Category: Exploring Second Life

The SPARK Project is a public region building project by Raven Frostwych (RavenStarr) which periodically offers a new location for people to visit and appreciate. Currently, Spark is presenting Olympus, Raven’s take on the the the mountain from which the most famous 12 of the gods of ancient Greece were said to have their residence (hence their collective name “Olympians”).

Within that mythology, these gods were said to live on the highest summit on the mountain –  Mytikas Peak. However, for her build, Raven offers a setting much more imaginative, tying together other elements of mythology, some from the legends of ancient Greece and one which – whilst turned into something of an ancient creature commanded by Zeus meme courtesy of 2010’s Clash of the Tians – actually has very little to do with ancient Greece or the Olympians, but which nevertheless fits this setting.

Occupying a Full region leveraging the Private region land capacity bonus, Raven’s Olympus features the home of the gods as an archipelago of lush islands held aloft, some stacked one above the other, by four huge Titans. The race of immortals who preceded the Olympians who were overthrown by Zeus and his siblings – the 3rd and 4th generation immortals – after the decade-long war of  called “the Titanomachy“, the majority of the Titans were imprisoned in the abyss of Tartarus, far below Olympus and the world following their defeat.

Here, in holding aloft Olympus, Raven’s Titans are both figuratively held below the Olympians as if in permanent servitude, whilst also echoing the fate of Atlas in having to hold aloft the heavens, except here their fate is to forever hold up the abode of the gods who have usurped them. That said, Atlas might be also be found here as well.

The landing point is located on the uppermost of these semi-floating islands, alongside an amphitheatre and the Olympian temple. The latter forms a club where events are at times held, the amphitheatre providing a place where 11 of the 12 Olympians, together with some of the lesser deities and offspring of Hera and Zeus, might watch over the celebrations, with Zeus seated in his throne. Poseidon, the 12th Olympian, sits apart, rising from a pool of water between amphitheatre and club.

The landing point includes a teleport point listing the major destinations within Olympus. This works through a Second Life Experience, so be sure to join it when touching a destination on the teleport board for the first time. However, for the fullest appreciation of the build, I strongly recommend following the paths and stairs running throughout the build and connecting all of the points of interest – including touches of Greco-Roman mythology tucked away here and there.

Descending through the lush levels will also bring visitors closer to the four huge Titans, their stone faces revealing nothing of what they might be thinking about their situation, keeping the realm of their victors and keep it clear of the waters far below.

As calm as these water might appear, even with the falls dropping freely from the gardens of the gods, they actually hides a secret – although whether awakened by a cry from Liam Neeson per the aforementioned film or not is debatable, given the Kraken is rooted in Norse mythology than it has anything to do with Zeus and his pantheon. I’ll leave it to you to work out how to get down to him; all I’ll say is despite his reputation, he doesn’t seem that unpleasant.

There is an undeniable beauty to this design that reaches well beyond its mythological foundations. It’s clear that a considerable amount of thought has gone into the overall design. For those unfamiliar with how to best appreciate the location as it is designed to be seen, the landing point includes information boards on recommended viewer settings, whilst awaiting discovery are multiple places to sit and pass the time, together with pre-placed poses for those wishing to take pictures. All of the main locations have their own points of interest and attractions, but I have to confess to finding the Sanctuary of Dionysus particularly attractive; it is – for me – beautifully relaxing.

Cleverly conceived and perfectly executed, Olympus offer a pleasing mix of exploration, photography and historical mythology – the latter of which might encourage a desire to do a little reaches by those who enjoy the setting but might not be familiar with the mythology interwoven into it.  Highly recommended for a visit.

SLurl Details

• Olympus by Spark Project (Spark, rated Moderate)

Earlier in September I received an invitation from Teagan Lefevre to visit her latest region build at Tilheyra (see: An everglades autumn at Tilheyra in Second Life). At the time, I noted from her Profile that she and her SL partner Cayleigh Lefevre (Cayleigh Aurelia) also had a new (at least to me) location on Heterocera where they’d set-up another picturesque setting for people visit, with the attraction (again, at least for me, of being home to a coffee house).

Occupying a 5,520 square metre parcel to the south-west of the continent (itself home to a fair few of the cafes I’ve written about in these pages), Le’eaf Forest Retreat is – as is always the case with designs by Teagan and Cayleigh – picturesque, engaging and – as if it really needs saying – exceptionally atmospheric and decidedly photogenic.

