Australian tourists reconsider Kelowna vacation in
I'm starting to wonder if the effort I put into image descriptions is actually worth it.
Image descriptions are serious business on Mastodon. Not few users refuse to boost posts with pictures without alt-text. Some even try to get everyone whom they see posting images to add a description to them. In fact, some actually criticise alt-text that isn't sufficient. Sometimes I even see people praise other people's alt-text.
I myself usually end up spending many hours describing one measly image. The outcome may pretty well be an alt-text with over 800 characters which mentions that the actual image description is in the post text. And that image description is tens of thousands of characters long.
However, nobody seems to care. It is as if nobody even notices.
Only in a few cases have I ever received any kind of feedback for posts with lengthy image descriptions. The first time I had written an image description with over 10,000 characters, I used it in which I also posted to Lemmy and in which I demonstrated four different ways of posting that image description. It got 19 likes and 2 dislikes, all from Lemmy, none from anywhere else, and it didn't get a single reply. The only times I got a reaction from the rest of the Fediverse, especially Mastodon, was a few times when I either replied to a Mastodon user with an image description or pointed Mastodon users at my image descriptions.
Otherwise, nothing. Not even criticism that my posts are too long. Or that my image descriptions are too long and too detailed. Or that my image descriptions are actually even lacking. Or that image descriptions belong into alt-text and not into the post. I'm not even being criticised for using too many or too few content warnings.
I can't see if my posts are being boosted, but it seems like not even this is happening.
I know that I'm writing about completely uninteresting stuff. I know I'm writing many many times more in one post than typical Mastodon users are willing to read. It just strikes me that neither any of my several hundred followers nor anyone who might be following any of the hashtags I use nor anyone who spots my posts in their federated timeline ever gives any feedback.
#AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #AskFedi #Feedback #CW #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostI'd really like to discuss accessibility and inclusion in the Fediverse with people who really care about it and ideally know more than average.
But I can't.
On Mastodon, it's irreversably set in stone that "alt-text" and "image description" are mutually synonymous. They mean 100% exactly the same, full stop. Content warnings always go into the content warning field which is the content warning field literally everywhere in the Fediverse. And posts can never be longer than 500 characters. Challenging either is absolutely futile because the very concept of deviating from either is absolutely unimaginable for too many Mastodon users. At most, they may be aware that some Mastodon instances allow for writing over 500 characters, but even then they are barely aware that there's a Fediverse outside of Mastodon, much less that it's different from Mastodon in any way.
And absolutely everywhere else in the Fediverse, be it Firefish or Friendica or Hubzilla or Lemmy, people don't even know that there is such a thing as accessibility or inclusion in the Fediverse at all. And they don't care.
I could just talk away right here right now. But it'd be futile. Over 450 connections don't mean certain reactions. One or two likes if I'm lucky. Replies No. Unless I happen to use a hashtag that someone interested in the same topic is following. If I want reactions, I have to stoop as low as asking my connections to boost my posts which especially fairly new users may actually do when asked.
Or I could try Lemmy. But there's exactly one , where there's a chance you might see at least one reply at all. It's mostly a community of disabled users, and the threads are either about their own disability issues or sharing news. Never in four months has accessibility in the Fediverse been talked about. Also, neurodiversity is absent entirely because it has its own community. So I'm not sure if this is the right place to join to talk about what I'd like to talk about.
#Fediverse #Accessibility #A11y #Inclusion #Inclusivity #InclusionMatters #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostOkay, this is new.
I know that Misskey has a hard-coded limit of 3,000 characters for writing posts.
But I've just discovered that two Misskey instances and one Sharkey instance I'm connected to failed to accept tonight because it is too long. That post is a bit under 49,000 characters long. That is, both alt-texts included, it it is a bit over 50,000 characters long.
The post wasn't cropped. It was rejected entirely.
The delivery report lists this chopped-off error message for all three instances:
Similarly, lemmy.world rejected the post which wasn't even targetted at any community there with:
Now I'm wondering what the limit could be. I think I should pay attention to more delivery reports of longer posts.
The flagship instance misskey.io failed with a 403, so that might have been caused by internal issues.
At the same time, at least some Firefish instances did accept the post. Remember that Firefish is a Misskey fork.
#Fediverse #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #Misskey #Sharkey #Lemmy #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
One of the new boxes actually contains an absolute rarity, the full Christmas Firepit Set. As far as I know, the original is not available anywhere anymore, and the copy at the various Clutterfly stores is broken. So the only chance to get it is by obtaining my upgraded version.
All 19 boxes, along with some more things created or modified by me, can be obtained in two places:
As usual for me, you can either copy the boxes or buy their contents without having to unpack them.
Image descriptions:
The pictures in this post are digital 3-D renderings created using shaders, but without ray-tracing, as they were taken inside a virtual world based on OpenSimulator. They show shelves with boxes containing various different items which I have either created or modified, offered for free.
OpenSimulator (), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and it mostly became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.
Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.
The first picture:
The first image shows a public shelf unit on the sim DropBox in OSgrid. OSgrid is the largest OpenSim grid and the oldest one, launched in 2007. DropBox is a sim on which everyone can offer items of almost all kinds for free as long as they are legal. It was created by Neovo Geesink, formerly tech specialist in Metropolis, once the first and biggest German-speaking grid, launched in 2008, which was shut down in July 2022. He has also built the 66 identical shelf units in the Alpha Quadrant, the triangular northern quarter of the sim. The other three quadrants do not have shelves they are for offering items that are too large for the shelves.
These contraptions have four shelves each. The shelves are supported by one cylindrical column in each edge. The pair of columns on each end is connected at the top with a horizontal cylindrical rod of the same diameter which is arranged in such a way that it appears to be resting on top of the columns which, in turn, would have to have semi-circular cutouts for the rod. The rods itself do not protrude beyond the columns. A third, much longer rod is installed between them and connects them, reminiscent of a giant handle. All parts show the same texture in various shades of grey on all faces. This texture imitates the look of stainless steel brushed in a circle or, due to being stretched on all surfaces, rather an oval. The constructions are about twelve metres wide, two metres deep and four and a half metres high. The shelves are one metre apart.
One of the shelves is in the foreground of the image and the only one carrying items or rather mostly boxes with items in them with only one exception. The boxes are cubes with an edge length of 50 centimetres.
The top shelf carries three boxes, centred precisely on it and 50 centimetres apart. The boxes will be described from left to right.
First comes a box with a sky blue front face. The only visible side, like the other three sides bordering on the front, has small strips of sky blue to the left and the right and eight different skin tones with black lines separating them in-between. The skin tones are ordered darkest to lightest from the front to the back. The three lightest skin tones are displayed twice. The box is oriented this way because the rear side which is the actual front is not quite safe for work.
The sides symbolise the content of the box which is eleven more boxes which, in turn, contain either twelve or eighteen classic female human avatar skins. They were created by Eloh Eliot in 2009, and I have taken them and "remixed" them into something more useful and versatile in 2021 because I was dissatisfied with what was already available. The eleven skin tone variants are snow, snow with baked-on clown red lipstick, pale, pale with baked-on freckles, fair, fair with baked-on freckles, tan, bronze, chestnut, coffee and mahogany.
The skins are available in not-safe-for-work variants with textured-on nipples and a textured-on hairless vulva, semi-safe-for-work variants like which omits the vulva and fully safe-for-work variants which also lack nipples. Each one of these is available with or without Eloh Eliot's original dark eyebrows and with or without Eloh Eliot's original black eyeliner. In addition, the snow skins with red lipstick are also available in variants with black eyeliner and blue eyeshadow.
Back to the box itself: Only the front has writing on it, practically entirely done in a Helvetica-like typeface. Right below the top front edge of the box, there is a writing in regular all-caps, "Eliot" and a midpoint in white and "Rowland" in gold, all with two blank spaces between the characters. It it almost as long as the box is wide. Underneath it, written in a taller, bold and condensed font and in all-caps again, "Starlight" is written in white, and "Remix" is written in gold. The writing stretches over the same width as that of the line above. The next line, in a font that is still bold, but not condensed and smaller, also still in all-caps and entirely white, is "The complete set". It aligns with the two lines above on the left, but it is shorter on the right.
The other lines are written in a regular font, in white and without all-caps, and most of them are written in the same size.
Below the three top lines, at roughly twice the distance between the three top lines, follows a bullet-point list. It sits significantly further to the left so that the letters after the bullet points start slightly further left than the three top lines. The list items are "classic skins, no applier", "high-res body textures", "11 skin tones with up to 18 variants each", "3 modesty levels with optional eyebrows and eyeliner" and "Free MIT-licensed".
Some more writing is shoved into the bottom left corner. The first two lines are "Made in OpenSim for OpenSim" and "Recommended for Ruth2 v2" which is a typo and should read "Ruth2 v4". Below, in a much smaller font, is one more line that starts with an all-caps "Warning:" and continues with "These skins do not work properly on Athena 6."
Ruth2 v4 and Athena 6 are so-called mesh bodies. They are 3-D models of female human bodies which can be rigged onto avatars in Second Life and OpenSim. Their purpose is to replace the original standard system body which is not really good-looking even for the standards of 2003 when Second Life was launched. Both of these bodies use a technology called Bakes-on-Mesh which was introduced in 2019 and makes the texturing methods for the system body available to mesh bodies. However, there are slight differences between the implementations on these two bodies, hence the warning.
The other two boxes on the shelf have six identical mostly white faces, and they look almost the same. They contain special nail polish which I have made for Ruth2 v4 in 2022 when there was practically no nail polish available for this body.
The middle box contains 24 different nail polishes. 22 of them come in colours which I have taken from the configuration nail polish applier for Ruth 2.0. I have named the originally nameless colours colours rose, cerise, crimson, hot pink, magenta, violet, light lilac, purple, cornflower, bright blue, Prussian blue, French blue, royal blue, emerald, forest green, olive, caramel, mocha, smoke, carbon, Tuscan red and thunder. I found the 23rd, mint, as a default custom setting on one of these appliers. The 24th is white and is intended as a basic user-tintable nail polish although the tints of the other ones can be modified, too.
The right box contains nine different nail polishes. Eight of them come from the nail control on the so-called HUD which is normally short for heads-up display but stands for a graphical controller that can be attached to the user viewport. I have named them pink, magenta, fuchsia, bright red, medium red, dark red, very dark red and vantablack. The ninth one is white again.
Both boxes have four rather relaxed female hands with nail polish on the nails on them. In fact, it is four times the same hand. It reaches into the box art twice from the left and, mirrored around the vertical axis, twice from the right. If I recall correctly, the nail polish colours on the middle box are crimson red on the top left hand, Prussian blue on the top right hand, emerald green on the bottom left hand and mocha brown on the bottom right hand, but don't take my word for it. On the right box, they are fuchsia on the top left hand, medium red on the top right hand, pink on the bottom left hand and bright red on the bottom right hand. The sides of the nails that are oriented towards the on-lookers show a light stripe of shininess.
The styling of the boxes is identical otherwise except for individual writing. Centred at the top, "Nail Polish" is written in large, medium red letters in the Lobster Two typeface with a smaller "for Ruth2 v4" in otherwise the same style below. The only difference in labelling between the boxes is in the black writing in the middle. Still between the top hands and still in the Lobster Two typeface, a bit smaller than the top line, the number of main nail polishes is indicated which is "22" on the middle box, not counting the white nail polish and the bonus nail polish, and "8" on the right box, not counting the white nail polish again. On the middle box, "colours from the Ruth 2.0 nail polish applier" in a small, bold Helvetica clone stretches across the width of the box between the top and the bottom hands with "+1 bonus colour" below. The same writing in the same style and at the same size on the right box is "colours from the Ruth2 v4 HUD".
The writing at the bottom is identical on both boxes again, still in a bold Helvetica-like typeface. It starts with a medium red line the same size of the previous line, "Caution:". The other three lines are smaller. Two are black and read, "Requires OpenSimulator 0.9.1.1 or higher and Bakes-on-Mesh" and "Compatibility only guaranteed for Ruth2 v4". The third and last one is medium red again and reads, "Not compatible with Athena and other SL bodies" where SL is short for Second Life.
With one exception, the boxes on the two shelves below contain scripted furniture and similar items, all made in mesh by Linda Kellie in the mid-2010s and released under her Clutterfly brand. I have upgraded them with the more modern, more versatile and more lightweight SFposer sit animation controller developed by Satyr Aeon while still keeping the same animations and largely the same features.
On the outside, the boxes have several things in common. Again, all six faces look identical. The top of each face is covered by a semi-transparent grey stripe with centred, opaque white writing on it. The top line is fairly small and reads, "Clutterfly Upgraded". The line below is larger and tells what kinds of items are inside the box. Optionally, there is another line below with the same font size as the top line which tells the particular style of the items if necessary. In this case, the grey stripe is a bit wider. In the bottom right corner, at a small distance from the edges of the box, there is the SFposer logo with yellow letters, the "SF" in a stencil typeface, with thick medium green outlines on a medium blue background. A semi-transparent grey rectangle sits on top of it with the opaque white writing "Now powered by" on it. All lettering except for the SFposer logo is done in a bold Bookman-like typeface.
So, the second shelf from the top carries nine boxes, centred precisely on it and 50 centimetres apart. The boxes will be described from left to right again.
The first box, labelled "Bathtubs", contains eleven bathtubs in different colours: black, blue, brown, cream, gold, green, pink, purple, red, teal and white. The box art shows them in this order in two rows of four and one row of three, all oriented horizontally with the faucet at the top. The ground was custom-made for the box art with small, fancy white bathroom-style tiles. All bathtubs are only coloured on the outside while the inside is still white. They are currently the only items on the shelves that can make additional objects appear and disappear when choosing animations.
A close-up picture in the bottom left corner, roughly the size of the SFposer logo plus the grey rectangle on top, shows the only modification on the outward appearance I've done on the bathtubs: The faucet knobs are colour-coded, red on the left, blue on the right. For purists, the box still contains the original texture for the faucet knobs. The close-up picture has the black writing "Colour-coded faucet knobs" right above itself.
The second box, labelled "Bean Bag Chairs", contains ten bean-bag chairs in different colours: berry, black, blue, brown, green, pink, purple, red, teal and white. The box art shows them in this order in one row of three, one row of four and another row of three, all oriented with the back to the top. The ground shows a brownish, blurry sand texture. All bean-bag chairs have a rhombically-shaped fabric structure textured on and the same blanket with colourful stripes thrown over the right side of the back. The shadows around the chairs indicates the sun standing right above them.
The third box, labelled "Beach Towels", contains four beach towels to be laid on the ground. They come in two shapes with two decorations each. From left to right, they are as follows:
The one referred to as "orange" is mostly orange with a white fringe that is thicker at the ends than on the sides. In the middle, there is a stylised white starfish with three dash-like ovals between its arms, one at the top, two on the sides. Five somewhat irregular white curves surround it like a circle. Shape-wise, it only has one large crease towards the bottom right.
The one referred to as "pink" has a background that is very light pastel teal on about the middle 40%, lined by thick vertical stripes in light teal and edges in pastel pink. It is decorated with stylised tropical flowers in magenta. It is messier than the first towel.
The one referred to as "teal" uses the same mesh as the "pink" one. It has only got thick horizontal stripes on it in darker teal, lighter teal, pastel teal, pastel lime green, pastel green and medium green. The pattern repeats a bit more than one half time, ending in another pastel lime green stripe that is about 35% the width of the others.
The one referred to as "yellow" uses the same mesh as the "orange" one. It is mostly yellow with some white print on it. At the top and the bottom, there are narrow vertical lines. Most of the rest has widely-spaced white polka dots on it.
The background of the box art is a beige sand texture.
The fourth box, labelled "Innertubes", contains seven inner tube floaties. The box art shows them in a two-and-three-and-two arrangement on a greyish beige sand texture. They all have a basic colour and three thick and thin stripes each.
The top left one is referred to as "purple" it is light purple with thick dark purple and thin magenta stripes. The top right one is referred to as "red/yellow" it is white with thick red and thin yellow stripes. The left one is referred to as "pink" it is pink with thick red and thin orange stripes. The middle one is referred to as "red" it is red with thick dark orange and thin lighter orange stripes. The right one is referred to as "yellow" it is lemon yellow with thick dark yellow and thin orange stripes. The bottom left one referred to as "purple/teal" it is white with thick teal and thin purple stripes. Finally, the bottom right one is referred to as "teal" it is the same as the previous one, but light teal instead of white.
According to the shadows cast by the floaties, the sun is standing high up to the upper left.
The fifth box, labelled "Pool Floaties", contains ten air mattress floaties in different colours: black, blue, green, orange, pink, purple, red, teal, white and yellow. The box art shows them in two rows of five on a ground texture similar to that on the "Beach Towels" box.
What follows are fourteen boxes with the same ground texture as the "Bean Bag Chairs" box. Thirteen of them contain three different sets of items in different themes.
The six "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" boxes contain four lounge chairs each, shown on the box art in one row. All lounge chairs have a bottom part that's slightly curved upward and a cylindrical pillow pushed against the backrest. The one on the left is plain otherwise. The next one has a blanket draped over the backrest and the pillow. The third one has one diagonally draped over the right front corner. The one on the right has one transversally draped over the bottom, but lifted so that the front left corner is free. The sun is always shining from above.
Three boxes are labelled "Firepit Set". Each one shows a firepit with animated flames in the middle, a tree stump below, two tree stumps with reddish-brown wood surrounded by a greyish-brown bark and one blanket draped over half of each one on the sides and two hollow pieces of tree trunk with the same greyish-brown bark at the top. The piece of trunk above the firepit has a blanket over its left end and two differently-sized square pillows and one round pillow in front of it. The piece of trunk on the right has one blanket pushed against it on the ground, another blanket draped over the first blanket and the right end of the trunk, four differently-sized square pillows on the second blanket and a fifth one lying next to the left end of the trunk which happens to be always lime green with a faint vine motif on it. Only the fire pit casts a shadow, but it indicates the sun shining from right above again.
Four boxes are labelled "Cuddle Blankets". They contain three times the same blanket with the right front corner pushed inward and three times the same two rectangular pillows and one round pillow with a knob in the middle on it and show them on the box art. The one in the middle has the blanket tucked under a hollow piece of tree trunk with a dark bark, referred to as "Forest Log". The one on the right is the same, but usually with a lighter, bleached tree bark and known as "Beach Log". On the left, there is the "No Log" variant which has one more rectangular pillow and one more round pillow, both with a knob in the middle, in the place of the log.
