August 2026 – Page 2 – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

From Slendai Harbour to Inari Okami Jinja in Second Life

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Inara Pey

*Inari Okami Jinja and Yamadera, August 2026 – click any image for full size*

I try very hard not to let my ego lead me in things (honest! – In fact I try to make sure it remains trapped in the bottom drawer of a locked filing cabinet with a sign on front saying “beware of the leopard – so to speak” 🙂 ).

However, when I learned that I’ve recently been on the mind of a kitsune guardian of a mainland shine, I have to admit I was more than a little curious, so I had to bounce in-world and discover more.

*Inari Okami Jinja and Yamadera, August 2026*

The Kitsune in question – Tamamo – watches over the Imari Okami Jinja shrine. Sitting high on the side of a southern Corsica mountain in-world, the shrine forms part of the Excellens Prefecture, developed and overseen by Deefer Doge and Petros Aabye.

Roughly half a Full region in size, the Prefecture draws inspiration from the Yamadera temple and surrounds in Japan, but folds so much into itself as to be entirely unique. It extends from the small coastal Slendai Harbour up through the Yamadera hills and on up the mountain to reach Inari Okami Jinja. Along the way, the lands present the most engaging of Mainland visits.

However, it’s not a simple case of following the path upwards as if on a pilgrimage: there is a lot to see and appreciate along the way as one explores, complete with paths to outer farmlands and looping trails with features of their own to discover.

This build started as a harbour, my place to sail from plus I wanted a garden, so the onsen was developed. I love building on Mainland, with all its constraints of terrain, I would like to see more of our wonderful SL world nurtured. I also like to explore and with that in mind I always keep my land open to public to use & explore, I do live here but I think I can share 🙂 .

– Deefer Doge on Inari Okami Jinja – Yamadera & Slendai Harbour

Given the size of the Prefecture, there are several points of entry, but the SLurl I’m using here is for Slendai Harbour down on the coast. To help in finding your way around, there is an information board at the harbour (and which is twinned elsewhere in the setting) which will give a map HUD and notecard to arriving visitors (just click the board if these don’t arrive), and the map outlines the major paths and trails.

There is also an Experience-based teleport system available – look for the kuguri rings which have been strategically located around the various locations within the Prefecture. Simply step through one (and accept the Experience the very first time you do so) to be teleported. However I strongly recommend exploring on foot.

The onsen Deefer mentions in her comment above sits just beyond the gates from the harbour to the main trail. Bathing is permitted, and to help keep things personal, it – like a number of places within the Prefecture – resides within its own parcel with Privacy enable.

The onsen also forms part of a looping trail around the back of the harbour -just follow the path over the red bridge spanning the channels feeding water into it – with the route up into the hill resuming via the torii gate alongside of the bridge.

I’m not going to go blow-by blow through everything to see along the way as that will spoil things. However, here are some things to look out for / make note of on your initial climb:

Slendai Harbour is open to the South Corsica waterway, and so can be reached by boat & has open rezzing should you wish to visit by boat and that sail away after (do mind the wreck partially submerged in the harbour tho!). A jet ski rezzer is also available
Don’t miss the eastward path just after the first two Torii gates climbing the hill from the onsen. It has a garden surprise tucked away along it and offers a path to the farmlands.
The Yamadera Shukubo Lodge overlooks the path up, sitting just above misty low-level cloud. Deefer’s former home, it is also open to the public.
The Admin centre is where Goshuin stamp collectors can collect their stamp – Deefer puts out a new one each month. It’s an area watched over by Miyone (do be sure to chat with her!). There’s also a lookout point to be found here and another route out to the farmlands and rice fields.

However, do be sure to keep an eye out for a small gate just to the left of the Sanman Gatehouse (itself alongside the lodge). Going through this smaller gate will lead you to the Tea House. Tucked away below the Admin centre, it is a lovely haven for peace and quiet – even meditation, given the way the outdoor seating is arranged.

This is actually one of my favourite parts of the setting, and potentially easily overlooked if the main path is followed without paying attention. If travelling with a friend or three, you can also enjoy a board game under the roof the Tea House.

But it is the Imari Okami Jinja shrine, which sits as the ultimate destination. Home to Tamamo, mentioned at the top of this article, it provides a view back down over the Prefecture to the harbour to one side and out over the gardens and trees to the rice fields on the other.

The red torii gates marching up the escarpment to the shrine offer their own guardianship against unwanted spirits making the climb (and a little rest area offers water to thirsty pilgrims as it faces one of the many small shrines to be found throughout the lands here).

Do be sure to respond to Tamamo when she greets you; she is very conversational and can tell you more about the shrine, the Imari, and the prefecture in general. She is both knowledgeable and at times very poetic.

