Screen Saviour

He's mad for movies. Madmaninc Zapatero came into SL to sell computers, fell in with the Steampunk crowd, and ended up living his dream, owning his own movie palace, the Phantasmagoria Theater.  He started out with P.T. Barnum's American Museum, but he quickly moved from a 'phantasmagoria' or magic lantern show to showing full length films through blip.tv.
As GoldenWillow Resident, Maddie Mhia, Trilby Minotaur, and the rest of the crowd milled around the grand lobby, getting their popcorn, I asked Mad what is up with film in SL.

 MadManinc Zapatero: I love movies. I love talking and watching and showing movies to people. Movies are a social experience, and if your friends are across the globe, now you can sit down watch a movie together. Plus, it beats pretending to dance to music I don't like.

U Wiz A

Mighty is geometry. Joined with art, it is irresistible.

Euripides

Last month, soror nishi filled UWA's Virtlantis sim with an incredible, and much blogged-about build, Transubstantiation. It was a beautiful sight, and showed just what can be done when an artist is allowed to expand an idea to sim-sized proportions.

This month it's the turn of Wizard Gynoid to spread her geometry out before us. The UWA's JJ Zifanwe is closing the sim for reasons of cost, but with classic Antipodean good humour, rather than doing a lot of hand-wringing about the decision to downsize, he's taken the opportunity to give some of SL's best loved artists the opportunity to make the sim go out with a bang.

Tuning oona

It seems like a lost town, a HiFi wilderness of circuits mysteriously broadcasting, and old signals leaking out of valves and scratchy needles. The little girl in the Test Card shivers a blank smile across the decades. There is nothing on TV... or is there? Are we just on the wrong wavelength, would a touch of the dial make it all spring to life? Among the shadow-filled carcasses of old speaker cabinets, the wire in the voice coil sings a hissing song of rare earth returning to earth, and the ghost of life and light glows in the valve glass darkly. Full of gaps and static, this is a whispering temple  to the age of analog, a far cry from the pure sound of the digital, poles apart, like the difference between teleporting and walking. The modern journey of sound has been truncated, perfected, but here among the hiss and scratches, we are reminded that in all refinement there is loss, that getting there is half the fun, and that is perhaps what makes us human.

This is Live! oona Eiren's new build which opens tomorrow at Dividni Shostakovich's  Split Screen Installation Space.

oona Eiren: Valve amps have the sweetest sound. I like to use lots of scratch in my sound work. Digital seems to want to do the opposite, to clean sound. The inspiration for this build was some vintage Hi Fi record players and TVs. They have history. I have records that jump in the same place they did when I was growing up, I love it, and old cassettes have it as well, they get stretched and warp.  I have software that's very good, but it all begins with hands on recording.

Oona jumped at the opportunity to exhibit at Splitscreen, a space she's sharing this time around with Misprint Thursday's  install White Sheets. It was a great opportunity for oona to try her hand at a bigger build, and over four weeks, the radio and televisual ensemble came together, both visually and with improvised sounds, starting with an image of an old TV and a ten second loop of sound that she recorded while out walking. As you move around the build, touch the objects and listen to their sounds.
oona Eiren: In RL I sometimes do illusration work, but work more with sound making installations and working with dance companys - and then theres a bit of film making thrown into the mix! My next move in SL is to try machinima. I've been playing with that a bit, it's fantastic, to build sets like this and then have a blast filming them!

Under the fun, though, there's a serious, purposeful side to oona's virtual work ethic.
oona Eiren: When I first got here, I had no idea how to use it but am slowly getting a handle on what I want to do. Now, I'm very excited about what I'm achieving, and I hope it's a launching point for my career. I want to show work I'm doing here at venues and places in RL, too. There's lots of places to show stuff, and I want to my feet in RL, not get lost in the SL whirlpool. I had a gallery in Avalon - that was my first public outing, but I always wanted to do bigger stuff. I do think people are missing out on a lot if they just stick to 2D. I must say the real artists for me are the great builders here - that's the way to go. I like what you can do if you layer, say, three or four ten second loops and play around with them.

 oona Eiren: Sound is so important!  Imagine watching a David Lynch movie to a soundtrack from some random band. It would ruin the experience. I'm a fan of Lynch. You should watch 'Fishing for Ideas', a video where he talks about his process of creating. Great stuff.