So numbers six, seven and eight on the second shelf from above are all "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" boxes. Number six is the "Tropical" variant with dull green loungers. The blankets have different arrangements of tropical colours on them like yellow, orange, lime green, magenta and teal. Number seven is the "Contemporary" variant with dull dark blue loungers. The second lounger has a medium blue blanket with white lines in a slightly chaotic, but roughly rectangular pattern on it. The third lounger has a dark yellow blanket with a heavily stylised white and grey flower print in a somewhat 60s style. The fourth lounger has a dark yellow blanket again, but with a different white pattern and some blue elements in-between. Number eight is the "Gothic" variant with black loungers. The blanket is red on the second lounger, purple on the third and striped red and purple on the fourth.
The ninth and last box on this shelf is the only different one. It is labelled "Lesbian Furniture", and it contains one armchair and one couch with lesbian animations. Both are black with light pink cushions, and this is also the colour scheme of the whole box. There is also a black round coffee table with two levels which the box art shows towards the left with the couch above and the armchair to the right of it. On top of the coffee table, oriented towards the armchair, there is a pink laptop with a black keyboard, a black touchpad and black hinges and an OpenSim viewer running on the screen. In the corner between the couch and the armchair, there is a black round end table which has two levels, too. It has a mostly black table lamp with a pink lampshade standing in the middle of it. Of course, all six items are in the box. Once again, the shadows indicate the sun shining from above.
One shelf further below, the objects on it start with a square blue sign resting against the left rear column. It is a copy of the "No Stairway To Heaven" sign from the film Wayne's World which was a jab against Led Zeppelin not authorising the use of their songs in films. Thus, it has a thin white line with rounded corners along its edges. In the middle, there is "No" written in all-caps and what appears to be a very big and heavy Helvetica-style typeface, and "Stairway To Heaven" in three lines right below in a smaller but even heavier slanted sans-serif typeface and still in all-caps. It is mostly intended for guitar departments in music stores.
Otherwise, there are another ten boxes on the shelf as partially described above. This time, they are grouped not by type, but by style. The boxes in groups are only 25 centimetres apart whereas the distance between boxes stays 50 centimetres otherwise.
The first box is the Christmas-themed "Cuddle Blankets" box. The blankets have a texture with a medium red and grey pattern on cream that is vaguely reminiscent of stereotypically ugly winter sweaters with trotting reindeer, strips with snowflakes on them and what could be described as very course pixel art of poinsettias. The rectangular pillow to the left is cream with a detailed red print of vines and blooms. The round pillow to the right is green with a darker green vine motif in the background plus large stylised snowflakes in different pastel yellow and green tones. The rectangular pillow underneath the round one is white with eight different kinds of stylised decorated Christmas baubles hanging on red threads.
One thing that is unique about this box is that it does not have a beach variant of the trunk. Instead, there is another blanket with a "Forest"-style trunk which is covered with snow. The variant without a trunk has a rectangular red and a round green pillow behind the other pillows, both with darker vines on them.
The second box is the Christmas-themed "Firepit Set" box. The blanket on the stump to the left is cream with a red and green Paisley print. The one on the stump to the right is chequered with four different squares. Two are red with black borders slightly darker red prints on them, one with what appears to be a snowflake, one with what could be vines. The other two are white with green borders. One is partially light green in the background with white six-point stars on it and a green twig with five leaves in the middle. The other one shows a green and red holly twig.
As for the trunks, the blankets on the ground have got roughly the same pattern based around the same "pixel poinsettias" as in the "Cuddle Blankets" set. On the blanket to the left, it's green, on that to the right, it's red and a bit bigger. Both have a rather low resolution and a whole lot of visible JPEG artifacts, though, as if they weren't available at full resolution anymore. The trunk on the left also has a medium-sized white buttoned rectangular pillow on the blanket with a mostly red and green Christmas print, including baubles, candy canes, both green and red conifers and Santa Claus in his sleigh. To its right, resting directly against the trunk, there is a larger rectangular pillow with a pattern in red and various shades of light brown that is a mixture of a tartan and Gingham. The smaller buttoned round pillow leaning against it is red with thin beige vines and stars.
The second blanket on the trunk to the right is mostly a darker cream with Christmas plant motifs on it such as pinecones, holly or a poinsettia, separated by red borders. The same cream rectangular pillow with red vines as in the "Cuddle Blankets" box is leaning against it. In front of it, there are a copy of the small lime green pillow at the left end of the trunk, a small dark green rectangular pillow with holly print and, half behind it, the same small white pillow with baubles as in the "Cuddle Blankets" box.
The two Christmas-themed boxes are followed by three Country-themed boxes, starting with a "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" box with dark brown cuddle lounge chairs. The second chair has a simple beige and red Gingham-patterned blanket. The third one has five cute pictures involving tiny teddy bears with cups, plates and the like in front of a background of vertically installed white wooden planks, separated by dark brick red borders. The picture at the top has a beige banner below it with the writing "Home Sweet Home" in a rather irregular serif typeface, all-caps and letters in red, blue, yellow and green. The blanket on the fourth chair appears to be a mostly white quilt with a dark grey border and some pieces in plain or printed red, green and different shades of light brown. Some of them appear to stand for autumn leaves.
The second box in the Country group is the "Cuddle Blankets" box. This time, the blanket shows a very coarse fabric pattern with a tartan with broad red and thin dark grey lines on cream. The rectangular pillow to the left is the same "Gingham tartan" pillow as in the Christmas-themed box. The buttoned round pillow to the right is various shades of brown with large leaves printed on it. The rectangular pillow under it is cream with green vines and leaves and red blooms. Of the pillows behind them in the trunkless version, the buttoned rectangular one is off-white with a cock, various chickens and a few eggs printed on it, and the buttoned round one is red with a tiny, hard to recognise pattern in cream on it.
The third box in the Country group is the "Firepit Set" box. The blanket on the stump on the left is mostly a light tan. Medium brown curves composed of circular arcs divide the texture into fields with two kinds of mostly brick red stylised blooms in them, a small and rather simple one with eight "petals", a slightly larger and more elaborate one with two layers of eight "petals". The blanket on the stump on the right is textured with a tartan which I consider purely fictional after having failed to identify it. It is mostly green and beige with one thin Bordeaux red and thicker Burgundy red line each.
The blanket on the trunk on the left shows a texture which is somewhat reminiscent of patchwork while clearly being a print because some of the sections aren't square or rectangular. Interspersed with blocks with chequered or chevron patterns or solid colours, various wildlife is depicted such as deer, waterfowl or a bear. There are also depictions of conifers and their cones. The smaller buttoned rectangular pillow on the blanket is the same cock-chickens-and-eggs pillow as at the back of the trunkless cuddle blanket in the previous box. Next to it, leaning directly on the trunk, the "Gingham tartan" pillow re-appears again. The buttoned round pillow leaning against it is mostly covered by a beige and gold texture with a crinkled appearance the knob in the middle is honey yellow.
The trunk on the right has the same arrangement with two blankets and five pillows as in the other "Firepit Set" boxes again. The blanket on the ground is striped horizontally in peach and brick red. The blanket cast over the trunk has a mostly white texture which indicates a very coarse fabric with horizontal brown and mustard yellow stripes and vertical dark orange and dark brown stripes woven in. The large rectangular pillow leaning against it is a darker cream with slightly stylised plants in shaded yellowish green and a few red berries and mostly red blooms with five petals each, all with black outlines. The small rectangular pillow a bit further to the right, leaning against this pillow, is mostly beige with an apparently abstract pattern in various tones of blue, red, green and yellow. The pattern is technically symmetrical around both the vertical and the horizontal axis, but the symmetry is ruined by the pattern being slightly misoriented and not being seamless. The small rectangular pillow behind it is cream with a rather elaborate and detailed hand-painted plant print that is mostly green with large blooms in rose and Bordeaux red tones and smaller ones in different shades of aqua blue. The two small lime green pillows are in the same places as in the Christmas variant.
Following the three-box Country group, the Shabby Chic group has the same three boxes in the same order, only with a different visual style and thus mostly different textures. So again, it starts with a "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" box. This time, the chairs are light grey. And again, the first chair does not have a blanket on it.
The blanket on the second chair, draped the same way as on all the other second chairs, has an appearance much like a quilt with the seams covered in white fabric, only that this is clearly supposed to be a print. The colour theme is cream, green and pink otherwise. There are twelve unique rectangular patches on the upper side of the blanket, six of which are largely or fully visible on the box art along with tiny bits of a seventh and maybe an eighth patch. Three of the largely or fully visible patches show roses against a cream, pastel green or pastel pink background. One has an elaborate cream and pink vertical stripe pattern. One is cream with pastel green vertical stripes with darker outlines, interspersed with rose decorations. One is simply pink with white or cream polka dots. The one that is barely visible is white with dark pink polka dots, and the one whose visibility is unclear repeats the elaborate stripe pattern, but in green.
The blanket on the third chair is white with a printed pattern of pastel pea green vines with leaves and blooms mostly or entirely in pastel rose and in various shapes and sizes. The blanket on the fourth chair is baby blue and has hand-painted plants printed on it with quite a variety of blooms on them, different songbirds sitting on them and butterflies flying in-between them all the visible butterflies are light blue. The aspect ratio of this texture is off, it is stretched vertically.
The second box in the Shabby Chic group is the "Cuddle Blankets" box again. Also again, it has the same blanket in all three variants. The blanket is white with yet another different hand-painted plant print which is mostly khaki apart from the blooms which are either white or various shades of pastel pink. The rectangular pillow to the left is sand-coloured with horizontal stripes in old rose in a pattern of three wide stripes surrounded by two stripes as narrow as the gaps between the stripes. The round buttoned pillow to the right is a faint pastel pea green with a very light faint pastel green and faint pastel old rose print of what might be supposed to be simplified roses with vines and leaves in-between, some of the leaves only being outlines. The rectangular pillow lying under it has the same lime green texture as the two identical small pillows in each of the two previously described "Firepit Set" boxes. As for the two buttoned pillows in the back of the trunkless variant supporting the other pillows, the rectangular one is sand-coloured with a vertical pattern of jagged stripes in two shades of pea green and one shade of rose. The round pillow is lime green with an olive green square pattern consisting of octogonal shapes, each made of four hexagons, interspersed by thick circles.
The third box in the Shabby Chic group is the "Firepit Set" box again. This time, the blanket on the stump to the left is off-white with a pastel violet and green flower pattern that is different from all previously mentioned prints yet again and three semi-transparent stripes, two light brick red and one pastel green, slightly diagonally across it. The blanket on the stump to the right shows another different rose print in pastel old rose and pea green on a bluish grey background with white dots, an irregular rectangular grid in semi-transparent somewhat darker bluish grey layered over it.
The blanket draped over the end of the trunk on the left is a faint greyish pastel blue with yet another different flower print, this time in pastel shades from white to dark rose and centred around roses. The three pillows in front of this trunk have all appeared before. The buttoned rectangular pillow on the blanket is the same one as at the back of the trunkless Shabby Chic cuddle blanket, the one with the jagged vertical pattern. The large rectangular pillow to the right of it is the same horizontally-striped sand and old rose pillow as on all three Shabby Chic cuddle blankets. And the round buttoned pillow is the same crinkled-textured beige and gold pillow as in the equivalent Country-style set.
Both blankets around the trunk on the right have new patterns again. The blanket on the ground has a horizontal stripe pattern that looks like lifted from a 1970s deck chair. Thick stripes of cream and pea green have thinner, semi-transparent stripes in various shades of pastel blue, pink and purple on top. The other blanket is lightly sand-coloured with another plant print, this time with branches and twigs in shades from white to tan. Leaves, vines and flower stems in various shades of green grow from them. Different blooms in white, various shades of pink and shades from white to sky blue are part of this vegetation, too. At least one bird of paradise is sitting on a branch, its head turned to the right, mostly two shades of yellow with shades of sky blue in the wing and tail feathers while the outer ends of the wings are salmon-coloured. The bird is actually looking away from a nearby butterfly with a pink body, khaki fore wings and aqua aft wings. The pattern repeats one third of a time vertically.
The large rectangular pillow leaning against the blanket is light pastel steel blue with fairly large ivory polka dots. The small square pillow lying in front of it is not a copy of the lime green pillow at the left end of the trunk for a change it is light pastel pink with fabric structure, but no printed or woven pattern. The small rectangular pillow on top if it, leaning against the rightmost parts of the blue polka dot pillow, is white with a pattern of cerise and teal flowers in large, rounded, almost circular cerise frames. Finally, the small rectangular pillow behind it is the same cream and flower-printed pillow as in the same spot in the Country-styled firepit set.
The last group is the Modern group with only two boxes, for there is no "Firepit Set" box in this group.
The first box is the sixth and last "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" box on the shelves. The lounge chairs are beige this time, still with the first chair lacking a blanket and the other three chairs having blankets draped the same way as in the previous boxes. The blanket on the second chair shows a horizontal gradient from white on the left-hand edge to pastel blue to a wide area of pastel lime green to pastel terracotta all the way to the right. Shading on the texture simulates an embossed longitudinal structure in the fabric.
The blanket on the second chair is greyish blue with a longitudinal stripe pattern. The stripes are rather broad with wavy edges and blurry enough to actually be gradients from light taupe in the middle to pastel slate grey to the greyish blue that makes up most of the texture. Between these stripes, there appear to be thinner, fainter stripes with a slightly greyer or browner tint and small light spots at a regular interval.
The blanket on the third chair is a tone of beige similar to that of the chairs themselves with another longitudinal stripe pattern. Two different stripes with fairly blurry edges alternate. One is pastel petrol blue with wavy edges. The other one is pastel pea green with shorter "notches" in the sides, lined by dark shading on both sides.
Finally, the second and last box in the Modern group and the tenth and last box on the shelf is the fourth and last "Cuddle Blankets" box. The three blankets themselves are identical again. They are white with a rough fabric texture and horizontal stripes which itself contain different black-and-white patterns, some involving lines in long zig-zags, some too small to identify due to the limited resolution of the texture.
The rectangular pillow to the left is beige with a horizontal fabric structure on the texture. It is printed with a petrol blue pattern of branches and rounded leaves and another similar pattern in taupe on top. The round buttoned pillow to the right is pastel teal with a pattern of five white roughly horizontal lines. These lines repeatedly spread out until the two outer lines touch those of the instance of the pattern above or below. The rectangular pillow which it is placed on has an unusual texture. It looks like it was stitched together from different fabrics with different structures and different shades of brown or grey. At least 16 wedge-shaped pieces each, always in two alternating styles, form circular shapes which are arranged in a very large square pattern in such a way that they touch each other. Some of these wedges are divided into an inner part and an outer part. The gaps between the circles are filled with similar wedge-like pieces of fabric with small circular pieces at the centre.
In the trunkless version, there are two buttoned pillows behind these three again. The rectangular one is dark petrol and plain except for a strong fabric texture the knob in the middle is terracotta-coloured, making the embossed edge more easily visible. The round pillow shows a wild, abstract pattern in sand, taupe, light tan, grey and black. The sand and grey areas show horizontal fabric structures.
The bottom shelf of the unit returns to a unified pattern of eight boxes, centred precisely on it and 50 centimetres apart. Each one of these boxes contains four wooden box shelf units. I have built them myself when I needed one for a shop. The units are one and a half metre wide, 70 centimetres deep, and they come in four sizes, namely two, three, four or five shelves which are always 80 centimetres apart. They come in eight different sorts of wood, using wood textures from FleepGrid. However, the rear panel is always plywood and tinted to match the rest of the unit if necessary. Care has been taken to keep the original aspect ratios of all textures.
Each box also contains the textures used for easier modification, signs that can be be mounted on the front sides of the shelves and a positioning aid for several sizes of boxes which makes positioning them easier, especially on shelf units which are installed diagonally.
All eight boxes are decorated largely the same. The four sides are identical. The box art shows all four sizes next to each other, the smallest one on the left, the tallest one on the right and a bit farther from the point of view which is slightly rotated into a diagonal position towards the shelves. The sun shines on them from ahead and above, making them cast shadows behind themselves onto the plain ground which appears roughly cream-coloured due to how low the sun is standing.
The upper third of the sides, as well as the top, are black. In the black are of the sides, the product line is named in golden letters: Centred at the top, "Jupiter's" is written in a medium-sized regular font. Below it, larger and in bold type, "Basic Shelves" is written. Further below, in the top left corner of the product image, the used wood is mentioned in a smaller but still bold font. Finally, "Wood textures, shelf signs and positioning aid included" is written along the bottom edges, aligned towards the right, in a rather small regular font. The typeface always mimicks Bookman.
On the shelf, the boxes are ordered alphabetically from left to right: beech, birch, cherry, dark oak, hickory, maple, pine and stained oak.
All boxes described above are switched to what is called "full bright". This means they have their shading turned off. Neither lighting or the lack thereof nor cast shadows have an effect on their appearance.
The textures on the contents of the boxes are too small to be visible in the picture itself. Also, the picture shows all text on the boxes so small that it cannot be read in the picture.
In the background, there are multiple shelf units identical to the one in the foreground, but they are all empty. The background is limited by a light brown brick wall. It is about ten metres high, and the point of view is chosen so that its top edge is aligned with the top shelf of the unit in the foreground.
The floor texture shows some light wood grain the wood is not separated into planks. The shadows underneath and around the shelf units indicate that the sun is shining down on the scene vertically. The sky is blue, but except for to the right and farther in the distance, it is covered by a large, cirrus-like cloud.
The second picture:
The second picture shows the inside of the Kaufrausch Mega-Store, a department store on the sim Santiago in Dorenas World. Launched in several home-hosted iterations in December 2009 and finally re-launched on rented Web space in January 2010, Dorenas World has been the oldest surviving German-speaking grid since Metropolis shut down.
In the foreground, eight wooden shelf units with three shelves each are lined up. They were made by me, and they can be found in the shelves boxes which have already been described as part of the first picture. Each sort of wood is present once as a demonstration, and each shelf unit carries the corresponding shelves box on the top shelf. The boxes are still the same, but they are larger with an edge length of 70 centimetres.
Also, the order is different. The row of shelves starts with the lightest wood, beech, on the left. Darker woods follow, namely cherry, pine, birch, maple and hickory. To the right, there are the two darkest woods, stained oak and dark oak.
