Category: Reviews

A recent visit took me to a Homestead region called Kaleidoscope, the home of the Monarch Education Project, itself branded as a MORPH / SPARK Project undertaking, with Raven Banrion (RavenStarr) as the core designer. Raven is the name behind a range of projects in Second Life, including Ravenport Reclaimed (which I wrote about in February 2022) and The Pond (I covered in May 2022), and having covered them both, I was keen to take a look at Raven’s latest work.

This is a very different setting compared to the likes of Ravenport and The Pond, offering as it does a literal walk into the world of nymphalidae – butterflies, notably danaus plexippus, the monarch butterfly, and particularly the sub-family of D. p. plexippus, the migratory monarch butterfly found in North America.

This subspecies is amongst the most familiar of North American butterflies, its annual southward late-summer / autumn migration from the northern and central United States and southern Canada to Florida and Mexico, and their reverse spring migration back up into the central and northern United States. The Monarch  was the first butterfly to have its genome sequenced, and the first butterflies to be reared in space, after being carried up to the International Space Station (ISS) as pupae.

Offers as a walk through a natural setting, starting high on a tree-crowned plateau on the south-east of the region. From here a trail runs north along a ridge before turning west before it switch backs its way down from the high ridge by way of others topped by wooden walkways to reach the ground. Along the way are information boards offering those following the trail the opportunity to find out more about the monarch – including the migratory habits of D. p. plexippus, their lifecycle and the growing threat to their continued existence in the United States.

The latter us believed to be in part due to the increasing destruction of milkweed, the monarch’s natural breeding ground in North America and in changes to their overwintering habitats in Mexico. As a result – and given the butterfly’s role in pollination (which is admittedly as great as the role played by bees) – President Barack Obama issued a presidential memorandum entitled Creating a Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators, which led to a national strategy in the United States to promote the health of pollinators in North America – and specifically identified the monarch by name. Even so, in 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature added the migratory monarch butterfly its red list of endangered species.

As well as the information boards, the walk leads visitor past flutters (or kaleidoscopes, if you prefer) of monarch butterflies. These flutter around the trail and board walks, circle trees and flitter in and out of sunbeams. The also hide within the region’s secret location (which can be easily missed – all I’ll say here is waterfalls 🙂 ). Also awaiting discovery are various places where visitors can sit and cuddle / relax and simply enjoy the ambience of the region, or for those who prefer, a walk along the canon floor around which the ridge path runs and descends as it departs the landing point.

Altogether an engaging and informative visit – and don’t miss the opportunities for you to get involved in helping monarch butterflies through the Monarch Joint Venture.

SLurl Details

• Kaleidoscope (Pebble Isle, rated Moderate)

Shawn Shakespeare recently dropped me the LM to LunarVille / Sur-Mer. As the name suggests, this is setting of two parts. joined by a common theme which might be said to just touch on global warming:

Earth circa 2052.

All continents have been submerged by water, most life is extinct. The 1% have expatriated to Mars and the lunar surface. Some survivors have managed to survive and harvest the seas, they have scrapped all vintage and advanced technology.

From Sur-Mer and LunarVille

The Landing Point offers advice on viewing the settings (in short: make sure you have Used Shared Environment active in your viewer) and a choice of teleport destinations The Hangar, Sur-Mer and LunarVille, all of which can be accessed via the teleport disk.

Which you visit first is entirely up to you; I opted to hop to Sur-Mer to start my visit; a place where the last remnants of human civilisation on Earth might be found, huddled along the span of an ancient bridge, surrounded by cold-looking water and a shroud of mist. Visitors arrive on a small deck below and to one side of the bridge, photographs on a panel showing what might have happened to Earth in our future history.

It is a strange place where the bridge runs from a cut-open diesel loco has been converted into a stage show setting watched by a small audience and the bridge runs to a most unusual home. Given that technology both vintage and advanced have been scrapped, there are robots to be found, powered islands hovering over the waters and home to garden or wind turbines – and even a WW2 era Mustang fighter apparently coming into land (complete with its undercarriage arranged to resemble that of a Spitfire), while at the house a line of flying vehicles are swooping in for a landing.

Strange it might be, but the location is genuinely photogenic for avatar and artistic shots, whilst the scattered seating present plenty of opportunities to set and relax.

LunarVille presents an equally intriguing setting. Central to it is the Moonbase where – presumably – some of the top 1% are living. It is certainly a cosy place and comes complete with its own nightclub – The Apollo Lounge. A second dance area is available within a hanger space – although the DJ will need a spacesuit.

Scattered around the rest of this setting are multiple points of interest for explorers – the module containing the teleport, the lunar equivalent of Area 51, a small meadow sitting under a dome where a cow and sheep graze and more, all of which offer further opportunities for photography.

Unusual and curled into fun with a hint of a message, LunarVille / Sur-Mer makes for a light and quirky visit.

SLurl Details

• Sur-Mer and LunarVille (Alpha Atoll, rated Adult)

Occupying a Full private region leverage the Land Capacity bonus, Hashima Island (or more simply, Hashima, given the -shima suffix can mean “island” alongside the more familiar (to western ears) rendaku form of Jima) is the latest regions design by Titus Palmira, Sofie Janic and Megan Prumier, appearing in-world under the “Skrunda” banner.