Among all the melancholy crackles and pops, a single, timeless, living image stands out in the build.
oona Eiren: That's Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein. I love this image, because she is strong. She rejects the monster. She is looking away, like she's saying  - No, you don't just build me to be someone's bride!
Oona a paused.
oona Eiren: I'll do a happy tune next I think - after all this doom and gloom :))) Maybe even a tune you can hum along to!
Live! is at the Split Screen Installation Space from tomorrow Sunday, February 6th at 2 pm SLT.

standalone

[08:02 PM]  Oberon Onmura: hola!
[08:03 PM]  thirza ember: omg
[08:03 PM]  Oberon Onmura: are you totally here yet?
[08:03 PM]  thirza ember: here I am
[08:03 PM]  Oberon Onmura: yay! In my basement!
[08:03 PM]  Oberon Onmura: I'm so excited about this I can't tell you. I've only killed it twice and it's been up almost three days!

Now, I know what you're thinking, 'basement' and 'killed' in the same sentence - not good - but wait! This is actually super cool! If you've ever wondered what it would like to be your own personal Linden, Oberon has proved it's possible.
 thirza ember: I have no idea what this technology is/means. How can you make your own grid in your own computer at home?

Putative

The natural love of life gave me some inward motion of joy, 

and I was ready to entertain a hope that this adventure might, 
some way or other, 

help to deliver me from the desolate place and condition I was in.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Part III

Beware of Draxtors bearing gifts. Oh, not the vid-spam of which he is such a generous purveyor, this is a more subtle kind of gift, the 'must see LM' variety. The first was to Laputa which has already been blogged to death, something I discovered after spending 15 minutes trying to understand how a pedestrian-looking bunch of shops could somehow be a fantasy japanese castle.

Turns out you go into the cinema, click on something, and then get tp'd up into the sky. 

To a crisp

We're deep into the burn today, but not nearly as laggy as you might think. Raven Haalan and the team, organizers and builders and bacon-purveyors alike -  have done a really great job! Raven was even nice enough to edit himself for this photo, when I couldn't get him to rezz quite right.

 I said he was a star for being so cooperative, when he must be multitasking like crazy, but he was quick to play down his role, and seemed sweetly positive when I broached the subject of - what else - doing it all again next year.

Raven Haalan: No, I'm just a helper bee! Next year? lol yah, of course! This is just a start, not the end, the team is good this year, and everyone is playin' nice, mostly, which makes for many smiles, if tired ones.

This was the scene at the Main Stage, lots of jugglers and people on stilts, I showed up in time to hear the excellent group ♫~D R U M~♫ Divine Rhythms of Universal Music, they're a seven-strong drum ensemble, including Lorin Tone, who puts the group's success down to the beneficial effects of bashing things.  If you've never heard them play, you can catch them tomorrow at noon for the opening of super spooky Halloween- themed The Unknown Country.

Sold

It's not Top Ten List evil, but it's definitely a nose-wrinkler, like Farmville and shoulder-pets, possibly Plurk. Having your portrait painted in SL, I mean. Not snapping photos while doing something interesting, I'm all for that, but just sort of sitting there, like the pigs in wigs you see on the walls of stately homes, or the women in Christower Dae's cattle-log, from which I got myself removed to the bemusement of every virtual signorina in Facebook. Why did it matter? Don't know. Where, how and why and where are the lines of acceptable admiration drawn? Having one's portrait done in SL seems to belong to the same family of demeaning and vacuous activities as beauty pageants which are even more eye-rollingly awful in the virtual world for all the reasons that have just crossed your mind.  So - Bleh - and it's a justified bleh; I'm certain because Voice of Reason and respected art historian Rowan Derryth says so too. Well, she nodded anyway.

