Sim Hopping

This will be a regular feature on the blog.  I love to sim hop.  This involves typing in a random word into the map and looking at sims.  I avoid residences and private sims; anything divided up into four quadrants--unless it looks interesting.  :)  Today's word was mist.  Sometimes the sim I find is next to a sim with the word mist in it, as this sim was.

Fish by In Yan, Butterflies by Yooma Mayo @ http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/DHSL02/131/128/21

This was quite an interesting sim--the terrain below the fish is made out of a plethora of mesh--squares of mesh placed close together.  In Yan teaches at Digital Hollywood Graduate School in Tokyo, Japan.  These fish--and a few others that are a BEAUTIFUL silvery white--seem to glide over the terrain with ease.

That got me thinking about the word silver.  I typed Silver into the map and landed on Silver Forest, the home and inworld photography studio of Kai Stoller.  Her house is made by Apple Fall, who owns a furniture store by that name.  I'll be heading there next.

Kai Stoller's home and Studio @ http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Diamonds%20and%20Pearls/40/202/2002

On Kai's sim there are four islands.  The house is on one.  On another island is a playable Candyland board made by Gracie Paperdoll.  :)

Apple Fall is an awesome mesh furniture store--and they sell prefabs as well.  If you go to the back of the store and teleport to the workshop, they're having a 50% off sale there.

The workshop is also for sale...imagine my surprise when I read on the wall that it was inspired by Howl's Moving Castle, one of my FAVORITE movies.  :)

You just never know what you'll find in Second Life.  :)

Arriving In Chaos And Light

It is evident upon landing at LEA 23 that, although “The Inevitability of Fate” is not yet finished, there is much to see.   The sim, created by Rose Borchovski, depicts the story of Angry Beth and the child lot during a war.  A child carrying a fish under their arm greets visitors.  She stares to the sky, bubbles emanating from her mouth, as if she too has become what she might fear.  The terrain is surrounded in water, with a hill off to the right.  Instead of a sea bed, the terrain is covered in words.

    At the landing point, the eye is drawn to a man with an illustration for a body.  The illustration depicts just what happens if one is overwhelmed with greed—in this case, a large fish has discovered that food isn’t everything.  The man’s heart lies atop this illustration, forever beating.  Stretching across the sim borders are large posters with similar cursive print as the terrain below the waters.

    I click the teleporter to travel to the main part of the exhibit.  I am greeted with more children.  One bedecked in swimming trunks and a party hat has caught a fish while another child looks on beating a drum.  Yet, the expression on their faces is one of fear.

The expression on their faces is one unlike I have ever seen on a mesh sculpture.  It evokes such a powerful mixture of fear and horror.  Behind them is the city, the night sky only lit with light from windows.  Perhaps they were ordered to bring home the evening meal.  A pig and rat look on from their feet with similar expressions of horror on their faces.

    Looking below, I spot a mountain of pigs that have seen better days.  Perhaps they were also a circumstance of fate, destined for someone’s dinner plate.  There is a play on words with two mesh signs: “Fool” and “Full”.  

Below this, I discover what I missed from my limited draw distance on the ground—a large mesh fish, snagged by a fish hook and wrapped by the fish hook with a cavalcade of characters and objects balancing on its fins.

   

    It is clear what this sim’s message is—children are hurt by war, even if they did not witness it.  Children can be affected by war even if they hear no mention of it from family or friends.  Media can spread the news quite easily, and nowadays, most children hear it on television or perhaps hear their parents talking about it.  There is no way to shelter children from this news—we can only explain to them that war happens when people disagree, and it can lead to horrible consequences.

Yet in this darkness, there is a speck of light.  There are still wonderful things happening in the world.  People still go out of their way to help others, to shelter them from the storms of war.  It is through this light that we discover our true character, and as a result, ourselves.

If you’ve never been to Rose Borchovski’s LEA exhibit on LEA 23, please take the time to do so.  She has spent a LOT of time painstakingly placing each prim into place.  It is a sim everyone needs to see, and everyone will, I think, come out of it with a different message.