Tag: Creative Fantasies

Banyan Tree

Stranglers

Normal trees grow like, you know, normal: they have a root system that runs below the surface, a trunk that goes up to the sky, and branches that spread throughout. Of course they have also twigs and leaves that fall off regularly and make people mad. But trees do that just for fun. That’s a risky behavior, though, because there’s some really mad people out there that go like crazy about it, and then go and grab a chainsaw and massacre the poor things that can’t run for their lives.

Most trees look so peaceful though, unmovable by the stress of daily life. Solace, that’s another word I can easily associate with trees. Even shelter. Most of these words entail a positive meaning, an association that may explain why some wise groups worship them. But as in any generous clan, some of them carry a bad reputation of some sort. For instance, members of the Ficus “family” are sometimes portrayed as sociopaths… that, or they are extremely affectionate, so much so that they embrace other trees so profoundly that they can hug them to death. For obvious reasons, they are called strangler figs. That’s an undeserved reputation, though, because they don’t climb up on other trees purposefully and then start to grow up and down and everywhere. Blame it on the birdies, because they eat the fig fruits, deposit the seeds on another tree, if that’s the case (don’t ask me to describe how they do that, I’m sure you know they don’t go about collecting figs in baskets), and then the seeds have no other choice but to germinate and start their life cycles wherever they are. If it happens to be on another tree, well you can guess the roots will snake down the trunk of the host tree, and then deep to the ground, or they can hang from branches so Tarzan and his ape mates can swing from tree to tree like bungee jumping, et cetera.

Big trees with aerial root systems like those of the banyan tree are quite common throughout the tropics. They fascinate temperate tourists that quickly go into a what-the-fuck-mode when they see one for the first time. And for a good reason because when these trees are old, they are wide and imposing, a real sight to behold. But in SL, you can’t have a banyan tree on a 512 sq.m. plot, or hardly on a 1024 sq.m., as I had to do for these pictures (shrinking the tree significantly as a matter of fact). They need some space to bloom as designed. The recently released Banyan tree from 3D Trees {slurl} in particular is a prime, but not primy, example. I’d suggest at least a 4096 sq.m. lot to  better place this 18-prim baby.

The first Ficus I owned in SL was Organica’s {slurl} Ficus benjamina. Despite being quite an elegant tree, I rarely used it because it is 61 prims, including 4 for the shadow. The root system was mainly simulated by the trunk texture, with a few of them sculpted around the base and one up. This tree was later replaced (though it’s still available) by…

Ficus 1 (redux), that lowered the prim count to 24, and eliminated the shadow. Even this one was put to sleep with the coming of…

Ficus 2, that became the lowest prim Ficus tree in that store, at only 6. Another pack, Ficus 3 (not shown), included two gigantic behemoths that could only be used in a rightful way on 1/4 sim parcels –at best– and up.

With the advent of mesh, Organica introduced Ficus 4 (above), which, from my point of view, was a remake of Ficus 2. This one gave way to a more ample version with more elaborate and independent aerial roots in Ficus 5. I took this last shot (below) in Organica’s sim since I don’t own a copy of this tree myself.

It may seem this is the story of Organica’s Ficus family line. It’s not my fault that their trees are so well made and attractive. There are some other strangler trees out there. The following two stand out as best (imho).

Buddhabeats‘ Bodhi Tree 2012 {slurl} is another example of a Banyan tree, but with a  less robust appearance. Its name points to the Sacred fig species (Ficus religiosa), which is tightly associated with Buddhist folklore.

The last in line is Julia Hathor’s Exotic Banyan tree. I almost skip this one because no matter what viewer or drawing distance I use –among other settings– I never fail to crash when entering Creative Fantasy {slurl}. I was able to get there for this shot using the latest version of Niran’s Viewer (I tried four crashing viewers in all). At 41 prims, it stands as the second most primy Ficus tree in this quick survey, but will surely be very welcome by Julia’s fans among gardening lovers.