And yet, and yet.

Numbers game

Inworldz Thirza is not a thing of beauty; the answer would be to ante up, but frankly, I don't know how many different grids I want to give my credit card number to. Or how many hours I want to spend dressing yet another dolly from scratch. But it was a trip worth making, to sim Taboo, to see a preview of Wizard Gynoid's Burning Life2 build. As you know, this year will be quite a departure from the vast acreage of the 2009 extravaganza; it's tiny by comparison, and independent of LL; but still no megaprims allowed, because of lag... nice to see some hidebound traditions have been respected.

There's newness though - all the prep and testing for Wizzy's burnt offering has been done over the past few months here in Inworldz, with help and suggestions from fellow builders soror Nishi, Artistide Despres, and scripter Nur Ophuls. The scripts to burn this down are rather complex, mainly because the temple will straddle a sim boundary. And all that jazz.

Whoot

There's no getting away from it, you can always recognize a Caerleon build. No matter who is in charge of the construction, or whether you're in SL or reactiongrid, they suggest the study of an absent-minded professor, a mess of precious manuscripts and useful equations jumbled about the place. The cardigan and pipe tobacco imagery fade, though, when you get down to the individual sections of the build, and the new show Identity is no exception. A work in progress for about a year, it will be up through the month of October, starting this Saturday.

Marshalled by the talented Freewee Ling, many fine artists have become involved with the project, I'm sure you can find a copy-n-paste to give you all eighteen names. Best of all, check out Botgirl's manly blog on the subject - OK, don't actually read the whole press release, it's like War and Peace, but there's a video presentation, Woot! It's a great introduction to the show, as well as a fine example of why voice morphing wins hands down as the creepiest idea LL ever came up with.

Coriolis

It's a turning world. It's one of the first lessons you learn in Second Life, playing that strange game of wavelength catchup with people on the other side of the planet who are breakfasting when you're ready for a night on the town. Not to mention the phases of virtual existence, from the newly hopeful to the jaded and fading. In the global community, to be able to connect with others it becomes necessary to aim your conversation with these things in mind, sort of the way you aim your body when you grab a suitcase off the baggage carousel, so that you don't end up walking away with the pink polkadot carryall, which would be bad, because that one has my stuff in it.

Or contrariwise, the Coriolis effect.  Nothing pink and polka dotty in the frame of reference of Oberon Onmura's very masculine new installation Coriolis, in the sky high above TCC Island. Six months in the making, it contains many elements familiar to those who've visited other Onmura build, but this is far from a repetitious dramatic arc. This time, the apparent twist in the trajectories of moving objects - even the weather -  due to the turning of the earth is at the heart of the concept. You will also find notions of weight and propulsion, the cycles of creation and destruction, the phantom and the physical. Soon you become aware that what had at first seemed a fairly empty space is populated with discrete sensations. The opportunities to interact with the different elements - whether it's sitting inside the Ghost Mountain, obstructing the cube spiral, or riding a spouting prim -  draw you even deeper into the artwork.

A single aluminium chair lifts to a central column on a square, edgy, quartered plane. A flock of creatures, halfway between birds and paper planes, flies restlessly about the build and chairs, more chairs, suddenly appear, pale and plain, shifting and falling over. Sit on one and see what happens.

Like four seasons, each quadrant has its own mood, sounds, and effects, its own point of focus, from the fizzing white energy of the Moire to the violence of falling cubes and the spectral music of Xenakis in the Mountains, to the exuberance of the Yellow Geyser and the stately swarming singing prims of the Cooling Tower, which contains within a hidden message. Turning, each quadrant turns on the viewer, offering for a moment the optical illusion of seeing where we are in the world.

Coriolis opens tomorrow, September 15 at 1pm SLT with a concert by Zachh Cale.