Once a bustling train depot of adventurers, the Le’eaf Forest Retreat has been reclaimed by Mother Nature and of course caffeine. An umbrella waits for your arrival as you wander through the rain, seeking shelter and a warm beverage.

– Le’eaf Forest Retreat About Land

Sitting in the arms of the junction between Atoll Road and Mock Heather Road, Le’eaf Forest Retreat is marked to the south by a stream tumbling downslope from the mouth of an old tunnel and into the formal lines of a canal just before it is in turn swallowed by another tunnel. Just a little up from this, with what remains of the old railway line mentioned in the About Land description, most of it now gone and replaced by roughly hewn trail which may – or indeed, may not – mark where the tracks might have once lead.

Another natural trail climbs gently upwards from the canal, crossing the one which may have once carried the single line track as it paralleled the water, and then continues up to what remains of the depot building itself – the largest structure within the parcel. Bordered on one side by what remains of an old ticketing station and another spur of train track, the old depot now sits as a café boasting strong coffee for those seeking it and with plenty of seating to be had for patrons – including bench seats which look as if they might have originated as seating within cabins on a first-class rail carriage.

To one side of its length, the café connects to the old ticketing hall via an old ticket office-come-waiting-room, now clearly no longer used as such but which has a couple of Japanese automated ticket machines – most likely brought to the old depot to act as décor more than anything else. Above the ticket kiosk and on a small mezzanine level overlooking the rest of the café is a further seating area where a large wall mural and posters celebrate rail travel and the allure of visiting far-away places.

For those who don’t mind getting a little wet once they’ve purchased their refreshments – Le’eaf Forest Retreat sits within a rainstorm of near tropical rain forest proportions – what’s left of an old brick outbuilding has been converted into a cosy snug, complete with movie projector and a brazier alive with the flames of a warming fire.

All of this sits within a landscape which has been put together to suggest both the encroachment of nature on humanity’s endeavours and also a wild, but still managed garden with blooms of colour and little corner delights tucked away and awaiting discovery by those who can to brave the humid downpour to wander the short paths around the depot, perhaps meeting some of the local wildlife along the way.

Such is the design of Le’eaf Forest Retreat that it really doesn’t require much of a description here – it speaks for itself from the moment you arrive. And if you happen to be someone who has not previously visited designs by Teagan and Cayleigh, do be sure to accept the note card which is offered on arrival, as it has a lot of information on their other builds together with  their partnership with The Nature Collective and about live events they host.

All in all, a pleasant pace to spend time, the rain and mist giving Le’eaf Forest Retreat a sense of isolation and introversion which is as engaging as the physical aspects of the location.

SLurl Details

• Le’eaf Forest Retreat Itame, rated Moderate)

I’ve been back on my café-hopping again of late, with a recent stop being that of Triple Sweet Café, designed and operated by Nisha Nebula (StarfireNebula).

Located within a Homestead region and sitting on the largest of five islands located therein, the Triple Sweet Café would – but for the trees which form the island’s major occupiers – offer a commanding view out over the waters towards two of the other four islands. It would also provide a broke of the island’s foreshore, where a dock points out from the land, a place where rowing boats await those who fancy taking a trip out on the water. However, should you opt to do so, please note that with the exception of the little island closest to the café’s (and linked to it via a humpbacked bridge), the small islands are private residences, so please do not approach or explore without permission.

However, as noted above, the café is screened from the westward island by trees and they climb up the rugged hillside to its flat top, giving the café and its aged terrace and foreland a cosy sense of privacy and detachment; marking them as a place where people can come and forget worries and upsets and simply relax and let the time pass without care.

The converted cottage in which the Triple Sweet is located is the only building on the island. It offers a snug main room complete with a counter where coffee and pastries might be purchased and comfortable armchairs and sofas sit around an open fire – something likely to prove popular with visitors as the nights start to drawn in here in the northern hemisphere.

A second little snug space sits above, on a half-floor reached via a spiral stairway. Should the main room, with its armchairs and tables and chairs prove to be a little busy, a connecting hall offers the way to a glass-roofed side room. This also offers comfortable armchairs before a fireplace, together with counter seating. It’s a genuinely warm, friendly place, whilst the old terrace outside the front door has seating for those who enjoy coffee and sunshine.

The café shares the hilltop with a wooden deck presented as an event space; dances are available for the romantically-inclined, while tables to one side offer further places to sit and enjoy a drink and a nibble.

