So, here is the BIG PRIZE I TOTALLY WON after spending the better part of very late last night poking around at Plod.

It is an utterly silly shoulder bag, one of the truly most useless items one can own in SL. But the silliness and the detail and the style of it – I had to have.

Now I don’t normally do hunts. Why? They are a pain in the ass. They take effort that normally I’d put into, oh, I don’t know, changing socks or turning onto my other side while in lying in bed. In other words, I am lazy (and have a doctor’s note to justify it) and would usually rather plunk down $L for something I want and NOT have to spend a bunch precious time and patience looking around for it. Especially the patience, because I have very little of that to spare. Plus I can’t even find my damn car keys in my own purse. Finding stuff hidden around a sim? Not my idea of a good time.

So with that disclosure, you may be wondering how indeed I did get sucked into the holiday hunt at Plod. It started out innocently. I got a notice from the Boing Frommage group about Elka’s new location at the Plod sim. Now, I own pretty much everything that Boing Frommage has put out, but I was curious to see the new spot so I went for a visit.

I just loved the look of this place. As I get back into content creation, I am in the middle of pondering different design styles in SL, because I am drawn to many different types. But in the end I am the biggest sucker for a good imaginary/storybook or comic book feel. Such as the one captured here:

This is the inside of a store called – uh oh – I hope I remembered it right – Kurotusubaki. Hoo. Those Japanese stores do NOT make things easy on us poor monolinguals. You can buy a few cute things here, like an animal hat with ears, a few poses, an animated rug. NONE of the cool stuff in this photo, mind you. But I’m blogging it for the build, not the merchandise. (Apologies Kurotsubaki, your merchandise is totally cute, but your build in Plod is what really got me.)

Plod has all the elements of an immersive storybook SL experience. And you know what? That stupid holiday hunt gave me the right “mission” to go exploring. Their products are really whimsical feeling, like the dirty bag I won with a lit miniature Xmas tree and a tiny animated squirrel hanging off of it. The builds are also well worth exploring, and some things you can buy and take with you like this treehouse:

So if you are into this kind of style, go take a look. And if you want the bag, be prepared to work for it. You will have to find yourself in some fairly weird places, such as the land of bigass squirrels:

I will say one thing. The people behind Plod are waaaaay into squirrels. I don’t know what that says about them, but don’t be alarmed if you find yourself here staring at a hungry looking bushy-tailed rat that’s 12 times the size of your avatar.

As for hints? I won’t give away too much, but I will tell you that you can find two of the elusive snowmen that you must collect (ten in all) in the last two photos. They are small and only count once. You won’t find any in any stores that are not Plod (another hint!)

So while I normally hate holiday hunts (though I appreciate the creators who work so hard to put the stuff together and make the event happen – kudos to all of you, and it is great marketing, as I did manage to spend a decent amount of $L whilst hunting last night), I have to tell you I had fun. It got me talking to strangers again, something I haven’t done in SL in a long time and seriously one of the more entertaining things to do there.

And the bag! It’s like so cute!

He wanted to take me to this place I’d never seen before. “It’s beautiful,” he said, and it was.

It’s La Reve, in case you’ve never been there.

I was looking through my photostream and thinking about how baby-related/pregnancy RL photos are sneaking their way into it and how our lives are sort of morphing now too.  This night – it was Halloween, actually – was the last time we just sort of hung out and explored together in SL. He goes in a lot more than I do these days but I think that’s just because I’m a lot more uncomfortable (physically) which makes everything more difficult.

I realize that all the same it’s a lot easier to explore in SL now than outside of it. But I don’t even know where to go anymore.

Suggestions are welcome!

(And I’m sorry but I had to change commenting policy because spammers were killing me. Even Aksimet wasn’t catching enough of them and several spam comments made it here a day. I apologize if it takes a little while for your comment to show, but promise unless you leave a comment that says something like “Pills! Vegas! Shoes! ?????????” it’ll show here!)

Well I thought I’d never see the day – not again – where my two old pals Romana Wei and Johnny Skosh would be in the same sim at the same time. But here’s proof. Romana is one of the original founders of the Topgol Philadelphia community and Johnny is one of the original Section 8 tenants. In January 2007 when I wandered into Topgol, Johnny was the first person I met. He looked like Robert Smith so I rented the place next door. That started our Topgol experience way in the back when.

Things changed – they always do in SL.  Romana started spending less and less time online. Johnny started spending more time online. He actually built his own empire and created the very swank up and coming Dead City (an undead themed retail and general hang-out sim).

There’s some fucking comment I wanted to make here about how time passes in SL and what that means to friendship or some shit like that, but I’m spent because I was sucked into SL until 3:45am and then woken up by my adorable labrador retriever at 8am for a rousing game of tug the slipper.