Arbor virtualis: the trees of soror Nishi

A certuni gli alberi

non dicono nulla

Ma pochi possono sentire 

il canto della corteccia

Sentiero, Thomas di Blasi

From nut to ember, trees warm, shelter, and  feed body and imagination alike. Like us, they stand with their heads in the clouds, their feet trapped in this earth, shaped by storms but forever reaching out to the wider world; like us they know times of plenty and of loss.  In their ancient, productive silence can be read all the knowledge of the world, into their form, a bridge between worlds. 

If we could go to a Gloucestershire valley right now, I'd show you a coppice of Linden trees that is two thousand years old, where there is the scent of the sap, and the light dances through rich broad greenery.
But we can't.
Which leads one to think: what about trees in Second Life? At places like Straylight, the technique of tree making has become so advanced that the standard SL Pine looks pathetic, except perhaps in old forests like Kahruvel. Yet not even in the new, picture perfect Cap Estel can you smell the sawdust, or hear the busy rush of wind against leaves, or suddenly spot a squirrel on a tree trunk, suspended thirty feet in the air, grey against grey. But this is not that world. What is needed is another route to the vertical highway. Shouldn't the metaverse have its own true woodlands?

soror Nishi says yes. The daughter of a flower seller, she has during her life turned her hand to both farming and architecture, and loves to paint, but rather than using SL as commercial outlet for her RL pictures, she prefers to bring together all these interests in 3D compositions.

 Using large, high-quality scans of textures in crayon, watercolour and oil, and Gimp and Blender, her flora virtua exotica originates from a taoist approach to the subject.
soror Nishi: If you don't understand the patterns then you can't really build a tree. I've seen plenty of unconvincing trees here in SL. If you don't look, you dont see, and if you don't see, you can't learn the patterns.
Soror's trees are like her - bright, bold, whimsical, fun, and beautiful.

She has created two-prim beech trees, and woods that run to the many thousands. She made the Norse tree Yggdrasil at The Companion, Frigg Ragu's folklore sim, currently under reconstruction. In her version, the monumental tree of doom that connects the underworld to our realm and to the heavens above floats in serene glory, the roots caressing the weight of the world below.

Playwright and lover of all things Irish Maeve Eirin filled her Celtic storytelling mountain, Skellig Medb, with soror's trees, including a stand of the Tree Sisters, with their distinctive red canopies. 
Mythical woods grow best among poems as lovely as trees, when the quality is right. Before importing a texture, one should consider whether it is good enough to hang on the wall in RL. If not, then it will disappoint on the screen.
 In the garden she has created beneath the UWA gallery, we talked about the panoply of bricoleurs and engineers to be found in the creative community of Second Life.

Taoist practice is working with the ordinary acts of life without any fabrication, how does that work here? We spoke of Levi Strauss, and I asked: If you understand the bricoleur as a hobbyist, a tinkerer with existing material, and an engineer as a pioneer who strives to understand how things work and get beyond the limits, in whatever field that might be, do both groups have their place in the metaverse?  Have SL quality standards gone up over the past few years, have limits been significantly overcome? (You know, just general chit chat.)

soror Nishi: Well, when it comes to textures, lazy is easy. Quality it isn't always top of people's list. I would like 2048x2048 for large prims, but we have had no new tools for years. Technique is important, in fact technique may be responsible for style. But without emotion there's no reaching the audience or pleasing oneself, and the funny thing is that it has nothing to do with textures. Is it a question of heart or head? I think both have to be present, I think probably it's more about synthesis - good art, anyway. I feel strongly it should stand on its own, without pages of explanations and theory it used to be called 'post-creative intellectualisation" but, having said that, people do like to be told what to think...

Soror's latest build is, of course, the IBM-sponsored Tree of Trees. It rises from a serene pool of of swirling greenery, illuminated by emerald particles. 

(Gosh did I say Emerald? Sorry.)

A forest of stumpy, almost fossilized topiary forms the rootstock and trunk of a massive community of trees, its nebulous crown lost in the region's clouds.

 Up here, the delicate white and blue canopies of goddess trees fan out over little islands of greenery, where orchids grow, protected by Doris the Dragon and her companion. The triumph of the tree as a village, a home for the diverse; resting, growing, flowing upwards together. 