The shelves are used to offer my upgraded Clutterfly items boxes as well. Except for the dark oak shelves all the way to the right, all units contain one or multiple of these boxes. From left to right, they are filled as follows:
The beech shelf unit all the way to the left has the Pool Floaties and the Tropical-style Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Beach Towels and the Innertubes on the bottom shelf.
The cherry shelf unit has the Lesbian Furniture and the Contemporary-style Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Bean Bag Chairs and the Bathtubs on the bottom shelf.
The pine shelf unit is for the Christmas style: It has the Cuddle Blankets and the Firepit Set on the bottom shelf.
The birch shelf unit is for the Modern style: It has the Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Cuddle Blankets on the bottom shelf.
The maple shelf unit is for the Shabby Chic style: It has the Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Cuddle Blankets and the Firepit Set on the bottom shelf.
The hickory shelf unit is for the Country style: It has the Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Cuddle Blankets and the Firepit Set on the bottom shelf.
The stained oak shelf unit has the Gothic-style Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf.
Behind the hickory shelves and partly behind the maple shelves, a plain shiny bluish grey piece of wall from the floor to the ceiling separates a very large window to its left to a smaller one to its right. Another similar piece of wall is on the right, extending into the building and beyond the border of the image. One of the building's three revolving doors is behind it. A shadow appears to be cast from the ground up to about 28% of the height of this piece of wall. It is actually a side-effect of the shininess as OpenSim's graphics engine is incapable of raytracing.
The small window consists of one pane which appears to be framed in metal. In the larger one, two wider panes are visible. They extend from the floor to about 80% ceiling height. Above them, the gaps between the walls are filled with additional horizontal pieces of wall. These are a faint dark purple and decorated with lighter rectangular frames corners curved towards the inside. Two of these frames are above the small window, six can be seen above the larger one. The glass in the windows is tinted grey which makes the outside appear darker than it actually is.
The ceiling is plain grey and appears darker than the walls. Towards the right, it has a slight yellow tint which comes from a light source.
A pattern of five tiles makes up the floor. Four of them are large grey squares with one corner cut off they become more or less slightly darker towards the corner opposite the cut-off corner. They are oriented with the cut-off corners turned towards one another. The fifth one is a small, dark red square that fits in the gap created by the cut-off corners.
The department store building is a one-off custom design by grid co-founder Anachron Young.
Behind the shelves with the boxes and through the windows, the outside can be seen. Right outside the department store building, there is a street with yellow centre lines and sidewalks with concrete pavement on both sides.
On the other side of the street, mostly left of centre, the ruins of an unfinished two-floor building, probably a residential one, can be made out. Its walls and columns are covered with cracked and weathered plaster. Doors and windows are missing. However, the building appears to be occupied by hobos. Someone has installed not only primitive wooden railings where the upstairs windows, but a makeshift trellis on the side oriented towards the department store and two more on the left around the corner. Green plants are growing up all three. Also, old and shabby furniture is strewn about both floors. Due to design limitations, the roof shingles can partly be seen from underneath. Various trees with green foliage can be seen behind the ruins.
The grey single-floor building to the right of the ruins is commercial, but unused. Only little of it is visible through the small window to the right. It, too, is labelled as a department store although it is much smaller than the Kaufrausch. So says the dark brown writing above the windows and the boarded-up door, none of which is actually visible in the image except for the uppermost bit of the "D" in the all-caps "department store" writing. Above it, a dirty and damaged yellow sign advertises "housewares & small appliances" in black all-caps. To the left of both, there is another dirty and damaged sign, a white one with "clothing" and "sportswear" written in two lines of red letters.
Directly to the left of the beech shelf unit, on the other side of the street, one of the three posts of a triple road sign can be seen.
Farther to the left and in the distance, there is another one-off custom building created by Anachron for this sim. The two-floor Prim-Air School has walls covered in vertical panels of an unknown material. Between the windows of the ground floor and the first floor, one of each of which is visible, the walls are painted brown, otherwise they are orange. The corners are a darker orange, but glossy which is why the one visible corner appears to be painted in a dark pastel tone. The school yard in front of the building is separated from the sidewalk by a black iron fence. The two large white rectangles on the ground of the school yard which are for various sports activities can just barely be seen.
What little of the sky above is not blocked by buildings or vegetation is blue and cloudless. No shadows can be made out outside, so the position of the sun remains unclear.
#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Upcycling #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #EyeContact #CWEyeContact #Food #CWFoodI thought I wouldn't need an #EyeContact #ContentWarning this time
But there are birds and other animals on some of the fabrics. They're absolutely invisible to the naked eye, usually being less than 1/100th of a pixel each in the final picture. But I guess I can trigger some #Autistic people by just merely mentioning that they're there. Remember that most birds have almost 360 vision, and deer aren't that far away from it. If you see a bird or a deer, you practically always see at least one eye.
On a sidenote: Having to describe over a dozen different plant/flower prints on fabric is tiring. I hope this will be over soon. I've only written some 7,000 characters today so far...
#Long #LongPost #ImageDescription #Inclusion #InclusivityI hate describing fabric patterns.
There's a blanket on a picture on the sides of a box. In the final picture, it'll be shown not much larger than six pixels, two wide, three high. I've just used a bit over 1,000 characters to describe only the visible part of that blanket because it has a patchwork-like print. But I'd do the very same thing if it was only a small pillow that'll be less than one pixel in the final picture.
I'm going to pump tens of thousands of characters into describing dozens of textures. And when I'm done, I'm going to mention that not a single one of these textures is actually visible to the naked eye because #Blind and #VisuallyImpaired people won't know that otherwise. But this invisibility due to low resolution is part of the image and thus needs to be described.
Oh, and I won't be nearly done before noon. And since I've just passed 30,000 characters, I'm not sure if I won't break my own record.
The things you do for #Accessibility.
#Long #LongPost #ImageDescriptionAnd I'm back. Now I hope to be done with the first description before noon and without breaking my #ImageDescription record of 38,650 characters.
14 boxes with content to go, six of them with various fabric textures. The other eight might be rather simple and done quickly unless #Accessibility and the curiosity of random readers demand me to give detailed descriptions of eight woodgrain textures plus plywood which are absolutely invisible to the naked eye in the picture.
I also hope I can really get away with describing and transcribing only once what appears multiple times such as certain labels on boxes. This description would really go completely out of hand if I were to fully describe each one of 30 boxes individually. This would become the first image description in the Fediverse with over 100 individual text transcriptions.
The second picture will only show boxes which are already in the first picture. I do hope I can get away with writing that these boxes have already been described in the image description of the first picture.
#Long #LongPost
The pictures in this post are digital 3-D renderings of exhibition displays at the annual OpenSimFest () which has started on September 15th and will continue until September 30th. They were created using shaders, but without ray-tracing, as they were taken inside a virtual world based on OpenSimulator.
OpenSimulator (), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and it mostly became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.
Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.
OpenSimFest takes place on its own grid. It is connected to the Hypergrid, so it isn't necessary to have an avatar on the OpenSimFest grid because you can visit it with an avatar that you have on another grid. It features a schedule of 12 hours each day, starting at 9 a.m. PDT. PDT is the standard time zone both in Second Life and on all OpenSim grids. On most days, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., there are live performances or DJ events on one of the four neighbouring event sims. Most of the other sims are much larger. They are so-called "varsims", something specific to OpenSim that doesn't exist in Second Life. They stretch across multiple regions arranged in a square without borders between the regions. Two of them are merchant sims where OpenSim creators offer mostly payware, but also a few freebies. Others are, for example, exhibition sims.
The motto of OpenSimFest 2023 is the Jazz/Blues Era.
These pictures were all taken on Sulfur, one of the two merchant sims. What they show, however, are displays of creations by the famous Second Life creator Arcadia Asylum. She started around 2006, and she was banned from Second Life several times, likely because she refused to charge money for her creations. Instead, she offered them for free, under a free, non-commercial copyleft license and with full permissions. Due to always being banned after a while, she went through several names. Arcadia Asylum was the first, followed by names such as Aley Arai, Lora Lemon and finally, when Second Life had removed the last names feature for new users, Aley Resident or simply Aley.
Her creations were mostly preserved by exporting them from Second Life and importing them into OpenSim. She wasn't opposed to this, she actually eventually gave her own official permission to do so. But she was never in OpenSim herself.
What is shown here are the preserved creations from her Space Pirates and Galactic Trade Union themes which she created from 2008 to 2011 under the guise of Lora Lemon except for a few items which she had to release through her Aley avatar. Most of them are static, unscripted objects. The displays are mostly surrounded by cubes which she had made, too, and which are amongst the items which she released as Aley. These cubes show space pictures on the inside, and they are fully transparent from the outside. Normally, they are the size of a whole region, but they were resized for OpenSimFest to work as display backdrops. The sides show various nebula while the top and the bottom only show a star field.
In the foreground, there is always a small bit of the broad walkways that connect the displays on Sulfur. Their textures give the impression of polished tannish stone tiles cut into two rectangular sizes, one wider, one narrower, but both with the same length. Between the walkways and the space cubes, there is always a very slightly sloped "ramp" with a medium grey texture that shows a stylised moon landscape covered in craters of various sizes.
The direction of view in the first picture is not perpendicular to the edge of the walkways it is rotated to the left by about 10.
The space cube in the first picture shows a photograph of otherwise nameless IC 434, as it is designated in the Index Catalogue, on the left-hand side. It is a part of the Orion B molecular cloud, a star-forming region in the constellation of Orion. However, the image seems to be altered. For starters, it is mirrored with the north to the right and the east to the bottom.
IC 434 itself is shown as a rose-coloured nebula extending mostly horizontally with an almost sharp lower edge below its long and thin brightest part, but flaring upwards from there with its brightness increasing in a number of steps. These flares increase in height, the farther to the right they are. In front of it, almost in the middle, there is the dark shape of the Horsehead Nebula, also known by its designations Barnard 33 and LDN 1630 in Lynds' Catalogue of Dark Nebulae.
Below and to the right of the Horsehead Nebula, the star HD 37903 can be seen shining with a faint lavender tint, but not so much the reflection nebula NGC 2023 which it would normally illuminate. What is even stranger is that Alnitak or Zeta Orionis which should be a very bright star to the right of IC 434 in this picture is missing there is another, smaller purple nebula in its place. The Flame Nebula, also known by its designations NGC 2024 and Sharpless 277, is in its usual place below where Alnitak would be, glowing orange-red while being partially obscured by a darker cloud in the middle.
The texture in the back is a photograph of the Crab Nebula, also known by the designations Messier 1, NGC 1952 in the New General Catalogue, Taurus A and Sharpless 244. It is the remnant of the supernova SN 1054 that was observed on Earth from July 4th, 1054 on, and it is in the constellation of Taurus.
The Crab Nebula generally consists of two components. The remains of the supernova explosion have formed thin, thread-like and chaotic structures that glow from lime green near the upper right limits above the edge of the image to yellow slightly closer to the centre already to orange farther to the lower left to a deep red on the lower left limits. In addition, there is a diffuse, faint aqua blue cloud of glowing gas created by the Crab Pulsar which is what is left of the exploded star. It is smaller than the supernova remnants, and it doesn't reach nearly as far to the lower left.
The texture on the right-hand side is a photograph of otherwise nameless NGC 604, the ninth-largest known nebula. It is a star-forming region that resides in the Triangulum Galaxy which in turn is in the constellation of Triangulum.
The gases that make up the nebula are slowly contracting under their own gravitation to chaotic fibrous structures which might eventually form stars. The brightest parts are in the middle of the nebula, in the upper right corner of the image, where a cluster of about 200 young and massive stars are making the nebula glow by ionising it. Close to these stars, it is shown glowing in a cream or champagne tone. With no gradient in-between, the outer parts are glowing in a much less bright Burgundy red.
On the edge of the walkways towards the ramp, way to the right of the picture, stands a sign-like structure. It is actually a scripted teleporter on which destinations all over OpenSimFest can be chosen, but not outside OpenSimFest. Its basic structure is a flat, rectangular, upright box with a texture that roughly mimicks stainless steel brushed in an elliptical pattern. At the very top, still on the stainless steel texture, there is the name of the device or most of it in vantablack in an unidentified monospace typeface: "MD Teleport System".
Apart from the wide margin, the rest of the front is occupied by various rectangular panels, most of which share the same full width which is about 90% of the width of the whole device. Also, most of these panels are vantablack with yellow writing in the DejaVu Sans Mono monospace typeface on them. The top panel names the destination chosen for teleporting, "Steam Fair by Aley c.2015".
Below it is an image that shows a preview of the destination. The centre of this is a semi-elliptical arch construction that serves as the entrance of a Victorian-age amusement area on a wooden boardwalk. The structure itself is fairly elaborate with a texture that resembles slightly yellowish light wood.
At its front, there is a partially transparent sign that gives the impression of being three-dimensional through highlights and shading, implying light falling in from the left. It shows a light grey silhouette of a boardwalk with four different buildings in various sizes and shapes on it, two of them with one triangular pennant standing off a small flagpole on the roof towards the left, one with two of these. To the right of the left-most building, there is a silhouette of a ferris wheel that bears a strong resemblance to a ship's steering wheel with its eight spokes and no visible cabins.
The boardwalk silhouette is standing on a medium grey horizontal rod. Above it and connected to the rod at its end, there is a semi-elliptical double arch in the same medium grey. This double arch carries the writing "SEAVIEW" in sky blue letters in a very ornate but unidentified serif font which follows the shape of the arch. There is a light grey cartoon crab with big googly eyes and a happy expression with an open mouth and pincers spread wide wearing a white bowtie and a black top hat with a white hatband below the left-hand end of the "SEAVIEW" writing. Likewise, there is a light grey kraken with curled tentacles on the right.
Between the "SEAVIEW" writing and the boardwalk silhouette, there is the horizontal writing "Amusement Park" in a less ornate, Western-style typeface with small capitals, seemingly held in place by two horizontal rods that connect to the inner medium grey arch, one at the bottom and another one at the top only holding the actual capitals. In the same typeface, also in medium grey and with small capitals, but in front of the boardwalk silhouette and only slightly above the horizontal rod that carries it, there is another writing, "Est. 1869".
The floor of the entire structure is textured to resemble longitudinal and transversal wooden beams made of darker wood with diagonal planks made of even darker but still medium brown wood filling the large spaces between them, held in place with one large blue nail at each of their ends.
The point of view is above the bridge that leads to the boardwalk, going slightly uphill. It is lined with fence-like guards on both side, the same as those which surround the whole boardwalk, with a wooden texture that is about as light as that of the wooden "beams" in the ground texture, but more yellowish. These mostly consist of four long planks, the top one being oriented horizontally and mounted against the tops of the support poles, the other three being oriented vertially and mounted against the boardwalk sides of the support poles.
The sides of the bridge are also lined by two strings of small pennants that lead past the on-looker and end on the arch. The one on the left shows eight pennants in, from front to back, green, blue, yellow, blue again, yellow again, red, green again and blue again. The one on the right shows six pennants in, from front to back, green, this one is barely visible, red, green again, blue, yellow and red again.
To the left of the arch, there is a lamp on a lamppost. Both the lamp and the post seem to be made from the same wood as the fence except for the lamp glass which shows a yellow glow. To the right of the arch, there is one dark wooden booth. Behind that booth, there is another different arch with the same wooden texture as the one that is the centrepiece of the preview image.
In extension of the bridge, a wheelbarrow with a market stand with six boxes textured like they contain various unidentified items is standing on the boardwalk. Various other structures are on the boardwalk, mostly in the background, like tents with tarpaulins striped in beige and red or cream and brown as well as a target and another string of pennants.
All objects in this preview image so far were made by Arcadia Asylum.
Above the whole scene, there is a "ceiling" with a transparent texture that refracts the dark purple night sky. Farther in the background, barely identifiable through the "ceiling", two structures can be made out. To the left, there is the semi-transparent, black, box-shaped display booth of the Focus virtual art magazine. The fourth nebula texture of Arcadia Asylum's space cube can be seen through it it is part of the third Arcadia Asylum space display which will be described along with its image. To the right, there is an enormous static wave with a constantly moving aqua blue texture on it.
Back to the teleporter itself: This image also triggers the actual teleport. If you click it, you are taken to the chosen destination.
The ten vantablack panels below list ten possible destinations. They show these destination labels in yellow writing: "A Whale of a Tale", "Diamond Queen - Ruth 2.4" which refers to the free, open-source mesh body Ruth2 v4, "Fashion Temple", "Kimberley's Fashion Lab", "FOCUS Magazine of Virtual Art", "Galactic Truckstop", "Space Pirates by Aley Arai", "More spaceships by Aley Arai" which is where this teleporter is standing, "Steam Fair by Aley c.2015" which is what is currently selected and "Chez Faire Beach display". Clicking them will select them as the teleport destination. These ten destinations are all on this sim, so they can also be reached by walking which would take a while due to the size of the sim, though.
At the bottom, there are four square vantablack buttons with yellow labels on them. The leftmost one has a question mark in the middle and "(DE)" in the bottom left corner. It gives you a notecard with a manual for the teleporter in German. The rightmost one is similar, only that "(EN)" is written in the bottom left corner. It also works the same, only that it provides an English manual. The buttons in-between are labelled "Pg Up" and "Pg Dn" respectively. With these two buttons, several pages with up to ten teleport destinations each can be flipped through.
On the far edge of the grey ramp, a few metres to the left from where the teleporter is standing, there is a vantablack sign that names and describes the display. In the same yellow DejaVu Sans Mono as the teleporter, it reads, "Name: More spaceships by Aley Arai Owner: Ada.Radius Description: Assets from the Arcadia/Aley library owned by New Media Arts, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation. Complete Opensim collection in Kitely grid." Kitely is the third-largest OpenSim grid and one of the oldest, launched in 2011 after preparations had started as early as 2008. The pipes in this transcription, the vertical lines, mark line breaks in the original.
While the sign is actually hovering above the ground, it is seemingly held by two more of Arcadia's creations, two robots facing the sign from the sides, both of which were released through her Aley avatar.
On the left, it is Rosie the Robot Maid which can also be used as an avatar. She is mostly a darker sky blue. Her head is "cylindrical" with a horizontal, transversal axis. On each side, along the extension of the head axis, sits one horizontal, conical antenna which is about 60% as long as the head is wide and ends in a bright red, double-conical knob. The sockets of the antenna consist of a short cylinder a bit more than 20% the diametre of the head and a slightly longer cone with about 20% the diametre of the head. Two red cylinders are the eyes. On top of each eye, there is one black protrusion in a shape roughly resembling a much-widened obelisk turned slightly outwards, mimicking eyelashes. A red box serves as the mouth with a sky blue box below it serving as the lower lip and another sky blue feature in a harder-to-describe shape above it serving as the upper lip and the tip of the nose.
