Here's what we announced at the Diversionarium meeting today:


New Sim FAQ 0.2

So here's the deal.  We have about 12,500 prims up for rental on a Class 5 island SIM.  When we have deposits from people covering 80% of that, or 10,000 prims, we'll buy the SIM and start terraforming. 

Please feel free to forward or cross-post this to anyone looking for a new, mature, future-friendly home - or who might be interested in designing and building with us!

I'll post a commitment-o-meter here within the next day or so, so you all can keep tabs on the status.  As of tonight, we have unpaid commitments for 4666 prims, so we're off and running! We expect to be funded at well over 5,000 prims within a few days, so our goal is close!

I'm *really* looking forward to having you as neighbors in a gorgeous new community!

*Much* more to come!



If you have any questions at all, IM me or email me at sophrosyne.stenvaag at gmail dot com!

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...

Wow, it's been a while since I blogged!  Last week was *really* 10 pounds of week in a 5 pound sack!  Every week's had a theme, and last week's was "friends and lovers," as nox and I reached a new level of of seriousness and steadiness, I spent happy playtime with my Sylphic friendskateamdahl and erisfallon, and "collided" like whoa with the mysterious Third Sylph, Andr3 Spear, and painted the town with my best bud Zada Zenovka.

(isn't that icon an awesome pic?! That's Andr3, Eris, Kate and me, from left to right, in the Beachfront Teahouse on my land)

But what I want to document is the build of my second house, the Loft. For everything I'm building I'm giving myself a design challenge around something in particular. For the Loft, I had two elements I wanted to integrate into a house design: one was a monumental painting by Diox Kohime, of a Japanese woman against a red wall. The other was my Chinese furniture set, in red, with lots of circular elements in the designs.

So what I thought of was one broad horizontal wall, 10X20, and slender Roman arches in Chinese red, supporting a glass-block barrel vault. I thought how much trouble I'd had with seams between 10x10 prims in the the Housemod, and decided to turn that bug into a feature, by putting columns supporting arches between each wall element.  The result is a sort of Chinese butterfly house, with my bed on a free-floating loft platform, and lots and lots of glass.

I like the result, and it's proven an attractive and comfortable place for my friends to come and spend time, which is a success beyond my dreams. Where it falls short, though, is in a major design goal of mine overall - integration into the environment. My land at Koh Terutao isn' the usual flat nothing, but thanks to developer/terraformer TertiumQuid Becloud, is a unique Thai-influenced environment. The Loft sticks out from it like whoa.

So, once I finish the main design elements on my property - the dance floor, which has been a design nightmare, and the shrine to the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin, I'm going to start on another house design. The challenges for this one will be a technical one of figuring out how to build traditional Thai architectural elements, and to design something integrated into the landscape. I want to build some guest suites for friends, so this build will be a good way to do that.

I'm also going to do an Aerie - my private retreat and adult play space :)

Yeah, I'm having fun!

My project of turning the freebie BD Archer House into a custom home is done, at last!

Well, except for the foyer, which I have *no clue* how to decorate. But I'll bring nox_pinion over in the next day or so, and turn my lovely artistic genius loose in the room, and that'll be that!

Here's the Before and After: the BD Archer House freshly rezzed from the box, and the Frankenhouse:










And here's what I did in Housemod II:

 

More photos here!

This is the first step in my project of learning how to build by customizing the living daylights out of my freebie starter house.

I began with the BSD Archer House that you probably saw on Help Island - that's where I got my copy. On Day 1 of the project, it looked like this:



And, I really wanted a separate workshop/studio: having my drafting table and pose stand in the bedroom, making me feel guilty for not working, wasn't helping my sleep! :)

So, here's what I did in Housemod I:

• Painted the ceiling sky blue, to get rid of that "under a concrete slab" feeling: just selected the house, clicked Edit in the pie menu, then checked "Select Texture" and clicked to bullseye the ceiling, then changed the color under "Edit/Texture tab/Textures ."


• Replaced the cheapo stonework with a nice pale blue stone: same tools.


• Stripped up the linoleum on the patio, leaving the bare concrete pad: same tools.


• Put worn copper sheeting around the interior wall separating the living room and bedroom: same tools.


• Replaced two of the glass walls in the bedroom with stucco, and painted them: same, but after choosing the textures, I had to delete the script for the window blinds that changes the transparency, and set the transparency to 0.
  

So here's where we are on Sunday of Week I:


Here's what's up for Housemod II:

• Putting a spiral staircase in the far corner of the bedroom. This is going to involve turning my 1-prim roof into a 4-prim, so I can cut a hole where I want it in the far right corner, then using Virtual Builders Studio to put in the staircase.
  

• Enclosing the space above the bedroom in glass windows and ceiling: I'll rez a copy of the house, unlink the prims, select the three glass walls and roof, link those, move them ontop of my house and link them to the structure. This will give me an enclosed dojo space upstairs.

