and you’re aching for change, but you keep starving your heart

It is never comfortable when someone needs to be hit with the clue-by-four. It is always painful, and can cause recriminations on both sides. In this particular instance, I was the one holding the clue-by-four, but I think it hurt me just as much, if not more.

The upshot is...I've been asked not to extend the rent on the annoying beach shack. Which, on the one hand, wouldn't bother me, because it's far from my favorite place. (Though I will gladly rent again from Fantasy Skyboxes, if I ever get up to where L$499 per week is comfortable again. Or just move back to Caledon.

However, none of that addresses the emotional turmoil, which will likely take some few days to settle. And I'm not sure how stable the ground will be from here. I'm not seeing trains, or fire, but there are definitely whistles in the distance. Because just ceasing to rent there, doesn't solve the issue that made me rent there in the first place.)



So this morning, in some attempt to calm before I log back in to the grid, I found myself going through saved images from the past. This was taken during the Praying Mary hunt. Note the flexi hair. And at this point, I can clearly perceive the difference between mesh and system, but...overall, I think it holds up fairly well for its age. It was taken back in 2012.



I don't remember the haunt I was in at the time. I do know this was from my doll days, back in 2013. It was a very interesting house, with sourceless teal light, and most of the haunts in it were also some interesting shade of teal, green or pale blue. Intriguing effect.



Aged pixels or not, this is still one of my favorite images from SL, taken in 2008, when I knew far less about photography and composition than I do now. The avatar I was wearing I don't even recall, and it can barely be made out anyway against the darkness of the rest of the tavern. But this was the height of Innsmouth as a sim--since this time, it's changed hands several times, and landscaping. I couldn't even tell if this little tavern still exists.



I remember getting in a bit of trouble for this, when I lived in Caledon Morgaine. After Sumie Kawashima passed, I'd put up her Darkhouse, a traditional tower lighthouse with a dark beam of light she'd given to me as a gift and an in-joke. The rest of the 'house' on the land was a floating chain attached to two floating, cavorite-ore-containing islands. It was a very narrow strip of land butting up against the mountain heights that separate Morgaine from Wellsian, so I thought a non-traditional 'home' took better advantage of the narrow dimensions. But people had...objected, let's say.

In retaliation, I built this skull--this was snapped in the process of building it, in 2008--and popped it up about a hundred meters above the house, slipped a green glowing snake into its mouth, and made the whole thing translucent. If I was going to be accused of being too strange and dark, I was going to fly the Dark Mark.

It stayed up for six months, Des defending my right to have it there, and what made me take it down was another resident across Morgaine's bay who'd logged in of a morning, looked out her window, and fell out of her desk chair. (In RL, yes.)

I didn't feel startling someone that badly was worth whatever value the protest had left, and took it down.

(It is notable that, two years later when I moved to Winterfell, and put the same tower up, and was told to take it down, I did...but replaced it with rubble and tumbled stones that stayed until I eventually left. That broke my heart, and while I understood no one knew what that lighthouse meant to me, to be summarily stripped of it because it was "too tall"--when essentially, I was on a small island in the middle of a forested zone with trees nearly as tall--well, emotionally, I left Winterfell that day. It just took a bit before I stopped renting, and formally moved out.



Yeah, probably. We'll see how it goes.

See you on the grid.