Just a brief note to express a heartfelt Thank You to everyone who responded to my post concerning the need to take a hiatus, be it via a comment left with that post or via a reply / DM on social media and / or in-world IM / messages passed through mutual SL friends. I’m sorry I could not respond to everyone in a more timely or direct manner, but I do want you all to know that your comments have meant and continue to mean a lot to me, both in terms of the love and encouragement offered, and in the way I’ve felt strengthened by them since getting home and being able to read them all ♥.
I’m happy to say the surgical work went really well – thanks entirely to the dedicated surgical and recovery team who are handling my case. Post-op care was equally superb, allowing my stay in hospital to be at the shorter end of the anticipated time-frame. There’s still a way to go for me over the next few weeks (including any adjuvant therapy which may be required), but I am today starting into my second week of Enhanced Recovery at home (my first full week back at home overall), and I’m hoping it will allow me to start spending a little time each day at my computer & maybe in-world.
Thank you again to everyone for your continued support and love – hope to see at least some of you in-world very soon!
A short note to let readers know I will be taking a hiatus from blogging about Second Life, etc., from October 8th, 2025 in order to address a health issue. During this time I’ll also be absent from Second Life.
I cannot say for sure when I’ll be resuming writing, but I do plan on doing so and getting back in-world as soon as is feasible. Until then, all the best to friends and readers.
Isla Myvatn, my Second Norway home, now completely converted to represent the remnants of a former fortification, and now forming a series of semi-wild courtyard gardens, with the exception of the pool house and boat moorings (bottom of picture) and the little cliff-edge summer house. The ruins are elevated above the pool house so it does not interfere with their sense of age.
Two of the things I love doing in Second Life are landscaping and building / kitbashing; I have in the past droned on about the commercially available houses I’ve purchased and then adapted for personal use (as well as some of my personal prim-based builds modelled after real and film structures). The former have been written in the hope of encouraging others to give kitbashing ago (with a couple of additional articles being written to help with this; however, regulars have probably noticed that over the last year-ish, I’ve not said much on the home front.
Well, buckle-up (or run away!), because here I go again 😀 .
As it used to be: A copy of Marcthur Goosson’s NO Cottage Bizar converted into a comfortable house opening onto the main courtyard of the original “castle ruins” which utilised some of Marcthur’s Ruined Wall kits
The major reason for not writing is because in Marcthur Goosson’s NO Cottage Bizar, I found what – for me – has been the perfect design from which to create an ideal home. I did provide a articles about a couple of my projects to adapt it for use as both a house and also to contain a swimming pool; but since those first went out, I’ve continued to refine and improve upon ideas, creating What I like to think of as a cosy home – I’ve just not wanted to bore people by banging on about all the updates and changes!
Some of this work has included a move to a larger island within Second Norway, which has allowed me to play with ideas for extended gardens and yet more ruins, making further use of Marcthur’s ruined Wall kits (all five of which can be purchased as a single full perm pack as well as individual Copy / Mod items – see his Marketplace store for more). Whilst this hasn’t been written about, some of the on-going work has appeared in my Primfeed gallery.
With the removal of one set of internal walls and a re-panelling of others (and using the structure’s tower stairs to reach the upper floor rather than the metal stairways), the NO Cottage Bizar lends itself to providing a large living room area with the remaining lower floor room making an excellent kitchen + dining space.
With the latter, I’ll freely admit to being inspired to play around with designs using Marcthur’s kits thanks to Lilly Blackwood and her SL and RL partner William Winchester, who have used seveal of the wall kits to great effect within their Winchester Harbor region design which I visited in August 2024, and their work did more than a little to prompt me to look at my own use a little more creatively – so thank you, Lily and William for the inspiration!
The thing I like about the NO Cottage is the fact it so easily lends itself to so much in the way of kitbashing: internal walls and stairways can easily be removed to open-out interior spaces; new internal walls can be linked into the design; the external courtyard is easily converted into an additional room, if required – it is just and absolute joy to work with and tweak. However, throughout all the recent work, an itch I’ve suffered on-and-off for a fair number of years now decided to make itself felt again.
I re-worked the swimming pool in the pool house version of the NO Copy Bizar Cottage earlier in the year, and more recently added a mirror to the far wall, together with a stairway to reach the upper gardens and summer house.
