there's nothing but chains around me

Allll right then. Let's talk about (hopefully) this year's haunt, Neon Ascendance. (Which needs a better name.)



So the first hiccup with the neon terror was losing the original enclosed skybox (seen in the above image as the pale blue sky section). I still do not understand what happened. Left the build for the night, came back the next day to continue, skybox gone. Bwuh. But why.



The next major event was partially my fault. See dolphins. Dolphins are broken. Why are dolphins broken? No idea. It puzzled me enough, I made a short vid on it. (Though I'm also 100% convinced it's user error. I break sealife. Why? I'unno. But it's not the first time it's happened.

But also (as again indicated by patches of sky) the entire build had dropped down half a meter. Why. WHY.



I was still having problems with walled corridors I couldn't walk all the way through. Again, why? No idea, but I thought repositioning the corridors so they're slightly wider would help.



Then my brain decided what would REALLY work better was to remove the interior black walls and replace them, because suddenly I hated black, or something?

So I started working on the proper width and layout of the NEW walls (working between restored skybox A and non-restored skybox B)...until last night when I took 2/3rds of the wall set back with a finger twitch. At that point, I had HAD IT for the night. Which was last night.

STILL having problems with the linkset, STILL having problems with the layout, which was not at all helped by someone coming over and nagging me about there still being non-walkable areas, which APPARENTLY were happening because my lovely curving mesh wall set, gifted to me by a love, was "bad mesh"...for...reasons?? (Reasons not adequately explained, is what I mean...)



Oh, and THIS shhh....nonsense, was the OTHER issue I've been dealing with since I started. I rez prim. I texture prim. I give texture correct dimensions. It becomes stripes. WHY THE FUUUU--

I am maybe two micrometers from giving up on this entire concept. But okay. New plan.



So far, I've made an original skybox, the which left, a mesh interior wall set, which dropped and then vanished, an enclosure skybox (the top blueish cube), and then every level you see from there in the above image? Are builds started which fractured, dropped, unhooked, repositioned, disappeared, or otherwise broke.



Welcome to Em's Terrible Map Tutorial.

Not really, but i was motivated enough just to see how it would look if I abandoned the entire concept of curving interior walls. The last time I put together all the walls for the build, they clocked in around sixteen LI, counting the original exterior walls. As I'm really trying to keep the structure itself to the bare minimum, so I can put out all the weirdness and oddity I wanted to put out...that didn't sit well.

Thus, the mesh wall set. Which...I do not have the fortitude to fight, I just want it to work. But. If I reduce everything to bare individual prims? That gives me a total of thirty-eight. Which is not counting exterior walls, or the ramp or stair set I toss in to reach the second level.

This. Is. A. Nightmare.

knelt down at the crossroads, can't get the devil off my mind (part two)

So here's part two of Harvest Hollow. (Part one being yesterday.)



I get it. Kitchen's where you carve and cook the bodies. But it's...gods, it's overdone. The cauldron under the toxic water spout's neat, though.

Blogger changed their content policy recently, and there is a passage on violence and gore, but I'm erring on the side of Second Life being just digital violence? I may be wrong, but I'm holding to that.



But I'm also confused--the corpse has been wrapped, but the feet are exposed? The feet are exposed, but the head (now detached) was wrapped? Or was the head exposed, too? Then why not remove the hands, if head removal was to prevent dental records being used to identify Mm. Nameless Wrapped-in-Plastic?

Am I overthinking this again?



The rest of the haunt had nothing new, we've all seen it a dozen times by now. But outside, there was a bumper pumpkin ride. That seemed neat.



Another Madpea contribution--and you can't see it here, but the selection in the upper right, A1? Salmiakki bats! Even virtual salmiakki is marvelous. Bat-shaped salted licorice? Even better!



And I won a new ghost plush from the haunted crane game.

All in all, am I unhappy I went? No, not really. Did it spark joy? No, not really. Apart from great landscaping, there's very little we haven't seen before, and most of the more "fun" things are in the "CARN-EVIL" section. Still, there is fun to be had--there's an easy maze, tons of picture opportunities (if you don't mind advertising for the estate), and it's not the worst hunt I've been to. (That distinction still belongs to the Clockwork Curse.)

I'd say...go if you want? Or don't, I'm not your mom.

took the blacktop to Texas, Stevie Ray was on my mind (part one)

Welcome to Harvest Hollow, since I'm ditching the personal haunt that's eating my brain for the night (the night being the fifteen minutes I remain on the grid)...



Right. Let's goooooo.



