Makara Yorimasa

Simon has been away for a few days so I've been working on a building project. I've made a moderately faithful reproduction of German architect Mies van der Rohe's iconic "Barcelona Pavillion", which he completed in 1929. I extended the smaller block at the end of the building to make a sleeping chamber which has a nice view of the back of the building; otherwise, the layout is unchanged from the original.

The finished building, which I've named the "Aoyama", after a district of Tokyo, can either be used as an exhibition space, a shop or a residence, and any member of the Chant Newall Development Group can have a copy for free, although I will be putting it up for sale eventually, under the Yorimasa Network FOC.

I am really satisfied with the way it has turned out. The textures by LFox look great; my main problem was finding a suitable statue (I used the one that came with my Japanese builder's set by Miko for these pictures). I also had a little trouble finding a suitable double-sliding door script, but RJ Kikuchiyo and Aprikat helped me out :-) Thanks, guys! The tree and fallen leaves are by Heart, who are always my first choice for horticultural supplies.

Things I learned how to do on this build: make drapes (the ones I am sitting in front of in the second picture); make lights; fit sliding doors.

I have to say, I am very pleased with this build. I think it has an elegant, modern Eurasian look, and would look equally fantastic in an urban, coastal or rural setting. *beams with pride*

Me and Simon are building a home together on Safe Harbor, using a prefab from Dharma, which we are modding. In the meantime, I have suspended a den-cum-office-cum-temporary bedroom 300m above the new house.

The skybox is a New York loft; I removed the New York skyline and inserted a London view instead. Simon wants to use his furniture in the new place, which is fine with me, of course, but I have a soft spot for this sofa etc. so I will keep it up here.

One of the problems I had with the wraparound panorama is that the image was reversed by the interior wall of the curve on the right hand side, if that makes sense. In the end, I simply uploaded another version of the same panel, which I had reversed in Photoshop using the mirror command, and that worked quite well.

Maybe I'm not hanging around with the right people, but when I read articles about SL like this one in the New York Times, I get really pissed off. Some of us like building because we LIKE BUILDING not because we're keeping up with the Joneses. Real Estate might be abundant in the USA, but here in London, I can't even afford to buy a studio flat. It's no mystery that in SL I live in a huge modern swanky pad, and in my free time, spend literally hours buying or building homes, putting them up, landscaping them, modding them and filling them with cool stuff, but does that make me a craven consumerist? No it bloody well doesn't. What on earth is wrong with wanting to look hot, live in a lovely environment and have tons of funky clothes? It doesn't mean I can't also read books, hold a conversation about deep stuff, care about world issues and do whetever else people do to prove they are educated and worldly wise.

And Homeless Hermes shoots himself in the foot rather by railing against the consumerist tendencies of some residents one moment, and then saying he makes all his money buying and selling real estate the next.

And another thing: sex and love. It's as real as the person you're making it with, and lots of people enjoy it on SL. You can't have much of a sex life if you have a wiggy avatar which looks like "a fruit salad encased in gelatin" - this isn't American Pie. Naturally, people want to be beautiful - I personally think my av is pretty hot - and for some people, having a sexy av takes away the fear of being rejected for their less-than-perfect RL looks, and allows them to express themselves sexually in an uninhibited way. It's a GOOD thing to be uninhibited, you morons! You can't deny physical attraction - it's an integral part of sex. Political correctness might not like the concept of physical beauty being valued but it's a natural human urge.

Anyway, in SL, where people can be as beautiful as they like, I find that how good the person is as a virtual lover is much more important than what they look like, a fact which seems to have passed by the writer of this article.

Regarding looking businesslike, our beloved leader, Chant Newell, has a basic skin and a friendly old man av - bald with a little grey beard - and I've never seen him wear anything other than a green shirt and a pair of jeans. Looks count for less than this article implies - it's your interpersonal skills and your business acumen that swings the deal. What this dork fails to realize that when anyone can look as impressive as they like, in SL more than in RL it's the fact that you can walk the walk and talk the talk that gets you taken seriously as a resident, not your big fuck-off glass office floating sky palace. If anything, SL is teaching people that appearances ARE DECEPTIVE, and that's a good lesson for the Real World as well as the Virtual one.

End of rant...

At a meeting of the CNDG last week, I was caught short (ahem!) and when Chant asked people for ideas about a new sim, I completely forgot about an idea I had back in April, which I actually did quite a lot of work on. I am going to put it forward this at the next meeting of the CNDG as a serious proposal to see if they like the look of it, and so that we all know what I'm talking about, I'll put the details in this blog and pass on the link. Here we go then.

The sim has a working title of "Arboreal James Bond" which will give you an idea of the direction I'm heading in. I was inspired by this fantastic modern treehouse, which will need to be built from scratch by someone comfortable with sweeping curves, and also by some of the buildings which are already available on SL, e.g. Parker McTeague's stuff (see http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=19182), and my current fave, Dharma Prefabs and Interiors (http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=38692), Fade Languish's builds and furniture at Cult Living, and those available at Maximum Minimum (http://maximumminimum.blogspot.com/) would also be appropriate.

