Yamato Memorial

Following a link from a recent blog post by the amazingly talented Eve Kazan (the header image on my site is by her), I came to the Yamato Memorial by Masakado.

This extraordinarily detailed 1:1 model remembers the heaviest and most powerful warship built by Japan during the Second World War.  The ship is moored quietly between a hilled museum area and an airplane shop, where Masakado's equally precise Japanese WWII aircraft can be bought.

At over 4,000 prims, it's one of the most detailed builds I've ever seen in Second Life.  It's a staggering achievement.  Masakado was nearby when I visited and I IMed him, hoping to learn if he had a personal connection to the vessel, but I think he was AFK.

The potential for virtual worlds for teaching history is enormous.  We can recreate any era, any place, any building, any machine.  I cannot begin to imagine the hours of research and construction that must have gone into the Yamato, but whatever it was, it was worth it.  This is an awesome, beautiful, frightening work.

The Yamato was sunk by American bombers in April 1945, taking with it over 3,000 of its crew.

State of confusion

I've seen Denise Rowlands's State of Confusion sim pop up in a couple of blogs recently and decided I'd go take a look with my camera, now that I've blown the dust off it.

The sim is located next to Crash Boat, which is, in fact, where your teleport touches you down, just outside an old railway station created by Denise.  Follow the road across the track (exercising due caution, obviously) and eventually you find yourself on a narrow wooden jetty which leads you across the sim border and onto the first of the islets.  Take a moment to appreciate the couple of food stalls (by The Biscuit) on the sea front first, though.  Actually, if you're on a diet, don't.

The three islets which comprise the sim are open, sandy isles spotted with palm trees.  Each has a single feature: on the first the ruins of a house by Kendra Zaurak; on the second an incredibly detailed rise of Alex Bader's plants and moss-covered logs and one of those source-less waterfalls that ever-so slightly irritates me (my bad, entirely); on the third a gorgeous beach bar by Eduardos Ducatillon.

As always with such sims, it's the space between these various gorgeous 'sets' that turns it from a showroom into a place.  Whilst the second islet's feature is so detailed that it feels just a little incongruous there to me, the overall balance between detail and space is well managed.  There's some very subtle details too, like the rock pools and the seaweed waterlines.

Ultimately, however, it was the wooden bridge connecting the second and third islets that I spent the most time on in this lonely, yet lovely, sim.  There's just something about a bridge, a view and solitude that's very hard to top.

The Trace

I've been feeling a little gorged on self-promotion lately, plus it's been a while since I wrote about actually doing something in SL. I've been toying with the idea recently of doing a little inworld photography, and then I saw this post by Ziki Questi and just had to make a visit to 'The Trace', a sim by Kylie Jaxxon.

This pastel landscape of open sands and grasses and meadow flowers is like stepping straight into a watercolour painting. The soundscape of distant waves and seagulls calling is almost superfluous as you pick your way between the tiny pools of water left in the sand; turn down the volume and you would still hear them in your head.

You might even hear the squelch  of your feet and the slap of the grasses against your shins. The Trace is the sort of place in real life that you'd turn up to wearing sensible shoes but end up submitting to the urge to go barefoot, whatever the weather.

Here and there, The Trace is punctuated by wooden buildings. There are a few small homes, a potting shed, an open-air school with apples bobbing in a pale of water at the door.  Toward the water's edge, the homes are raised on stilts.  A path runs through floodland grasses to a lighthouse (press the big red button by the door - who can resist those - to sound the fog horn).

Halfway up the hill, you encounter the island's only stone building, a small, domed room with a mosaic floor and ceiling painted with angels. Outside, four sets of tables and chairs encircle a wood burner. The only thing missing is an espresso machine.

Dotted around the sim, a few other visitors make their own personal explorations, each making a physical connection to the landscape in their own personal way, such as standing still in quiet water.

With all this talk of SL being in its final couple of years (even Wagner James Au seems to think now this might be likely), it is easy to forget that places like this exist, and that they are completely perfect. There was nothing even approaching the quality of this when I joined SL... and now there is.

And, without a doubt, I couldn't have picked a more easy place to take pictures in.