A family tree.

Home and garden: Soleil's Giverny

Gardening and painting apart, 

I'm no good at anything

Claude Monet

Summer is grey-white and gloomy here, indoors and out, so to try to beat the blues, I followed Geo Meek's link from Facebook to two SLCC speeches, the first by Philip Rosedale, the second by Doug Thompson. I thought for a long time 'Dusan' was a girl's name, Dusan/Susan, I suppose. Anyway Hobo stalwart Geo Meeks rocks, you should bookmark his site livestream.com. 
Before today, I had never seen or heard P. in the flesh; he wore a weird shirt and improbable hair; but to be fair he was jet lagged, which explains why on a couple of occasions he lapsed into trying to sell us an iphone. 
He is going to fix lag, Search, and the communication gap; let 16 year-olds come play with the grownups (yippee), and make it so an avie can have multiple names, because... apparently we need more deception in SL.
He is going to let you design him a brand new avatar - as long as it looks like the old one, but with better (ie free) clothes. 

So, 'Everything is/will be fine'. I felt sorry for the lady teacher, whose hard work selling the soon-to-be defunct teen grid is now all for nothing; she got an amazingly insincere response from P and after lunch, Doug Thompson rambled on for an hour on this and that. He has the same tailor as P.

But who cares. 

When there is no way to walk away, what do you do? Keep going. In otherwise excellent health, over the last two decades of his life, Monet lost his sight to cataracts. Colours became desaturated, and objects faded into blurred shapes; a deteriorating, frustrating, unbearable state of unrezzedness. Four years before his death he wrote to a friend, "I am more absorbed than I've ever been, expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and abandon the rest."
That threat of abandonment did not materialize, the paintings kept coming; abstract, with rather muddy colours, but paintings nonetheless. 'My poor eyesight makes me see everything through a fog. I't very beautiful just the same, and this is what I wish to convey."  

That beauty is conveyed into Second Life thanks to Soleil Snook  and her Monet house on Giverny. The house, built by Jorge Serapis with sculpties by Vicky Jayaram, is a fascinating case study in how a real life treasure can become accessible to everyone on the grid. It is still a work in progress, although the kitchen, living, and dining rooms are well on their way to being complete. One unexpected aspect of the house is Monet's choice of art - you find none of his own pictures on the walls, he preferred Japanese landscapes, and was instrumental in making them popular. 

Soleil Snook: I don't mind that the process is taking a long time, and I love Vicky's sculpties because they lay flat and don't pucker. I'm particularly pleased with the sculptie oven. Monet entertained a lot at home, that's why the oven is so large, he took great pride in serving fresh produce from his own kitchen garden. Sculpting is not my thing. Mirror imaging just makes me crazy, so I build things and send them off to be converted into sculpties.

There's a poster in each room that shows how close Soleil's version of the house is to the real one.  The original house was a farm house and when Monet bought it he added on a bedroom for himself and a studio with a separate entrance, seen here. This was because he was a morning person, and Alice and the children were not, this way he could entertain buyers without disturbing the whole family. He had six grown-up children living with him at one time, the three boys sleeping in the attic, and the three girls in a small room above the kitchen.

Outside, Soleil has given an impression of the 'floral fanfare' that continues to delight RL visitors to Giverny, complete with kitchen garden. SL Giverny has had its upheavals, but Monet had his own trials; in 1913 he wrote: "We were in the midst of a great flood and I, in my selfishness, could think only of my garden, my poor flowers that have been soiled with mud. With this weather I haven't managed to do anything and to add to my miseries an appalling storm has created havoc in my garden. The weeping willows I was so proud of have been torn apart and stripped; the finest entirely broken up." 

Soleil's sim boasts a fine glass house by her friend Podruly Peccable  and you'll also find a gallery for sculpty artist Kyra Roxan. back in the house, the creation of each room has involved many days of research, planning and gathering, a magpie process with minute attention to detail, somewhere between making a painting, a jigsaw, and putting together a doll's house. Using drawings and paintings rather than photos gives her the control and freedom to get the look just right. She is rightly proud of the lovely blue walls of the drawing room, and plans to furnish it exactly as the photo, right down to the playing cards on the folding table. 

