A Short History of the Aerie
I just more-or-less finished work on my fourth house, which is also the fourth version of my skybox complex, the Aerie. So, here's a little tour!

The Aerie started the week after I moved to Koh Terutao - I was living in a very small house, The Loft, and I needed a play space. So I just tossed up my favorite freebie, the BSD Archer House, put in my bed and bondage furniture, and had something ready for my first date with ali_hermes  :



With a few minor modifications, it looked like this, for version 1:


Version 2 just expanded it a bit: outdoor bath (which you can see in my journal header), playroom and bedroom. I never lived in the Aerie: I hung out in The Loft, and would always leave the Aerie to go back there to sleep.



After I replaced The Loft with Amethyst Defarge's relatively high-prim Pagoda Bath House , I broke down the playroom and rebuilt the Aerie as a featureless gray box with one room, my play-bedroom:



Beautiful as the Pagoda Bath House was (and much as I miss it now), it was never home. I think I spent the night there twice in the six weeks of its existence. I came to live more and more in the Aerie.

But, one morning I awoke to find three ass-ugly skyboxes outside - and when you live in a glass house, that's a real distraction. Here, I'd put in a couple airstrips and a helipad on the roof of Aerie 3, and you can see the visual clutter:



That day, I got frustrated and went to Michelle Morphet's Metamorph Sky Shop and started buying stuff to solve my problems. I got the 50x50 flying mountain for a base, and the 100 meter skybox shield capsule. After a day of frantic building, I grounded the gray box of Aerie 3 on my new moonbase. I don't use doors, so I had to cut a hole in the wall of the Aerie to get in and out :P




Here's the finished exterior. There's room for more structures off the central tower - a photo studio, a guest suite, whatever. I still have some landscaping to do in the park area: right now there's just a tentacle monster pond, and I'd like to put in a full alien park.  The freefloating capsule is my bath. The radar tower on the airstrip is Galatea's build, the Air Lounge, a "2001"-ish quiet place to think and work. The lower structure off the main tower is my dungeon/playroom, the upper one the Aerie Suite, my sole home now. I've abandoned the ground almost entirely, leaving only my teahouse as a refuge:



Here's the Aerie Suite: I still have some art to put up, but it's basically complete. You can't tell from this angle, but there's a 10x20 meter dance floor behind the seating area. The transparent gray ramp leads up to my loft bedroom, in the second shot:



Here's the dungeon/playroom, again still waiting on a bit more artwork:



And here's an exterior view of the whole Aerie complex: the VR Suite is at the bottom, then the Dancefloor, then the capsule holding the Aerie lunar base:



When our Big Utopian Project comes to fruition, I'll come down from the sky :)  Till then, the Aerie's my home...