the night is coming and the starling flew for days

This may be the best site in the history of ever. It's a growing archive of women who have done phenomenal things, usually at the risk to their own safety, because they felt they had to, because they felt it was important, because no one else was stepping up to do it.

In the meantime...



Well, that's not something you see every day. This is the What's Lost Spirits store. Or...something.



I found this very odd...creature...thing...in a store I'd landed in on one of the sales list I wander every week. I can't even really describe it--it was all elongated limbs, pointed head, cell-blast silver-grey skin...and of course, I pondered getting it to put it...somewhere...on the sim I'm helping to build. For reasons.



I didn't grab a picture of that, but when I went to what I thought was the store to get the strange...creature...thing? Well. I found Lost Spirits.

None of these pictures are altered in any way. I wanted to present exactly what I saw--no photoprocessing, no lightening, just--what's there. Because what's there is eerie, beautiful, disturbing, unnerving, surreal...and amazing.



This seemed to be the main form of transit--floating elongated elephant platforms that slowly rise and fall between levels. Because of course it is.

All of this, by the way, seems to be the brain child--or fever dream--of Ms. Stabitha (what88.zond). I'm told she changes the landscape every couple of years, and not sure how long this build of things has been up, in that case? But...yes.


Floating islands, chained to rocks, stacked hexagons of stone, huge, dimly glowing crystals, faces rising from the bases of buildings. Hands reaching for the stillborn sky. This is not my mental landscape, but...it resonates.

And I am very cognizant that--while so far I'm one of only two that's seen it--one of the first structures I put up on the developing sim was a series of floating rocks, chained to the land. It's not this--I hadn't seen this yet--but...recognition, nonetheless.



I never managed to find where that odd alien creature was, on this sim. I looked. There are places it seems the only way to access is by flight, so...rather than investigate further on foot, I just looked. I did end up buying the hand trees, though. And the cultists outside the castle on the sim? They began life here.



Atop the screaming island is a coffee bar with some brooding residents. I don't know how much is for sale, here, honestly, though I do know that the first picture of the tower-hatted individual is for sale--floating island, hat and all. And while I'll have to edit this later and put the name of the artist up, everything I unpacked from here contained a card saying that if we didn't find something we were looking for, just ask. I may ask for that silver-skinned thing.



Turns out, if one Googles "What's Lost Spirits", a lot turns up, but...most of it is post-processed, colored, different effects added, or shot in SL's day cycle. And...no. You can go look at the videos and other blog entries if you want, but...you really need to go here. Stand in the stillness. Breathe in the peaceful grey. Ride the elephant platform. And wander as far as you can.

It's one of those sims where I don't know what everything on it means, but I do know that it means.

here in the half-light, the motorhomes leave

This person does not exist. This is why. This is how you can help train the AI to create these images.

I find this both compelling and creepy. Compelling in that it's phenomenal we've come this far already in training artificial intelligences both to recognize what makes up a recognizable image of a human being, and allowing us as individual existing humans to help the machine learn. Creepy in that the first thing that crossed my mind was nefarious repurposing: how many of these images of nonexistent people are going to start showing up on Facebook profiles, Tindr and Grindr profiles, or used to 'catfish' other humans for emotional or financial grift reasons?

I've said this for a few years now, but this reinforces it: we now live in a time where we can no longer trust images, moving or still, to be true simply because we see them. This is further proof of that truth.

In other news, this wasn't surprising in the least. In fact, the only surprise I felt reading that article was that 25% of the grid being geared to adults strikes me as a tad low, and I thought it was higher. Also, the comments section for that post immediately went off the rails. I'm fairly sure I'm done commenting--I think I made my point, even if that point was instantly misunderstood--but I do find it interesting that the automatic first conclusion as to the ratio of sex/extreme content sims to non-sex/extreme content sims was 'dem filthy liberals'.

reminiscing

Searching for something else entirely brought me a note I'd sent in 2009, to a love long lost. I don't know why I'm copying it here. Nostalgia, perhaps.

He sits with me and sips tea on the couch. I've sat on this couch, curled up on it, lain full-length upon it, and never once seen it. Is it chintz? Brocade? Leather? Glossy, or has the gloss rubbed off over a thousand scuffs of virtual hands, and feet, and other parts?

I don't know. But it's in the back of my mind when I talk to him.

We've sat and eaten cookies on it. We've shared tea--I always assume mine is Earl Grey or Darjeeling, something that wreathes my head in fragrant steam, but who knows, really? We've looked out upon a distance, so I assume, in this virtual space, there's at least one window.

We have cuddled on it. He has held me down while I writhed underneath him, in the grip of sweeping ecstasy. He has held me tightly in his arms, unwilling to let me go; and these nights, I am equally unwilling to leave. He has held me, face hidden, shuddering, stroking my hair as I cry in his lap, weeping from some pain or slight.

It is a comfort to me, this place that is no place. This couch, this virtual structure of...what? Wood? Bone? Metal?

Why does what it's made of--when it's just a mental construct, a 'place' to share experience--why does it matter? But my mind worries at it.

In the end, it's just a place, familiar, known, even if I don't know the specifics. It's that place between us, what we've made, him and I, the midpoint in our walk towards each other. Important, in its own way, but--just a place.

Plaid? Vinyl? Chinois bamboo and leaves? What is it made of? Why do I care?

Maybe it's just the trivia of it all. I can worry at this, where I can't worry about anything else. Maybe that's okay, too. The small thing, the thread in the weave I can puzzle over.

Likely, he'd just hand me a cup of tea and smile. "Deal with it."

So I will. Feet tucked under me, sipping Earl Grey, looking out at lights on water. Hey, if it's partially my virtual space, then I have a say in what I see, don't I?

Save for the couch is his. So I still don't know what it's made of.

That was where it ended. I'm not going to comment much on it past that. Surprisingly, it causes very little pain, just a very distant ache. At this point, perhaps that's all that's left, and all that will be.

it pulls you under and you just fall away

So, this one happened right after the adoption of jellydolls. And 90% of the time, I'd port somewhere, and all the avatars beyond my chosen complexity level would be some intermediate solid color.



Except for this one. And at first, I didn't even have a name tag. I just had the pixels, sort of...swaying.



And, as can be clearly seen, there's another jellied avatar behind this one. So other complex avatars were showing up correctly. Why did this happen? I have no idea.