The upper body is a trapezoid with separate rounded sides that widens more at the front and the back than to the sides. It has three small, cylindrical, bright red buttons at the front. Both arms consist of an upper and a lower arm with separate joints. The shoulder joints are held together and in place with one big bright red slotted pan head screw each. The elbow joints only have one sky blue cylindrical pin each. The hands are two-part clamps with cylindrical pins.
The lower body is shorter, black and can best be described as two trapezoids with rounded sides on top of each other. The top one is rather low and widens downward the upper body protrudes through the rounded sides. The bottom one is basically of the same shape, but turned upside-down and stretched to about three and a half times the same height. The only foot is sky blue again. It consists of a cylindrical leg, an elliptical, conical upper part, an elliptical, but non-conical lower part and two simple black cylinders as wheels.
Rosie wears multiple white objects shaped like something between half an eight-point star and half a bloom with eight petals. One is standing on top of her head. Two are surrounding each of her wrists. Another two, arranged in an angle of 60 degrees, resemble an apron. Finally, there is a white bow made of two flattened cones on her lower back, right above where her upper and lower body meet.
Due to the low resolution of the meshes, everything that is supposed to be round is actually octogonal.
The robot on the right of the sign is Asteroid Al. He is much more humanoid and uses fewer, but more complex shapes. He also makes more use of complex textures, especially for his body and his head which are mostly covered in detailed metal-like textures. The head is stretched upwards and backwards with large deep cavities for eye sockets and where the ears would be. The mouth is a grille and part of the head texture. The eyes are almost completely baby blue and more reminiscent of two headlights, but they aren't glowing. They're textured onto the ends of what roughly appears like two black cylinders bending into the head towards the back with several golden rings around them.
He is wearing a brick red sleeveless shirt which is textured on rather than a separate object. On the front and the back, there is a picture of a "galactic truck stop" which looks completely different from what Arcadia had built and given the same name and rather resembles that in the Mel Brooks film Spaceballs. From what can be seen in the very-low-resolution image, it seems to have been built on top of an artificially flattened asteroid with the debris from the flattening still around it, and it has three circular landing pads with spaceships on it and structures both above and below landing pad level. The highest point is a purple "GALACTIC TRUCK STOP" sign. The same writing is on the shirt as well, "GALACTIC" above the image, "TRUCK STOP" below it.
Another robot is floating above and behind the image, closer to Asteroid Al than to Rosie: the tiny maintenance bot Widget. Widget is basically a sphere with things attached to it. These are two short clamp arms, three jointless legs with suction-cup-like feet, two eyes similar to Al's, but with silver rings around the cylinders, two tool-like hexagonal attachments on the upper sides, a structure on the back built around an elliptical orb glowing teal and two cylindrical red protrusions, one at the top, one at the bottom. The one at the top serves as the attachment point for a small "satellite dish" that is oriented more forward than upward.
Most of Widget's textures have too low a resolution to be able to identify them. The full-resolution textures might never have made it over from Second Life. But the dominant texture for the attachments is black with diagonal yellow stripes. And the texture of the cylindrical body, probably mostly black with diagonal yellow stripes, too, shows circular blue signs on the left and the right, each surrounded by a silver rim and showing two crossed white tools which may be a pickaxe and a hammer.
Behind the sign and the three robots, slightly to the left again, there is a vortex-like object that is not textured onto the space cube. It looks like the accretion disc of a black hole. The inner half is mostly white, lavender and baby blue whereas the outer half is rose and brick red. It implies a clockwise rotation, but it is static. In order to appear blurrier, it was made of two semi-transparent objects with similar textures. The one up front has a texture that is blurred more, and it has a higher transparency. The object is labelled as a wormhole, but non-functional.
As for spaceships, this display shows tens of them, three of which are parked on the grey ramp in front of the space cube.
The leftmost ship in the foreground, oriented with its bow to the right, is named Retro Rocket Ship. Its fuselage is cylindrical in the middle with slightly elongate spherical ends. It has five fins with a curved, back-swept shape reminiscent of Buck Rogers aesthetics, but with a rectangular cross-section. Two of them are mounted on the sides of the cylindrical part like wings. The other three are mounted on the rear, one on top, the other two rotated slightly downward from the sides. The ship has a short nose that ends in a sphere. Fuselage, nose and fins have textures that suggest that they're riveted together from steel plates with no surface treatment. The ship has no visible landing gear.
The interior of the ship can be seen through 15 portholes which are riveted into the fuselage. The spherical bow contains the cockpit with two padded seats and eight portholes. Behind it, in the fore half of the cylindrical section, there is the crew compartment with a double bunk bed. It has two portholes on each side and more control panels like those in the cockpit below them. The other half of the ship is the engine room with a "rocket engine" that leads to a dark grey rocket nozzle on the back of the ship. It has one porthole and the ship's only door on the port side, two portholes on the starboard site and even more control panels below the portholes. The compartments are separated by double sliding doors which are closed.
While this ship was only inspired by Buck Rogers, the tiny ship in front of its nose, bow oriented roughly towards the front, had its design lifted from actual 1930s Buck Rogers toys. It is one out of only two ships on this display with no visible interior, and it is one out of only two with a glossy surface. Unlike the toys, but following Arcadia's style, it still looks like it's riveted.
Its front contains the cockpit. It is spherical with a strongly semi-elliptical cross-section. On top, there are six roughly rectangular windows in side-by-side pairs of two with light blue panes. Farther back, there are two short, stubby wings, one on each side, with partly elliptical fore edges and straight aft edges. Above each wing, there is one porthole with a light blue pane in it. There is a partly cylindrical, partly conical tube on the nose from which a structure made out of two long, thin, very slight cones protrudes.
Right behind the cockpit, nine elliptical pipe-like objects are arranged in such a way that they appear like 18 small thrust or exhaust nozzles, judging from the soot on their ends and the fuselage aft of them. The soot also covers the door with porthole on each side. The longer aft section of the fuselage is semi-elliptic in shape again, but stretched more than the cockpit section. Four semi-elliptical fins are mounted on it, one on the top, one on each side, one on the bottom. Between these fins, there are four slightly larger and much longer nozzles. Unlike those behind the cockpit, they aren't straight but protruding from the fuselage in a curve. A small normal rocket nozzle sits on the rear end between the fins.
This ship has landing gear. Two wheels are located under the cockpit at the same length as the portholes and the wings. Dark patches in the fuselage texture suggest that they can be retracted actually, they are static. The third wheel is mounted on the bottom fin slightly aft of the larger nozzles. All three wheels sit in streamlined shrouds which add to its 1930s-style looks, tying in neatly with the motto of OpenSimFest 2023. None of the wheels touch the ground, though.
The ship behind these two is near the ground of the space cube, facing out of the cube, but rotated about 20 degrees clockwise away from standing perpendicularly to the walkways. It is labelled as the Retropolis retro future spaceship. At first glance, it is very similar to the Retro Rocket Ship, but shinier, neater and less grubby. It has a more elaborate nose which ends in a cone. Instead of the two wings, it has three fins around the cylindrical section. These wings are more simple in shape than those on the Retro Rocket Ship. They have multi-part, largely conical insertions vaguely reminiscent of early aircraft jet engines, one sitting on the outer edge. Between the outermost two, the wings are extended towards the back. The stern is surrounded by four diagonally-mounted fins now, similar in shape, but each with only one two-cone construct on the outer edge. The rocket nozzle was replaced with a different, more obviously octogonal and non-conical one, surrounded by four "cylindrical" objects above and below it as well as on its sides which could have been booster nozzles earlier. It's rather obvious that not all original textures have come from Second Life to OpenSim with this ship. Arcadia's space themes are rather problematic in this regard.
The interior is easier to access, also because the single door is open it opens downwards. The engine compartment has some additional handles and pipes and a larger rocket engine. The other two compartments can be access through the sliding doors, one of each is open now. In fact, one of the cockpit doors is misplaced and clips through the fuselage on the port side. The crew compartment has a small round table, a chair, four cargo shelves, eleven wooden crates all over the port side place and a third bunk. The four shelves even extend into the cockpit where they hold another five crates. Also, the cockpit not only has one handwheel in front of each seat, but it also has a ship's steering wheel in the middle and, for some reason, even a periscope above it.
Another vessel is half-hidden behind the retro future spaceship. The Centurion cargofighter of the Galactic Trade Union has a strong resemblance to post-war jet fighters. It doesn't have a modelled interior the glass of the cockpit cupola is completely opaque and black. The long nose is slightly curved from the sides, but hexagonal in its cross-section. The two wide wings have winglets on their ends, slightly tilted outward. They also carry what appears to be four hexagonal ray weapons on their weapon mounts.
Most of the rest of the ship is more rounded except for the four square engine nacelles, one mounted into each of the four fins arranged in an X. The nozzles at the ends of the nacelles are round again. Most other details are drawn onto the textures. These include 14 "portholes" similar to those on vintage Buicks, four behind the cockpit and above the wings and three below the wings on each side, as well as several safety markings with black and yellow diagonal stripes, different safety markings with black and red diagonal stripes on the rayguns and a painted-on "shark maw" on the underside below the cockpit.
The "landing gear" consists of three rather elaborate, but unarticulated vertical legs. They suggest or rather require vertical take-off and landing capabilities of which the rest of the Centurion doesn't show any traces.
Right above and farther to the back hovers another, larger, less elegant ship: the Behemoth Freighter of the Galactic Trade Union, facing to the left and slightly to the front. This ship was a cooperation with Jim Carter. It is covered almost entirely in a texture that looks like a wild and chaotic "patchwork" of rectangular metal panels, only that these aren't riveted.
The centre-piece of this ship is its boxy main cargo hold. On each side, two massive cylindrical engines are mounted with intakes at the front which make them partially seem more like turbofan engines. On top of the cargo hold, there is an empty dome which can be accessed via a ladder. The trapezoid stern features the loading ramp which is the only access to the ship's interior. The ramp is lowered almost completely. Above the ramp sits a third engine which is as big as the other two, but of a different type. Invisible from the on-looker's point of view, there are also twelve cube-shaped crates of different kinds in the cargo hold.
Forward from the cargo hold, the fuselage not only narrows, but also rises both at the bottom and at the top towards the elevated cockpit. This section two crew seats, a bed, a touch panel, a microwave and a "Mr. Coffee" coffee maker from Spaceballs. The cockpit has only got one seat which is surrounded by control panels. It is also the only part of the ship with windows. Two rows of ten rectangular windows with rounded corners each are wrapped around the semi-elliptical cockpit section.
The landing gear is lowered again. It consists of four legs, each with four feet with four extending pads each, connected to the upper struts via double shock absorbers. One pair is installed under the rear end of the cargo hold, the other one under the rear end of the "neck" between the cockpit and the cargo hold.
To the right and farther above, there is a ship simply named Saucer that looks the part. It is basically the stereotypical flying saucer. Most of its details are painted onto the texture again. It is oriented in such a way that the open hatch which doubles as a ramp faces the on-looker. The improperly installed double sliding door behind it grants a glimpse into the interior of the ship which, however, lacks any notable details except for the ladder up to the cockpit.
As usually for flying saucers, the cockpit is under a cupola on top and in the middle of the vessel. It shows a great deal of part recycling by Arcadia: Not only are the textures for the control panels standard, but the textures for the 16 windows surrounding the cockpit are the same as on the Behemoth, and the three black padded seats are the same as those in the cockpit of the Retro Rocket. On top of the cupola, there is a structure which is identical to the Retro Rocket's nose except for the texture and the pulsating blue glow around the narrow part below the sphere at the top.
Three partly diagonal, partly vertical struts with round feet make up the extracted landing gear. Also, glowing, translucent purple rings are slowly descending from the bottom of the ship to where the ground would be. Normally, four of them are visible at the same time.
Another much smaller flying saucer is hovering to the right of the Buck Rogers ship. It is simply named the Small Saucer. The very detailed texture on the main fuselage gives it a worn-out apperance. Above it, there is an egg-like cupola with the now-well-known window texture and 32 panes altogether, but the tiny vessel lacks an interior. It emits similar purple rings from the bottom as the Saucer, but they widen on their way down, and only two are visible most of the time.
The light-grey ship seen from behind below the Saucer is the Orion Jump Freighter, another cargo ship. Its rear is facing the on-looker with its rather inconveniently installed cargo hatch open, showing an arch-shaped black and yellow safety marking around its outer edge and granting an easy view into the cargo hold. The surface is mostly covered in identical rectangular texture panels which have rectangular safety markings with diagonal black and yellow stripes and rounded corners in two corners and slightly darker patches with one large circular structure between two smaller ones in the other two corners. The seams are shown as being covered with silver metal stripes.
Its fuselage mostly consists of two half-spheres, connected by a half-cylinder. The bottom halves of all three are actually flattened. The rear half-sphere contains the cargo hold. It also carries four fins with cylindrical engine nacelles at their end, two sloping sharply upward, two sloping slightly downward. The engines have white and orange textures on their rear ends. Between the upper nacelles, there is a rear wing much like on a sports car. The cargo hold contains the usual cube boxes, this time in various sizes. Together with the rear wing, they suggest that the ship has been made in jest.
The front section contains the spacious cockpit with three brown seats with black padding. It is half-surrounded by four rows of ten rectangular windows, re-using the same window texture yet again. In the middle of both the cockpit and the cargo hold, there is one column each carrying what might be a holoprojector. A semi-translucent cube is rotating slowly and clockwise above the one in the cockpit, but showing an animated standard plywood texture because the original texture is lost. Three dark grey ranged weapons are mounted next to each other under the cockpit.
The landing gear consists of three legs of the same kind as under the Behemoth, one under the cockpit, two under the cargo hold, but with different textures.
A rather unusual vessel, created in cooperation with Jim Carter again. is located in the background to the right of the Orion in the image. The Dromedary Super Freighter of the Galactic Trade Union is basically a space-going big rig. It doesn't have a fuselage in the traditional sense. Instead, it has a structure to which six standardised, octogonal cargo containers can be attached, two on each side and two on top. This structure also carries the six landing legs like those on the other two freighters which don't look like they can be retracted here. Three big drive engines are attached to the rear end, the middle one being mounted higher than the other two by a bit more than half its diametre. All four have the same white and orange textures inside their nozzles as also seen on the Orion.
The front, mostly obscured by the Orion and shaped like two joined trapezoids, looks more like the driver's cabin of a lorry. It is mostly red with one wide and two narrow stripes on the sides, the front and the roof. Said front is also adorned by two double headlights and a chrome-plated grille, all of which are part of the texture. There are several hatches and even two stainless-steel fuel tanks textured on the sides.
Access to the cockpit is granted by a door on the port side which leads into a room clad in red artifical leather padding except for the inside of the door and the ceiling which are covered in structured stainless steel. Other than the ladder that leads up to the actual cockpit, it only contains a bed. Likewise, the cockpit is mostly clad in the same padding except for the stainless steel floor. The single seat is the same brown seat as in the Orion's cockpit. The window texture has been re-used, too, but tinted red. On the roof, there is a communications dish aiming forward and slightly upward.
All six container bays are occupied. The front left container is orange. It shows a white label with the black writing "TITAN SHIPPING" and "UNIT 14 ANDROMEDA SPACE DOCK" on it. It is the only one without graffiti. The rear left container is dark red. Any writing it might have is covered in graffiti. The front top container is green with lots of graffiti on it and labelled "GRIDLAG SHIPPING INC." in a white stencil typeface. Grid lag refers to a phenomenon that might happen if a server running an OpenSim grid cannot keep up with its tasks. The rear top container is yellow any labels on it are covered in graffiti again. The front right container is brown with lots of graffiti and "GREY GOO INTERSIM TRANSPORT" written on it in a yellow military stencil typeface. The rear right container is grey and unlabelled except for the number 3669 and the usual lot of graffiti.
Finally, standing on the grey ramp all the way to the right, the tenth and last spaceship is also the most unusual one. Its shape is mostly defined by a seemingly wild arrangement of ellipsoids, and its glossy surface texture is separated into panels with a large variety of "greebles" on them. Even electric wires appear to be strapped openly across the dome-like shape that makes up the top. The nose object from the Retro Rocket re-appears yet again with the same flashing blue light as on the Saucer, but since the object is much smaller now, the flashing is more easily visible.
The cockpit is almost entirely surrounded by black control panels with mostly white, red and blue buttons on them. It features a single medium grey, dark grey and dark blue seat. It cannot be accessed because the bottom hatch is too small ironically, the open lid is way too big for the hatch. It can only be seen through the windscreen which is covered in a pattern of ellipses. One ranged weapon is installed on each side. Radiation warning signs on them suggest that they use something radioactive at least internally. The ship is standing on three strangely shaped and actually asymmetrical legs.
To the left, behind the rear end of the Retro Rocket, a bit of natural ground can be seen with the default diffuse green texture with irregular patches of light brown. It ends at a somewhat irregular and steep shoreline. Beyond it and all along the left-hand edge of the image, the ocean is stretching up to the horizon. It is mostly a bluish lilac with slightly less saturated reflections of clouds on the lower parts and a gradient towards purple near the horizon. The sky above it shows a gradient from a faint rose on the horizon to purple near the top left corner.
Close to the horizon, right next to the left-hand edge of the space cube, a single star is glowing.
The scene is illuminated by ambient light and by "sunlight" coming in from a low position opposite the display. There is no actual sun in the scene.
The second picture shows the second display of space-themed Arcadia Asylum creations. It has a direction of view which is straightly eastward and perpendicular to the walkways. These and the grey ramp area between the walkways and the space cube are basically identical to the first image.
The space cube is pushed back by about a metre and a half, uncovering the ground below which has the same mostly green default texture as the ground described in the first picture. It is the same space cube as in the first picture, but rotated counter-clockwise by 90 degrees. The Crab Nebula is on the left-hand side now, and NGC 604 is in the back.
On the right-hand side, there is a photograph of the Lagoon Nebula, also known by the designations Messier 8, Sharpless 25, RCW 146 in the Rodgers, Campbell & Whiteoak Catalogue and Gum 72 in the Gum catalogue of emission nebulae. It is a star-forming region in the constellation of Sagittarius. The nebula itself is greatly shifted to the left on the texture and thereby towards the background from the on-looker's point-of-view.