In RL Soleil cares for a terminally ill relative. Building the interior of the Monet house little by little when she has the time and energy required, alternating activities from textures to furniture making to installing poses in chairs is all part of a slow upward curve of creativity. 

'Art is hard work,' Monet once told a reporter. Yosemite Sam-ming apart, what else is there?

No-one's Perfect: Sextan Shepherd

External objects produce decided effects upon the brain 

Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth

It's the perfect cure for any midsummer melancholy: Sextan Shepherd's Nemo. If you haven't been lately, get out your best graphics card and prepare to spend a couple of hours in bliss. Forget about clown fish, Captain Nemo is the central character in Jules Verne's book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a brilliant and sometimes disquieting book well worth a (re-)read this summer. Even if you're not into Steampunk, this build will delight you and pull you in. Quiet, charming and self deprecating in the best Gallic style, Sextan has put together one of the most amazing adventures available inworld. Albatroz Hird, who was wearing his Indian avatar, introduced us on the dockside.
It was late at night. This is what happened, minus most of my inane questions and cooing.
 If you click on the pictures, they get bigger.

Albatroz Hird: Thirza, meet Sextan, Sextan, here is Thirza :) Voilà, comme ça, ça, c'est fait ^^
Sextan Shepherd: Thanks for the introduction Alba.
Albatroz Hird: Thirza a écrit un super article sur Avignon, très bien illustré.
Sextan Shepherd: Yes Alba, I have read it, it's really well done.
Woo hoo, vive la France, mental handshaking and compliments. You can't beat it. On the jetty, there's a dirigible that takes you on a tour of the island, it's one of those rare places where you get the delicious feeling of being a little lost, in an imagination vast enough to disappear over the horizon. Alba, Sextan and I walked into the great underwater elevator.

Albatroz Hird: Un indien dans tes installation, c'est compatible ?
Sextan Shepherd: LOL il est étanche l'indien?
Thirza Ember looks up  étanche = waterproof ... hehe je crois.
Albatroz Hird: Sûr, en tout cas, y prends pas l'eau! C'est vraiment étonnant de réalisme, je suis vraiment impressionné!

We walked out into the big underwater compartment, and looked at the model of the installation.
Sextan Shepherd: You never came here before Alba?
Albatroz Hird: Nope, it's my first time
Sextan Shepherd: OK, Thirza, so you already know the submarine city. I'm afraid all that I have built since that time is no more connected with  the J.Verne story. The flying city in the poster is called Alnitak. It is the ancient name for the biggest star of the orion constellation Zeta Orionis. Come on, follow me.
   I tried to follow them, but this horrible Snowglobe viewer, or the new mouse, or ...something. Anyway, I fell in a sort of trough and couldn't get out. There's no flying on Nemo, so I was pretty stuck, and did all kinds of jumps that this skirt was not built to withstand.
Thirza Ember: uff... don't laugh so hard.
Sextan Shepherd: ...... I said nothing!
Albatroz Hird: We don't, do you Sextan?
Sextan Shepherd: You are so thin.... you can hide between the walls.

See, I told you they were French. The giant shrimp is my favourite part of this build, it makes me hungry for a yummy fritto misto. Although this one might be a bit indigestible.
Sextan Shepherd: So how did I had the idea to build Nemo. Look over you, at the manta ray on the ceiling. This is the start of Nemo. I built that manta ray because I thought it was cool, don't ask me why! Then after that, maybe I was hungry too... I have built the shrimp. I was just having fun. Then I thought it could be nice to have a place where I can put this stuff in, and Nemo was born.