This place is called Inari Okami Jinja. A shrine to Inari – the great kami of foxes, rice, fertility, prosperity, and… well, many things. Inari is generous that way, refusing to be pinned down to just one domain. I watch over it and keep the energy clean. Chase away things that should not linger near sacred ground. Sometimes I guide visitors.

– Tamamo, in conversation with me about Imari Okami Jinja.

The beauty of this setting cannot be overstated, nor can the sense of peace and age; there is so much more to be seen than I have allowed here (see if you find your way to the stone hand and the photo opportunities there). The sense of age is communicated by the mix of torii gates, the way paths and steps branch but then go nowhere, as if overgrown and their purpose forgotten.

From Slendai Harbour through Yamadera to Inari Okami Jinja, this is a perfect part of the Mainland to visit; rich in detail and utterly idea for viewing under a wide range of environment settings as well as its own default. And, needless to say, it is thoroughly photogenic throughout.

My thanks to Deefer for the opportunity to visit and for spending time with me when I did – and again to Tamano for her kind words and our conversations 🙂 .

Slurl Details

Slendai Harbour (Excellens, rated Moderate)

Space Sunday: Europa’s ice, the eclipse, + a rocket goes BANG!

Posted on August 16, 2026 by Inara Pey

A rendering of Europa, showing the believed subsurface ocean lying over the warm mantle and under the surface ice crust, and in the inset, how this ocean is likely kept liquid. Note, particularly, the deep ice of the crust and the theorised reservoirs of water within the ice, theorised to be formed by ocean water coming up through the ice – an idea now challenged in a new study. Credit: NASA/JPL

The subject of Jupiter’s moon Europa is rather hot at the moment. With two major missions currently en-route to Jupiter to study this icy world – NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which will focus entirely on Europa, and the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission, there have been various science papers of late on the subject of liquid water on Europa – two of which I covered most recently at the start of the year.

Those two studies directly speculated on the opportunities for Europa – assuming it does have a relatively warm, liquid ocean sitting under this icy crust – to be the abode of basic life, and with somewhat differing outcomes.

Animation of the Laplace resonance of Io, Europa and Ganymede, showing how Io and Ganymede exert gravitational influence over Europa, most likely causing tidal flexing which helps generate heat within the moon, which it turn helps keeps its ocean liquid. Credit; Matma Rex

While it seems likely that Europa does – through a combination of interior heating and a similar kind of tidal flexing experienced by volcanically active neighbouring Io – have sufficient heat to give rise to a liquid water ocean under its surface, the problems remains of how to get down to that ocean and probe for signs of basic life.

The most common idea for this has been to actually land on Europa and drill down into the ice to obtain deep core samples which might contain minerals and other deposits indicative that the Moon has potentially habitable zones in its ocean – or even to get an automated mini-sub to actually explore the waters under the ice.

The problem here is that we now know that the ice of Europa’s crust is around 30 km thick – that’s not something easily drilled through to any significant depth. Such a thickness of ice also casts doubt on the idea that – based on images and data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope (2012/13) and the Galileo spacecraft (1995-2003) respectively – water is escaping up from the ocean through crack in the ice as water vapour geysers.

As a result, the focus of efforts to try to reach liquid water on Europa and gather samples or remote analysis shifted to trying to analyse what appear to be reservoirs of water actually within the ice crust itself, in the belief that these “lakes” were being created by warm water forcing its way up through faults and cracks in the ice and then spreading horizontally through the ice strata – and that this might also be causing the geysers of water vapour believed to have been seen.

However, more recently, revisiting the data from Hubble and Galileo has cast doubt on the idea that Europa is geysering water vapour into space. On top of this, a new study led by scientists from Rutgers University now casts credible doubt on the idea of warm water pushing its way up through 20-30km of ice so as to be close enough to the surface so that when the surface ice breaks as a result of the flexing mentioned above, it could escape as a vast outgassing of water vapour.

The models previously used for determining whether warm water could form conduits up through Europa’s ice from the ocean and then exploit weaknesses within the strata of ice were based on the mechanics of magma here on Earth, which operates in a fairly uniform manner. Given the apparent nature of cryovolcanism among various bodies around the solar system, this idea of uniform action appeared reasonable.

A rendering of Europa’s interior, as the modern consensus of opinion see it: a 30 km outer crust with a water ocean approx 100 km deep, either fully liquid or a mix of liquid water and semi-frozen ice and slush, and a large rocky mantle heated by an iron core due to gravitational flexing. Credit: Kelvinsong

The Rutgers’ study however, looked at the behaviour water is volcanic-like systems and found that its behaviour is far more turbulent than found with denser magma, with convection currents being far more extensive, particularly as warm warm came into direct contact with ice of a density similar to that measured on Europa.