Seeing the entrance area, I'm fairly sure that somewhere nearby is the rental office for the estate. There are paths leading to more haunted areas--I took the road to the left, then turned right at the fork after the bridge--but overwhelmingly, it seems like it's not a Halloween build, just an enhanced commercial build. Does that make a difference?



I will say, the sim is very pretty. Seriously, for the stroll factor alone, it deserves a visit.



...and almost instantly, I have to dock a skull for the advertising. Maybe it's because I'm frustrated with my own haunt-in-process, maybe it's because the survey that asked me to answer--in the welcome area at the entrance--for a "gift" really leaned hard into me answering that I was going to follow them on Facebook and rent from them soon, and...seriously, that is the exact wrong tack to take. I don't have Facebook, and I have no need to rent, but now if I did, it wouldn't be from them.



Maybe that's too much to put on a pumpkin. I don't know.



I thought this was a nice touch. Not only Madpea's knife mirror (since the rest of this particular haunted house is...repetitive), but the translucent butler who both greets and dusts.

Normally, I'd probably tie up the review here, but I took ten pictures, and I'm going to use all ten, so...this is now part one.Part two's coming very soon.

am I jumping trains? I ain't turnin' back (part two)

Picking up where we left off.



Here be clockwork spiders. But I couldn't stir myself to care.



And the galling thing is, there are some nifty ideas here. A corrupt mage, trapping an entire town to fulfill his mad scheme to control time itself. The mage parting people out, extending limbs, to turn them into twisted replacement parts for his clockwork creations. Those aren't suffused with mediocrity, at least on the concept level.

No, it's just the entire concept of the haunt is depressingly mediocre.



Could this have been done with existing dark ride scripting? Absolutely. Would it have required time investment on its own? Absolutely. Is the haunt "designer" just effing lazy? Maybe.



Even "fight" scenes could have been done with existing technology. Why, then? Was it just a cash grab? Well, it's not a dark ride that charges. Though it IS listed on at least Firestorm's destination page, if not Second Life's at large. Does that count? Who knows?



And it's not even that it's AI start to finish. It's that ALL of AI is based on one solitary concept: teaching a machine mind to hallucinate. And it's especially obvious in this ride, because everyone has the same six faces, everyone has similarly-detailed clothes, every single set piece looks like every other set piece. It's goddamn derivative as hell.



Case in point, three of the "time portals" opening.



If you haven't tired of the haunt itself, there's a very matchy-matchy maze after, with "gifts". Which are also designed by AI.



And the pic above this one was the last one I took at the haunt site itself. This pic was set up with the gifts I gathered from the maze. I took two images, chose the better one of them, then deleted them from inventory. They're worth the nothing the rest of the haunt is worth.

Here's the thing. Set aside the ecological devastation of multiple data centers drawing enough local water to force droughts, drawing enough power to spike electricity costs for people dozens to hundreds of miles away, causing enough noise from multiple gas-powered turbines to cause hearing damage (similar to families that live too close to airports) in people in those centers' vicinity--those are heavy costs, and those are real, and they matter.

But the bigger cost, for Second Life, at least to me: this required so little personal creativity. I mean, hells, for all I know, this could be a job-lot design from another place entirely, and the dark ride's owner didn't even feed in prompts, they just bought the entire construction. (And again, that just makes it worse, not better.) It's depressing, it's lazy, it's tied to systems that rip our own creativity from us, as individuals, and we're already seeing the effect in essays and research papers, resumes and lesson plans. Hallucination machines do not invent anything; they recombine. And they recombine based on destroyed rare books and stolen art. Why is Second Life encouraging this? Why have a copyright system at all if no one's going to care?

I care. I won't return. Everyone who visits this haunt is now dumber for having listened to it. I award it no points, and I will quietly pray for its extinction from the grid.

I need coffee. This was emotionally draining beyond belief.

am I running away? am I changing tracks? (part one)

It's been forever since I updated, and I want to get back to that. I need to get back to that. But while I'm taking a break from updating holiday information--anyone in the Gearhaven group will see that later--and concurrently taking a break from the most insane haunt I've ever made--and pictures on that are coming, gods help us all--I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about the most depressing dark ride I've ever ridden--in SL, or out of it. Let me introduce you to The Clockmaker's Curse.

And this is probably going to be at least a couple entries.



I think any reader of this blog grasps the issue immediately. Love the details if you will--I did--admire the concept of a steampunk dark ride--I did, too. But it's AI, start to finish. The images, the visual effects, the narrator's voice--all of it. It's all artificial intelligence.