Albatroz Hird: c'est vraiment un travail, exceptionnel que tu as réalisé.
Sextan Shepherd: Before this, I was building small objects, like the object that you saw at Avignon. I got the sim to make this real. Ok, so now that you know how Nemo was born - lets go to see the rest! Fasten your seat belt!
With that, Sextan led us up another flight of stairs and down a tube. Once again, I got stuck in a gully. It was all pretty humiliating. I asked about textures. There are hundreds of sharp, beautiful, and surprisingly quickly loading textures in this build.

Sextan Shepherd: On this sim the textures represent 50% of the time involved in the building process, I create all my textures from scratch, or I start from a picture taken,  so I spend a lot of time on photoshop. You know, I love video games, and I wanted to find the same kind of atmosphere, something very immersive, that doesn't look like what we usually find in SL and yes, the details are important to get that immersion.
Albatroz Hird: Volta, Tesla, Faraday, Watt, Edison, et tous les autres précurseurs devaient vraiment tout inventer: c'est ça, le pur génie. Créer pour pouvoir créer plus loin. [That means Creating in order to create further - I looked it up]
Sextan Shepherd: Absolutely, Alba. They had all to discover things. J'adore l'electricité. I'm a big fan of Tesla's work; I don't think he would have liked SL, he was involved in reality, in matter, and he was already beyond our universe. This would all be too unreal, too abstract. William Crookes is another genius ...dans un autre genre. He discovered Neon. All the neon lights that we have today.. it's his invention, we owe him the TV screens too. Tesla, Verne, Eiffel, Guimard, Crookes... they all lived at the same period! They could have met each other.

Albatroz Hird: Au sommet de la tour pour un diner, ennuyeux pour les autres, mais certainement intéressant pour la science!
I tried to imagine them all at the top of the Eiffel tower, at the Verne restaurant of course, and wondered what they would order. Maybe the shrimp. Or lobster. I like lobster. In another room which, for once, I navigated without mishap, there were round platforms with a celestial clock and other mechanisms were on display, part of the continuing build.

Sextan wanted us to move on, down another long dark straight tunnel, but I hesitated, trying to take a picture, and apparently was waving my arms about, although not on my viewer.

Albatroz Hird: Thirza rame - you want some flippers, Thirza ? :))
Thirza Ember: you are too quick for me: remember I am only a blonde and it is all new.
Sextan Shepherd: It's because there are so many things to see.
Albatroz Hird: Take your time, no problem
Sextan Shepherd: Ok now lets walk straight..
Easier said than done. We came out into a cavernous space dominated by a giant drilling machine.
Sextan Shepherd: These are the orichalcum mines. It is a fantastic material, it's what gave to Atlantis its technological advance. Plato talked about that when he wrote about Atlantis.

We climbed an iron staircase and came to a transporteur.
Thirza Ember: This is beautiful too.With so much detail, you make the sim seem very big, it is an incredible imersive experience.
Sextan Shepherd: Well it's a sim size. I just can't have bigger.
Albatroz Hird: Je suis réellement impressionné.
Sextan Shepherd: Lol it's nothing but a few prims.
Albatroz Hird: Oui, mais quels prim!

When the transporteur stopped, we were at Nemo station. A path led off to the left, to the village, but we climbed up to take a look inside the Nautilus. I asked Sextan how he builds - from RL drawings, or gradually, prim by prim, within SL.

Sextan Shepherd: I have no organisation at all. One build calls another one, and another one, it's a kind of organic growth.
Thirza Ember: The central idea is very strong.
Sextan Shepherd: ho.. if you found the central idea .. send it to me! I wish I could knew it!
Thirza Ember: I think it is beauty in science, or elegance in exploration, like Tesla; he found elegance in electricity.
Albatroz Hird: Depuis combien de temps travailles-tu sur ce projet ?
Sextan Shepherd: I have started this in March.
Thirza Ember: Tell me, also, does being famous it make it harder for you to build?
Sextan Shepherd: I'm not famous LOL so I can build quietly lol

Thirza Ember: oh no, you're famous - the sim was full from the first day. Everyone is drawn to this build, it is
so beautiful and interesting, and even now there are always people here.
Sextan Shepherd: Yes, but 99% of the people that came here on the first day have forgot my name since. The sim is famous .. not me.
Thirza Ember: Well, I don't think so, but i think it is better to be quiet than to be famous.
Sextan Shepherd: yes me too!
Albatroz Hird: I agree.
Thirza Ember: you don't feel pressure to make something even better?
Sextan Shepherd: Ohh yes, all the time. Every build is a challenge, how to make it better than the
previous.
Albatroz Hird: This kind of pressure is coming from the inside of you. it's the worst one, and the best one too.

