Hello strangers and others

As Chestnut posted, she and I are busy building together, and she was sweet enough to offer me post rights here to talk about the build, and the fun we're having building together. I don't know how often I'll get around to blogging. Time, and energy, are rare commodities, but I'll try and sneak in here from time to time and see what I can add.

If you've never built in Second Life, its really an interesting experience. If you've built, but never built with someone you're missing a lot. Early on in exploring Second Life, I had the eye opening experience of helping a friend put together the little pre-fab freebie house she'd laid hands on. Suddenly, we were floating over her house, chatting about how things lined up and when it looked right, and why. I was amazed at how easy and natural it was for two of us, separated by hundreds of miles to work on a single project.

Fast forward a little over a year. Ches and I get the chance to start building on a lightly landscaped void sim. Void, or open space sims, are full sized sims, with 1/4 the prim count. The nature of the void sim implies a light hand on the overall build. The sim was lightly landscaped, and amazingly terraformed when we started looking at it.

In moments, it became a shared vision. Can we build our house there? In the little gap between the two peaks? Oh? Ok. Maybe the gap needs to be a little wider.. We dragged a few things over from my old build on an adjacent sim and began to explore.

Stone ruins in the saddle between the hills? Build it. Place it. Yuck. Blocks off too much of the view. Do we want a house, or social gathering place, which we can call home. Rez some chairs, and chat about it.

How about a deck arching out over the ocean. Oh, that's nice. Now, how to make it look light. Wood? no. Crystal. Maybe. With complete trust, ideas flow up and back. sometimes without even words. Building is a special pleasure. Building with someone who can look at your work, reach out, and move a prim out of your way, because they can see what you are thinking, is even more pleasurable. Building with someone who is perfectly happy to reach out and tweak, until its perfect, and knows that it's OK, because the build is shared is spectacular.

Over the past two weeks, our sense of the space has evolved. Several elements showed up, and have remained constant. The deck, the little balconies. A set of stepping stones, leading one around the core of the sim, has slowly become part of the vision.

The rest, we've explored. bit by bit. A possible path for a waterfall and stream have been laid out. One stream has been rejected, as too big and visually jarring. Like several other cool elements which don't fit in where we are building at the moment, it will likely show up, someplace else on the sim. The stepping stones keep slowly evolving. Some are discarded, others added, until the pattern pleases both of us.

We have several ideas in motion. How to display some of our art. How to blend the water feature into the space. How to play with lighting and setting off the space to make it clearly a separate, but organic part of the sim. The fun part, is that we will find the answer to each of these together, slowly sharing thoughts until vision merges, and we know what we want to do.

I look forward to sharing what we discover with you here. Its a voyage of discovery, and we hope you'll have almost as much fun as we do.

~ Zha