Cica is one of my favourite SecondLife artists. She is also very kind and very productive. Funday is her latest installation, and I went to get a break from my inventory sorting.

Funday is cows and cats and chickens and clicking everything and dancing. There are monster-big frogs and a dragon in a lake, But it’s a lot of fun.

In the spring of this year, I read on Bryn Oh’s blog that she would cast the dancer in bronze. I love bronze, and I have long been contemplating getting some bronze art, so I decided to put my name down for a copy. It has just arrived, and it’s beautiful.

A man gets out of bed and walk through a grey world – and past some scary characters to a woman with a sheep.

Sapphire Mirror Lake (by Haveit Neox)
On the first warm day of Spring every year, the people at Sapphire Mirror Lake reconstruct an Iron Age skeleton of what we may call today a mythical beast: the centaur. It is said the secrets of a powerful lost technology are locked in their bones. This year, they have unearthed a 20 meter high gargantuan, but will it speak? This is the Arts and Entertainment sim of Fantasy Faire 2016, with a central stage for a variety of first-rate performances, and two galleries featuring Fantasy themed art from the collections of some of the best photographers in Second Life. The story above sets the mood for the builds of the sim, both above and below sea level. Please dive in!

The beautiful Sapphire Mirror Lake made me long for the old design on Binemist. The magic of a world above the surface and a completely different looking world beneath. That is pure magic to me.

I really enjoyed taking part in this year’s community celebration, but not so much the cake exploding and it all being over. It was a swell party indeed.

Here are my impressions

My exhibit

I am not a creator, I’m a designer, so I have asked a list of creators if I could use their creations in my exhibit, and I have been met by such lovely response. Some of the creators I asked look forward to seeing my design, others offered to help and donate more stuff, and one creator/artist even helped me out when my Event Assistant wanted a real creator on my list of building assistant. I am overwhelmed by the kindness and helpfulness of all the creators.

SL12B has been such a rewarding experience for me, and it hasn’t even opened yet!

It was terrible news for the woman, as she had grown so fond of her hobby, and she didn’t really know what to do. She knew the estate needed to make money, but she didn’t know anyone she could ask to become her neighbours. So what should she do. She thought long and hard, and eventually decided to go it alone and get a full island all by herself.

The woman was not rich, and she couldn’t afford to buy an island from LindenLab® (the makers of her virtual world), so she made a deal with the estate owner. He had a homestead that was becoming available, and I think he felt he owned the woman so he let her have the homestead for a very good rate. The woman was inspired and eager to get started, and she had lots of ideas.

The woman had an old church on her parcel and she wanted that church to be a feature on the new island. She had  an idea of a Nordic beach and a central feature should be that church.

The church was placed on a mountain with a bridge crossing a gorge from another mountain. There was 2 ways to climb the mountains. One was to walk up the path from the forest on the West coast and take the last steps, another way was to climb the step spiral staircase towering up from the sandy beach to the East.

To the South the woman made a vast grass plane. She had just visited her SecondLife® friend in Austria and she had seen the Alpine grass meadows in the mountains there, and she had loved it so much, she wanted to recreate it virtually on her land.

In the forest was a little farm with lots of animals – a clearing in the woods provided a pen for the sheep and goats and pigs, while the chicken roamed the grass in front of the farm house.

As soon as the design was finished – or as close as the woman could make it to finished – she opened up the Gates to the community. Lots of other people like herself came to visit her land – her work – and she was happy every time she found images from her Binemist.

The seasons changed on Binemist. First to autumn and later to winter. The woman had fun changing the colours especially in the forest to brown and orange

And as winter came to the woman’s native RL land, so she changed the season again on Binemist. A lot of fun was had in the winter landscape by her friends who came to visit.

Eventually the woman grew tired of all the colourless snow and ice, and her creative juices were flowing once again. She had been a big fan of the island Embryo – an ever changing water sim with patches of dry land and lots of trees and flowers, so after winter she started transforming her island to a vast waterscape. She couldn’t bring herself to take the church down, so that stayed on it’s mountain with the spiral staircase to access it. The lighthouse stayed too.

A big water space is a great place to put out large pieces of virtual art and the woman found a perfect spot for a Haveit Neox piece called Ship of fools.

At the church you could find Bryn Oh’s White Balloon

In the tree tunnel on the water you would find Ladder Chairs by Cherry Manga and WISH YOU A BUBBLING 2013 by Rose Borchovski and other fish.

Under water tortoises swam free over a myriads of Cica Ghost grass and Cherry Manga’s Light Birds. When the woman’s creative juices started flowing again, she thought she would give the tortoises more room and expand this little corner of her “island”.

The woman finally let go of the church and lowered the ground to 20 meters under the surface on most of the island, and thus creating the land that is Binemist today.

Under the surface the woman created a hidden world that one only discovers when one wonders down the steps from the beach house. The woman is very pleased with the way Binemist looks on her 2nd anniversary.

It is my dream as the woman in this story to carry on Binemist. It may keep it’s current shape, or it may change again. Only time will tell.

* A Last Note: All the snapshots I’ve used for this post are taken by visitors to Binemist and shared on the Binemist Flickr Group.

The installation at LEA 18, Cocytus: The 9th Circle of Hell, is Frankx Lefavre’s attempt to capture the mood of Dante’s Inferno. I have no idea if he succeed as I haven’t read any Dante, but the SIM is amazing. It was a perfect back-drop for Gora’s and my catch-up this morning.

Click to view slideshow.