So instead of the water simple melting and forcing its way up through cracks it forced into conduits, the Rutgers study found the the water would quickly start forming convention currents: the warm water rising up into cracks, with its outer edges rapidly cooling as it made contact with the ice, forming a convection current of rising and descending water – with the latter carrying ice crystals melted off the the ice before the water cooled. These crystals would then clump and cool the water further, eventually choking the entire flow long before the water could rise up through the ice far enough so it could form a reservoir which a) would remain liquid and b) be available to escape as a geyser if the remaining ice above it cracked open.

But given there is data indicating bodies of water are suspended within Europa’s ice, and if they are not formed by warm water forcing its way up from below, what is forming it? The Rutgers’ study suggests a simple, somewhat elegant solution: as noted, Europa is in tidal flux and subject to interior heating; its curst is cracked and line as a result of stress fracturing from this motion. This cracking and fracturing will result in frictional rubbing between different elements of ice and different densities of the ice strata – and friction melts ice.

If the Rutger’s study is correct, it would suggest that trying to obtain samples of any water trapped within Europa’s icy crust is unlikely to reveal much about the potential of the underlying ocean having all the mineral and chemical elements present to give life a kick-start. This does not negate the study of Europa as a whole; there is still much to find out about it – including whether or not the ocean believed to exist there is actually liquid water (rather than, say, an icy slush) – it just underscores the fact that nothing about Europa can really be taken for granted.

Imaging the Eclipse

*The diamond ring starts to form (right) in this image by Daisy Dobrijevic, a passenger aboard MS Sitsbergen on an eclipse cruise, august 12, 2026*

August 12 saw a total / partial eclipse visible across the north Atlantic and a good portion of western Europe. Whilst the path of totality was predominantly lay across the Atlantic, it did touch eastern Greenland, western Iceland and part of northern Spain and Portugal, with up to 98% partiality witnessed from parts of northern Europe.

Here are some images of the event which have been publicly released.

*The diamond ring in a deeper colour view, the Sun’s corona clearly visible in this image from amateur astronomer Spain-Deborah Simpson in Spain*

Obviously, those sitting along the line of totality got the greatest views of the eclipse – bot that’s not to say those only witnessing a partial eclipse missed out, as “Mr photon” from Switzerland demonstrated, with the assistance of a local hot air ballooning event!

Long March 7A Explodes After launch

Just to show western rockets have exclusivity on exploding, on August 10, 2026, China suffered a failure with a Long March 7A booster.

A variant of the Long March 7 (CZ-7) workhorse, capable of lobbing just under 14 tonnes to low Earth orbit (LEO) and 7 tonnes to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), the CZ-7A was first launched in 2020 and up until the August 10 launch, had a record for 16 successful flights out of 17 launches.

The launch was intended to deliver a Zhongxing-4B telecommunications and broadband internet satellite to GTO, the rocket lifting-off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, Hainan province at 12:00 noon UTC on August 10. The flight appeared to be proceeding well until 85 seconds after launch, when the vehicle exploded.

*August 10, 2026: A long March 7A (CZ-7A) rocket explodes over China, 86=5 seconds after launch. Credit: Meng Zhongde*

It is not clear exactly what happened, but the timing of the flight suggests that the explosion occurred as the vehicle was experiencing “max-Q” – when the structure is facing the maximum in aerodynamic stresses as it accelerates and tries to punch its way through the denser atmosphere. Some reports suggest that this might have resulted in the forward, upper section of the rocket suffering a structural failure, however, amateur footage taken of the launch appears to show an initial explosive flare near the base of the vehicle, which appears to have split it in two, prior to a second explosion occurring.

This might be significant, as the very first flight of the CZ-7A in 2020 is said to have been result of a pressurisation failure in one of the rocket’s four strap-on boosters – although that particular vehicle loss came some 168 seconds into the flight.

The Long March 7 family has an interesting operation in regards to its core stage and side boosters. While such arrangements are common in rocket systems, in most, the side boosters tend to be jettisoned once they’ve carried out the work of initially accelerating the booster and getting it through “max-Q”, lightening the load and allowing the first stage to continue to power the rocket until its fuel is expended. However, with the Long March 7, the side boosters and core stage are jettisoned as a single unit, generally around 170-175 seconds into the flight.

At the time of writing, some 5 days after the vehicle loss, the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) has not commented on the event, other than to state it is under investigation. Whether or not any reason for the vehicle loss will be given in the future is unclear – while there is speculation as to the cause of the loss of the first CZ-7A in 2020, China has never officially revealed the cause of that loss, and the same could be seen with this vehicle as well.

Of Ravenmere Redwoods, BREATHE & chat with Anu Papp in Second Life

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Inara Pey

*Ravenmere Redwoods, August 2026 – click any image for full size*

Back in January 2025 I visited Poetic Moon, a homestead region held by Anu Papp and which she and Dandy Warhlol (Terry Fotherington) had created as a stunning setting – and you can read about it here.

