Tag: Heart’s Garden Center

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.

AAPPAA Style

With so many visits to Asian-themed sims lately, the acquisition of a couple of Ryusho Ort’s builds (see some of his works in two previous posts, [1] and [2]), and a 4096 sq.m. empty lot, it was a matter of time –a very short time–before I turn the prims to face the Orient. It may sound harsh (I hope not), but all I knew from Asian cultures –except for what everybody else knows– were chow mein and sushi, mmm. I’m exaggerating a little bit, as usual; the point is, aside from admiring Asian architecture and landscaping exclusively from pictures taken by others, I have never thought of recreating an Oriental garden in SL. Yet, better late than never, or as it sounds more “poetic” in Spanish: Nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena.

I had already started building the first version of my Asian garden when I had to contact Ryusho Ort to help me solve a minor problem with one of his build packs. It was that week when the world thought the SL marketplace would collapse judging by the number of complains I heard from others and from first hand experience. I wanted to surround most of the available space with a wall, and a couple of gates, and the Himalayan Tower, and a couple of houses, and a pavilion, and… you get the idea: too much. So Ryusho told me that, to secure Asian status, I had to win the approval of the Academy for the Appreciation and Preservation of the Purity of Asian Architecture (AAPPAA for short).

I got some advice from the master, and tried a second attempt. Though it was somewhat “better” than the first one, I still wasn’t convinced it was worth keeping. So I did a little research on –mostly– Japanese, Chinese and Korean gardening and architecture, went back to the plot and moved around a few things, deleted some others, set out the greenies, and voilà: got the AAPPAA’s seal of approval, woot!

Credits after the break, but before that I have to thank Mr. Ryusho Ort for his advices and inspection during the building process. All the architectural elements you see in these pictures are from some of  his industrious creations, which you can get from his store in the now functioning Marketplace. I modded them for this project, as I usually do, so if you don’t see the exact building in the store, you could either ask me what packs are these based on, contact Mr. Ort, or buy at will. The water lily arrangement in the picture above is from Tiki Tattoo [slurl], while the sword reed is from Heart’s Garden Center [slurl], and the Japanese lantern from Edo Daikoku [slurl].

The cherry blossom in the foreground is from mosq lab [slurl], shrubs from KTG [slurl], flagstones from Hydro Homes [slurl], shrine from Edo Daikoku, bamboo chime from Aja [slurl], and the rest of the garden items from Organica Specialty Trees [slurl].

Bamboo from KTG too, rocks from Forest Floor [slurl], nodate-gasa (the red umbrella) from [GB] [slurl], wood bench from Old World [slurl], another bamboo chime from Aura Wind Chimes [slurl], and the blue azisai  (hortensia) from Forest Feast [slurl]. From left to right, the bonsai are from KTG (you can win one from a lucky chair if you visit the store), Organica (not originally a bonsai, but a fully grown bristlecone pine), Artic Greenhouse [slurl], and Organica again (the last two).

Water lily leaves from alirium Gardens [slurl], water lily flowers from New Trails [slurl], willow from 19Motorcycle [slurl], and cherry blossom from Forest Floor again.

Rocks and ferns from Organica, another bamboo from Sono [slurl], blue maidens from Heart, and some more shrubs from Garden of Dreams [slurl].

Quite a picture intensive post, isn’t it? Thank me I didn’t post the 46 of them, lol.

This is a view from above of Nowhere. The parcel also has some nice environmental sounds from Acoustic Alchemy [slurl], as well as a blue heron and a white crane from Animania [slurl]. Not seen in any of the pictures, there is also some grass from Shade Fantasy Outfitters [slurl].

Thanks for staying till the end of the long post.  🙂

Backyard

Last weekend I decided to cut my land in half. I wasn’t seeing any use in having a large plot (I may have been in an out-of-my-mind mental lapse), not even a precious waterfront corner lot. And so I proceeded to empty Nowhere,  and to move to Next to Nowhere that little decaying scene I appreciated the most. Hence, I transformed my backyard into what you see in these pictures.

It isn’t exactly what it was in Nowhere, but I do like the end result. Plants and other items from: Alirium Gardens, New Trails, Organica,  Garden of Dreams, KIDD Creation, Tobias Novi, Ferox Faber, Forest Feast, Artic Greenhouse, Heart, Botanical, Wretched Dollies, Rustica, Virtual Nature, Napoliy, and Forest Floor.