I was somewhat inspired to post today by the news that a good SL friend of mine had suddenly decided to log off indefinitely, saying something to the effect (I didn’t talk to her) that she had put too much of herself into SL and her RL was suffering, her friends were bitching that she’d changed. And I know exactly how that feels, to be honest.  It’s a bit tricky to draw the line between the two worlds sometimes as the Second has it’s very own reality. It’s literally like balancing two lives sometimes.

So to my friend – be well and enjoy the fresh autumn breezes. Take long walks and drink steaming mugs of whatever.  Know that you’ll be missed but that even so, you’re understood.

“You just gotta see this cute camper!” said Myg as she threw the snapshot on my desk in the Pwnshop. “Can we get one? Huh? Can we?”

My first reaction was no. Absolutely not. (Myg often calls me Mr. No Not.) I’ve got way too much to do here in Mainline (SLURL)–the club has to get finished by the end of the month, and the only thing that’s been done on the new municipal complex is the basement. The crew finished pouring the concrete and planked over the top of the hole and went on extended break. For a week. The foreman claims it’s due to shipping delays on Italian marble.

“Italian marble? Who the hell ordered that?” I yelled.

“You did, sir.”

I don’t remember Italian marble… Pauly! That old man is going to turn my agita into angina into an aneurysm. See how stressed out I am? Between the construction delays and all this business with Myg and the vampires, I haven’t slept well in more than a month. Suddenly a getaway, just the two of us, in a little camper seemed perfect. Memorial Day in Philly can be like taking a foot-long and… well, never mind.

“Okay doll, let me go check it out, first, and then maybe we can go this weekend.”

So I tp’d over to Tableau (Tableau (198, 179, 17)) and like Myg says in her Flickr caption for the camper snapshot: “Wanna know what I love most about SL? People who build stuff like this.”

And this:

The whole sim is one beautiful desert retro build after another. It’s a vacation in Second Life. I spent an entire morning wandering around, checking out one cool thing after another. Besides the camper there’s an art gallery, a deli where I bought an ice cream cone (before noon–I like to live on the edge), and the awesome bowling alley with the green VW bug (166 prims). You know the landowners love their cars when they’ll set aside a couple of buildings’ worth of prims for the Beetle (fahrvergnugen!) or a comparable amount for this panel wagon:

If you get bored of looking at great designs, peaceful desertscapes, and classic cars, there’s plenty of shopping–hair, skins, furniture, even the Homestore (I bought a treehouse)–it’s all there. With stores seamlessly integrated into the sim, you never feel like you’re in a mall. Ugh. I sound like a damn brochure writer now. It’s that good. So Myg and I are going to grab the tent and packs and head up into the hills for a few days, just after she goes to her appointment with Dr. Moody. Maybe the desert sun and air will put some color back into her skin.

Especially in Second Life.

They burned Tattletales, Pauly’s favorite lunch spot, to the ground.

What you’re seeing in these pics is all the empty land that once was a large portion of Little Philadelphia. According to Max and Paige, the former owners of the bulk of this great build, “We couldn’t take the lag” and so they sold it all and are moving to a new class 5 server. And what do you suppose is causing the lag? One guess. Come on. You know it.

See, once upon a time in Topgol there was another casino. Back in the day, we also had a bad lag problem. Then the club sold out and left, and we were all set lag free. I couldn’t believe the difference. Then this place moves in, and the lag is back. We’ve all sat down to talk with the owner, but first of all he doesn’t actually believe he’s causing any problem, and second of all he doesn’t care.

It seemed we were kind of fucked. But then in stepped our new neighbor Diane.

Not only did she buy the bulk of Max and Paige’s land, but by her commitment to the Philly concept she inspired Sable and me and Alex to do likewise – between the three of us we own just about all of that section. But if that wasn’t cool enough, she then entered into some negotiations with the owner of the shithole casino to try to swap some land with him on another server to get him the hell out of Topgol. For his sake, I sure hope it works. Otherwise, it’s so on people.

Hopefully Romana and Gala come back soon so we can have a proper urban planning meeting. We’ve got a hell of a lot of building to do, but rest assured when it’s done, Philadelphia Second Life style will be more kick ass than ever.

Just then a man and a woman walked into the bar. The man sat at a little table and started to play Rock Paper Scissors with himself. The woman sat on the bar stool next to Allotta. He loosened his grip on my midsection, so I hopped behind the bar and started to polish bottles, thinking I’d stall for time and try to find a convenient exit point. “What are we drinking, folks?”

The gal started jibbering in Korean to Allotta, who started jabbering back. They knew each other–he’d called for back up! My gut told me they had it in for me. But why?

I poured some booze into a glass and handed it to her with a wry, wan little smile. She returned the favor with an icy look and kept yammering on in whatever hieroglyphic symbols I couldn’t understand. While Allotta was distracted by her prattle I poured another and handed it to him, dumping it in his lap at the last second. As he started cursing me in 7 different languages, and she started to unpack what looked like a nice little handgun, I hurled the espresso machine across the bar between the two of them and ran for the exit.