Nor is sitting in or close to the café the only options for visitors to the island. Follow the steps at the front of the café’s grounds to the lowland area, and it will not open lead to the small dock mentioned above, but also opens the way to most of the other places where people can sit and cuddle or chat and pass the time. One of these – the little campsite – has a path curving away to it to where a second set of steps descend the hill from the café to reach the stone bridge as it hops of the water to the little island I also referenced above.

Low-lying and circular in nature, the island is home to ruins of an equally circular form. What they may represent is up to the imagination, but with the surrounding trees and flow of vines over the stonework, it forms another place of romance for dancers, the fountain at its centre completing the attraction of this quiet location.

Like many places in Second Life, Triple Sweet Café is dressed for the Autumn / Fall, with many of the trees around the café heavy with leaves turning brown, gold and red, while some of the leaves having decided to make the jump for the ground, where the colours also reflect the time of year, even as racoons and squirrels roam. Also given the time of year, the trappings of Halloween have started to appear, both indoors and out.

Highly photogenic and finished with a fitting local soundscape, Triple Sweet Café makes for an inviting and engaging visit. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a coffee and a cinnamon roll with my name on them 🙂 .

SLurl Details

Triple Sweet Café (Hydra, rated Moderate)

It’s been a good few months since my last visit to Elvion, so when Cube Republic sent me a link to an image showing the region’s current iteration, I realised it was high time I dropped in again.

The work of region holders Bo Zano (BoZanoNL) and his SL/RL partner, Una Zano (UnaMayLi), Elvion has tended to shift between Homestead and Full regions, but whichever it has occupied, it has never failed to offer settings of intrinsic natural beauty rich in detail and thoroughly photogenic.

Most often the builds are focus on very pastoral settings, rich in flora and fauna, and sometimes with a lean towards fantasy environments. Some iterations, however, have at times touch on more rural environments – such as with the design the couple presented back towards the start of 2023 (see: Elvion’s coastal retreat in Second Life). With the September iteration, Bo and Una take the region in another direction, offering a setting reflecting the ecological threat of climate change / global warming and the effect it is set to have on the likes of coastal cities and towns.

With rising global temperatures cities become less habitable. Nature is taking back and people are migrating to the country. Except some, who find peace and see the beauty.

– Elvion About Land

However, this shouldn’t be taken to mean this current iteration of Elvion is in any way a treatise on the threat of climate change and rising sea levels. Rather it is a visual ode to the fact that nature has a way of taking care of her own and redressing the balance when it comes to humanity’s claims on the land, even after those claims may have resulted in the land being ravaged beyond hope.

Elvion, September 2023The core of the build suggests the outskirts of a city or town, probably coastal in nature, and where an elevated freeway once provided rapid access to the heart of the conurbation without a lot of tedious mucking about navigating the gridwork of edge-of-town streets or dealing with locals, the broad lanes of the road instead being raised away from all that to run alongside the rail tracks which once carried goods trains on their backs.

However, the traffic carrying days of both rail and road have long passed; the freeway is in almost total collapse, the rail lines similarly broken and incapable of carrying. Even the buildings rising above or visible from the elevated roadway have clearly been long deserted, with some showing signs of being close to joining some of their brethren in collapse. At ground level, streets have largely vanished, becoming overgrown with weeds and grasses or lost under pools and channels where water has naturally taken command.

Exactly what has happened here is open to interpretation. Did the sea levels rise sufficiently to start drowning the town, resulting in its abandonment? Did it suffer the battering force of one or more hurricanes or typhoons so severe, abandonment rather than recovery was seen to be the only sensible option? was it broken by the force of a tsunami which originated across the seas but spent its fury here? The story is yours to decide.

What does appear to be clear is that whatever happened, it occurred long enough ago for Nature engage in the long, slow process of reclamation, and is now a good way along that path. The hardtop of roads and parking lots is being taken over by weeds and grass; vines hang from the sides of shops and the barriers guarding the edge of elevated road sections; a children’s play area is now little more than a rusted hulk, its tone matching the majority of the remaining vehicles scattered throughout – some of which are sprinkled across the freeway as if they were, for whatever reason, deserted in a rush by owners and passengers alike.