Sextan's version of Nautilus is a giant fish. propped up on the shore. It's a role-player's dream, and I should have thought it would make a great place for whose in the literary community, struggling with writer's block, to meet and get inspired.

You can see why Sextan's study is right here on board, in the heart of the build. It was late, very late in France, but Sextan kindly continued the tour. The men talked about building tips, something about metal textures, stuff I wouldn't have understood even in English, and I admired the helm. After a bit, we got back on the transporteur and rode to the village. Sextan really isn't at all Steampunky in the way one would expect, as I then discovered.

Albatroz Hird: Tu connais Syberia ?
Sextan Shepherd: Non Alba. What is siberia but a country?
Albatroz Hird: C'est un jeu d'enquête fait par Benoît Sokal dans cet esprit steampunk, un univers d'automates.
Sextan Shepherd: Oh no I don't know.

Ooo shops. I remembered the SLSyberia build that Clematilde Oyen and her friends put together a couple of years ago, and wished I'd better pictures of it. Sextan led us into to a giant orrery, complete with shadows that make the planets seem alive. Under the mechanism, a couple of lovers were saying a shy good night in open chat.

Sextan Shepherd: Thirza this part of the sim is not taken from a book, it's just my fantasy, je me suis amusé avec le planetarium.
Ever the perfectionist, Alba's next question was no surprise.
Albatroz Hird: Super! tu as calculé la correspondance des cycles, je suppose ?
Sextan Shepherd: Oui plus ou moins...
Albatroz Hird: je me régale [that means 'I'm loving it', isn't that nice?]
Sextan Shepherd: haha tant mieux!
Albatroz Hird: pas de parcelles à respecter, libre de faire comme tu le vois, c'est top!

We went up onto the roof. There was a giant cannon.I like giant cannons. Mouselook. We shot ourselves up into the sky and landed on the flying city above. What a trip.

Sextan Shepherd: Welcome on Alnitak the Flying City. It's still in progress... want to see something new in SL ? La maison aux miroirs.

The geostationary mechanically assisted flying city reminded me of an old fashioned funfair, the attractions linked by a sort of boardwalk. We walked into a lofty room, bright with stained glass and turning mirrors. The men started talking technical stuff, and I just zoned out, enchanted by all that spinning, sparkling glass.

After a while, we walked over to the Space-O-Rama. This beautiful metal sphere contains a theatre with giant lenses that turn to show aspects of space: a sun, a nebula, and the vortex of a black hole.

Albatroz Hird: super !
Thirza Ember: It's a wonderful build, and I have almost no lag, which makes it so much more fun.
Sextan Shepherd: I try to keep the scripts as low as I can: I still need to add something in one lens, it's empty for the moment.

Alba suggested a model version of the sim, similar to the one he is wokring on for his own marvellous build at Avignon, but with so manyy intricate and oddly shaped buildings that seems close to impossible; and yet, looking at Sextan, nothing seems quite beyond his ability.

It was late, so we took a brief look at the Museum of Flying Machines, containing some of Sextan's notable working creations, and this beautiful photograph. It was really very late, dawn had broken over the sim and it was time to say bonne nuit to both these fine builders... I knew I'd be back, again and again, for there is still so much more to see, from the underwater rooms to the tea set carousel, and the spider building...

 I hope you'll visit Nemo soon, and experience this truly liberating place for yourself. Nemo is the perfect antidote to all the imperfections of the summer sun. If you see a clumsy blonde in the corner, give a wave, it's probably me.