In comparison with NGC 604, the Lagoon Nebula appears much more as an actual nebula. The gases are more diffuse and spread more homogenously. The brightest spot is also known as the Hourglass Nebula or NGC 6523. On its left-hand edge, hardly separatable from the Hourglass Nebula itself, there is the very young star Herschel 36 which ionises the gases in the nebula and makes them glow, is left of centre in the picture, but far to the right in the nebula. The Hourglass Nebula shows a light teal glow. In turn, it is surrounded by darker clouds through which some more young stars manage shine, including smaller, very dark and dense clouds which are slowly collapsing under their own gravity and may eventually turn into stars themselves. Immediately to the right of the Hourglass Nebula and below it in a dark cloud, there are a few bits of nebula glowing purple.
To the left of the large dark cloud to the left of the bright centre, there is NGC 6530, a particularly striking open cluster of young giant and hypergiant stars which contribute to the brighter glow extending farther to the left than to the right. The cluster extends to the top left of the bright centre behind a very large dark cloud, contributing to the unbalanced spread of the glow some more. Towards the edges, the nebula fades through a faint taupe to Bordeaux red. The faint glow to the left of the star cluster NGC 6523 is designated as an individual nebula, IC 4678 a small part of it is cut off at the texture edge.
Outside the Lagoon Nebula, way to the right and above the bright spot that is the Hourglass Nebula, on the bottom right edge of a Bordeaux red nebula cloud, there is a bright star designated as HD 164385 in the Henry Draper Catalogue. Farther in the same direction are two more, less luminous stars. The brighter one is HD 314895 I couldn't find a designation for the one nearby to its upper left.
In front of NGC 604 on the rear side of the space cube, what appears to be an image of Earth edited into the texture towards its top left corner is an actual sphere with an Earth texture on it. It is oriented so that open international waters east or northeast of French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean way to the west of South America are facing the on-looker.
On the edge between the walkways, a few metres right of centre, there is a teleporter that is identical to the one in the first picture. I myself have set it to the same teleport target as the one in the first picture so that I wouldn't have to write another description for an image within an image with over 4,000 characters.
On the far edge of the grey ramp, right in the middle, there is a vantablack info sign with yellow writing in the DejaVu sans Mono typeface on it which is similar to the one in the first place. This one reads, "Name: Space pirates by Aley Arai Owner: Ada.Radius Description: Astonishing artwork created in Second Life by the avatar known as Arcadia Asylum, Aley Arai, Lora Lemon, Aley and other alts, exported with the artist's permission by many volunteers to OpenSim." "Alts" are short for alternate avatars, avatars which users may have in addition to their primary avatar. In both Second Life and OpenSim, it is possible to have multiple avatars. The pipes in this transcription, the vertical lines, mark line breaks in the original.
To the left of the info sign, there is an info kiosk built by Arcadia Asylum and, like most other displays, published under the guise of Lora Lemon. It has a square footprint, and all four sides are identical. The uppermost part is a symmetrical trapezoid that narrows downward. Its top surface has a science-fiction-style "structured" grey texture which is also used on the sides of the lowermost part with vertical edges. Its sides show a trapeze-shaped image of a dense field of small asteroids in front of a star field, surrounded by frame in very light and medium grey, again, with a "structured", relief-like appearance. On the image, there is a writing in teal letters in a science-fiction-style, unidentified typeface: "The EXCITING History of Asteroid Mining!"
Right below is a semi-translucent cube that serves as an image display. It circles through 16 pictures and changes them every two seconds. All four sides always show the same image. Here it currently shows a picture of what appears to be a small mining vessel in an asteroid field. The latter is shown as about a hundred big and small rocks before a grey "haze" which is tilted from horizontal orientation to the left by about 30 degrees. The ship appears mostly black, so details are hard or impossible to make out. It has a vaguely egg-shaped main fuselage with a single ignited rocket engine nozzle at the back. It also has two probably cylindrical nacelles on the sides with rounded ends and position lights on their rear undersides, red on the left, green on the right. It is located way to the left within the asteroid field and aligned with it, the rear end facing the left, but it is rotated around its own longitudinal axis to the left by almost 90 degrees. It also appears to have made contact with an asteroid slightly smaller than itself on its bow, and the active rocket engine suggests that it is pushing the asteroid.
Between the screen cube and the lowermost box, there is another trapezoid of the same size and shape as the one on the top, but turned around with the small side up. On its top, it has a fairly abstract black and green science-fiction texture which can be seen through the screen cube and which is the same as on the bottom of the upper trapezoid. All four sides show a science-fiction-style control panel which is way too elaborate for an info kiosk with 45 square buttons, three round buttons, nine dial knobs, 34 rocker switches, a 3.5-inch socket and four black-and-mostly-green displays, including at least one radar. All displays are static.
The large display in the centre has a writing on it in the same typeface as on the trapeze-shaped picture on the uppermost part, but it is green and much smaller now. It reads, "80 years ago asteroid minng (sic!) was still a vibrent (sic!) buisness (sic!), With the advent of more advanced atomic fules (sic!) and subsequent improvements in intersteller (sic!) drive engines the need to refule (sic!) from asteroid minning (sic!) pased (sic!) into the glorious annels (sic!) of galactic hstory (sic!)... Blah blah."
The vantablack display info sign is also surrounded by altogether four robots. A worker robot labelled Sculpty Robot (Industrial Model) is standing between the display info sign and the info kiosk, facing the latter. It is similar to Asteroid Al in the first picture, but in a more simple posture, without the sleeveless shirt and with silver rings around the "eye apparatus" instead of golden ones. It seems to be the basic version of these robots. Apparently, it was released by Arcadia under the name Aley Arai.
The same applies to another derivative of this robot which is standing to the right of the display info sign, facing the on-looker. It is called the Bell hop bot (Bellbot). It is identical to the robot looking at the info kiosk except for a red cylindrical bell-hop cap with black and golden trim, a red bell-hop jacket with black and golden trim and many golden buttons, a white button-down shirt underneath and a black bowtie.
Another robot creation released under the Aley Arai guise is still in its original package and lying on its right side underneath the display info sign. It has a much more humanoid and actually female look. Its face is that of a human. She has the same eyes as the two other robots, only that they are elliptical now instead of circular. She has an ellipsoid on her head that stands in for hair it has an angular cutout for the face all the way back to the ears which are built into the head. She has a more pronounced chest with two round features on the texture that suggest a pair of breasts, a slimmer waist below and a skirt-like attachment around her waist farther below. Also, her arms and legs are somewhat more human-like.
The package box has metal grey science-fiction outer textures all around except for the mostly transparent front where it re-uses the spaceship window texture. The inside is completely textured in what looks like aqua blue padding. There is an opaque, light blue rectangle extending from the left-hand edge of the window about 70% across and from right below the robot's knees to about a third of the way up to its thighs. It has the product name of the robot written on it in black letters in the same science-fiction typeface as used on the asteroid mining info kiosk. The upper line reads, "ROBOMAID-3000", and the lower line reads, "ROBOT DOMESTIC".
The gap between this rectangle and the right-hand edge of the window is closed by another, upright rectangle in the same tone of blue which extends beyond the upper and lower edges of the first rectangle by 75% of the latter's height. It shows the logo of the manufacturer. In the middle, there is a black rectangle with rounded edges surrounded by a thin black line with a light blue robotic hand modelled after a human's left hand in front of a background of zeroes and ones in dark grey digits in an unidentified monospace typeface. "Positronic" is written above the rectangle in what appears to be a bold, italic and condensed Helvetica variant except for the quite stylised, science-fiction-style capital P. Below the rectangle, "ROBOTICS" is written in a different, unidentified sans-serif title typeface. All this writing is in black again.
Below the first rectangle, there are two barcodes. The one to the left appears to follow the Universal Product Code standard as per International Standard ISO/IEC 15420. The code number is 1-33023-81220-0. To my best knowledge, it is either a fantasy code, or it has expired years ago. The barcode to the left is a fantasy code that makes use of what appears to be a 16-colour scheme in three rows with various heights.
At both the top and the bottom of the window, "CAUTION HANDLE WITH CARE" is written in a stencil typeface which can also be seen on one of the containers on the Dromedary Super Freighter in the first picture, but in yellow with thick black outlines. On both sides of each writing, there is a triangular caution sign with rounded corners, a red frame and a black exclamation mark in front of a yellow centre.
The fourth robot in the group, released under the Aley guise again, is another female robot and much more well-known. It is modelled after the robot Maria from Fritz Lang's 1928 silent movie Metropolis. Unlike the other robots, it looks like it was entirely made from brass. It has also got a very detailed body instead of details drawn onto the textures. It is standing to the right of the Bell hop bot on a trapezoid pedestal which has the official logo of the film on the front, surrounded by a golden rectangular frame. The pedestal is partially sunk into the grey ramp below, however. This robot was actually made to be used as an avatar. The avatar variant can be acquired for free elsewhere, and yet another place which I've described several months ago uses it as an automated non-player character.
Above Maria and slightly to the right, a spherical contraption called Confederation Police Drone is hovering, another product by Aley. It is mostly spherical with bright yellow-orange cylindrical extensions at the top and the bottom, similar to the red ones on Widget in the first picture. Again, only a low-quality version of its main body texture seems to have been preserved. It is mostly Prussian blue. Two stripes full of technological "greebles" with dark grey trim along both edges surround the body below the top and above the bottom. One night blue stripe each goes around its vertical axis and its longitudinal axis with black, silver and black again trim along both edges. The "greeble" stripes cut through the blue stripe around the longitudinal axis, but their dark grey trim doesn't.
On both sides, where the blue stripes meet, there is a circular police badge with medium blue as its basic colour. It has a multi-layer frame around its edge which starts with a thin silver grey or bright golden circle, followed inward by a gradient from what appears to be dark grey to medium grey, followed again by a thick golden inner frame which appears to be elevated due to the shading on its edges. The same applies to the other golden elements in the badge. There is a star with four points at the top, at the bottom and on the sides which connect to the thin outer ring of the surrounding frame and cut through the elevated golden ring and four less-than-half-sized points between them. In the middle of the star, the outlines of the number 42 are cut into it. "Confederation" is written across the top of the badge and "Police" across its bottom, both cutting through both the inner frame and the star. "SECURITY DRONE" is written in two lines on the blue stripe to the left and to the right of each badge. All writing uses the previously seen science-fiction typeface again.
It has three horizontally arranged identical weapons at the front. What kinds of weapons they are remains unclear. Otherwise, it doesn't have any farther attachments.
Farther up and fully inside the space cube, there are also four different spaceships. The highest up, right in front of the nebula NGC 604 in the background and the farthest back in the space cube, hovers the Pirate Shark Ship which belongs to the Galactic Trade Union theme. It is pointing past the on-looker to the left. Its fuselage is mostly cylindrical with semi-spherical ends. On the top and slightly below the middles of the sides, three fins are mounted, backswept like those of a shark. Each one of them has an engine installed near its end. The engines have ellipsoid, hollowed out casings with a funnel on each end. The funnels have both the same chaotic blue and teal texture which might originally have been made for water surfaces. Here, however, it is animated. At the front of the engine, it moves inward, at the end, it moves outward. Also, each lateral fin has three dark grey ranged weapons mounted on its front edge.
The name is justified by the front design. From the upper half of the frontal semi-sphere protrudes an ellipsoid that emulates the nose of a shark. On each side of the nose, there is one bulgy, menacing eye with a red iris on a black eyeball mounted on the seam between the cylindrical mid-section and the sphere. Below the nose, on the frontal semi-sphere, there is a shark maw with two rows of pointy teeth on a dark red background which is shaded in order to appear like it's actually built into the ship rather than painted on. And on both sides of the maw, there is a dark grey structure that resembles a cogwheel with no hub which might even imply that the shark maw can be opened. In spite of the many "greebles" on the grey texture that covers almost the whole ship, it doesn't seem to have any hatches or other openings.
Also, it doesn't have an interior. The cockpit is not much more than a cupola on top of the ship, mostly on the nose, with four opaque black panes, one at the front, one at the back, one on each side. Right behind the cupola and in front of the top fin with its engine intake, a small communications dish is rotating clockwise, about once every three seconds, slightly tilted upward.
Both sides of the cylindrical mid-section are labelled. In the middle, there is a white human skill in front of two crossed sabers with black outlines in front of a black playing card spade with a white outline. Next to it, towards the bow, there is a sign made of three black chevrons with cream outlines, one from the top, two slightly tilted from the sides. On the other side, towards the stern, there is a hexagonal badge with black and yellow chevrons and a black outline which has previously appeared on the Orion Jump Freighter in the first image. The chevrons point towards the bow in the usual direction of movement. "PRIVATEER SPACE PIRATES" is written above these three emblems and "RESISTANCE IS FUN!" below them, both in the now usual science-fiction typeface and in black with beige outlines.
The tail consists of a cylindrical cone with a circular cross-section that is mounted against the middle of the rear semi-sphere plus two thin backswept hollow fins with two pointy ends each, one at the top, one at the bottom. Each fin has another one of the same engines installed as the fins on the middle fuselage section. On each side, there are two yellow lightning bolts pointing backwards the lower one is a mirrored variant of the upper one.
There is no landing gear on the ship.
The ship below the middle that appears to be almost immediately below the Pirate Shark ship is actually a lot closer to the front. It is the Sloth Armored Transport, another ship from the Galactic Trade Union theme.
Its main fuselage section is about three and a half times as long as it is wide or high. It is octogonal from all sides, but differently from ahead or astern than from above or below and from the sides where it has the longest stretches of diagonal shape. It carries two large brackets on each side, consisting of a thick vertical connector plate and two thinner fins protruding from them diagonally which carry the actual turbine-like drive nacelles with the same white and orange rear nozzle textures as the Orion and the Dromedary, one from the top, one from the bottom. The fins also cut through one curved shield-like plate on each side which seems to be part of the brackets, and which seems to imply that the drives are not to be trusted. Most of the outside shows a texture that emulates slightly rusty steel plates with sometimes widening gaps between them.
The rectangular cargo hatch at the end is open, and since the ship is seen from behind, it reveals the interior which mostly shows a different, lighter, embossed texture. The same arrangement of twelve cargo boxes shaped like slightly flattened cubes is standing on each side, but rotated by 180 degrees towards each other. Only the boxes on the port side are visible in the image. Towards the stern, there are four stacks of four boxes each. Farther ahead, there are only two boxes. There are four different boxes, all with the same texture on all sides, arranged in alternating pairs in all directions.
Within the rearmost stack, the box at the top and the second one from the bottom have lids with a picture of a planet apparently made of melting cheese below the centre, slightly cut off at the bottom. A sleek, dark golden flying saucer comes dashing around it from the left, leaving a golden trail behind. Another mostly green flying saucer is in the top right corner, surrounded by a magenta halo and with a beige trail behind it. The planet is surrounded by an arch of golden embossed letters in a serif typeface which spell out, "PLANET CHEESE".
The other two boxes in the stack seem to be held shut with two yellow rectangular brackets riveted around each corner. In their middle, there is a rectangular logo with a medium blue background and a frame with diagonal black and yellow warning stripes around it. Towards the top right corner, there is a somewhat large grey cogwheel with six spokes and black outlines. Another slightly smaller and lighter cogwheel connects to it from the opposite corner. In the top left corner, there is the capital letter "C" in the bottom right corner, there is the capital letter "G". Below the logo, "CAPITAL GOODS" is written. All writing is yellow and in a stencil typeface.
The boxes ahead of each Planet Cheese box have lime green corner reinforcements. Most of each side shows black and yellow diagonal warning stripes. In the middle, there is a circular logo with a faint golden frame around it and a crossed shovel and pickaxe together with three identical cream-coloured dodecahedra standing in for rock pieces on it. In black letters in the usual science-fiction typeface, "PROCESSED" is written above the logo and "ASTEROID ORE" below it.
The remaining boxes ahead of each Capital Goods box and above and below each processed asteroid ore box appear like they've got internal cooling systems and bolted-on lids. In the middle, there appears to be a window surrounded by black and yellow diagonal warning stripes through which various food items inside the box can be seen this is of course only part of the texture. On each side of this window, "REFRIGERATED FOOD STORAGE" is written in yellow stencil letters. The writing is always vertical to the left of the window, it is rotated clockwise, to the right, it is rotated counter-clockwise.
Ahead of the cargo hold, there is a box-shaped "neck" with the cockpit in a structure that can be described as a transversally-mounted barrel. Across the front, two rows of eleven windows using the standard space ship window texture allow for views inside or outside. The cockpit itself has two seats. The control panel ahead of them and below the front window is animated. Underneath the cockpit, there is the ship's only landing leg which is identical to those of the freighters in the first picture. Apparently, the ship uses the lower engines and the curved shields as rear landing gear.
Towards the right, below the Lagoon Nebula as seen in the picture, there is a smaller freighter with a quite angular fuselage whose most striking features are the four big engines protruding from the stern, each again with the white and orange textures. It is called the Tarsus II Tramp Freighter, another Galactic Trade Union ship, the smallest one of the cargo ships and the only one with an elaborate interior, but no access from outside. Its outside texture has lots of hatches, black and yellow safety markings, vents and other "greebles", but it does not have any door or hatch.
Most of the trapezoid bottom of the fuselage is used as the cargo hold which contains six boxes, two Capital Goods and refrigerated food storage boxes each and one Planet Cheese and processed asteroid ore box each. The top part is a bit more complex in shape. At its front, there are two rows of five windows for the cockpit the usual window textures had to be modified for this use-case. On each side, a ranged weapon is mounted on the angular seam between top and bottom. A static dish is mounted on top of the ship.
The upper level, connected to the cargo hold via a ladder, has to be the most comfortable one on all ships. Apart from lots of control panels and the same brown seats with white seams and black padding seen on other ships before, it has a double bunk bed, and it is also equipped with the column of touch panel, microwave oven and Mr. Coffee also found inside the Behemoth freighter in the first picture. Camming through the ship would reveal a bathroom with a sink, a toilet and a bathtub filled with a slowly rotating bubble bath. Outside the bathroom, the upper has even got a patterned green carpet on the floor.
Last but not least, there is what may be the most unusual vessel of all. Fairly down low and a bit to the left, seen mostly from behind again, the Slee Banana Cruiser 2 is tagged as published by Aley again. Its main fuselage is yellow and actually shaped like a banana, riveted together from steel plates. At the rear end, there is a rocket nozzle which consists of three riveted funnels nested inside one another. The fin shape from the Retro Rocket in the first picture is re-used for one single fin on top of the nozzle, but with a simple brushed metal texture now. The front is decorated with a rusty figurehead shaped like a stylised bald female human.
