in my viewer, to everyone else in SL, the whole baking process had got as far as my underwear and then given up.  There I was, unknowingly parading around wearing nothing but a smile and a thong.

So my triumphant return to the shores of SL took the form of... spending several hours skulking underwater with my boobs out, trying to figure out what was going wrong and how to get it fixed.

(Pictures are not forthcoming, this is still Not That Sort of Blog.)

So.  Welcome back, to and from SL.

Merry Christmas

Last year, I produced a little Christmas gift package to send out to people... this year, alas, I haven't been that organized.

It's been an ... eventful ... few weeks offline, just to round off an eventful year.  I won't go into details, beyond saying: all those travel warnings, around now, about the floods in England?  How you shouldn't go anywhere, basically, in the west of the country unless your journey is strictly necessary?  Well, they ain't kidding.

Anyway.  Back to civilization, or at least Internet access.  Who knows how long it will last?  Not I.  My New Year's resolution, though, is going to have to be to pick up the scattered threads of my SL and stitch them back together.  Still have building to do, things to see, people to - well, do things with.

Basically, I am harassed but yet unbowed.  If anyone's still reading this, Merry Christmas to you all, and do not expect you have seen the last of me quite yet.

Work in progress...

Things continue to develop, even when I'm not part of them.  It's almost as if I wasn't completely indispensable.

Anyway.  Among other things, a seismic shift has taken place in Caledon Steam SkyCity, my home in Caledon for much of my career.

The economy has been no kinder to that sim than to any other, and with parcels falling long-term vacant, our esteemed Guvnah was forced to downgrade it to a homestead.  This meant, of course, a substantial reduction in the complexity and number of holdings there... Some people bailed out; others, myself included, announced a willingness to stay on after the redevelopment.  So, one weekend, I packed up all my prims, threw my tentacle monsters into the proverbial red spotted hanky on a stick, and withdrew to await developments.

The developments concluded... sadly, not entirely to my taste.

The new Steam SkyCity is a visually impressive build, from the outside; a huge floating metal spheroid, supported by the requisite rotors (I for one argued, apparently persuasively, against replacing the rotors with a simple airship gasbag), hovering on high over the waters beneath.

Unfortunately - from my point of view - this is achieved by what's essentially a set of massive enclosing prims (the bottom bowl, the deck, and the dome and girders overhead) which severely restrict the physical space available for building on the city.  Furthermore, in response to commercial pressure (people like leafy suburbs, apparently), the Guv has made that deck a single big lawn, and planted trees all the way around.  In short, rather than the urban-industrial setting of the Steam SkyCity I knew and loved, this is something much more like an enclosed, suburban, gated community.  (There's no conventional way in or out except by the CAT lift.... and the structure of the build means there isn't even a view from the main deck, it's all shut away behind a wall.)

It's all just virtual anyway, yes?  Just pixels in a video game?  ... yeah, right.  This honestly, really, upset me.  So I messaged the Guvnah to that effect.

Well, never let it be said that the Guv refuses to listen to people's concerns.  Some people would have been annoyed by receiving a message to the effect that "your brilliant new build sux and I'm not going to live in it"... but the Guv took it on the chin, and we thrashed out a compromise, which involved him carving out a separate parcel, away from the city itself, where I can build, unencumbered, and in the sort of idiom I feel appropriate to Caledon STEAM SkyCITY, dammit.

Of course, now, I am honour bound to actually build something.  Which means, I suppose (since life and other realities keep on intruding on my not-so-copious free time) that this blog may get even more neglected as I bolt prims together inworld.  But I will be back, and building.  Watch this space.  Something may happen here yet.

Another "not dead yet" post...

Nor is my mother, but there have been more medical alarums and excursions... I really do hope things settle down a bit; one way and another, it has been one hell of a summer.

Anyway.  I'm still around.  With luck, more so, soon.

Steam Hunt 7 is on

... and, of course, I am on it.  Taking it at a leisurely pace, so far, but I'm on it.

What's more, this time, I am in it - shop number 106 on the list is my little one in Steam SkyCity.  After last month's alarums and excursions, I am more than a little relieved to have got things done in time! - and, in fact, it turned into a mad scramble the day before the Hunt started, and I'd never have managed it if it hadn't been for Tali's unstinting help and support.  She really is wonderful.

Anyway.  I have no idea if this will Put Me On The Map as an SL merchant and have hordes of people beating a path to my door... but I was in one of the Hunt shops, the other day, and a fellow hunter came up to me and said how much she'd liked my little place.  I was quite unreasonably chuffed about that one.

Meanwhile, I'm working through the rest of the Hunt shops, and it will be a while till I get to my own place.  So far, Epic Toy Factory has been Epic as usual, while one place is providing a Martian war machine that positively made my mouth water.  Everybody should have a war machine.