As a Premium account holder, I’ve often availed myself of the Linden Homes perk provided to such account by LL. I’ve both reviewed themes as they’ve been released and I’ve shared ideas on how to customise them to offer more unique and personal interiors (notably with the Houseboat theme, which has long been my favourite). However, I’ve never really lived in any of the modern Linden Homes for any real length of time; rather, I’ve simply furnished them and then used them as a bolt-hole into which I could dive in order to avoid the Ravenous Restart Beast of Agni. Yet I’ve often wondered how I might somehow more comfortably link island home and Linden Home in a way that lets me make more use of both.
Although it took a while to register (because I’m not exactly the fastest train on the tracks), the answer has been staring me in a face for about as long as I’ve been going through my on / off phases in thinking about the issue. In short: why not simply extend the local experience I have on the home island for various purposes (such as maintaining privacy from folk randomly teleporting in), and use it to include the Linden Home in a manner that makes passing between the two feel as natural as possible?
One of the summer houses on the island – this one is used with the re-vamped “castle ruins” and utilises one section of Cory Edo’s Yara Treehouse. Cory is another go-to building designer for me, because many of her designs are extremely flexible in terms of modding or kitbashing them
One of the key benefits in finding a means of linking the Linden Home with the island home as seamlessly as possible meant I could potentially remove the (much loved) No Cottage Bizar conversion and extend the ruins and gardens to present a place of quiet retreat, with my Linden Home becoming the “house” for this setting. Admittedly, this did mean moving out of my Linden Houseboat (as it just didn’t sit well with the rst of my ideas), but this was offset by that fact that the Linden Home theme best suited to matching the rest of my design ideas was that of the Log Homes – and these happen to be a style I’ve always liked but never actually held; this therefore seemed to be the perfect opportunity to try them on for size.
So, for the last couple of weeks, and using the aforementioned kits from Marcthur, plus plants and landscaping kits from some of my preferred creators – such as Cube Republic, Alex Bader, Sasaya Kayo, and Krystali Rabeni – I’ve been once more re-doing the grounds of the island home to extend the ruins and gardens to occupy the space previously taken by the NO Cottage house; I left the pool house and boat moorings in place because I still want to make use of the waters in Second Norway (and beyond) for sailing / boating / flying, and because – well, where else am I going to “own” property with a large private swimming that come maintenance free?
One of the “garden courtyards” that replaced the NO Cottage Bizar house. Maybe at one time it was a hall or something. Now it is occupied by some of the statues from CioTToLiNa Xue and ArtemisGreece I’ve collected or have been gifted over the years
Not that the House has gone forever; I’m a great believer in rezzing systems, keeping a number available in my inventory toolbox. One of these, Seedro Lowey’s Magic Rezzer, is ideal for swapping between scenes quickly (well, once you’re sorted through want is to go where and as a part of which scene!). This has allowed me to take the No Cottage house and its immediate surroundings – lawns, summer house, plants, trees – and create a scene, and then do the same with ne expanded ruins and their flora and immediate surroundings. Thus, with a click on the rezzer and then on the dialogue box, I can happily switch between the two, and without affecting the rest of the build.
In doing so, I’ve also been able to maintain additional individually between the two settings through the simply use of different summer houses, etc. For these I turned to Cory Edo, one of my go-to building designers, because her structures are generally very kitbashable / moddable. In particular, her Moosehead Lake Log Cabin formed the basis for a summer house to go with the No Cottage house layout, whilst one of the two structures from her Yara Treehouse became the basis for a small “hideaway” outside of the ruins, complete with a little “balcony” from where passing boats can be observed.
One of the garden paths winding around the island to connect the ruins
As to the “integration” of the Linden Home, that was simply a case of installing a doorway in one of the archways within the ruins. Behind it, I placed a TP-on-collision-scripted prim using the local Experience to direct Group members to the Linden Home location. A photo of my Log Home taken at the appropriate angle and in the right ratio means that when the door is opened, it seems to give you a view through the arch to the Linden Home on the “other side” of the wall; then when you “step through” the arch, you arrive in the Linden Home parcel on the “other side” of the doorway.
Using an identical door set into an identical wall on the Linden Home parcel does the same in reverse – the door opens to reveal the island gardens beyond, and “stepping through” the archway teleport you to them. This is not a particularly new trick with portals, but it has achieved what I want, and to further assist in the sensation that both island and Linden Home are connected, I’ve used the same EEP 24-hour Day Cycle in both (obviously set to UK time!), thus maintaining the same overall ambience between the two.
The teleport portal leading to my Linden Home, allowing me to “connect” it with the island, making them sort-of extensions to one another
All that’s needed now is for me to add a further script to the TP prims so that the images they show switch between daylight and night-time to (roughly) match the EEP settings, and I’ll be done 🙂 . However, that’s an “if / maybe” project for another day!