Once outside I ducked into a public toilet and frantically scanned my inventory and friends list. Wiped clean again! My memory still fuzzy, I opened the search window and tried to think of the name of my home…topgas…torvgol…toglepac…then a snippet came to mind. Wawa. I searched Wawa and hit the button.

Schhhhhhhhhht0ink!

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I didn’t want to listen, but she was so damned earnest that it was pretty hard to blow her off.

I’d only been back from Paris 1900 (SLURL) a couple of days when they started in on me: “We had no idea where you were for days, you didn’t answer any IMs, you could have died, what’s with that whole sock monkey dancing dream, etc., etc., etc.” Same old, same old. But they had a reason to be worried.

My last disappearance was plenty spectacular and even I couldn’t deny that I’d come close to eating pavement, biting the dust as it were. Lucky for me that parachute was self-deploying because coming out of that blackout mid-fall off Le Tour Eiffel (SLURL), I had no idea I was even wearing one.

There were a lot of questions to be answered, such as, where the hell did that dress and the ice come from? God knows I haven’t got any taste or use for formal, so this was more than a little unsettling. So unsettling I almost forgot to wonder how I’d fallen off the Eiffel Tower in the first place.

I was in dire need of alcohol at that point, so wandered into the local bar looking for a hard pour of Absynthe. There I ran into some Harry Potter look-alike dude named Allotta.

He looked almost startled to see me walk into the bar – his face went all blank and then white like a zombie. He stared hard at me but I just buried my face in my drink and waited for the warm fuzzy.

Things got very weird when he he came up along side me, real close, snaked a clammy, rubbery arm around my waist and rasped alcoholic mutterings in my ear, “Where’s the dough? I thought you were going to leave it in the trunk of the car.” The dude was breathing down my damned neck like I knew something.

But I was clueless, as usual.

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I was screaming, screaming like you’d scream if you saw death approaching as fast and as hard as a concrete slab flying toward your face at 120 k an hour. I would have wondered how in the hell I’d gotten there but there was no time. I was seriously about to bite it.

Then THWACK!

The jolt of the parachute catching the air nearly snapped my damn neck. But then I realized I wasn’t dead, and that was a good feeling.

The only problem was, I wasn’t dreaming. This shit was really happening and I seriously had no idea how I’d gotten there.

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I don’t know how long I was out of it. Hours? Days? It felt like a lifetime as the heavy stupor rolled off me like recovery from a near death experience. My head pounded like a bulldozer on broken concrete and I stunk so bad I made myself gag…twice.

My clothes? Gone. I was down to my boxers, but somehow wound up in someone else’s smelly socks and ripped up shirt. My money? Stolen, I guess. I was penniless, not even able to buy a demo hair. My inventory? Fucking wiped.

I came around a little, but still didn’t have my full faculties. I couldn’t remember full names of places I’d been, where exactly I was from. I wandered around, staggered is more like it, but came to see that somehow I’d ended up on the streets of Reforma, new Mexico City (SLURL). I imagine the scene was not far from how Andromeda Xi had once pictured it…shiny clean streets, fancy strangers tuxedos and sexy accents, and one dirty beat up dragged out wanderer, for balance and authenticity. But I hadn’t volunteered for this. And I wasn’t going to take it laying down in a cardboard box on the sidewalk.

Only in Mexico City can a gal look this haggard and still get hit on, I think.

I HOPE that’s the case, anyway. But believe it or not, even with me looking this grimy and this pissed off, some random dude gave me a “rose for a special lady” (yeah, you know the one) and asked me a ton of shit like where did I live, did I wanna go to the club, etc. I said, “Dude, look at me…” When he didn’t get the hint, I just gave him a blast of my foul sock chewing breath and he scampered off down the street.

For a moment I was left alone with this red beauty next to me, and a thought flashed in my throbbing skull.

Could I hot wire this ride and cruise my way out of Reforma for good? I was desperate to be sure, but was I ready to lead a life of crime? I mean, wasn’t politics bad enough?

continue reading at Bumped right into me.

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It was from him.

I’d long followed Andromega’s steady stream of images, floating across the web like dream flashes from someone else’s unconscious. He’s a man whom without knowing me seems to know how I think.

After that long TP from Topgol I was in need of a piss. But to be honest, the little girl’s room was so skeevie you wouldn’t even squat over one of those toilets. I just crossed my legs and hoped for the best. He pointed across the dark, creepy underground station.

“Get in,” he said.
So I did.

I clicked the doors, the floor, the station walls themselves. Arcadia Asylum’s handiwork again, I should have recognized the fine detail and comic realism so prevalent in her Mission Soup Kitchen. I made a note to myself to look her up again and see if I can’t get her to sing some of her trade secrets to perfect slum builds.

I looked at Andromega and smiled my thanks. I didn’t care where we were going then. We were riding, he and I, and at the time that’s all that mattered.

But then the train stopped and we got off. That’s when the real trouble began.

to be continued…

Read Part II: Bodegaddiction
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