The centerpiece of Second Life's Ninth birthday was an enormous stage called the Cake stage which straddled four sims. I originally thought it took up one sim, then I looked closer at the map and realized exactly how enormous it was. The style is pure, unadulterated 8 Bit, which I find so amazingly charming in a Second Life increasingly overtaken by the desire to be as realistic as possible. Each of those "tiny" 8 bit pixels is enormously huge - I wish now I'd gotten pictures of my avatar by some of these structures, just to give a sense of the sheer scale of it. The small pictures make it look diminutive and sweet, but in person I found that weird optical illusion you only find in prairies or the ocean - when I was moving it felt liek I was standing still because it was simply so huge.
I ended up straining my computer to the max for this pictures, and you can see how the landscape itself vanishes into pixels at the edges. This was a place where multiples upon multiples of people could meet at the edges, though when I finally got to exploring it the sims were nearly empty. Look at those adorable strawberries, resplendent in 8 Bit style. I adore the colors, the brightness, the sheer scale and impressiveness of what was built - and in a way it's the perfect symptom for SL9B, a celebration which came together at the last minute due to the desires of it's members, cobbling together an enormous number of disparate parts into a bright and cheerful whole, edged in with the darkness of critique and complaint which is inevitable with any large project.
I really want one of these candles. Does it come in rainbow?
( More pictures here. )
good one!
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