Whether or not this approach to help “conjoin” or “integrate” a Linden Home was other property you may hold is of any use to you is obviously up to you; all I can say is, it keeps my little mind happy 🙂 . If it does appeal, and it’s something you hadn’t considered / would like to try – feel free to run with it; as noted, the basic idea isn’t in any way original to me and has been used in various forms for years – so just take it and run with it as you please!
And with that, I’ll shut up and leave you in peace!
My Linden Log home showing the door of the portal to the island off to the left of the house, within the old walls (it’s closed in the picture because I felt it looked odd seeing it open to show the gardens of the home island through it, whilst over the wall above it, my neighbour’s house is clearly visible!) Each end of the teleport is oriented so people arrive as if they’ve simply opened either door and walked through
My SL island home, as rendered on the PBR Materials viewer
So it’s another year and another pair of birthdays, physical and virtual – although I admit as the time passes, I get more and more envious of my avatar’s youth; she remains eternally young, trim and fit. Me? While I admit to still being vain enough to work out and maintain something of a trim figure (home rowing machines and exercise mats are both a godsend and a means of home torture), I have to admit that each year I find the back complaining a little more, the feet and knees getting more resentful when I go for walks or spend 20 minutes on the rowing machine…
However, be that as it may, December 5th saw my avatar reach 17 years of age. I actually had to be reminded of this by Johann Neddings (who always sends rezday greetings, bless him!), as I’d totally missed the fact for myself. I guess that as with the physical world, the older you get the harder it is to mark the passing birthdays with any enthusiasm!
2023 has been an interesting year; events in the physical world have – and continue – to mean that my ability to spend time in-world has become choppy. This is somewhat reflected in the number and frequency of posts appearing in this blog decreasing through the year as I’m just not had time to even begin to keep on top of things in Second Life. Sadly, this is likely to continue through the first part of 2024, largely as a result of one set of contractors messing a project up so badly, another project had to be postponed and cannot now commence until the end of January / start of February 2024. However, on the positive side, the project to switch to solar for the bulk of the house’s electricity requirements did go ahead without fuss or bother (although very nearly derailed by the aforementioned mess-up), and in the last 2 months alone has seen a reliance on the national grid for electricity drop by some 40%.
Anyway, what time I have had in-world has largely been devoted to various personal projects and following the ongoing updates to the platform – particularly that of PBR Materials and the Lab’s work to adopt the Khronos glTF 2.0 specification. With the first phase of the PBR Materials work now live across the grid (see: A simple introduction to PBR materials, reflection probes & glTF in Second Life), I’m looking forward to getting the home island updated with reflection probes. I’m also eagerly awaiting the availability of the PBR Materials terrain work Cosmic Linden is working on, to see what that allows.
Another view of the island home, with two copies of the No Cottage Bazar used to form the “pool house” (lower left) ad “main house” (behind it, upper left) overlooking the old “castle courtyard”, the two linked via a small walled inner courtyard and be dint of swapping out windows on the upper level of the “pool house” for a door
In terms of the home island, Second Norway remains my “home” estate, but time being what it has been, I’ve not had the ability to fiddle-fart around with trying out new island designs and kitbashing houses as frequently as I’ve been known to do in the past. There are certainly a lot of house designs I’ve encountered whilst wandering SL and reporting on public regions, but even if I’d had the time to start playing with ideas, I’m not sure I would; a good deal of available effort this year has been in putting together a home design based on what remains one of my favourite models to be offered with Second Life: Marcthur Goosson’s NO Cottage Bizar, which I first obtained in January and initially kitbashed into – of all things – a home swimming pool and lounge area (see The NO Cottage Bizar in Second Life).
Since then, that build has gone through a couple of iterations, but remains very much in use, becoming the nucleus for a scratch-build home design using renovated ruins as a theme before I finally opted to simply bring two copies of the model together to form a single extended home. Although me being me does mean the layout has had a couple of updates since I originally blogged about it (notably swapping the positions of the “house” and the “swimming pool” with one another).
Under full sail
Due to the lack of time, sailing & boating – a particular pastime I enjoy in SL – has also taken a back seat in 2023, whilst flying has been almost totally absent my SL. However, I would like to again thank Spartaco Zemenis and Analyse Dean for their individual generosity in supplying me with versions of the ’86 Domino cruiser and Skûtsje Barge respectively. I’ve enjoyed taken both out on the water (even if the ’86 Domino is by far the largest vessel I’ve operated in SL!) and equally enjoyed modding them to suit my needs.
