Places

I haven’t been to Karuna Plaza for a while (I haven’t been around There much for a while, but that’s another story). Today I went there to find some people scattered around as usual but also to find that the infamous “Spam Wall of Karuna” had (almost) disappeared.

This seems to have been achieved by dropping a number of 200m x 200m x 500m “sacred” portazones to prevent members doing the same thing with smaller zones. The things-for-sale area has therefore moved a bit further down towards the beach; the closest large member-built structure to the plaza is now a religious outlet rather than a commercial one.

Is this a good thing? I suppose in an abstract way it is; the area is now free from all those advertisements from members that everyone was steamed up about. The area seems to be a lot quieter as well, but that might not be related.

What irks me is that the member-provided spam has been replaced with There-provided spam, most notably the huge skirt models pictured. Am I happy that the several rounds of badly thought out changes to sign and scroll permissions followed by the more recent raising of document prices by a factor of ten, all in the name of reduced clutter, has made the world of Thereia a safe place for 30ft high advertisements from The Management with flashing neon on them?

Curiously, no.

They enjoy it, you know. No, really, I have it on good authority. Particularly the shrine building part and the presents.

There_Monitor is no longer to be found at Kangaroo Island. She isn’t back at her old haunt on the volcano either; all that there is at that location now is a “Jopy is watching you” sign. My personal theory is that she was scared off by this and has finally run off to join the circus. On the way, she seems to have dropped by the new announcement board to make a post about the system opening late.

For those hankering after the Good Old Days, here is a picture from January showing the old location. The ground looks odd because the image was taken with QuintanaVision enabled. You can see that There_Monitor used to stand with one foot in sector 58 and the other in sector 9.

The cliff houses above the Oasis have gone now, and building has moved instead to the top of the hill, an area I’m calling Folly Ridge. There are some interesting buildings up on the ridge including a Roman folly, one of tempest’s castles and a couple of Moroccan palaces. In the middle is Leran’s Folly Springs portazone, pictured above.

This zone was built with aztec3’s help, and uses his pool object as its central feature. The large green boulders are recent designs by Arepera. The smaller round boulders are seating, and another 5-seater group seating object is concealed within the pool itself. This is a lovely place to just sit and read the newspaper or chat with friends.

Above the door to the tomb in (There) Egypt, an inscription in hieroglyphics caught my eye. Being a suspicious kind of person, I wondered whether this was perhaps not some ancient language, but rather an English phrase transliterated using an ancient alphabet (people do this kind of thing for a laugh all the time, even in children’s books).

Assuming the black dots were word boundaries, a bit of work with an alphabet chart from the Royal Ontario Museum gave me “TUMB UF UR AXPAKT?TEUNS”, or more smoothly “Tomb of Our Expectations”.

I’m not sure whether this is some kind of morbid joke about a project that went wrong, or an uplifting statement about the kind of visual detail and quality There’s art team can produce when appropriate. Either way, the inscription sounds like it is a quotation from somewhere, and if you have any idea where it might originate I’d be interested to hear from you. Google, usually my friend in times of need, came up with only one hit for the phrase in an article by the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Spokane…

It doesn’t make sense to try and document every change in a place like the Oasis village, but over the couple of weeks since my last overview pictures, it is interesting to see what has been stable and what has stayed the same.

Perhaps the most obvious thing that has happened is that the village is now larger, with more builders and more portazones. It is no longer possible to take a picture of the whole area, so I have taken three to form a kind of panorama (unfortunately, normal panorama software doesn’t work very well with There screenshots).

The center of the village has opened up a lot, so that there is now building on both sides of the road (the light-coloured area) that leads to Sirocco Heights to the west. The spaceship you can see straddling the road has since flown off to another part of There. Since these pictures were taken, one of the shop units in the central “L” has also been converted into a bridge to allow easier access from the ruins on the western side. The tent at far left was originally part of the central garden area; it is now off to one side and provides enough seating for large groups of people to talk at one time.

At the eastern end of the central area (right hand end in these pictures) you can see that a brown tower has been erected; this is actually made by two separate builders working together.

Out of the picture to the right (east) are at least another three portazones at the time of writing. The images were taken from the top of Dark_Viper’s tower bar before it was replaced by the Viper Pit Bar.

An avenue of cherry trees is blossoming in the Edo (Shearin) frontierzone on southern Motu Motu. There are benches to sit on under the trees, and a sorihashi bridge and a model of Edo castle to admire at the end of the avenue.

This is marisa9’s frontierzone, and I think all of the objects in the zone are her own design; most are available from auctions. You can’t buy copies of the Edo castle design, but I think that’s right: it’s based on a place in the real world (Edo is the old name for Tokyo), so there should only be one Edo in There.

Dark_Viper’s original bar for the Oasis area (see my earlier post) had to be torn down because he picked up a lower floor by accident while working on a higher one…

I actually prefer the new building: the ground floor and upper floor both have two sets of group seating in the “wings” and there is a bar with a nice view over the desert on the upper floor. My only quibble is that the bar stools are in the form of two 2-person sofas instead of four individual ones, so people at one end of the bar can’t see the chat bubbles of people at the other end.

Dark_Viper built an apartment block/bar complex for the Oasis neighbourhood. Japanese group seating on all levels except the top floor, where the bar is located. The stair is Dark_Viper’s own design, available in auctions.

[Yes, this building has already been replaced by another one…]

Here’s another building style I haven’t seen anywhere else. In this case, the left-hand building is the first to be constructed and was erected by Kobby, who is apparently some kind of builder in the real world. You can see that he favours building something that looks like it is solidly constructed and definitely connected to the ground.

The second cliff house belongs to MupP3t; both houses have fantastic views over Dune Valley and Sirocco.

In the Calderan desert, an oasis has appeared containing (amongst other things) the first flamingo I’ve seen in There with its feet in water…

It is perhaps too much of a simplification to say that member-built architecture has tended to be along the lines of a large portazone, a couple of sky decks and some components from the Roman builder set. However, the oasis is clearly a departure from the old style.

This has been enabled in part by the new “shop” construction objects, which are being used as small accommodation units. Their flexibility, low price and size (they will fit in a medium builder portazone) has allowed a number of different people to come together to build a little spontaneous village around a shared garden. Perhaps half a dozen portazones of different sizes are involved in the current setup.