The Splendor of Rivendell

Rivendell...I heard about this place through various social media platforms and being a fan of

Tolkien, I HAD to go and see for myself. It is one of my favourite things to wander through the visions of other people. I enjoy seeing how they will put together a place and a space. Quite often places allow you to fly or run or just teleport all over the place. I don't mind that if it is a large landscaping store or something similar. But for the most part, especially in places like these, I just walk. I walk and pause and ponder and look at every little thing and notice the detail. It is a small joy. This is probably why it takes me so long to get around a place like Rivendell and also why I prefer to wander these places by myself and lost in my thoughts.

The music throughout is perfectly suited to the sim. It seems like such a little thing, but I really like it when the music matches the mood, it adds to the experience of BEING there. Walking from the entrance point, up over the little hill, suddenly, the world becomes magical.  It is ethereal and beautiful. The statues that are set up to point your way are perfectly positioned to give you the feeling that you are being led on to something more...when you are ready.
The attention to detail is startlingly breathtaking and at the same time the lag is next to non existent.  There are moments of glory, delight and beauty. There are many nooks and crannies and little places set up in unexpected locations to sit, or take photos or just to take a pause. There is a large hall set up perfectly for weddings or other events.

While I love the beauty of this place and respect the hard work and creativity that has gone into setting up this sim, if you go there, you should keep in mind that this is INSPIRED by Rivendell, not an exact replica. That being said, if you are looking for a place to take some photos, or get married or even just to hang out or explore...go. Go to Rivendell and be inspired and amazed. Go to Rivendell and think quiet, joyful thoughts. Just...go...and see the splendor for yourself.

Refs:
Rivendell SLurl
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Snowflake%20Hills/30/185/21

My Personal Flickr
https://flic.kr/s/aHskRYCesq

Rivendell Flickr Group
https://flic.kr/g/u7q6D

9. Byrd Island

This Sim is done by LICK Sim designs and it is exquisite. Excuse me if I gush a little but this is the first Sim I have been to (that wasn't an art installation) that I have loved every moment, from the time I landed to the time I regretfully teleported away. The music was laid back and moody which perfectly fit the ambience of this Place. The lighting, the effects….the BIRDS. You just can't help but wonder what happened to the inhabitants of this house.

You teleport in on a jetty overlooking a beautiful bay. As you walk off the jetty you come across an old rickety wooden elevator and a ladder. I chose the ladder and climbed to the top of the sim, turned around and physically gasped in real life. The scene was so….Jane Austen. I wish I'd worn more Austenesque clothes but there was no way I was going to get changed now (That and I don't have any!). Tearing myself away from the view, I walked a short distance and spent some time just sitting on a lovely bench and admiring the view. The sun going down, the muted colours, the gentle music playing in the background…it was just so peaceful.

I walked through fields of long grasses and wildflowers. Sat quietly and watched the birds circling overhead. Explored houses that were beautifully and tastefully decorated in old farmhouse styles and left as if their occupants had just disappeared suddenly.

In one house I had an Edgar Allen Poe moment and had to read "The Raven" all over again...

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, 
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 
"Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-
Only this and nothing more." ~Edgar Allen Poe  

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing further then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered— Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before— Then the bird said “Nevermore.” ~Edgar Allen Poe

This Sim has been taken down now. Such is the transient nature of some of the most beautiful places in Second life. However, LICK is currently in the process of making a new Sim and I for one can't wait to see it.

Refs:

Poetry Foundation. The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/48860

5. At the end of my first week

So at the end of the first week, here are some of my thoughts. These are some of the things I wish I could most go back and tell myself….

Hello Adventurer! How YOU doing? So you want to join Second Life? Well...Sit down and make yourself comfortable in the chair over there by the fire and let me give you a little bit of advice....

This is not a game…it is a simulated world. That will be the first and hardest thing to wrap your head around, coming from a gaming background like you do. There are no goals except the ones you make. There are no achievements or levelling up. There is just you and the choices you make.

The interface is really not very intuitive. Once you are thrown off noobie island, that is it. You are on your own buddy. There are some places you can go and if you decide to visit here I would direct you to them quick smart because they are the places where you will actually learn the things you need to know…like how to change your clothes without embarrassing yourself. The best place I visited was New Caledon, the steampunk sim that has Caledon University. The tutorials were really easy to follow and the people there were friendly and welcoming.

Without a goal, you will feel lost and will quickly become bored and despondent.

Don't assume everyone in world is creepy and out to get you and grief you. You will not meet one person who treats you badly or even annoys you in this first week. There will be no drama and no griefing. People will be genuinely friendly and are often happy to give you advice, especially if they know you are new.

Don't read the bad press from years ago. Go in and make

your experience about what YOU want.  Think about what you like to do, what you might want to do, who you want to be and live that life. Stay away from the "adult" areas (unless that is where you actually want to be) and take a class in safety at the Caledon university.

Also remember, YOU CAN'T DIE IN WORLD. That was something you will have to wrap your head around because, coming from games like WOW and Subnautica and such, avatar death is something that happens with enough frequency to make you jumpy. So let me repeat it because it took me a little while to fully comprehend it...You CANNOT die in world!!!!!!

