Yesterday's Garden

The Second Life chess club I'd been running for about half a year ended yesterday due to the break-up of my two partners, Ada and Rose. I couldn't afford to keep it running by myself or with just one of the other partners--I was already only paying seven dollars a month while they were each paying around twenty. I'll miss the place--not just playing chess but just hanging out, watching others play, helping new players get into the game. We had weekly parties and I liked coming up with playlists of music to stream in the club based on themes.

I was also allowed to redesign the club totally a couple weeks ago, so before taking it all apart yesterday I took a bunch of screenshots.

This was a little two prim cat I found at a shop called SEU. It mewed when clicked. Prims are any simple 3D object in Second Life and most objects are made up of multiple prims. Sims and rented spaces of sims, like Chess Garden, have limits on how many prims they can support--Chess Garden's was something like 650 or so.

Larger pictures are at my live journal.

I tried to stay prim conscious and found a lot of prims called "sculpted prims" or "sculpties" which are objects somehow made by uploading their dimensions to Second Life as texture files. I'm still pretty fuzzy on how that works. In this picture, I made the stone platforms and the grass base myself using free seamless textures I found by googling. The trees are by Fiddler's Green--they're each 2 or 3 prims. The bench is by Golden Oriole, the candles are by House of Avro and the pond and cobblestone path is by Tobias Novi.

The grass that sticks up is from a shop called Happy Mood. Each patch of grass is one prim and they have to be placed by hand.

We had one Go board in addition to the chess boards, though I've personally never been able to get into Go. The stones just don't have enough personality for me. The tent, rug, cushions, brazier, and stone base in this picture are from The Curious Prim.

I made these hedge knights by retexturing full permission sculpted prims available on the web based Second Life Marketplace in the builder's tools section and I took the pots and trunks from hedge plants contained in the modular garden kit at Risk City. I made the stone walls myself, except the smaller walls which Ada made and were the only things left from the old Chess Garden design. The vine creepers on the walls I got from Balderdash and the pieces of Roman ruins scattered throughout the garden are by Metamorph.

I wanted the big chess set in an area with a slightly different design from the rest of the garden. The chairs are from Roawenwood and the huge tree barely visible in the background--though it was clearly visible from everywhere in the garden when you were there--is from Happy Mood and was only seven prims despite its size.

This area was for practice and teaching. The balloon swing is from Risk City, the bamboo chair is from Golden Oriole, the rug is from Kismet, and the vases and fountain are from The Curious Prim.

These pictures are simple prims I made myself with textures I got through googling. On the left is a pinup by Gil Elvgren, on the right is a photo of Ann Miller along with two illustrations by John Tenniel from Through the Looking Glass.

Twitter Sonnet #411

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