The wings re-use both the rear fins from the Pirate Shark Ship and, like most of the ship, the riveted steel textures from the Retropolis retro future spaceship in the first picture. Each one holds a hexagonal vertical pod through its leading edge. From each one of these pods, a pair of double-bladed fans like on a gyrocopter protrude upward on a long shaft, and what gives the impression of a machine gun is mounted underneath. The guns seem to also double as landing gear.
The cockpit is inside a yellow sphere which holds onto the banana below with two humanoid arms. The lower half is made of riveted steel on the outside and covered in control panels on the inside. The upper half uses the window texture for a strangely asymmetrical arrangement of 15 windows. Inside, there is a padded red seat behind a hooded yellow instrument panel with a yoke.
To the left of the space cube, a bit of the neighbouring space cube from the first picture can be seen with a small part of its Crab Nebula texture. To the right, there is another bit of land, sea and sky as already described in the first picture. In the top right corner, there is a bit of a cloud. One particular bright star is shining right below the cloud and a smaller one farther below on the edge of the space cube.
Again, the scene is illuminated by ambient light and by "sunlight" coming in from a low position opposite the display. There is no actual sun in the scene.
The third picture shows the third and last display of space-themed Arcadia Asylum creations. Its direction of view has turned southward, but it is perpendicular to the walkways again. These and the grey ramp area between the walkways and the space cube are basically identical to the other two images.
Unlike in the second picture, but like in the first one, the space cube aligns with the ramp. It is placed with the same orientation as in the second picture, but it is being looked at from a different side now, thus showing NGC 604 on the left, the Lagoon Nebula in the back and the mirrored and edited picture of IC 434 with the Horsehead Nebula on the right.
On the edge between the walkways, a few metres right of centre, there is the same teleporter as in the other two pictures again. And once again, I have taken care that it also shows the same teleport destination.
To the left of it, there is a white sign which can also be found between the other two displays, but which cannot be seen in the other two pictures. It is white with black writing on it. It counts down Arcadia Asylum's main avatar names in Second Life and the themes associated with them: "Arcadia Asylum 2006-2007 Slum City/Urban Blight, Hobos, Street Urchins, Subway System, Modular Sewer System, Greenies, Loli Caverns", a blank line following, "Aley Arai 2008-2011 Space Pirates, Robots, Space stations, asteroids and wormholes", another blank line following, "Aley 2011 - 2015 Flotsam Pirate Town, Pirate ships, The Abyss, Nemo's world and submarine, Mer, sunken ruins, Clockworks, Mad Scientist, Aquatics, Steam Fair". Again, the pipes in this transcription, the vertical lines, mark line breaks in the original.
The vantablack display info sign is in its usual place in the middle near the far edge of the grey ramp. This time, it reads, "Galactic Truckstop and Honest Zorg's by Aley Owner: Ada.Radius Description: Astonishing artwork created in Second Life by the avatar known as Arcadia Asylum, Aley Arai, Lora Lemon, Aley and other alts, exported with the artist's permission by many volunteers to OpenSim.." Once again, the pipes in this transcription mark line breaks in the original.
The centre-piece of this display is the Galactic Truck Stop in the back and almost in the middle. Its most striking feature is the two-level cupola on top. It uses the same texture for its ten rows of windows as some of the ships in the first two pictures use for their cockpit windows. The top level is a social area with eight dark grey armchairs. The level below has eight sleeping compartments, each with a double bunk bed, a hard-to-define piece of furniture and a scripted sliding door. Still, all these rooms have "glass walls" to the outside all the way to the floor, no curtains and illuminated ceilings.
The structure extends downward in a cylinder with a smaller diametre than the cupola. Directly below the cupola, there are four structures which appear to be fuel storages. They have a label on the side which consists of the Shell logo, a white rectangle below with a red and yellow logo that might be original and "FUEL" written under it in yellow letters with red outlines in a previously unseen science-fiction-style typeface and finally another upside-down Shell logo below that. There is a large porthole divided into 25 panes below each fuel storage.
Between the portholes, there are cylindrical airlocks protruding with two sets of doors. Each airlock leads to a landing pad shaped like a section of a circle. On the edges and towards the airlocks, these pads show striped black and yellow safety marking. The landing areas themselves are marked with white circles from which short white lines protrude into four directions. Inside the white circles, each landing pad has a label with an individual number, always written in red narrow and stencil-like characters with the number at the top, "PAD" below and a horizontal line between the number and the word. The landing pads on this level have even numbers the ones towards the fronts are numbers 2 on the left and 4 on the right whereas the ones in the back are numbers 8 on the left and 6 on the right.
On the inside, this level contains a diner with a robot similar to Asteroid Al and two tables with four seats each. By default, when trying to enter any of the airlocks by clicking on them, one ends up sitting on one of these chairs.
The bottom level has its own set of four shorter landing pads. These, the corresponding air locks and the portholes between them are offset from those one floor up by 45 degrees. They have odd numbers number 7 is oriented towards the on-looker. The portholes even have fuel storages above them again which are hanging underneath the upper landing pads. The airlocks appear to be standing wide open because the doors are misaligned the outer door for airlock number 5 to the left even lacks textures. They are scripted nonetheless.
On the inside, the bottom level holds a big souvenir and duty-free shop with Asteroid Al himself behind the counter as the shopkeep.
All levels inside the station have brownish metal panels with lots of small slot-like holes in them on the ground. They are connected via a lift with red buttons inside which is actually a set of teleporters in disguise.
Above each airlock, the writing "GALACTIC TRUCK STOP" in the same fashion as on Asteroid Al's shirt in the first picture re-appears, but without the picture. In the typical science-fiction typeface from the second picture and the same tone of purple, "Last fule (sic!) n Restrooms for 20,000 Lightyears" is written below. The writing is not connected to anything.
Way to the right and near the front, there is the other part of this display: Honest Zorg's Used Spaceships. It is located on a small, slightly irregular round asteroid with a brown, crater-littered surface and an almost flat top. Interestingly, even the flat top has craters on it, so it came to exist naturally rather than through mining.
Four riveted steel poles are holding up two strings of pennants that surround the dealership. It's a pattern of 16 pennants in five colours: blue, white, red, yellow, green in this order. The 16th pennant to fill the number up after three repetitions is red again. The front left and rear right poles also carry signs painted onto riveted steel plates with the same structure texture as on the Dromedary on the back. The larger part of the sign with a slanted right-hand edge and a pointy upper right corner is painted denim blue with "HONEST ZORG'S" written on it in a heavy stretched Futura typeface and a thick yellow arrow pointing downward on its left-hand side both are yellow. To the right of the arrow, there is an additional red and rectangular panel with the red writing "USED SPACESHIPS" on it which is made to appear like neon lights.
Within the strings of pennants, there are six small vessels which appear to be personal spacecraft, three on each side, most of which have rather odd shapes. In the back to the left, there is the only ship with transparent windows, another small flying saucer, which doesn't have any cockpit interior, though. Opposite of it, a rocket-style ship stands vertically on eight rear fins. It doesn't even have a cockpit, and with the sleeve around more than half its length, it rather resembles a big turbojet engine with a long pointy nose. The almost white ship to the left in the front has a chubby, mostly ellipsoid fuselage, a "collar" behind its small cockpit and eight tail fins. The oddly shaped one opposite of it in various tones of grey with a cockpit cupola similar to that on the Pirate Shark Ship has even got 16 tail fins. All these ships have in common that they lack visible drive components this only doesn't matter for the flying saucer. But they all lack landing gear as well. Except for the upright rocket, they are sitting on their bellies.
The office in the back is basically a Retro Rocket Ship as seen in the first picture. However, its wings were cut off with no traces of their whereabouts. The rocket engine was removed it is standing in front of the ship in two parts with a picnic table in front of the engine. The door is not only open, but dislodged and lying on the ground. The separation wall towards the cockpit including the doors is missing, as is one of the doors to the former crew compartment where the bunk beds have been removed, too. The former engine room is the office with the sales counter now. Honest Zorg turns out to be a grimy worker robot based on the same shape as Asteroid Al again. And the whole ship is slightly tilted forward because it seems to have dug itself into the ground, somewhat like in a crash landing.
There is a sign above the door which is completely obstructed by the dealership sign at the front. Through the porthole ahead of the open door, the bright teal sign on the counter is partially visible. In the same slightly stretched Futura as on the sign on the pole, but in blue, it reads, "Welcome to Honest Zorg's! We sell the finest in used and reconditioned Spacecraft". Below, in red and a bit smaller, there is added, "This is NOT the complaints office!!!" On top of the counter, the dark grey cash register can partially be made out.
This time, the image was taken in such a way that nothing is visible to the sides of the space cube. The scene is illuminated by ambient light and by "sunlight" coming in from the right. Due to the space cube not having visible outside textures, the directed "sunlight" can fall in through it, so, for example, parts of the Galactic Truck Stop or the ships at Honest Zorg's cast shadows. There is no actual sun in the scene.
#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #OpenSimFest #OSFest #OSFest2023 #ArcadiaAsylum #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #VirtualPhotography #ScienceFiction #Spaceships #Long #LongPost #EyeContact #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions
Image descriptions are serious business on Mastodon. Not few users refuse to boost posts with pictures without alt-text. Some even try to get everyone whom they see posting images to add a description to them. In fact, some actually criticise alt-text that isn't sufficient. Sometimes I even see people praise other people's alt-text.
I myself usually end up spending many hours describing one measly image. The outcome may pretty well be an alt-text with over 800 characters which mentions that the actual image description is in the post text. And that image description is tens of thousands of characters long.
However, nobody seems to care. It is as if nobody even notices.
Only in a few cases have I ever received any kind of feedback for posts with lengthy image descriptions. The first time I had written an image description with over 10,000 characters, I used it in which I also posted to Lemmy and in which I demonstrated four different ways of posting that image description. It got 19 likes and 2 dislikes, all from Lemmy, none from anywhere else, and it didn't get a single reply. The only times I got a reaction from the rest of the Fediverse, especially Mastodon, was a few times when I either replied to a Mastodon user with an image description or pointed Mastodon users at my image descriptions.
Otherwise, nothing. Not even criticism that my posts are too long. Or that my image descriptions are too long and too detailed. Or that my image descriptions are actually even lacking. Or that image descriptions belong into alt-text and not into the post. I'm not even being criticised for using too many or too few content warnings.
I can't see if my posts are being boosted, but it seems like not even this is happening.
I know that I'm writing about completely uninteresting stuff. I know I'm writing many many times more in one post than typical Mastodon users are willing to read. It just strikes me that neither any of my several hundred followers nor anyone who might be following any of the hashtags I use nor anyone who spots my posts in their federated timeline ever gives any feedback.
#AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #AskFedi #Feedback #CW #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostI'd really like to discuss accessibility and inclusion in the Fediverse with people who really care about it and ideally know more than average.
But I can't.
On Mastodon, it's irreversably set in stone that "alt-text" and "image description" are mutually synonymous. They mean 100% exactly the same, full stop. Content warnings always go into the content warning field which is the content warning field literally everywhere in the Fediverse. And posts can never be longer than 500 characters. Challenging either is absolutely futile because the very concept of deviating from either is absolutely unimaginable for too many Mastodon users. At most, they may be aware that some Mastodon instances allow for writing over 500 characters, but even then they are barely aware that there's a Fediverse outside of Mastodon, much less that it's different from Mastodon in any way.
And absolutely everywhere else in the Fediverse, be it Firefish or Friendica or Hubzilla or Lemmy, people don't even know that there is such a thing as accessibility or inclusion in the Fediverse at all. And they don't care.
I could just talk away right here right now. But it'd be futile. Over 450 connections don't mean certain reactions. One or two likes if I'm lucky. Replies No. Unless I happen to use a hashtag that someone interested in the same topic is following. If I want reactions, I have to stoop as low as asking my connections to boost my posts which especially fairly new users may actually do when asked.
Or I could try Lemmy. But there's exactly one , where there's a chance you might see at least one reply at all. It's mostly a community of disabled users, and the threads are either about their own disability issues or sharing news. Never in four months has accessibility in the Fediverse been talked about. Also, neurodiversity is absent entirely because it has its own community. So I'm not sure if this is the right place to join to talk about what I'd like to talk about.
#Fediverse #Accessibility #A11y #Inclusion #Inclusivity #InclusionMatters #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostOkay, this is new.
I know that Misskey has a hard-coded limit of 3,000 characters for writing posts.
But I've just discovered that two Misskey instances and one Sharkey instance I'm connected to failed to accept tonight because it is too long. That post is a bit under 49,000 characters long. That is, both alt-texts included, it it is a bit over 50,000 characters long.
The post wasn't cropped. It was rejected entirely.
The delivery report lists this chopped-off error message for all three instances:
delivery rejected: 413 "statusCode":413,"code":"FSTERRCTPBODYTOOLARGE","error":"Payload Too Large","message":"ReSimilarly, lemmy.world rejected the post which wasn't even targetted at any community there with:
delivery rejected: 413 <html> <head><title>413 Request Entity Too Large</title></head> <body> <center><h1>413 Request Entity Too LarNow I'm wondering what the limit could be. I think I should pay attention to more delivery reports of longer posts.
The flagship instance misskey.io failed with a 403, so that might have been caused by internal issues.
At the same time, at least some Firefish instances did accept the post. Remember that Firefish is a Misskey fork.
#Fediverse #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #Misskey #Sharkey #Lemmy #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Australian tourists reconsider Kelowna vacation in wake of new short-term rental rules
The new rules are the provincial government's response to the housing crisis in an effort to turn short term rentals into long term ones.
-termrentals
Australian tourists reconsider Kelowna vacation in wake of new short-term rental rules
The new rules are the provincial government's response to the housing crisis in an effort to turn short term rentals into long term ones.
-termrentals
One of the new boxes actually contains an absolute rarity, the full Christmas Firepit Set. As far as I know, the original is not available anywhere anymore, and the copy at the various Clutterfly stores is broken. So the only chance to get it is by obtaining my upgraded version.
All 19 boxes, along with some more things created or modified by me, can be obtained in two places:
- Alpha Quadrant, , OSgrid
hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/DropBox - Kaufrausch Mega-Store, , Dorenas World
hop://dorenas-world.de:8002/Santiago
As usual for me, you can either copy the boxes or buy their contents without having to unpack them.
Image descriptions:
The pictures in this post are digital 3-D renderings created using shaders, but without ray-tracing, as they were taken inside a virtual world based on OpenSimulator. They show shelves with boxes containing various different items which I have either created or modified, offered for free.
OpenSimulator (), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and it mostly became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.
Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.
The first picture:
The first image shows a public shelf unit on the sim DropBox in OSgrid. OSgrid is the largest OpenSim grid and the oldest one, launched in 2007. DropBox is a sim on which everyone can offer items of almost all kinds for free as long as they are legal. It was created by Neovo Geesink, formerly tech specialist in Metropolis, once the first and biggest German-speaking grid, launched in 2008, which was shut down in July 2022. He has also built the 66 identical shelf units in the Alpha Quadrant, the triangular northern quarter of the sim. The other three quadrants do not have shelves they are for offering items that are too large for the shelves.
These contraptions have four shelves each. The shelves are supported by one cylindrical column in each edge. The pair of columns on each end is connected at the top with a horizontal cylindrical rod of the same diameter which is arranged in such a way that it appears to be resting on top of the columns which, in turn, would have to have semi-circular cutouts for the rod. The rods itself do not protrude beyond the columns. A third, much longer rod is installed between them and connects them, reminiscent of a giant handle. All parts show the same texture in various shades of grey on all faces. This texture imitates the look of stainless steel brushed in a circle or, due to being stretched on all surfaces, rather an oval. The constructions are about twelve metres wide, two metres deep and four and a half metres high. The shelves are one metre apart.
One of the shelves is in the foreground of the image and the only one carrying items or rather mostly boxes with items in them with only one exception. The boxes are cubes with an edge length of 50 centimetres.
The top shelf carries three boxes, centred precisely on it and 50 centimetres apart. The boxes will be described from left to right.
First comes a box with a sky blue front face. The only visible side, like the other three sides bordering on the front, has small strips of sky blue to the left and the right and eight different skin tones with black lines separating them in-between. The skin tones are ordered darkest to lightest from the front to the back. The three lightest skin tones are displayed twice. The box is oriented this way because the rear side which is the actual front is not quite safe for work.
The sides symbolise the content of the box which is eleven more boxes which, in turn, contain either twelve or eighteen classic female human avatar skins. They were created by Eloh Eliot in 2009, and I have taken them and "remixed" them into something more useful and versatile in 2021 because I was dissatisfied with what was already available. The eleven skin tone variants are snow, snow with baked-on clown red lipstick, pale, pale with baked-on freckles, fair, fair with baked-on freckles, tan, bronze, chestnut, coffee and mahogany.
The skins are available in not-safe-for-work variants with textured-on nipples and a textured-on hairless vulva, semi-safe-for-work variants like which omits the vulva and fully safe-for-work variants which also lack nipples. Each one of these is available with or without Eloh Eliot's original dark eyebrows and with or without Eloh Eliot's original black eyeliner. In addition, the snow skins with red lipstick are also available in variants with black eyeliner and blue eyeshadow.
Back to the box itself: Only the front has writing on it, practically entirely done in a Helvetica-like typeface. Right below the top front edge of the box, there is a writing in regular all-caps, "Eliot" and a midpoint in white and "Rowland" in gold, all with two blank spaces between the characters. It it almost as long as the box is wide. Underneath it, written in a taller, bold and condensed font and in all-caps again, "Starlight" is written in white, and "Remix" is written in gold. The writing stretches over the same width as that of the line above. The next line, in a font that is still bold, but not condensed and smaller, also still in all-caps and entirely white, is "The complete set". It aligns with the two lines above on the left, but it is shorter on the right.
The other lines are written in a regular font, in white and without all-caps, and most of them are written in the same size.
Below the three top lines, at roughly twice the distance between the three top lines, follows a bullet-point list. It sits significantly further to the left so that the letters after the bullet points start slightly further left than the three top lines. The list items are "classic skins, no applier", "high-res body textures", "11 skin tones with up to 18 variants each", "3 modesty levels with optional eyebrows and eyeliner" and "Free MIT-licensed".