One more point about safety, if someone is annoying you...just teleport away. Mute them, block them and go somewhere else and do something else...don't let someone else's bad attitude ruin YOUR experience.

You're gonna be ok. You are going to get frustrated and the learning curve is going to be steep. You will accidentally get naked in public and not know how to get dressed and be so mortified you mention it over and over again. You are going to run into walls and people while you are learning to move around in the world. You will not know where to go or what to do. You are going to freak out the first time you fall from great heights while flying. You are going to doubt your ability to translate your first life art into second life art and you are going to have a hard time talking to people because that's just you. When it all gets a bit much, just stand up and walk away from the computer. Go outside. Breathe fresh real air and live your first life. Your second life isn't going anywhere without you. 

And lastly, adventurer....Explore, Explore, Explore. Remember that book written by Enid Blyton? The Magic Faraway Tree? The one where different lands would come to the tree and the kids got to visit them and have adventures in incredible, fantastical, WONDROUS places? You always wanted to be one of those kids...and in Second Life, you will feel like you are. 

Refs:

SLurls

Botanical Gardens Infohub 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Botanical%20Gardens/66/62/22

Caledon Oxbridge

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Oxbridge/96/196/27

4. The First 5 Days in the Second Life of Mangrovejane Part 4

Day 5.  Time to build. What shall I build? Got to start somewhere. Lets start with a box....

Handy Dandy BASIC Informational Interlude while building.....

Prims

The basic building blocks using the in world building tools are called Primitives or prims. They are three dimensional shapes that can be pushed, pulled, stretched, rotated, skewed, sliced...they can be given new textures, made transparent, be made to glow. They can be given physics in order to move in certain ways and each prim has a weight in the world. 

Some things are measured in prims. Land for instance, is measured not just in size but also in the amount of weight in prims it can hold.  This has been since superseded by the measurement Land Impact (LI), however, a rough rule of thumb here is that 1 prim = 1 LI (unless linked to other prims and then the formula gets a bit complicated and I am still unsure of that so I am certainly not going to try to explain that right now). 

In the past few years, mesh has become a really popular way of building, especially with clothes.  You will see a lot of mesh furniture and landscaping items as well for a number of reasons but one of the most useful applications when you are watching your LI value, is that you can make very low LI and prim value items with mesh as well as making them more finely detailed and realistic looking. These are usually made using third party programs such as Maya and Blender  and uploaded into the world using some sort of computery type magic that once again, I am not knowledgeable enough to talk about at the moment. ;) 

And one last thing, there are two really important groups in world that I found who are incredibly helpful and active and do not mind at all if you ask the most basic questions that they have probably heard a million times before (blush) and who also run building classes and games (like Primtionary, a game similar to Pictionary but instead of drawing, you build your word with prims!)...they are Builders Brewery and Ivory Tower of Primitives. If you get in world and you want to build anything at all, do a search for them in groups and JOIN. The SLurls to their sims are listed below in the references. 

...4 hours later

Ok I ended up with a MONOLITH .  I took photos and then accidentally ripped the base off. Yup. THAT happened.  Because of course none of my pieces were actually linked up together like when you build textboxes and clip art together in word in a lovely and artistic way and then have to group them together so they stay together.  <sigh> Then I spent a lot of time trying to fiddle it back on. 

With a LOT of help from the lovely people in the Builders Brewery Group, I managed to get all my bits linked up and packed away. So now I give you....PRIM AND PROPER! TA DA!!!

Prim and Proper

You’re impressed. I can tell. And amused because it’s all made out of prims...and its prim and proper...get it? GET IT?!!! Oh nvm....

Refs:

SLurls

Builders Brewery Sim and School 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Builders%20Brewery/144/197/24

Ivory Tower of Primitives

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Natoma/210/164/28

Articles

Second Life Knowledge Base: Build Tools

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Build-Tools/ta-p/700039

Second Life Wiki Articles:  Good Building Practises

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Good_Building_Practices 

Videos

Basic Building Tutorial for Second Life Part 1 (of 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYAItoufobA

Basic Building Tutorial for Second Life Part 2 (of 2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBR9mZ61W8s

3. The First 5 Days in the Second Life of Mangrovejane Part 3.

You know who I am and why I am here by now. If you don't, go back and read Posts 1 & 2 ya big slacker! Let's get started shall we....

Days 3 and 4.  Now what am I going to do? I have NO idea and no Money. Where are the quest markers? Where are the directions for where to go and what should happen? Why is it so hard to move around ANYWHERE? WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!?!?!??!?!?! I may have hyperventilated into a bag a few times.  I am a girl that likes goals and structure. I thrive with something to aim towards and a plan to get there.   This was not at all that and I was not at all thriving. So I did what I would usually do in real life when faced with a fork in the road of my life, I point my steel capped boots in a direction and stomp off down the road.

This turned this day and the next into the best and least embarrassing days of them all to date.

I started looking for art galleries and installations. I used the in game search feature combined with my old friend google. I read some blogs, got some ideas and off I went. I spent two days lost in a haze of, “OMG” and “HOLY MACARENAS!!!!” and <jaw on the floor>.