Elsewhere the presence of water along some of the depressions caused by former roads is such that little island have had time to be established and freshwater ponds form, offering homes for a range of waterfowl and wildlife. Even the wrecks of vehicles have become so accepted that they are now little more than perches from which heron can watch for signs of passing fish in the waters around them. Bear and beaver are equally at home here now, as are deer, whilst geese find the setting more than acceptable as a stop-over during their long migration flights.

Also scattered throughout the setting are signs that not everyone has fled this place; to the south, for example, someone has created a little homestead for themselves. A wind turbine provides lighting for the simple shack, chickens and goats are being reared, horses looked after (including one that will rez rideable copies of itself, and a canoe is kept in good order, presumably for fishing trips.

This is not the only sign of human habitation. Elsewhere, someone has built a raft while boardwalks and decks and scattered around on and over the waters, and at least one tree appears to have been felled to create a makeshift bridge over a water channel.  But whether this is all the work of those living at the homestead, or whether it speaks to a little community of people holding-out among the ruins is for you to decide. And given there are these signs of habitation, so too can be found places to sit and pass the time, and appreciate the beauty of the setting.

As always with Elvion, there is a tremendous amount to see and appreciate with this build; far more than either my wittering here or meagre images herein can convey. As such, and as always, a visit is highly recommended.

SLurl Details

• Elvion (rated Moderate)

The year is turning and, for those of us in the northern hemisphere autumn is once more starting to show its face. With it comes the popular redressing of many regions in Second Life to provide autumnal (or Fall, if you prefer) colours. One of these is the Homestead region held by Flower Caerndow, which she offers as a public space for people to explore, enjoy and photograph.

Presented as Shades of Autumn, a name which precisely describes the setting, this is a landscape rich in the greens, browns, and golds, and so on associated with the season. However, there is so much more to appreciate here than a single season.

This is a landscape dominated by ruins, the largest of which being a Norman-style keep sitting astride the region’s northern highlands – as one might reasonable expect. With the curtain walls of the inner ward largely intact, the keep carries with it a sense of romance inside and out. Close by, and overlooking the water’s edge, is a single tower, perhaps one a part of larger fortifications which once formed a ring out outer defences for the main castle but now offers a point from which to appreciate it as it now stands – and imagine how it might once have looked.

Away to the south and occupying what is effectively a broad headland, sit the ruins of a chapel. It is far enough away from the castle so as to suggest it always stood outside of the Castle’s walls – not an uncommon state of place for the medieval period – but close enough that it could be protected by the presence of whoever occupied the castle. Together, the castle, tower and chapel are not the only ruins to be found within the region, but they are the most visible for those arriving in the setting.

While it is not enforced, the landing point sits towards the east side of the region, close to the tower ruins and the shallow bay it overlooks. It’s a vantage point offering a good view of the keep as it sits upslope, whilst also close by is a broad pool of water which forms the region’s most unusual natural feature.

Clearly sitting over a natural spring, this pool is open on two sides, allowing the water from it to tumble outwards, dropping by means of little falls and two narrow streams to reach the surrounding sea, thus effectively cutting the land in two. Fortunately, visitors are spared any wet feet thanks to the three bridges spanning the streams, even if two of them are slightly makeshift in nature.

Although the ruins clearly point to the island being occupied during medieval times, they do not mean the Normans were the first to inhabit it; also occupying the slope leading up the keep is a ring of Neolithic standing stones. They indicate there is a much older tale to be told about the island and its past. A further sense of mystery (and fantasy) is added through the presence of crystals and otherworldly-seeming plants (particularly in the keep’s inner ward) and the presence of statues here and there, all of which further add to the sense of romance found within the the keep.

And romance is very much the focus here, alongside that of photography, with any backstory we might care to create while visiting purely a matter for our imaginations. This focus on romance can further be found throughout the setting in the form of the many places visitors can find to side, cuddle and simply pass the time. Some of these are easy to find, others might require a little more in the way of exploration.

This is also an island with a secret; one which is not that hard to find, admittedly. It takes the form of an Experience-based teleport portal, and delivers visitors to a sky island which not only continues the theme it also – in Flower’s own words, offers a memory of the region’s previous iteration, thus connecting the two. Follow the path there to the portal leading back to ground level.

With a richness of beauty and nature, Shades of Nature is an engaging setting to visit, one which is – quite obviously – highly photogenic.  The attention to detail is superb, and the way in which Flower has brought everything together is pretty much perfect. Definitely not one to miss.

SLurl Details

• Shades of Autumn (Enchanted Remnants, rated Moderate)