• Enclosing the space above the living room for my design studio. This will be trickier: the stone walls extend above the roofline, so I can't just rez copies of all the downstairs prims, I don't think - I think I'll have to edit those stone walls down to flush, then copy.
  

• Making proper 3-D matted picture frames for nox_pinion's artwork: using her paintings as a base prim, overlaying a flat box prim with canvas texture with a hole widened to mat size. Do an inner and outer mat, then drop all that into a hollowed-out box that will be the frame. Texturing the edges of the frame will be the interesting and tricky part!

After Housemod II, I'm going to move the whole house over to the edge of my property, to clear a space for building my first original design!

My land problem miraculously solved itself this morning!  My strange (now ex-) neighbor bought my extra parcel. I went out and asked him/her if they wanted to buy mine, but no answer. But since his/her group has been on a buying binge, I figured it was worth a shot, and bought the parcels I've been looking at. And sure enough, mine sold right away!

So I'm all moved, onto just under 3 parcels. Prim limit, bye bye! Woot!

Needless to say, I'm spending the day working at my drafting table in my new place.

Plus, I got a good morning hug from nox!

If I can only stay awake till I see her tonight! *g*

I bought land!  And a home! And I've moved in!

It was just amazing luck - I read my friends page last night and saw that masteralida had a property for sale, for a good price, plus the house. After about two hours of flying around the neighborhood checking *everything* out twenty times (hey, it's hard work being compulsive!), I put in an offer.

And just *happened* to catch Alida on line this morning at a time I'm *never* around. Somebody else was interested, and I might have lost out if I hadn't picked up that IM when I'm usually out doing my taolu.

I'm so happy I could explode!

And, I was up for hours last night thinking about architecture and interior design: I've got some ideas for how I can apply the fashion style I'm building to my house as well. But that's for months from now - right now I still have a coffee table sticking out of the middle of my couch, so I've got a *lot* to learn!

But, I've learned what a "prim limit" is, sigh! I can't even furnish beyond - well, even up to - the bare minimum. I've got to learn what to do about that.

Then, while I was out looking for furniture, I got this incredibly cool smart metal egg that transforms into a motorbike, an offroad vehicle, hovercraft, boat and helicopter. And it''s got an incredible sound system. It's called an Elemental from the !Meta Group. I wiped out the bike into some poor guy walking out of a store, and managed to stall the helicopter and eject, so I think I need to add flying lessons on top of everything else!  :P

I'll do a photo post soon of the new place and me being sooo badass on my new bike!  :P

I just lost out on a land auction.

I found a *nice* 512m parcel: a residential-only neighborhood with a little park nearby with a gazebo, and a *really* interesting building to explore. It would've been great to get started in, and it was only $3,000. 

Till I started to bid. I dropped out at $10, 400, which is *way* more than I really could afford, but - I'm more impulsive than I like to admit, *and* it was really nice, *and* I want to stop sleeping on a park bench!

But I lost out. :-( 

Had a good cry, and now I'm curled up on my park bench for the night.

*sob!*

ETA: Oh, and I got macked on by a levitating blue teddy bear. Eew!

And, I just landmarked The Prim Limit and Club Republik. I wanted to stay at both places! At The Prim Limit, the bartender said hi right away, and somebody called out to me (nicely!) at the club. But I had to go - I was sneaking time as it was.  I wish I could tell the bartender my sob story, meet some people and go dancing. But nooo, not till Monday. Poor me! :P

I want a home NOW!  I'm spending the nights in a little dell somewhere. It's pretty, but it's still homelessness.

So I want to buy land and build as soon as I can - which might be a week or more, with time and money being what they are. But at least I can plan!

Here's what I want:

• My style is "Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan:" spare and open, rough materials, lots of light.
• I want a living room big enough for parties, and a kitchen to match. Not that I cook! But the caterers need room to set up in.  :P
• A bedroom. And isn't it a good thing my closet won't actually have to *contain* my wardrobe!
• A study, with a glass-and steel desk for my tower computer and big widescreen monitor. A couch and a comfy chair, for thinking naps. *g*  And a drafting table with a white board and corkboard.
  
• Outside, zen-garden style. A sandy area big enough to do my katas in, that I can rake into interesting patterns afterwards. And a hot tub big enough for 4-6. And some patio furniture, for days when it's nice enough to work outside.
  

And I do mean work. I'm serious about being self-supporting. It'll probably take a year or more to get there, but I think I can make it as a designer or an architect.

I've got an emerging style I can only find bits and pieces of: it's sort of traditional Chinese/exercise wear/goth  - like what an emo 22nd Century ninja would wear.  :-)  There's *got* to be a market for that, right? *g*  And I can get to the point where I'm blending the same influences in architecture and interior design.

So I'm going to be spending a lot of time at that drafting table, learning and practicing!  Then open up a shop and consultancy...

Soph's got big plans!

First step? Sleeping *indoors*!