the pathless heights

Over the last two weekends much time has been given over to setting up and running an OpenSim region as a stand alone on my Mac computer. The idea is to use it as a personal sandbox so that others do not have the pain of viewing my truly clumsy first attempts at building and texturing.

Setting this up has not been straightforward but more by luck than judgement the region has made it on to my screen with its resident 'Master Avatar', who remained a gray misty gas-ball for over a week whilst I struggled my way through the forums and finally learnt the trick that she has to wear not only a 'new' skin, 'new' eyes and a 'new' shape but also 'new' hair after which Kazaam! - the default Ruth avatar is forced to appear.

The steep learning curve was amply rewarded by viewing the land spread as ordained across the new wastes of sim as I loaded my first terrain file. Coupled with reading a passage in Freya Stark's The Southern Gates of Arabia this experience has set me dreaming of worlds in creation.

No grimmer coast can be imagined. The mountains are sharp - naked apparently as when they hissed in black coils from the darkness of earth, lonely and hard as death, and with a derelict and twisted beauty. Their cliff faces press one behind the other towards the sea, whose luminous moving waves seemed to repeat in gentler and more living form the chaos of their desolate chasms and ridges.

I know how to do it now, and what is this? Southie Allen offering a landscape competition for residents of Blues Islands? Guys you ain't seen nothing yet! Stand back and watch the Twisted Mountains rise...

But the pretty spangles must go.

'Our Mansab has issued an order that spangles, sequins, cowrie shells and all such ornaments are to be abolished from the wardrobes of Hureidha. Consternation fills every harim. The ladies with sighs are snipping from their new dresses, just finished for the feast, the stars they wear so gracefully in the middle of their backs, swaying as they walk. And the sadness is that we are responsible for the tragedy. It is the sight of our dowdy clothes that inspires dress reform in the heart of the Mansab.' Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia.

These pretty star spangles are from a sweet star sculpt available at Treasured Cove Sculpts.

Shepherdess

Jean-François Millet, Shepherdess, 1860s, originally uploaded by Gatochy.

'Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a drawing of J.F.Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girl stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for the closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks, out of sight.' Alice Meynell, Solitude.

The colour of the evening sky here has the luminescence of late Autumn. As the sun sets it creates an iris of blues, silvery white and purples. Freya Stark writes of young Arabian shepherdesses who wear tall conical hats. On the evening skyline she watches them make their way homeward, trailing their long skirts in the dust.