Usually, I ride every dark ride I've gone on in SL twice. More if I really like it, but at least twice: once out of mouselook, for pictures, and the second time as intended--the "correct" time of day, in mouselook, just for the experience.

This one? Popped out of mouselook when I found a reasonable image for this entry, popped back in, because I knew this would be the one and only time I rode it. And my gods, it broke my heart.



I can almost name the engine, too. There's a particular similarity of faces with generative models. Midjourney comes closest--the faces are similar, the particular detailing...the utter lack of everything-is-Pixar-shaped (see PXZ.AI or YouCam). It might not be, it could be another engine I havent run across--and if you scan up to the first two images, that particular style layout, that font, those colors are everywhere in SL right now, and that is also depressing. I've gone to two iterations of the Whispering event, and I'm not going back a third, because...as much as I'm fond of a few creators who've had booths there, the inundation of AI textures, AI text, AI image layouts...it all looks the same, it's all instantly recognizeable, and it's all AI nonsense.



The story wasn't even terrible. Black Hollow was a normal small town, until the Clockmaker arrived. He wanted to preserve time, and he did it with arcane rituals and souls. You have arrived in Black Hollow, years--or decades, or centuries--later, and are advised not to stay after dusk. But...you do. And thus, the ride begins.



I'm not saying the haunt's bad, per se. (Though somehow that makes everything worse.) I am saying it's 100% AI.



I am saying that if I had known about it in advance, I never would have gone.



I am saying if this hadn't been so obviously, so carelessly AI, I might have been far more invested.

On to part two.

drowning in the silence

Second post of the day, because I have been gone a WHILE--

And this one's more random. From a message I just sent my partner:

[3:57 PM] 26 April, 2026: Emilly [VOID]: I so want to ask for a land forms kit from Fanatik that now has PBR textures, but I'm still in a tailspin after coming back, things haven't evened out, and that was AFTER I apologized for going radio silent months before.

[3:59 PM] 26 April, 2026: Emilly [VOID]: The animal wounded retreats for imagined safety, and it never works out, and I do it anyway. 50% getting tired of saying the same things, 50% not wanting to "burden" other people (and yes, gosh, THANK you for that one, mother, you've been dead a third of my life now, get the F̸̥͍̭̮͛̉̈́̏̒̑̕͜#̶̧̳̦̤̩̥̮̳̖͈͑͠C̸͇̹̺͓͎̦̘̳̼̭͇̫̳͕̋̅́̆͐͛̅̒̄̌͗̆̕ͅK̸͓̜̘̤̼̮͎̜̠͙̈́͝ out of my brain, thx). I am bad at all the things.

[4:00 PM] 26 April, 2026: Emilly [VOID]: I love you still. I will try to be in touch more often, it's just...hard. Everything is hard right now. But I will perservere.

I will, it's just...still a bit thrown from life in general at present. Pain levels spiking, check, still struggling to get ONE new prescription since my optometrist changed his policies from "grudgingly updating my prescription to one new pair of glasses" to "Sorry, no, we don't give out pupillary distance unless you purchase at least one frame through us"...

How much are those frames? Well, the "cheap" trays start at $120 per pair...



Oh, and for the gut-punch vicious irony, if I hadn't mentioned it before: lost my last client back in February, didn't know it until I fixed the comp enough to log back in. And I am using "lost" in its full sense, here--the motiver behind the screen passed away. Meeting nearly every week for eleven years...I miss him. I didn't expect his passing to be so destabilizing...but grief's like that at times, it sneaks up on us.

And with that, I think my courtesan days are finally over. My heart's just not in it. I guess I'm a Duchess full-time now, which won't be much of a shift, honestly--I pretty much am done, at least this year, with casual romps, I'm just keeping to the core group of loves. Three of which are pretty much perpetually offline...

RIGHT, this is getting dire. ANYWAY. I'll likely finish the post before this later tonight, 'cos I just crashed for the SEVENTH GORRAM TIME--

So that's it for now. Working on making OBS mah bish, because it's currently drop-kicked me into the basement, cackling maniacally. Bah. But I really want to do at least three vids, one of which should be for the upcoming five-year anniversary for Gearhaven.

(Did I not mention that? Yeah. Five years we've been on the grid. Time really flies when you're stressed beyond all comprehension, or something. But it's had its moments I would not exchange for all the perfumes of Arabia...

And I need to fix the blog layout. A-friggin'-gain...

All right, all right, that's it. Be well, be safe. Gearhaven out.

they ask her why she did it, she said, "honey, you would too"

OKAY. OKAY YOU KNOW WHAT? NO. NO HAUNT FOR OCTOBER. NO. DONE.