Some more writing is shoved into the bottom left corner. The first two lines are "Made in OpenSim for OpenSim" and "Recommended for Ruth2 v2" which is a typo and should read "Ruth2 v4". Below, in a much smaller font, is one more line that starts with an all-caps "Warning:" and continues with "These skins do not work properly on Athena 6."
Ruth2 v4 and Athena 6 are so-called mesh bodies. They are 3-D models of female human bodies which can be rigged onto avatars in Second Life and OpenSim. Their purpose is to replace the original standard system body which is not really good-looking even for the standards of 2003 when Second Life was launched. Both of these bodies use a technology called Bakes-on-Mesh which was introduced in 2019 and makes the texturing methods for the system body available to mesh bodies. However, there are slight differences between the implementations on these two bodies, hence the warning.
The other two boxes on the shelf have six identical mostly white faces, and they look almost the same. They contain special nail polish which I have made for Ruth2 v4 in 2022 when there was practically no nail polish available for this body.
The middle box contains 24 different nail polishes. 22 of them come in colours which I have taken from the configuration nail polish applier for Ruth 2.0. I have named the originally nameless colours colours rose, cerise, crimson, hot pink, magenta, violet, light lilac, purple, cornflower, bright blue, Prussian blue, French blue, royal blue, emerald, forest green, olive, caramel, mocha, smoke, carbon, Tuscan red and thunder. I found the 23rd, mint, as a default custom setting on one of these appliers. The 24th is white and is intended as a basic user-tintable nail polish although the tints of the other ones can be modified, too.
The right box contains nine different nail polishes. Eight of them come from the nail control on the so-called HUD which is normally short for heads-up display but stands for a graphical controller that can be attached to the user viewport. I have named them pink, magenta, fuchsia, bright red, medium red, dark red, very dark red and vantablack. The ninth one is white again.
Both boxes have four rather relaxed female hands with nail polish on the nails on them. In fact, it is four times the same hand. It reaches into the box art twice from the left and, mirrored around the vertical axis, twice from the right. If I recall correctly, the nail polish colours on the middle box are crimson red on the top left hand, Prussian blue on the top right hand, emerald green on the bottom left hand and mocha brown on the bottom right hand, but don't take my word for it. On the right box, they are fuchsia on the top left hand, medium red on the top right hand, pink on the bottom left hand and bright red on the bottom right hand. The sides of the nails that are oriented towards the on-lookers show a light stripe of shininess.
The styling of the boxes is identical otherwise except for individual writing. Centred at the top, "Nail Polish" is written in large, medium red letters in the Lobster Two typeface with a smaller "for Ruth2 v4" in otherwise the same style below. The only difference in labelling between the boxes is in the black writing in the middle. Still between the top hands and still in the Lobster Two typeface, a bit smaller than the top line, the number of main nail polishes is indicated which is "22" on the middle box, not counting the white nail polish and the bonus nail polish, and "8" on the right box, not counting the white nail polish again. On the middle box, "colours from the Ruth 2.0 nail polish applier" in a small, bold Helvetica clone stretches across the width of the box between the top and the bottom hands with "+1 bonus colour" below. The same writing in the same style and at the same size on the right box is "colours from the Ruth2 v4 HUD".
The writing at the bottom is identical on both boxes again, still in a bold Helvetica-like typeface. It starts with a medium red line the same size of the previous line, "Caution:". The other three lines are smaller. Two are black and read, "Requires OpenSimulator 0.9.1.1 or higher and Bakes-on-Mesh" and "Compatibility only guaranteed for Ruth2 v4". The third and last one is medium red again and reads, "Not compatible with Athena and other SL bodies" where SL is short for Second Life.
With one exception, the boxes on the two shelves below contain scripted furniture and similar items, all made in mesh by Linda Kellie in the mid-2010s and released under her Clutterfly brand. I have upgraded them with the more modern, more versatile and more lightweight SFposer sit animation controller developed by Satyr Aeon while still keeping the same animations and largely the same features.
On the outside, the boxes have several things in common. Again, all six faces look identical. The top of each face is covered by a semi-transparent grey stripe with centred, opaque white writing on it. The top line is fairly small and reads, "Clutterfly Upgraded". The line below is larger and tells what kinds of items are inside the box. Optionally, there is another line below with the same font size as the top line which tells the particular style of the items if necessary. In this case, the grey stripe is a bit wider. In the bottom right corner, at a small distance from the edges of the box, there is the SFposer logo with yellow letters, the "SF" in a stencil typeface, with thick medium green outlines on a medium blue background. A semi-transparent grey rectangle sits on top of it with the opaque white writing "Now powered by" on it. All lettering except for the SFposer logo is done in a bold Bookman-like typeface.
So, the second shelf from the top carries nine boxes, centred precisely on it and 50 centimetres apart. The boxes will be described from left to right again.
The first box, labelled "Bathtubs", contains eleven bathtubs in different colours: black, blue, brown, cream, gold, green, pink, purple, red, teal and white. The box art shows them in this order in two rows of four and one row of three, all oriented horizontally with the faucet at the top. The ground was custom-made for the box art with small, fancy white bathroom-style tiles. All bathtubs are only coloured on the outside while the inside is still white. They are currently the only items on the shelves that can make additional objects appear and disappear when choosing animations.
A close-up picture in the bottom left corner, roughly the size of the SFposer logo plus the grey rectangle on top, shows the only modification on the outward appearance I've done on the bathtubs: The faucet knobs are colour-coded, red on the left, blue on the right. For purists, the box still contains the original texture for the faucet knobs. The close-up picture has the black writing "Colour-coded faucet knobs" right above itself.
The second box, labelled "Bean Bag Chairs", contains ten bean-bag chairs in different colours: berry, black, blue, brown, green, pink, purple, red, teal and white. The box art shows them in this order in one row of three, one row of four and another row of three, all oriented with the back to the top. The ground shows a brownish, blurry sand texture. All bean-bag chairs have a rhombically-shaped fabric structure textured on and the same blanket with colourful stripes thrown over the right side of the back. The shadows around the chairs indicates the sun standing right above them.
The third box, labelled "Beach Towels", contains four beach towels to be laid on the ground. They come in two shapes with two decorations each. From left to right, they are as follows:
The one referred to as "orange" is mostly orange with a white fringe that is thicker at the ends than on the sides. In the middle, there is a stylised white starfish with three dash-like ovals between its arms, one at the top, two on the sides. Five somewhat irregular white curves surround it like a circle. Shape-wise, it only has one large crease towards the bottom right.
The one referred to as "pink" has a background that is very light pastel teal on about the middle 40%, lined by thick vertical stripes in light teal and edges in pastel pink. It is decorated with stylised tropical flowers in magenta. It is messier than the first towel.
The one referred to as "teal" uses the same mesh as the "pink" one. It has only got thick horizontal stripes on it in darker teal, lighter teal, pastel teal, pastel lime green, pastel green and medium green. The pattern repeats a bit more than one half time, ending in another pastel lime green stripe that is about 35% the width of the others.
The one referred to as "yellow" uses the same mesh as the "orange" one. It is mostly yellow with some white print on it. At the top and the bottom, there are narrow vertical lines. Most of the rest has widely-spaced white polka dots on it.
The background of the box art is a beige sand texture.
The fourth box, labelled "Innertubes", contains seven inner tube floaties. The box art shows them in a two-and-three-and-two arrangement on a greyish beige sand texture. They all have a basic colour and three thick and thin stripes each.
The top left one is referred to as "purple" it is light purple with thick dark purple and thin magenta stripes. The top right one is referred to as "red/yellow" it is white with thick red and thin yellow stripes. The left one is referred to as "pink" it is pink with thick red and thin orange stripes. The middle one is referred to as "red" it is red with thick dark orange and thin lighter orange stripes. The right one is referred to as "yellow" it is lemon yellow with thick dark yellow and thin orange stripes. The bottom left one referred to as "purple/teal" it is white with thick teal and thin purple stripes. Finally, the bottom right one is referred to as "teal" it is the same as the previous one, but light teal instead of white.
According to the shadows cast by the floaties, the sun is standing high up to the upper left.
The fifth box, labelled "Pool Floaties", contains ten air mattress floaties in different colours: black, blue, green, orange, pink, purple, red, teal, white and yellow. The box art shows them in two rows of five on a ground texture similar to that on the "Beach Towels" box.
What follows are fourteen boxes with the same ground texture as the "Bean Bag Chairs" box. Thirteen of them contain three different sets of items in different themes.
The six "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" boxes contain four lounge chairs each, shown on the box art in one row. All lounge chairs have a bottom part that's slightly curved upward and a cylindrical pillow pushed against the backrest. The one on the left is plain otherwise. The next one has a blanket draped over the backrest and the pillow. The third one has one diagonally draped over the right front corner. The one on the right has one transversally draped over the bottom, but lifted so that the front left corner is free. The sun is always shining from above.
Three boxes are labelled "Firepit Set". Each one shows a firepit with animated flames in the middle, a tree stump below, two tree stumps with reddish-brown wood surrounded by a greyish-brown bark and one blanket draped over half of each one on the sides and two hollow pieces of tree trunk with the same greyish-brown bark at the top. The piece of trunk above the firepit has a blanket over its left end and two differently-sized square pillows and one round pillow in front of it. The piece of trunk on the right has one blanket pushed against it on the ground, another blanket draped over the first blanket and the right end of the trunk, four differently-sized square pillows on the second blanket and a fifth one lying next to the left end of the trunk which happens to be always lime green with a faint vine motif on it. Only the fire pit casts a shadow, but it indicates the sun shining from right above again.
Four boxes are labelled "Cuddle Blankets". They contain three times the same blanket with the right front corner pushed inward and three times the same two rectangular pillows and one round pillow with a knob in the middle on it and show them on the box art. The one in the middle has the blanket tucked under a hollow piece of tree trunk with a dark bark, referred to as "Forest Log". The one on the right is the same, but usually with a lighter, bleached tree bark and known as "Beach Log". On the left, there is the "No Log" variant which has one more rectangular pillow and one more round pillow, both with a knob in the middle, in the place of the log.
So numbers six, seven and eight on the second shelf from above are all "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" boxes. Number six is the "Tropical" variant with dull green loungers. The blankets have different arrangements of tropical colours on them like yellow, orange, lime green, magenta and teal. Number seven is the "Contemporary" variant with dull dark blue loungers. The second lounger has a medium blue blanket with white lines in a slightly chaotic, but roughly rectangular pattern on it. The third lounger has a dark yellow blanket with a heavily stylised white and grey flower print in a somewhat 60s style. The fourth lounger has a dark yellow blanket again, but with a different white pattern and some blue elements in-between. Number eight is the "Gothic" variant with black loungers. The blanket is red on the second lounger, purple on the third and striped red and purple on the fourth.
The ninth and last box on this shelf is the only different one. It is labelled "Lesbian Furniture", and it contains one armchair and one couch with lesbian animations. Both are black with light pink cushions, and this is also the colour scheme of the whole box. There is also a black round coffee table with two levels which the box art shows towards the left with the couch above and the armchair to the right of it. On top of the coffee table, oriented towards the armchair, there is a pink laptop with a black keyboard, a black touchpad and black hinges and an OpenSim viewer running on the screen. In the corner between the couch and the armchair, there is a black round end table which has two levels, too. It has a mostly black table lamp with a pink lampshade standing in the middle of it. Of course, all six items are in the box. Once again, the shadows indicate the sun shining from above.
One shelf further below, the objects on it start with a square blue sign resting against the left rear column. It is a copy of the "No Stairway To Heaven" sign from the film Wayne's World which was a jab against Led Zeppelin not authorising the use of their songs in films. Thus, it has a thin white line with rounded corners along its edges. In the middle, there is "No" written in all-caps and what appears to be a very big and heavy Helvetica-style typeface, and "Stairway To Heaven" in three lines right below in a smaller but even heavier slanted sans-serif typeface and still in all-caps. It is mostly intended for guitar departments in music stores.
Otherwise, there are another ten boxes on the shelf as partially described above. This time, they are grouped not by type, but by style. The boxes in groups are only 25 centimetres apart whereas the distance between boxes stays 50 centimetres otherwise.
The first box is the Christmas-themed "Cuddle Blankets" box. The blankets have a texture with a medium red and grey pattern on cream that is vaguely reminiscent of stereotypically ugly winter sweaters with trotting reindeer, strips with snowflakes on them and what could be described as very course pixel art of poinsettias. The rectangular pillow to the left is cream with a detailed red print of vines and blooms. The round pillow to the right is green with a darker green vine motif in the background plus large stylised snowflakes in different pastel yellow and green tones. The rectangular pillow underneath the round one is white with eight different kinds of stylised decorated Christmas baubles hanging on red threads.
One thing that is unique about this box is that it does not have a beach variant of the trunk. Instead, there is another blanket with a "Forest"-style trunk which is covered with snow. The variant without a trunk has a rectangular red and a round green pillow behind the other pillows, both with darker vines on them.
The second box is the Christmas-themed "Firepit Set" box. The blanket on the stump to the left is cream with a red and green Paisley print. The one on the stump to the right is chequered with four different squares. Two are red with black borders slightly darker red prints on them, one with what appears to be a snowflake, one with what could be vines. The other two are white with green borders. One is partially light green in the background with white six-point stars on it and a green twig with five leaves in the middle. The other one shows a green and red holly twig.
As for the trunks, the blankets on the ground have got roughly the same pattern based around the same "pixel poinsettias" as in the "Cuddle Blankets" set. On the blanket to the left, it's green, on that to the right, it's red and a bit bigger. Both have a rather low resolution and a whole lot of visible JPEG artifacts, though, as if they weren't available at full resolution anymore. The trunk on the left also has a medium-sized white buttoned rectangular pillow on the blanket with a mostly red and green Christmas print, including baubles, candy canes, both green and red conifers and Santa Claus in his sleigh. To its right, resting directly against the trunk, there is a larger rectangular pillow with a pattern in red and various shades of light brown that is a mixture of a tartan and Gingham. The smaller buttoned round pillow leaning against it is red with thin beige vines and stars.
The second blanket on the trunk to the right is mostly a darker cream with Christmas plant motifs on it such as pinecones, holly or a poinsettia, separated by red borders. The same cream rectangular pillow with red vines as in the "Cuddle Blankets" box is leaning against it. In front of it, there are a copy of the small lime green pillow at the left end of the trunk, a small dark green rectangular pillow with holly print and, half behind it, the same small white pillow with baubles as in the "Cuddle Blankets" box.
The two Christmas-themed boxes are followed by three Country-themed boxes, starting with a "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" box with dark brown cuddle lounge chairs. The second chair has a simple beige and red Gingham-patterned blanket. The third one has five cute pictures involving tiny teddy bears with cups, plates and the like in front of a background of vertically installed white wooden planks, separated by dark brick red borders. The picture at the top has a beige banner below it with the writing "Home Sweet Home" in a rather irregular serif typeface, all-caps and letters in red, blue, yellow and green. The blanket on the fourth chair appears to be a mostly white quilt with a dark grey border and some pieces in plain or printed red, green and different shades of light brown. Some of them appear to stand for autumn leaves.
The second box in the Country group is the "Cuddle Blankets" box. This time, the blanket shows a very coarse fabric pattern with a tartan with broad red and thin dark grey lines on cream. The rectangular pillow to the left is the same "Gingham tartan" pillow as in the Christmas-themed box. The buttoned round pillow to the right is various shades of brown with large leaves printed on it. The rectangular pillow under it is cream with green vines and leaves and red blooms. Of the pillows behind them in the trunkless version, the buttoned rectangular one is off-white with a cock, various chickens and a few eggs printed on it, and the buttoned round one is red with a tiny, hard to recognise pattern in cream on it.
The third box in the Country group is the "Firepit Set" box. The blanket on the stump on the left is mostly a light tan. Medium brown curves composed of circular arcs divide the texture into fields with two kinds of mostly brick red stylised blooms in them, a small and rather simple one with eight "petals", a slightly larger and more elaborate one with two layers of eight "petals". The blanket on the stump on the right is textured with a tartan which I consider purely fictional after having failed to identify it. It is mostly green and beige with one thin Bordeaux red and thicker Burgundy red line each.
The blanket on the trunk on the left shows a texture which is somewhat reminiscent of patchwork while clearly being a print because some of the sections aren't square or rectangular. Interspersed with blocks with chequered or chevron patterns or solid colours, various wildlife is depicted such as deer, waterfowl or a bear. There are also depictions of conifers and their cones. The smaller buttoned rectangular pillow on the blanket is the same cock-chickens-and-eggs pillow as at the back of the trunkless cuddle blanket in the previous box. Next to it, leaning directly on the trunk, the "Gingham tartan" pillow re-appears again. The buttoned round pillow leaning against it is mostly covered by a beige and gold texture with a crinkled appearance the knob in the middle is honey yellow.
The trunk on the right has the same arrangement with two blankets and five pillows as in the other "Firepit Set" boxes again. The blanket on the ground is striped horizontally in peach and brick red. The blanket cast over the trunk has a mostly white texture which indicates a very coarse fabric with horizontal brown and mustard yellow stripes and vertical dark orange and dark brown stripes woven in. The large rectangular pillow leaning against it is a darker cream with slightly stylised plants in shaded yellowish green and a few red berries and mostly red blooms with five petals each, all with black outlines. The small rectangular pillow a bit further to the right, leaning against this pillow, is mostly beige with an apparently abstract pattern in various tones of blue, red, green and yellow. The pattern is technically symmetrical around both the vertical and the horizontal axis, but the symmetry is ruined by the pattern being slightly misoriented and not being seamless. The small rectangular pillow behind it is cream with a rather elaborate and detailed hand-painted plant print that is mostly green with large blooms in rose and Bordeaux red tones and smaller ones in different shades of aqua blue. The two small lime green pillows are in the same places as in the Christmas variant.
Following the three-box Country group, the Shabby Chic group has the same three boxes in the same order, only with a different visual style and thus mostly different textures. So again, it starts with a "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" box. This time, the chairs are light grey. And again, the first chair does not have a blanket on it.
The blanket on the second chair, draped the same way as on all the other second chairs, has an appearance much like a quilt with the seams covered in white fabric, only that this is clearly supposed to be a print. The colour theme is cream, green and pink otherwise. There are twelve unique rectangular patches on the upper side of the blanket, six of which are largely or fully visible on the box art along with tiny bits of a seventh and maybe an eighth patch. Three of the largely or fully visible patches show roses against a cream, pastel green or pastel pink background. One has an elaborate cream and pink vertical stripe pattern. One is cream with pastel green vertical stripes with darker outlines, interspersed with rose decorations. One is simply pink with white or cream polka dots. The one that is barely visible is white with dark pink polka dots, and the one whose visibility is unclear repeats the elaborate stripe pattern, but in green.
