No, it’s not the name of another tedious reality show… but one of the joys of Second Life.
When I first bought land in SL, a nice hillside facing the rising sun, I put a little house up, based on an 18th century Cornish pump-house. That area eventually became surrounded by noisy casinos and commercial establishments, so I bought some land I noticed was available one day on an island near my friend Lily’s place.
Once there, I put up a house rather like a big version of what I had before. It was very economical on prims, which is nice (especially as I used up such a lot of them on the Nautilus floating up above) but a touch boxy and it also had a bunch of space I didn’t really use very much. So I decided to look for something a bit more interesting.
I suppose it’s something to do with having that enormous airship overhead, but I’ve been going through a kind of Victorian period in SL, and spending a lot of time hanging out in Caledon, which is really good fun – Victorian with some excellent steam-driven and early electrical tech – the genre known as steampunk. I picked up a few Victorian outfits such as the one shown here (click on the thumbnail for a better view) and, dare I say, several neo-Goth ones from another part of the world too.
Thus I decided to look around and see what offerings were available on the housing front. I was sorely tempted by an enormous castle with towers on all four corners and an astronomical dome and telescope on top, all driven by various aetheric machinery, but I decided against it – the neighbours might have objected (see below).
Eventually I went for a rather elegant mansion on two and a bit storeys, Britannia House (and, because of its name as much as anything, I put a flag on top), shown at the top of the page from the front (ocean side). It’s actually quite a lot smaller than my old place in terms of footprint, but it is rather cosy. There are two big rooms on the South end of the house (to the left as you look from the front), where I have a living room downstairs and bedroom upstairs, while at the other end are two long rooms: the lower one I have set up as a recording studio with surround speakers, and upstairs I call the ballroom, with a Musical Alchemy piano and most of my dance poseball collection.
A friend of mine came over and said she thought I would have had a rather more Goth-inspired place than this. Hmmm. It had more than crossed my mind. I thought the majority of Gothic places I had seen, however, were a bit too big, and a bit too dark. (I mean, I’m into magick but only the nice kind.) However… I had seen a very impressive Sorceror’s Tower – 6 stories high and just 21 prims (rather important at this point), got one and put it on the property round the back of the house.
Hmmm. Impressive, all right, with incredible views and astonishingly detailed. But I wasn’t sure. I decided to sleep on it and came back the next day. Looking at it again, it was too much. It was evidently also too much for the neighbours, who had already put up a storey-high wall of pseudo-foliage to stop them seeing my previous house. Now the wall was three storeys high and ugly as hell. The tower had to go. I de-rezzed it and wrote to the owner of my neighbours’ place and apologised, hoping she’d take down the wall. A little later her friend IM’d me to ask about the tower and I told her that it had gone. And next morning not just the extra storeys but all the wall of foliage next door had gone. And I now have a nice relationship with next door (next door the other way is already a friend).
I have a lot more room around the house now – the house itself occupies more prims but has a smaller footprint than the last one, mainly I presume because of the staircases – so I hunted all over the place for a big, impressive, ancient tree to put in the back yard where the tower had been. I’d seen the one I wanted and it came from Relic – based on a remarkable island modelled in extraordinary detail – and after a great deal of hunting around found, and bought, one. Here is a view of the rear of the house showing it.
It had taken me a couple of days to get it all fixed up – taking the contents of the old house back into inventory, deleting the house and erecting a new one, and then re-rezzing and repositioning the contents… but it’s very nice as you can see, and will do for the time being – unless that astronomer’s castle keeps sticking in my mind…