So when Anu invited me to pop over and preview a new make-over for her Full region of Ravenmere, which she has also developed in collaboration with Dandy to create the quite magnificent Ravenmere Redwoods.

I got this region from LL back in 2009, so I have been its keeper a very long time. Its name used be Ravenhart, but today it’s the most beautiful. I live in Northern California, which inspired this build.

– Anu Papp discussing Ravenmere Redwoods

From Anu’s comment and the design’s name, it should be obvious that the region offers a celebration of the California’s mighty Sequoia tree. However, this is more than just a place of the imagination: Anu used data from the physical world to create the terrain maps used in the design to give the region its overall towering appearance.

As regulars to these pages know, I love settings in SL which bring with them a twist of somewhere in the physical world, shaped by the creating minds behind them, and Ravenmere Redwoods totally fits this. There is so much packed into its – literally towering – design.

The landing Point sits some 80 metres above sea level, the region lies surrounded by high forested peaks, some with snow sitting within shadowed sculpts and dips in their sides, immediately mindful of the Sierra Nevada, where the mighty redwood can be found.

However, the land also drops away to one side, providing steps for giants (and trails and paths for us lesser folk!) down to an eastern coastline. This comes complete with a rocky cove that has perhaps seen better days as a focus for commercial fishing, but which also sits as a reminder of all the hidden bays and little coastal centres of activity which once hugged (and still do hug, in some cases) the coastlines of California and Oregon.

Between these two upper and lower extremes is a setting utterly rich in detail, perfectly conceived and photogenic to the point of being a work of art.

This is a place for people to come to and relax. It’s not for business, there are no rentals. I disabled fly within the region and I’d like people to explore carefully; there are so many hidden areas. All I ask is that people keep activities PG.

– Anu Papp discussing Ravenmere Redwoods

One of those details might be easily missed by visitors on arrival should they be tempted to set out along the path leading away from the Landing Point. However, by turning around and walking just past the fence behind them, they will find a trio of heady walkways stretched out between some of the huge trees, presenting bird’s eye viewing of the rugged and misty lands below.

There’s also a path to be found here as well, running down through the mists and past a fire look-out point, twisting its way to come by turn and and corner to where three redwoods stand guard over a covered a wooden bridge.

Here again, the temptation might be to simply walk on by and over the bridge – which is a route that should be taken as a part of overall exploration, as it will carry visitors on along the eastern shoulder of the setting where more redwoods tower over more regularly-sized trees and a superb view down over the coast can be obtained.

But those paying attention as they reach the covered bridge might spot a sign Some Place Else. It offers a path of discovery to another mountain lake and a grand overlook.

Similarly, just beyond the bridge the path splits again, this time offering a way down to a further overlook above a quite magnificent ribbon lake, complete with a café perched above it to one end, and further trails running around and over it for further exploration.

The two eastward paths eventually join up to point people towards an unexpected – but still fitting perfectly within he region – location: a henge out on a headland. Here, again, keep an eye out for a rocky secret: a crafty little path perhaps originally cut by the passage of water, now offering and alternative means to reach the coastal bay.

Across the region are multiple places to sit and relax. Many are nicely tucked away to give a sense of natural privacy. Some are bobbing on the waters of the lakes and tucked away on the waterfront.

*Ravenmere Redwoods, August 2026 – BREATHE*

Those following the highland path from the Landing Point will eventually come to an old summer house straddling the path (passing another route down the mountainside along the way!). Beyond this is a large open deck space. This is the Ravenmere BREATHE Meditation Centre.

Breathe Meditation is a place to gather in stillness, breathe together, and remember that our individual practice becomes more powerful when shared in community. It’s a place for people to find peace. On Sundays, I’ll be hosting 30-minute meditation sessions there for those who wish to join me at 7:00am SLT. Please wear white attire if attending!

– Anu Papp discussing BREATHE at Ravenmere Redwoods

Those who can’t join Anu on Sundays can still nevertheless partake of the opportunity for meditation on their own or with friends – or simply use the space for a quiet time of conversation of contemplation.

That said, wherever you wander within the region, you’re going to feel nothing but peace and harmony.

Rich in wildlife and a fitting soundscape and captured until a Shared Environment ideal for viewing it (although it does lend itself equally to others), Ravenmere Redwoods is genuinely beautiful – a work of art, as I’ve already noted.

When visiting, please do keep in mind the following:

The region will only be open to full public access for a period of one month from August 15, 2026, after which it will return to Group access only.
Group access will provide rezzing rights for photo props, etc., – but as always, do please remember to pick things up again.

My sincere thanks to Ana for the invitation to visit ahead of time and for taking the time to chat with me about Ravenmere Redwoods; it was greatly appreciated. Also, my congratulations, to her and to Dandy for creating such an outstanding place of beauty in Second Life.