I visited worlds that were surrealist installations, I visited galleries that housed contemporary art works done by people far more talented than I and galleries that held traditional works from classic artists. 

I visited the Musee de Louvre.  

Musee de Louvre

I saw an incredible world that was a pop art gallery of the Artist De Moya 

Moya Land

and was blown away by a trippy Ars Simulcra installation world. 

Ars Simulcra entrance

I sighed that I had missed DC Spensley’s, “ Sky Dancers”  by two years and that I had missed Bryn Oh’s, “ Singularity of Kumiko” by less than a month. I was inspired and thrilled. I couldn’t wait to see the next world and the next after that. I bookmarked them all with plans to return to each one and really LOOK at every little thing and every little detail. 

University of Western Australia Second Life Campus

I visited university campuses. The University of Western Australia where parts of the actual university campus have been recreated in Second Life and where they hold classes and exhibit the students art works. The University of Texas San Antonio (aka UTSA Tejano Tech) that also holds revolving art exhibits of their students work in their ultramodern looking gallery that dominates the world that holds smaller installations all over.

In the back of my mind a small thought grew and with that thought a smile. I wrote that thought into my Masters proposal draft and dreamed dreams that seemed way too big and smiled a smile that was way too joyful and went to sleep seeing a new reality building itself in my mind.

Refs: 
SLurls

Musee de Louvre 
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Paris%20Couture/38/93/22 

Moya Land 
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Moya%20Land/4/130/22 

Ars Simulcra 
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Ars%20Simulacra/159/128/1773 

University of Western Australia http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/University%20of%20WA/72/226/25 

UTSA (University of Texas San Antonio)
l http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/TejanoTech/110/38/67

Weblogs
Bryn Oh 
http://brynoh.blogspot.com.au/ 

2. The First 5 Days in the Second Life of Mangrovejane Part 2

I am a real life artist who has never dealt with digital art. I have never even used photoshop. I really like the feeling of a pen scratching over paper or the physical aspects of putting together a large installation. 

So WHY Second Life I hear you asking. Well...I was exploring the nature of reality and playing with the idea of virtualities and virtual worlds as platforms for Art and Second Life came up the most in the articles I was reading. There are other places...Inworldz,and IMVU for instance, but I didn't just want a social platform (which is what IMVU appears to be) and Inworldz at the moment does not compete population wise. Even though Second Life has been around for 13 years now, it has kept up and still holds a decent population base. (For a more thorough history and timeline check out Daniel Voyager's Blog post Recap of Second Life History 1999 to 2013 or The History of Second Life Wiki)

And because I couldn't really wrap my head around what a virtual installation would look like or how a simulation like Second life actually functioned in a cultural, creative, philosophical and economic sense,I read some more about it, asked some people....and here I am at...

Day 2. The Social Factor. With all the bad press about the sexual exploits of Second Life and the sordid tales of my teenage son telling me all about sexual practices I would rather have not known about at all ringing loudly in my ears the very first interaction I had with someone as I stood in a beginners area called Caledon went something like this...

Random Lovely Person: Hi! 

Me: (hesitates for a very long time before cautiously typing) Hi 

Random Lovely Person: I see you are new. Can I help you with anything? 

Me: NO! I’m fine! All good here!! No worries at all!!!! Thanks anyway!!! BYE NOW!!! 

Random Lovely person: OK. Well if you need anything at all, let me know. I am here to help.

U-huh. I was just congratulating myself on getting through my first social exchange without being recruited as a sex slave in a BDSM parlour and reading through the tutorials on how to change my clothes when the next thing I knew I was naked. Not just a little bit naked...but naked as the day I was born naked.

Now, just to make this obvious for those of you who have never been here before, some zones in Second Life are strictly NO NUDITY ZONES.   I was clearly in one of those zones.  There were large signs everywhere telling people to keep their clothes on.  There were also signs telling vampires not to bite people too but that is by the by....I could feel the blush on my real life face. I frantically rattled through my inventory searching for clothes to throw on while simultaneously trying to read the signs telling me how to put clothes on when this exchange happened...

Another random lovely person:  Hi there. Is there any way I can help you today?

Me: Errrmmmm ummmmmmmm I appear to be naked. I am terribly sorry for my unclothed state. I am trying to put clothes on. Please don’t throw me out naked into the world. I was just trying to change my clothes as per the instructions on your board and....well....nakedness. 

Another random lovely person:  Yes, You do in fact appear to have no clothes on. Would you like to hop into a dressing room? It is more private there. 

Me:  I don’t know what they look like but I think I know how to put a shirt on....(fumbles around the settings a whole lot and manages to take off my skin) 

Another random lovely person:  No worries...Let me help you....

And that lovely person gave me quick step by step instructions on how to put my clothes back on. After which I thanked him very nicely and left very quickly. 

New Caledon Oxbridge University 

Refs:
New Caledon Oxbridge University SLurl
 http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Oxbridge/92/193/27
Daniel Voyager, Recap of Second Life History 1999 - 2013 https://danielvoyager.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/recap-of-second-life-history-so-far/ 
Second Life Wiki - History of Second Life http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/History_of_Second_Life