Like Skrunda-2, which I wrote about in February 2021 and again in November 2021, and which was modelled after the Soviet-era township / base of Skrunda in Latvia, Hashima is modelled after a physical world location which might not be otherwise well known to many: a tiny abandoned island situated some 15 km from the centre of Nagasaki, and one of over 500 uninhabited islands lying within the greater Nagasaki Prefecture.

Known to locals as Gunkanjima – “Warship Island”, more usually referenced as “Battleship Island” – it is a place indelibly linked to Japan’s industrialisation in the late 19th / early 20th centuries, and which has more recently been a focus of some international controversy. It is said that the nickname arose in the 1920’s and was due to the resemblance the silhouette of the island had, when seen from the city, with the the hulk of the inter-war battleship Tosa.

The latter had been been launched just months before Japan signed the Washington Naval Treaty of 2022, which effectively outlawed warships of her intended size and armament. As a result, her hull, sans its big guns and much of its superstructure, lay in Nagasaki harbour for much of 1922 prior to her being towed to the Seto Sea, to be used as a target for the Imperial Japanese Navy whilst testing new gun and torpedo systems.

By the time of the Tosa’s construction, however, Hashima had already been continuously occupied for more than 30 years. It had come to prominence as the Meiji Restoration sought to establish Japan as an economic and military powerhouse under the slogan Enrich the country, strengthen the military from the 1890s onwards, spurring massively accelerated industrial growth within the country. Coal was known to lie beneath the island, so as part of this drive, Mitsubishi purchased the island to exploit the coal reserves beneath and under the surrounding seabed.

Four deep shafts were cut through the island’s rock to reach the undersea coal seams, and by 1916 work was underway to both expand the island through land reclamation and offer better protection for its growing workforce. In particular, this lead to the construction of large sea wall defences and the first large-scale use of concrete in the construction of extensive housing in Japan through the development of the island’s 7-storey tall apartment blocks, designed to give workers and their families better protection from typhoons.

The island’s coal production reached its zenith in the late 1950s, when it was home to over 5,000 inhabitants – which is a lot for an island roughly 16 acres in size. It boasted a school, a playground, swimming pool, cinema, welfare centre, shops, a shrine and a hospital – all packed into a space just 480 metres long and 160 metres across. However, the rapid rise of oil and gas in Japan during the 1960s saw an equally rapid decline in the country’s use of coal. By January 1974 Mitsubishi decided continued mining, even at a reduced scale, was no longer viable on the island, and so closed down the pits and within three months had completed removed all inhabitants and all salvageable equipment, leaving the buildings and streets to nature.

For their interpretation of the island, Sofie and Megan offer a setting post the April 1974 island clearance, with nature in a state of rapid take-over – although there are still signs of some activity: steam rises from one area of plant, smoke periodically belches from the finger of a chimney stack, and a small fresh fish market is open on the pier where tourists would normally make their landing. How much of the build is based on the actual Hashima and how much has been pulled from the creator’s imaginations is unclear.

The apartment blockhouses clustered to one end of the island offer a reasonable facsimile, but some liberties appear to have been taken in the placement of features such as the mine shafts (one of which rather imaginatively leads to a hidden cafeteria). Similarly, while the island’s shrine is represented, the “stairway to hell” which climbed up to it has been replaced by a more roundabout route to reach it.

Not that these differences from the actual island diminish the build in any way; there are plenty of references about Hashima to be found on the web – I would certainly suggest this interactive tour – so those with an interest can research the original with ease; and the build itself is atmospheric enough to give more than a good flavour of the original and encourage one to learn more about its history.

In 2002, Mitsubishi relinquished their ownership of the island, with Nagasaki city now holding jurisdiction over it. It has been the subject of limited tours 2009 onwards, which is also the year in which the current controversy concerning the island first arose. It was in 2009 that Japan first applied to UNESCO for Hashima and 22 other sites within the country to be awarded World Heritage Site status for their roles in the nation’s development. This led to objections from both South Korea and China on the grounds that from the 1930s through to the end of the Asia–Pacific War, Korean and Chinese nationals were forcibly moved to the island and made to work the mines.

South Korea maintained its objections through until 2015, when Japan agreed to admit the use of forced labour at Hashima and other locations during the war, and to establish a full record of this at visitor centres related to the UNSECO sites. However, immediately following UNESCO granting World Heritage status to the sites, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida effectively walked back the agreement, and UNESCO has remained critical of Japan for failing to acknowledge the full history of the island, with the Japanese government refusing to adhere to the agreement as recently at December 2022.

In the meantime, and while it might not be widely known in terms of its role in the industrialisation of Japan, Hashima is likely known to film goers around the world as the fictitious “deserted island off the coast of Macau” which served as one of the setting for the 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, in 2015. It was also indirectly referenced in a 2017 South Korean war film, The Battleship Island, which told the fictional story of an attempt by Korean labourers imprisoned on the island to make their escape.

Rich in historical context, and a springboard for explorations both in-world and across the web to capture the story of its namesake, Hashima Island is an engaging place to visit.

SLurl Details

• Hashima Island (Misty, rated Moderate)