Bitter-sweet birthday bash and other sheds

This week, Linden Lab is celebrating Second Life’s 8th anniversary. Eight years, in technological terms, is an era. I’ve been around SL for half that time, and I can assure you, it still feels like 2007. Personally, I think that “shortage” of accomplishments, other than keeping the world going “round” and people logging in, is certainly not enough cause for celebration. For a company that once had offices around the RL world, that generated some decent millions of  US dollars in revenue, and that used to have a small army of employees, very little has been done to improve the user-base experience. At least I would have expected, by 2011, to have a “crash-proof” viewer, yet every time I try the official SL viewer (now version 2) the virtual world collapses as much as 4 years ago. Even the experimental releases of third party viewers tend to be more stable than the LL one.

For the last 4 years (and probably since the beginning), most, if not all, of the visual improvements seen around are the result of user generated content. Two of the most immediate examples are avatar skins and fashion. A quick search inworld or in the SL marketplace will show that all those amazing and quite realistic skins and tailorings responsible for today’s avatars’ glamorous looks are produced by residents, while the so called avatar mesh, which is LL’s part of the “deal”, has never (if ever) seen an update.

Exactly the day the SL8B party began, I started to experience a series of server and database issues reminiscent of 2007. I guess it’s because every time you go through a birthday cycle, you tend to look back to analyse where you are now. So maybe it’s LL’s way of acting “human”. As a result, I still have no idea if my inventory has lost more than a few objects. One I did witnessed to turn to virtual dust is the shed opening this post.

During the 4th Annual Home & Garden Expo in mid-May, I bought two nice buildings created by Ulaa Coronet, owner of Funky Junk. One was the Primrose Weathered Greenhouse (not shown) and the other one was the Lil Country Shed (pictured above). Until now, I didn’t have the time to do anything with any of them, but a couple of days ago I decided to rez the little shed in my plot. I was bored and wanted to have fun landscaping something out of an otherwise empty lot. So I dragged the Lil Country Shed box out of my inventory and dropped it on the ground. Immediately I got one of those error messages that say something like “Cannot rez, object not in database”, and puff: the box was gone. I waited a few minutes to see if it returned to my Lost and Found folder, used the relog trick, and even cleaned up the cache, but the shed was definitely gone.

It wasn’t the first time something like that happened to me of course; in 4 years it has been quite common, and usually when using the SL official viewer (damn you, piece of sh…). Thus, I proceeded to contact Ulaa Coronet to verify if she had deleted the shed out of SL (how naive of me, trying to deny it was LL’s fault). She replied almost instantly, said she had it in her store, and TPed me to the place. I told her what had happened, and logged in Second Life’s website to check my transaction history to give her my proof of purchase. As if eating my shed wasn’t enough, I found out LL only keeps transaction records for 30 days (or they don’t give you access to older data, as they used to do in the past). Thirty days, can you believe it? Thirty days (rolls eyes). Gone was my little shed, gone was my transaction history, and gone was my chance to get back my purchase, sighs.

Fortunately, Ms. Coronet was more than kind enough to send me a new copy of the Lil Country Shed, even when I couldn’t show her proper proof of my original purchase. I guess that’s another evidence that, even at customers service, independent content creators are better than the Lab at taking care of their clientele.

So, to finish this post, again this pretty Lil Country Shed is from Funky Junk [slurl]. There are a lot of other nice buildings, from barns, to greenhouses, to skyboxes in the store, all of them at more than reasonable prices.

Trees are the Ferox Faber I already blogged, while the Sunsent climbing roses are from Creative Fantasies [slurl]. The rowboat, mailbox and street lamp are from Dirty Rat [slurl], while the logs are from Napoliy [slurl]. Stepping stones and lotuses are from Organica [slurl], and finally the wild loosestrife (not very obvious in the background) are from Heart Gardens [slurl].

A honorable mention goes to this pretty Outhouse Potting Shed by Tatty Soup [slurl]. I acquired it some time ago, but didn’t had the chance to blog before. It’s so nice looking that it deserves its own picture, don’t you think? (winks).

If there is something we should celebrate in this 8th SL birthday, it’s all the users that have spent who knows how many hours of their real lives to make what Second Life is today.