A Little Cruise Before Downtime

I spent the early hours here on the East Coast cruising around the Northern Mainland Continent. No, I'm talking about driving ya sickies... It was a lot of fun and nice break from the coding I was trying to finish before the grid went down, but I am lazy and decided I'd never get it done in time, why not just have some fun.

Doing my casual forum browse I can across a post by Shiryu Musashi that indicated he sold cars through his Musashi Motorsports location. I own a bunch and love my Dominus Shadow, but always like to see what's new and spend my money. Oh I love spendin' da money.

Post Detour: While trying to remember who I bought the car from I had to use my browser's history and jumped around a bunch of the pages I finished knowing there was a signature with the car location. In one of the topics it seems some ResMod says the Linden's support making it an offense in the Forums to link to a closed thread. What is that? You can still find the thread by clicking through pages. You can still find it through search. So it's like a library carrying "Mein Kampf", listing it in the card catalog, but kicking people out for talking about it? Gimme an break. This interruption brought to you by Tangents 'R Us.

So it's nice to see that Shiryu's cars are gear driven and I grab one of the convertibles, a nice shiny red one! Filing away the notecard I head back to my parcel in Suisun where I have built a road up the mountain that is linked to the Linden road thanks to Guy Linden's efforts. Why didn't I start driving where I was? No build area... oh well, no biggie, I like to see the shiny car on my crap textured road. I rez it, hop in, and take my first sim border drop into Buckler with a smile. The car rights itself fine (through the entire trip I fell through the road and required edit mode only once, at a four-sim border with a T-intersection on the road).

I stayed in first gear for nearly the whole trip, 128m draw distance, max sliders, everything looked great, th only time I even saw the grey LOD was whe I crossed into the Ice Sims. There was a lot to look at, and at that speed it was easy to stop and hop out to view the many displays on the roadsides. I saw Crucial's shop and the giant Promenade across the street (no parking, d'oh!). There was a beautiful build I bookmarked across from Cristiano's ANOmotions shop (first time I've seen one outside the awesome Midnight City), I believe it was Little Rebel's Designs, a white columned build with a slo rotatingsign out front. I of course had to see many copies of the 16m plot three sign bandit (a nice enough person but man do I hate those). I wish I had more time to stop and see everything, but I came across another repeating vendor selling some interesting cars so I figured I'd try something for once: I took a landmark from the dispenser, opened the map, closed it and kept the marker on my diplay as I vowed to drive to my destination, over 6500m away.

At this point I was near the center of the Northern Continent... well, maybe not the center, north of the Ice Area at least, and my desination was to the South East. There would be a lot of turns to make the trip, and far more ground to cover than the straight line the map marker indicated, but I thought this would be fun, and it was. On the way I witnessed four different Linden road designs. I had seen two of them before, but two were new to me: one was dark asphalt with small metal edge barriers rather than the solid berm in front of my land in Suisun. Another was a three lane variation with a center striped section sometimes holding trees at intersections. Actually there may have been more variations as when I crossed a variety of bridges I think sometimes there were change-ups.

I drove by a number of great SLCC displays (really looking forward to that, have my hotel reservation, now I just need the airline tickets and finish my magazine for the convention), houses, park land, a great little diner build with some awesome cars parked out front (click-edited them so I could shop some more later). I drove up and down mountains (occasionally needing to shift to second gear to get over minor bumps). I hopped out to buy a neat looking hover bike. I passed rotating signs, particle signs, abandoned vehicles on the road (including a wheelchair!), listened to my Air Supply Greatest Hits (and others, I will not be typecast!)...

Post Detour 2: This is one of the things I'm gonna cover in my magazine, but it bears mentioning here. Yes, we can run our external music apps. Yes, they save bandwidth. Yes, parcel owners set media streams. BUT... What if we could attach a virtual MP3 player/radio in-world. It would have a set of radio stations (on my parcels I stream an '80s station I love) including Linden ones, one preset for the parcel stream, and another that could load a local .m3u playlist. Just a little more immersion for yours truly. Pweety pwease.

Suffice it to say I barely scratched the surface of the wonders in Second Life so many have created. I've seen great full sim builds in my time, and awesome small ones. Here I just explored. For two hours. Two hours driving along the public road. I want the sim border crossing bug fixed, but I also want to see more exits and places to park so I can check out stores and parks and then get back in and keep driving. I loved the chance to by happenstance see something that I would never have thought to search for.

In the end I arrived at my destination, bought a few more cars, when my trusty vehicle was returned to my lost and found. Seems the car lot owner had auto-return on in their parking garage. I took it as a sign and called it quits for the morning.

The point, besides wasting some hard drive space and your time if you slogged through this drivel? Just wanted to let everyone to take a little time to explore a bit. In between all of your activities, your building and socializing, and of curse the requisite bitching on the forums, hop into a car or bike, or just fly or take a boat... just take the time to view our world here that Linden Lab has given us to create. It's quite spectacular. Even when your head goes through the pavement at the region border.