What Wrean's Seen

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention this too!  Sunday (Sept 14th) was the Mid-Autumn Festival on the Chinese calender.  I'm afraid I wasn't able to get to or take part in any festivities this year, but I did eat a mooncake at least!  If you celebrated this holiday, I hope you had a wonderful time and if you have never taken part in it before, well I recommend it (who doesn't like fun holidays!?) especially if your community has a sizeable enough Chinese population to hold any events (or, you know, you are in China :) ).  祝大家中秋快乐！

This is just a quick post about something that I'm sure has been mentioned before many times, but I thought I would have my say as well.   I must say I am not fond of the habit many land owners have of barring entry onto their property of outside objects (this goes mainly for properties on the mainland)!  I don't have a problem with someone making their land a 'no-rez' zone for others, but when they block outside objects they make it impossible for others to enjoy so much of what SL has to offer.  I have a fondness for ballooning in SL, at times I enjoy floating just below the clouds, with a friend or alone, listening to relaxing music.  Several times in the past I would drift aimlessly across the continents until I landed somewhere new and in some cases I would make a new friend that way.  I can understand that barring entry of outside objects is a good way to prevent griefers from interfering with a person's day or events and avoid having random things show up on your lawn.  Personally, I wouldn't mind mystery objects appearing on my land innocently - as the land owner I can always remove them and there is sometimes an interesting story behind the object, how it got there and its owner.  It may be that being a somewhat older resident of SL (rez day in early 2005) and remembering what it was like to be able to drift freely has me mildly jaded; however, attempts to balloon freely now are frustrated by running into invisible fences in the sky.  For my part, I encourage land owners to allow objects to pass through their property, perhaps at least when they are offline, it would make SL all the more flexible and interesting!  This could dovetail nicely into a later post about privacy in SL/feelings of entitlement in virtual worlds/escapism in both worlds and RL vs. SL psychology - I'll have to think on that one!    Oh, and I'm afraid I don't have a picture to go with this post yet - I'll work on that too!

I thought, with my first sim review, I should tell you how I will actually write them up.  I will basically give a general description of the sim, information about any noteworthy people (such as sim owners, land owners, business owners, etc), note any interesting attractions, stores and rent-able areas.  I will not, however, be terribly thorough in my descriptions for two reasons: A) I simply don't have time to look into everything and everyone exhaustively and B) I would like to mention just enough to make you, the reader, interested in going there yourself!

That said, let's begin!  After a few days of island hopping, I've found my first sim to explore and tell you about in greater detail.  The island of Windsong (and neighbouring Windsong II) is a beautiful maritime country sim overflowing with green!  Filled with grass, flowers, ponds, falling seeds and pine trees, it is owned by Rylan Oldrich and Seren Trevillion, who rent cottages in both sims.  According to the first paragraph of the note one obtains upon entering the sim:

Windsong Isle is a private community of only 7  cottages, offering residents peace and quiet and privacy in a serene natural environment. The island features a natural wooded setting with rolling hills specifically designed to give each cottage a feeling of seclusion  and nature.   


A typical scene in Windsong... green, watery, peaceful


While I was exploring the area, I noticed a few cottages still for rent, so if you would like to rent land and a country house in an extremely peaceful and sparsely populated sim, this might be the place for you, however the rents that I saw were about 1000 to 1200 L per week, which seems a little expensive but then, you do get a very nice cottage, about 4000 square meters of land and 150 prims to play with.  Technical details aside, I would certainly like to have a place here, myself; it reminds me of the wonderful country in nothern Ontario and Quebec.

The cottages vary in size from modest to large and in style all seem to be rather Victorian and mostly stone-built, each one it seems with a cozy fireplace inside, a bench to relax on the lawn with and a dock on the surrounding water.  The parcel permissions seem to be fairly standard to rent-able land with the ability to set your own music and video, rez freely, etc.  Additional sim rules are outlined, again, in the note you receive when you arrive.  There are no stores it would seem, however, as it is stritcly residential but given the beauty and tranquility of these sims, it is worth it to visit (especially if you can't get to such a place in RL) just to see the cottages, enjoy the countryside, solitude and perhaps, if you are looking for a nice quiet place to settle in SL, rent.


*yawn*....relaxing!

So my first serious blog post is not of travels in SL but something I learned while there that I'd like to share with everyone.

Most of us find ourselves lucky enough to have at least a few moments of sheer joy, great happiness, comforting stability or intoxicating excitement in our lives.  But always, it seems, one way or another our happy times change or fade and we are left feeling saddened or bittersweet at best, devastated at worst. 

When I was on the eve of leaving for parts unknown overseas in RL in late 2005, knowing that I would be out of SL for a long time, perhaps forever, a dear friend of mine (now herself gone from SL) comforted me with these words one day.  She suggested that I not see my life as a long line of events connected to each other - which is a natural and obvious way to see it of course - but instead to see the events of my life as a cloud of bubbles, each bubble containing a memory or short fragment of my life.  This way I could isolate my happy memories, disconnected from whatever came before or after and still derive joy from them.  This is especially useful for otherwise happy memories that may have preceded something traumatic.  Nothing can ever change the fact of what happened at a point in time in our lives (as far as we know, I guess!), and if we hold just that one bubble up to look at it we can always smile when we see it. 

I know that in some cases, a pleasant time may be followed by something so tightly connected and so horrific that no mental trick can ever recover its shine...but for most of the usual memories we acquire, in all their brightness and possible subsequent darkness, we can preserve a bit of the feeling that made it so special, without reservation, if we just focus on the event itself inside its bubble, which we can revisit at any time.  I highly recommend trying to think like this...for myself it has changed so much and made each wonderful moment all the more important and enjoyable!


Tiny bubbles....



Now, with that in mind, to set out and find the first interesting sim for you!


 

Tada! *cuts the ribbon*  Amidst low-key fanfare I declare this travel and journey blog open!  I do hope this is the first of many interesting posts on things I discover in Second Life and interesting items I can bring the reader!  Stay tuned for a piece of wisdom I received 'long ago' in the fantastically earlier sl-age of 2005!