Primarily because...



...this is as far as I'd gotten.

Yeah.



AND I'm hopelessly behind blogging. AND I'm hopelessly behind on haunt coverage. AND AND AND I'm hopelessly behind on hunts.

Oh, and somewhere in that, hee hoo ha, I was planning on teaching myself how to make Dinkie clothes because...reasons...and...

NOTHING IS GOING WELL.

And I'm both tired of complaining and haven't even started complaining yet. (Make that one make sense.) Plus, the entire household is sick, and tired, and...and...and...

Yeah. So, no haunt. I did buy the gorgeous hunk of now-useless Octember building from What's Lost Spirits, because I saw it at the event...can't even remember which one, the last Engine Room? Something...and I had to own it. And I was coming up with a way to do the pathing properly and make a rest-of hunt beyond that one room, but...just...everything takes energy.

And I have the energy of a small yellow plastic soap dish right now.

So yeah. No haunt. Eventually there will be some haunt coverage. No guarantee when. Check out the last entry if you care to, there's a video there that I was tickled about actually getting done. It's not perfect--I am not a videographer on the same level as I am not a photographer, I do both badly--but hey, perfection is no longer the goal.

Or something.

So...expect more content...but no longer giving whens. I'm not good at them at the moment.

Right, off to meatspace to see if there's chocolate.

give me hope, help me cope, with this heavy load

The more things change, the more they break the same. It took the better part of two and a half hours to bash some kind of functionality into the Kaya head. And in the end, what we have is...not me.



And I am beginning to believe it just never will be me, and...why is everything so hard?



So, welcome Not-Me to the cast of characters, the rest of which are usually me, because I wanted a functional EvoX head to put EvoX layered things onto.



And if she does nothing else, pouty elven bitch that she is, she can at least stand around and get made up. It's ridiculous.

Something I sent to an otherlove when I finally gave up on making her look any better--or worse:

[15:41] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): Gods, when did I log in...around one? And it's now...now...and I have JUST finished finding an outfit and bashing a mesh head into at least surface-usable condition, and...now I'm exhausted.
[15:42] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): I hate this, I love you, I'll see what I can do with things this evening, and I'm off for a nap.

All I wanted to do is review EvoX layers for things. Why is it this stupidly difficult?

I'm broken down, the world around us surrounds my suffering

Okay, then, somwewhere else. How about this one? Because I'm already miserable, so why not?



House looks okay...if I ignore the obvious game rips...



They have vendors across the street.



I like the chairs. They're from Never Totally Dead, home of many lovely haunted things.



And the orphan asylum kids from Alice. I'm out.

Some innovation here and there? So for the sake of charity, two skulls.

the friends I've had to bury, they keep me up at night

So, at what point do I just give in and admit I work for a lesbian club now?



Maybe it's just that where I work is no longer a draw for anyone but...women. And I'm just not good at targeting them, because while I adore women, in my fifteen years of adult experience on the grid, they don't pay. Flat out. I can still count my female clients on one hand, in all that time, and have fingers left over.

Or this is depression talking, but...one way or another, the all-girl brigade is getting old. Especially as it's not just women, but women who are specifically drawn to women and MAKE THAT PLAIN IN MAIN CHAT, and...that's getting old, too.

Maybe it's finally time to move on.

I never knew my killer would be coming from within

Bit of an update from tonight's entry from earlier.

I'm not going to put these in frames, these are just shots on the fly.



Welcome to New Xantis.



Or what's left of it.



There are stores empty.



Now, not everything is gone, as I'd thought--but looking through these quick shots, I'm thinking Jaimy left up the main connecting throughway between the sims on either side of New Xantis.



With this side connection, I have no idea what used to be here, but I'd suspect a major set piece with the large items for sale, which then connected to that upper walkway leading down into another sim. It's all gone.



And I didn't want to wait until they fully rezzed in, but from left to right, this is Anthony Haslage (Ntanel Swordthain), Melina Firehawk, and Kirk Wingtips. Swordthain seems heavily involved in Star Trek fandom groups in SL, Melina Firehawk is pretty much in every RP group you can think of (and I'd be willing to bet either is the sponsor for the Super Heroes sim at Sci Fi Con, or at least organizes for it), and Kirk Wingtips (who not only seems to run Sci Fi Con, but is either involved with, or runs SciFi Expo, so dubious on that connection for now, plus is in a lot of Firefly/Star Trek groups).

And then I cleared their airspace, potentially never to return.

It used to look like this. Now...that's all over. Because the organizers were abusive. This is a very bad turn of affairs.