These luxury homes will be a mixture of these treehouses, prefab extremely modern houses perched on struts on the sides of mountains, and beach houses; if possible, a few smaller modernistic homes should also be made available for the less wealthy resident. In order to maintain the look of the sim, I think I will have to request that all owners and occupants speak to me first before erecting anything of their own.

The sim will boast two communal areas, to encourage visitors and community life: the Beach Club and the Volcano Cave.

The Beach Club

... will be located in the bay on a wide sandy beach. A partially-open geodesic dome, there will be a music/club/dance area on the sand outside and a chill-out zone inside with piped music. I like to play chess with Simon, so a decent working chessboard would be nice :) Outside on the beach, there should be sunbeds, towels, swimming and surfing animations, a beach shower, and any suitable games we can lay our hands on.We should also allow a couple of vendors to sell beachwear and similar here. It's always nice to go shopping. There should also be a beach restaurant where we can take our mates out for a meal - for free, of course.

The Volcano Cave

In the centre of the island is a volcano, covered with trees on the outside, except for the crater, which smokes, rumbles, and sends up a lava flare occasionally. The cave at the centre of the volcano can be accessed via some tunnels in the cliff wall behind the communal beach. You reach the cave by following the torch-lit tunnels, passing walls of glowing orange, smoking, free-flowing lava, and crossing a ricketty rope bridge over a lava river.

Eventually you find yourself in a huge dark space, with dark congealed lava flow shapes mounting up the walls. In the centre of the cave is a pool of smoking hot, bubbling lava, like a traditional fountain-cum-pool water feature: it illuminates the cave and acts as a focal point. Spread around the cave are quiet areas for lying and relaxing, massage (non-sexual!). A natural hot spring pool with seating poses steams away in one corner. Strange plants - jagged and spikey - push up from the sandy floor. Mad mosses grow up the walls. Lizards scurry around.

More details when I have time to post them. I already have a proper layout of the whole island. Watch this space...

It's time for a radical rethink about the Arabian-style palace and gardens. As I see it, there are three fundamental problems with this area:

1. It's incompatible with the Cape Cod theme!
2. It's positioned right over the pond in the middle of the sim, so the same music plays at the duck pond on the ground as well as up in the palace. The ullulating exotic stylings of Iranian Radio don't sit well with quacking ducks, Adirondack chairs and lemonade.
3. It's not exotic ENOUGH. I toned down the Arabian-ness of the gardens in order to try to segue between the pond, the gardens and the palace, but as a result, the gardens ended up looking like an homage to Barbara Cartland. The Japanese style bathhouse island was easier to match to the Cape Cod theme, perhaps because both are simple, low-rise, wood- and stone-based architectures originating in warm temperate climates.

Having had a think about this, I am going to make the following proposals to my fellow prawns:

1. I think we still have three island spaces left (I hope...), and I could move the garden to ground level on one of these islands, make the garden smaller and more authentic, and spice it up a lot, and then float the palace about 500 metres above it, with a teleport to the palace from a hidden place on the ground.
2. I could try making an underground secret cave somewhere else on the island and move all the naughty stuff down into it, and store the palace again.
3. I could just scrap it and bung it all into an inventory store box!

I meant to finish some work around Safe Harbor, but one way or another, I ended up spending a lot of the bank holiday weekend chatting to people. One of them was the lovely Linuxess, a member of Thinc, who was looking for a new skin. We went to Snowflake Skins, which have the most kawaii designs in SL, IMHO, and I'm delighted to say that she bought a very pretty anime-style pale skin with huge eyes and petal pink lips (you can see it on her blog which is listed on my links). She had been looking for a realistic skin, but I think I persuaded her that it is nice to be a little more cartoony sometimes, which brings me on to the subject of this post.

Aesthetics are a personal thing, of course, so what I'm going to give here is my personal opinion. SL is basically a cartoon environment at the moment - it's not sophisticated enough yet to handle "Final Fantasy" levels of detail - so when I'm designing, shopping or building in SL, I try to bear this fact in mind. For this reason, I avoid ultra-photorealistic textures at all times, prefering a more painterly effect. I don't mind how wiggy or off-the-wall buildings and clothes are - or how safe and boring they are - but I do think a photographic texture looks out of place in an animated cartoon world.

Particularly jarring are plants, but I also find textures representing bookcases, or cupboards full of food, etc. quite unpleasant to look at. I have been installing a kitchen in Gabe's refurbished house this morning, and have had a lot of trouble finding attractive fittings (I don't want him to have a kitchen that looks as if I've slapped a polaroid of a cooker over the top of a square block).

Of course the first thing I should do is to enrol on a building course and learn how to make my own textures. I'll look into this tonight.