The other thing I’ve continued to enjoy / appreciate is Second Life is the art exhibitions and installations I’ve been privileged to be invited to view. I haven’t always been able to make every invite – and certainly not every exhibit or installation; but the fact that my opinion is actively sought and artists and gallery owners take the time to write to me either via the blog comments or directly after I have written a review, is both greatly appreciated and genuinely humbling. Thank you to all of you for this – it genuinely keeps me engaged in SL and wanting to see (and often learn about) more art and expressionism in SL.
And, of course, there are all the marvellous public builds across the grid I’ve been invited to visit. Again, apologies to those who have sent an invite I’ve been unable to follow-up on for one reason or another; as noted already, time has often and quite genuinely often been against me. However, the fact that folk do take the time to offer a personal invitation is deeply appreciated, and I do try to respond whenever I can by paying a visit, even if time later conspires to prevent me from offering a writing-up.
A final but by no means lesser thank you to everyone who does continue to read this blog, comment on articles and who suggest ideas for articles and / or pass on news and pointers; all of you genuinely make these pages what they are as much as I (only with fewer typos! – I’m still exceedingly lazy in checking my own pieces after a day of checking other people’s written work; my apologies again for that).
Each time my rezday rolls around, I tend to wonder about the portion of my life spent in Second Life, and whether it has been a meaningful, worthwhile effort, and whether or not I should continue to devote time to it. But the flipside to this is just where else is it possible to see such a rich and diverse gathering of creativity, companionship and artistic outreach and expression from the comfort of an armchair and in the company of your own cats (yes, both of mine will actually sit on my lap / on the desk and watch SL on the screen in fascination – and occasionally try to paw something so it will stop moving!)? As long as all of that remains available, it’s kind-of hard to imagine stopping altogether.
Besides, next year my avatar will be old enough to vote! 😀
So I’m sweet sixteen! Or at least my avatar is – would that it applied to me once more…
When I reached 15 continuous years in SL I really had little to say (although I managed to say it in around 900 words!), as not that much had changed with me personally over the course of 2021 – and SL itself had remained fairly well balanced.
2022 has been slightly different – there have been new features and capabilities deployed to Second Life, with LL working to try to increase the platform’s appeal and engaging with users in the development of new features. True, some of the planned work hasn’t quite come to fruition and so won’t be popping up until 2023 – but one project in particular should over time very much change how SL looks for the better.
On the “personal” SL front, things have changed a little. While blogging takes up a lot of my time – thank you to everyone who follows and supports and helps me along that journey – the second half of the year has allowed me to spend a lot more time enjoying the company of those closest to me (notably Imp, who has given me endless reasons to smile and laugh – there’s a reason I’ve given her that nickname!). That said, things in the physical world have been turned upside down on a number of occasions through the year, resulting in blogging efforts taking a back seat here and there.
But that said, I’m still nicely settled within Second Norway (and still recommend it to anyone looking for land they’ve like to rent and establish a home within), although I’ve not actually done as much sailing, boating or flying as I’d like. Regulars may have noticed (and been breathing a sigh of relief at the fact) that I’ve not been boring people with write-ups of the latest changes in house and / or island design. Not that I’ve stopped; I’ve simply reverted to building things from scratch, rather than using any rebuilds as an opportunity to review a particular commercially available house designs – although admittedly, the current house was heavily inspired by Cory Edo’s Jura Waterfront Cottage, a genuinely stunning design which (unfortunately) didn’t quite marry up to my kitbashing needs, so I opted to build from scratch whilst keeping the look of that design in mind.
One thing I had considered doing this year was to take time out to look at some of the other worlds I’ve visited in the past. However, the truth of the matter is, there is nothing out there (outside of OpenSim) which offers the broad creative richness and freedoms as Second Life; not just in terms of content creation, but in how we expression our personalities, how we interact, how we have fun, what we can do to encourage and support others (in-world and out-world), and so on. Thus, I just haven’t felt the incentive to do so. As I said on occasion of my 15th rezday, I really don’t see anything like Second Life emerging from the haze of verbiage people call “the metaverse” any time soon.
In this regard, I am far more excited – even as a comparative lay person – by the new features and capabilities Linden Lab is working on to further enhance SL. I’ve particularly appreciated the performance boosts we’ve seen in the viewer thanks to the Performance improvements work, and have appreciated the efforts to bring users directly into the fold in developing things like support for glTF 2.0-compliant PBR materials / reflections probes (which lays the foundations for even greater glTF compliance in the future, making content creation for Second Life a lot more predictable when using external tools and workflows), and the Puppetry Project work, both for the capabilities it can bring to a range of SL activities and for the foundations it lays for potential future enhancements to the platform.
Other than that, I really don’t have too much to say on the occasion of my rezday – other than maybe one day I’ll get a card / cake from Linden Lab like others do on their rezday *sigh* – but for now I’ll shut up and return this blog to its usual schedule! 🙂 .
Yup fifteen years as Inara Pey; I’m pretty sure that in SL terms, that officially make me a OAP – where can I claim my pension? 🙂 .
Usually I try to write something on the occasion my rezday, but this year I really don’t have a lot more to say than I noted in 2020, I continue to log in (pretty much daily), I’m still blogging – and appreciative of all who read my ramblings and take the time to offer comments / feedback. I’m still enjoying kitbashing, building, landscaping, exploring et al. So really, not that much has changed in the last year :).
Sadly, unlike many others this year, I don’t have any stats from Linden Lab that I can share about my on-line times, etc., (not that I set much stock by such things as they always seem to have an air of elitism about them (or maybe that’s me just being crabby 🙂 ). That said, were I to approximate the amount of time I spend in SL, the answer would likely be “too much!”, as I don’t think there has been a day in the last 36-ish months (at least!) when I haven’t logged-in.
I’m not sure if that reveals something about me or about Second Life – or both. Admittedly, a lot of the time when I am logged-in, I’m actually parked somewhere, either blogging about it or something else, or actually off away dealing with physical world matters (like stuff that pays the bills, given I work from home), but at least my avatar can impersonate an answer machine for catching incoming IMs!
I’ve certainly not got a lot to reflect on SL-wise or personally; things have chugged along on both front pretty much “as is” throughout the year. Platform-wise, as the work on “bedding in” SL at AWS draws to some kind of initial completion, there will hopefully be a lot more to play with and ponder in 2022, but we’ll see.
On the personal side, I did make the decision early-ish in the year (with thanks to Vinyl for giving me little nudges!) to re-engage in some of the things I was involved in years ago, and this has been fun. I’m still happily settled in Second Norway (with my Linden home as a useful bolt hole from region restarts and the like!); after some 15 months since moving, I have absolutely no hesitation the estate and Vanity and her team to anyone looking for a island parcel with plenty of open water access for sailing / boating / flying, but which maintains its own sense of tranquillity by being off the more regular boating / sailing routes.
One of the things I’m still enjoying is playing with the home island – kitbashing house models, scratching building (in prims) and landscaping
Back in 2016, I pondered on whether a decade of virtual living was really enough, and that perhaps it was time to consider stepping away. Truth be told, I still have such thoughts from time-to-time; I think any of us who have been engaged in SL for an extended length of time has similar thoughts. Yet, here I am, half as much again beyond that point, still enjoying the many forms of freedom of expression SL offers all of us.
In this regard, when we discuss SL, much is made of its “secret sauce”, with people pointing at this or that. To be honest, I don’t believe there is a single “secret sauce”; rather it is – like many recipes – made up of multiple ingredients, of which one of the core items is that freedom of expression (which in some technical respects is also SL’s Achilles Heel). With all the hype and yack-yack around “the metaverse” we’ve seen this year, this freedom we enjoy in SL – be it to create, to generate an income, to role-play, to use SL as an artistic outlet, to socialise (and find romance) – is what really already separates SL from anything we might see spawned by the likes of Meta, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, et all.
This doesn’t mean I think those “big players” won’t succeed – likely they’ll all end up with there own walled gardens of various sizes. Rather, I mean that I just don’t see any of them being remotely interested in offering such broad-based freedoms of expression we have with SL. Thus, and while such freedoms may not be something the vast majority are looking for in this age of instant gratification, I tend to feel that there enough people with a similar outlook as those of us who remain engaged in SL year-on-year such that if LL can find a balanced means to market SL and make initial engagement smoother for those who are out there who can appreciate SL’s potential, then there is no reason why this walled garden cannot continue to flourish in its own modest corner of the digital landscape for the enjoyment of users and the pockets of investors, unnoticed by those now rushing to put their own stamp of authority in “the metaverse”.
Obviously, whether or not I’m right in thinking this will be revealed in time. For now, I think I’ll just got on with getting the start of my sixteenth year in SL kick-started!
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 