The blanket on the third chair is white with a printed pattern of pastel pea green vines with leaves and blooms mostly or entirely in pastel rose and in various shapes and sizes. The blanket on the fourth chair is baby blue and has hand-painted plants printed on it with quite a variety of blooms on them, different songbirds sitting on them and butterflies flying in-between them all the visible butterflies are light blue. The aspect ratio of this texture is off, it is stretched vertically.
The second box in the Shabby Chic group is the "Cuddle Blankets" box again. Also again, it has the same blanket in all three variants. The blanket is white with yet another different hand-painted plant print which is mostly khaki apart from the blooms which are either white or various shades of pastel pink. The rectangular pillow to the left is sand-coloured with horizontal stripes in old rose in a pattern of three wide stripes surrounded by two stripes as narrow as the gaps between the stripes. The round buttoned pillow to the right is a faint pastel pea green with a very light faint pastel green and faint pastel old rose print of what might be supposed to be simplified roses with vines and leaves in-between, some of the leaves only being outlines. The rectangular pillow lying under it has the same lime green texture as the two identical small pillows in each of the two previously described "Firepit Set" boxes. As for the two buttoned pillows in the back of the trunkless variant supporting the other pillows, the rectangular one is sand-coloured with a vertical pattern of jagged stripes in two shades of pea green and one shade of rose. The round pillow is lime green with an olive green square pattern consisting of octogonal shapes, each made of four hexagons, interspersed by thick circles.
The third box in the Shabby Chic group is the "Firepit Set" box again. This time, the blanket on the stump to the left is off-white with a pastel violet and green flower pattern that is different from all previously mentioned prints yet again and three semi-transparent stripes, two light brick red and one pastel green, slightly diagonally across it. The blanket on the stump to the right shows another different rose print in pastel old rose and pea green on a bluish grey background with white dots, an irregular rectangular grid in semi-transparent somewhat darker bluish grey layered over it.
The blanket draped over the end of the trunk on the left is a faint greyish pastel blue with yet another different flower print, this time in pastel shades from white to dark rose and centred around roses. The three pillows in front of this trunk have all appeared before. The buttoned rectangular pillow on the blanket is the same one as at the back of the trunkless Shabby Chic cuddle blanket, the one with the jagged vertical pattern. The large rectangular pillow to the right of it is the same horizontally-striped sand and old rose pillow as on all three Shabby Chic cuddle blankets. And the round buttoned pillow is the same crinkled-textured beige and gold pillow as in the equivalent Country-style set.
Both blankets around the trunk on the right have new patterns again. The blanket on the ground has a horizontal stripe pattern that looks like lifted from a 1970s deck chair. Thick stripes of cream and pea green have thinner, semi-transparent stripes in various shades of pastel blue, pink and purple on top. The other blanket is lightly sand-coloured with another plant print, this time with branches and twigs in shades from white to tan. Leaves, vines and flower stems in various shades of green grow from them. Different blooms in white, various shades of pink and shades from white to sky blue are part of this vegetation, too. At least one bird of paradise is sitting on a branch, its head turned to the right, mostly two shades of yellow with shades of sky blue in the wing and tail feathers while the outer ends of the wings are salmon-coloured. The bird is actually looking away from a nearby butterfly with a pink body, khaki fore wings and aqua aft wings. The pattern repeats one third of a time vertically.
The large rectangular pillow leaning against the blanket is light pastel steel blue with fairly large ivory polka dots. The small square pillow lying in front of it is not a copy of the lime green pillow at the left end of the trunk for a change it is light pastel pink with fabric structure, but no printed or woven pattern. The small rectangular pillow on top if it, leaning against the rightmost parts of the blue polka dot pillow, is white with a pattern of cerise and teal flowers in large, rounded, almost circular cerise frames. Finally, the small rectangular pillow behind it is the same cream and flower-printed pillow as in the same spot in the Country-styled firepit set.
The last group is the Modern group with only two boxes, for there is no "Firepit Set" box in this group.
The first box is the sixth and last "Cuddle Lounge Chairs" box on the shelves. The lounge chairs are beige this time, still with the first chair lacking a blanket and the other three chairs having blankets draped the same way as in the previous boxes. The blanket on the second chair shows a horizontal gradient from white on the left-hand edge to pastel blue to a wide area of pastel lime green to pastel terracotta all the way to the right. Shading on the texture simulates an embossed longitudinal structure in the fabric.
The blanket on the second chair is greyish blue with a longitudinal stripe pattern. The stripes are rather broad with wavy edges and blurry enough to actually be gradients from light taupe in the middle to pastel slate grey to the greyish blue that makes up most of the texture. Between these stripes, there appear to be thinner, fainter stripes with a slightly greyer or browner tint and small light spots at a regular interval.
The blanket on the third chair is a tone of beige similar to that of the chairs themselves with another longitudinal stripe pattern. Two different stripes with fairly blurry edges alternate. One is pastel petrol blue with wavy edges. The other one is pastel pea green with shorter "notches" in the sides, lined by dark shading on both sides.
Finally, the second and last box in the Modern group and the tenth and last box on the shelf is the fourth and last "Cuddle Blankets" box. The three blankets themselves are identical again. They are white with a rough fabric texture and horizontal stripes which itself contain different black-and-white patterns, some involving lines in long zig-zags, some too small to identify due to the limited resolution of the texture.
The rectangular pillow to the left is beige with a horizontal fabric structure on the texture. It is printed with a petrol blue pattern of branches and rounded leaves and another similar pattern in taupe on top. The round buttoned pillow to the right is pastel teal with a pattern of five white roughly horizontal lines. These lines repeatedly spread out until the two outer lines touch those of the instance of the pattern above or below. The rectangular pillow which it is placed on has an unusual texture. It looks like it was stitched together from different fabrics with different structures and different shades of brown or grey. At least 16 wedge-shaped pieces each, always in two alternating styles, form circular shapes which are arranged in a very large square pattern in such a way that they touch each other. Some of these wedges are divided into an inner part and an outer part. The gaps between the circles are filled with similar wedge-like pieces of fabric with small circular pieces at the centre.
In the trunkless version, there are two buttoned pillows behind these three again. The rectangular one is dark petrol and plain except for a strong fabric texture the knob in the middle is terracotta-coloured, making the embossed edge more easily visible. The round pillow shows a wild, abstract pattern in sand, taupe, light tan, grey and black. The sand and grey areas show horizontal fabric structures.
The bottom shelf of the unit returns to a unified pattern of eight boxes, centred precisely on it and 50 centimetres apart. Each one of these boxes contains four wooden box shelf units. I have built them myself when I needed one for a shop. The units are one and a half metre wide, 70 centimetres deep, and they come in four sizes, namely two, three, four or five shelves which are always 80 centimetres apart. They come in eight different sorts of wood, using wood textures from FleepGrid. However, the rear panel is always plywood and tinted to match the rest of the unit if necessary. Care has been taken to keep the original aspect ratios of all textures.
Each box also contains the textures used for easier modification, signs that can be be mounted on the front sides of the shelves and a positioning aid for several sizes of boxes which makes positioning them easier, especially on shelf units which are installed diagonally.
All eight boxes are decorated largely the same. The four sides are identical. The box art shows all four sizes next to each other, the smallest one on the left, the tallest one on the right and a bit farther from the point of view which is slightly rotated into a diagonal position towards the shelves. The sun shines on them from ahead and above, making them cast shadows behind themselves onto the plain ground which appears roughly cream-coloured due to how low the sun is standing.
The upper third of the sides, as well as the top, are black. In the black are of the sides, the product line is named in golden letters: Centred at the top, "Jupiter's" is written in a medium-sized regular font. Below it, larger and in bold type, "Basic Shelves" is written. Further below, in the top left corner of the product image, the used wood is mentioned in a smaller but still bold font. Finally, "Wood textures, shelf signs and positioning aid included" is written along the bottom edges, aligned towards the right, in a rather small regular font. The typeface always mimicks Bookman.
On the shelf, the boxes are ordered alphabetically from left to right: beech, birch, cherry, dark oak, hickory, maple, pine and stained oak.
All boxes described above are switched to what is called "full bright". This means they have their shading turned off. Neither lighting or the lack thereof nor cast shadows have an effect on their appearance.
The textures on the contents of the boxes are too small to be visible in the picture itself. Also, the picture shows all text on the boxes so small that it cannot be read in the picture.
In the background, there are multiple shelf units identical to the one in the foreground, but they are all empty. The background is limited by a light brown brick wall. It is about ten metres high, and the point of view is chosen so that its top edge is aligned with the top shelf of the unit in the foreground.
The floor texture shows some light wood grain the wood is not separated into planks. The shadows underneath and around the shelf units indicate that the sun is shining down on the scene vertically. The sky is blue, but except for to the right and farther in the distance, it is covered by a large, cirrus-like cloud.
The second picture:
The second picture shows the inside of the Kaufrausch Mega-Store, a department store on the sim Santiago in Dorenas World. Launched in several home-hosted iterations in December 2009 and finally re-launched on rented Web space in January 2010, Dorenas World has been the oldest surviving German-speaking grid since Metropolis shut down.
In the foreground, eight wooden shelf units with three shelves each are lined up. They were made by me, and they can be found in the shelves boxes which have already been described as part of the first picture. Each sort of wood is present once as a demonstration, and each shelf unit carries the corresponding shelves box on the top shelf. The boxes are still the same, but they are larger with an edge length of 70 centimetres.
Also, the order is different. The row of shelves starts with the lightest wood, beech, on the left. Darker woods follow, namely cherry, pine, birch, maple and hickory. To the right, there are the two darkest woods, stained oak and dark oak.
The shelves are used to offer my upgraded Clutterfly items boxes as well. Except for the dark oak shelves all the way to the right, all units contain one or multiple of these boxes. From left to right, they are filled as follows:
The beech shelf unit all the way to the left has the Pool Floaties and the Tropical-style Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Beach Towels and the Innertubes on the bottom shelf.
The cherry shelf unit has the Lesbian Furniture and the Contemporary-style Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Bean Bag Chairs and the Bathtubs on the bottom shelf.
The pine shelf unit is for the Christmas style: It has the Cuddle Blankets and the Firepit Set on the bottom shelf.
The birch shelf unit is for the Modern style: It has the Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Cuddle Blankets on the bottom shelf.
The maple shelf unit is for the Shabby Chic style: It has the Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Cuddle Blankets and the Firepit Set on the bottom shelf.
The hickory shelf unit is for the Country style: It has the Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf and the Cuddle Blankets and the Firepit Set on the bottom shelf.
The stained oak shelf unit has the Gothic-style Cuddle Lounge Chairs on the middle shelf.
Behind the hickory shelves and partly behind the maple shelves, a plain shiny bluish grey piece of wall from the floor to the ceiling separates a very large window to its left to a smaller one to its right. Another similar piece of wall is on the right, extending into the building and beyond the border of the image. One of the building's three revolving doors is behind it. A shadow appears to be cast from the ground up to about 28% of the height of this piece of wall. It is actually a side-effect of the shininess as OpenSim's graphics engine is incapable of raytracing.
The small window consists of one pane which appears to be framed in metal. In the larger one, two wider panes are visible. They extend from the floor to about 80% ceiling height. Above them, the gaps between the walls are filled with additional horizontal pieces of wall. These are a faint dark purple and decorated with lighter rectangular frames corners curved towards the inside. Two of these frames are above the small window, six can be seen above the larger one. The glass in the windows is tinted grey which makes the outside appear darker than it actually is.
The ceiling is plain grey and appears darker than the walls. Towards the right, it has a slight yellow tint which comes from a light source.
A pattern of five tiles makes up the floor. Four of them are large grey squares with one corner cut off they become more or less slightly darker towards the corner opposite the cut-off corner. They are oriented with the cut-off corners turned towards one another. The fifth one is a small, dark red square that fits in the gap created by the cut-off corners.
The department store building is a one-off custom design by grid co-founder Anachron Young.
Behind the shelves with the boxes and through the windows, the outside can be seen. Right outside the department store building, there is a street with yellow centre lines and sidewalks with concrete pavement on both sides.
On the other side of the street, mostly left of centre, the ruins of an unfinished two-floor building, probably a residential one, can be made out. Its walls and columns are covered with cracked and weathered plaster. Doors and windows are missing. However, the building appears to be occupied by hobos. Someone has installed not only primitive wooden railings where the upstairs windows, but a makeshift trellis on the side oriented towards the department store and two more on the left around the corner. Green plants are growing up all three. Also, old and shabby furniture is strewn about both floors. Due to design limitations, the roof shingles can partly be seen from underneath. Various trees with green foliage can be seen behind the ruins.
The grey single-floor building to the right of the ruins is commercial, but unused. Only little of it is visible through the small window to the right. It, too, is labelled as a department store although it is much smaller than the Kaufrausch. So says the dark brown writing above the windows and the boarded-up door, none of which is actually visible in the image except for the uppermost bit of the "D" in the all-caps "department store" writing. Above it, a dirty and damaged yellow sign advertises "housewares & small appliances" in black all-caps. To the left of both, there is another dirty and damaged sign, a white one with "clothing" and "sportswear" written in two lines of red letters.
Directly to the left of the beech shelf unit, on the other side of the street, one of the three posts of a triple road sign can be seen.
Farther to the left and in the distance, there is another one-off custom building created by Anachron for this sim. The two-floor Prim-Air School has walls covered in vertical panels of an unknown material. Between the windows of the ground floor and the first floor, one of each of which is visible, the walls are painted brown, otherwise they are orange. The corners are a darker orange, but glossy which is why the one visible corner appears to be painted in a dark pastel tone. The school yard in front of the building is separated from the sidewalk by a black iron fence. The two large white rectangles on the ground of the school yard which are for various sports activities can just barely be seen.
What little of the sky above is not blocked by buildings or vegetation is blue and cloudless. No shadows can be made out outside, so the position of the sun remains unclear.
#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Upcycling #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #EyeContact #CWEyeContact #Food #CWFoodI thought I wouldn't need an #EyeContact #ContentWarning this time
But there are birds and other animals on some of the fabrics. They're absolutely invisible to the naked eye, usually being less than 1/100th of a pixel each in the final picture. But I guess I can trigger some #Autistic people by just merely mentioning that they're there. Remember that most birds have almost 360 vision, and deer aren't that far away from it. If you see a bird or a deer, you practically always see at least one eye.
On a sidenote: Having to describe over a dozen different plant/flower prints on fabric is tiring. I hope this will be over soon. I've only written some 7,000 characters today so far...
#Long #LongPost #ImageDescription #Inclusion #InclusivityI hate describing fabric patterns.
There's a blanket on a picture on the sides of a box. In the final picture, it'll be shown not much larger than six pixels, two wide, three high. I've just used a bit over 1,000 characters to describe only the visible part of that blanket because it has a patchwork-like print. But I'd do the very same thing if it was only a small pillow that'll be less than one pixel in the final picture.
I'm going to pump tens of thousands of characters into describing dozens of textures. And when I'm done, I'm going to mention that not a single one of these textures is actually visible to the naked eye because #Blind and #VisuallyImpaired people won't know that otherwise. But this invisibility due to low resolution is part of the image and thus needs to be described.
Oh, and I won't be nearly done before noon. And since I've just passed 30,000 characters, I'm not sure if I won't break my own record.
The things you do for #Accessibility.
#Long #LongPost #ImageDescriptionAnd I'm back. Now I hope to be done with the first description before noon and without breaking my #ImageDescription record of 38,650 characters.
14 boxes with content to go, six of them with various fabric textures. The other eight might be rather simple and done quickly unless #Accessibility and the curiosity of random readers demand me to give detailed descriptions of eight woodgrain textures plus plywood which are absolutely invisible to the naked eye in the picture.
I also hope I can really get away with describing and transcribing only once what appears multiple times such as certain labels on boxes. This description would really go completely out of hand if I were to fully describe each one of 30 boxes individually. This would become the first image description in the Fediverse with over 100 individual text transcriptions.
The second picture will only show boxes which are already in the first picture. I do hope I can get away with writing that these boxes have already been described in the image description of the first picture.
#Long #LongPost
Bought my ticket as fast as I could, got to the platform in time to see my bus pulling out ouch. Hopefully just half, not an hours wait.
to
Girls on the Golf Course, Taylor Swift Brittany Mahomes Handshake Reaction & Ryan Long Ep 212
Tsukiatte Agetemo Ii kana
Do We Relationship
Inuzuka
Sawatari
Cap
Hair
Hair
Even if the could be pressured or bribed into considering taking control, it is far from clear if they would be accepted, or able to do it.
A government installed by the Israeli military would not be seen as legitimate.
The are already widely resented in the for their weakness in the face of Israeli authorities, for being inefficient, unrepresentative and riddled with corruption.
And though the majority of Gazans were not old enough to vote when lost elections to in 2007, there is no reason to think they have become more popular.
The only idea floated by Israeli politicians and officers for Gazas future, an force, seems rooted more in wishful thinking than reality.
It seems that the war is going to be very, very and we have to take into account the , the risk of conflict into the wider region, the of support and the question to whom we are going to pass in Gaza for example if we have to pass it potentially to some Arab-led force, said former prime minister Ehud .
Wo bin ich und wo will ich hin -Vehicel
Sask. government seeking builders for new long-term care facility
On Thursday, the government announced it had issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for a team to design and build the specialized facility.
-termCareFacility
Sask. government seeking builders for new long-term care facility
On Thursday, the government announced it had issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for a team to design and build the specialized facility.
-termCareFacility
it such a to Still not there where I used to be
But be there ( to my )
an awfull year
The era has truly the out of
After Israel warned them to evacuate in light of a planned ground offensive against Hamas, thousands of Palestinians fled to southern Gaza to seek refuge.
Heat Check Podcast: What did we learn from Miami Heats preseason opener
Trip Destination: Balos Beach, Crete. A girl traveler in a black outfit and white shoes, enjoying the stunning view of the ocean, beach, and mountains. Have you ever explored such a scenic paradise, like a modern-day Scalise or in search of the elusive Bigfoot
Regina city councillors work towards providing more long-term bed spaces.
City councillors agreed to rezone a portion of the land by the Wascana Parkway to allow for the development of a long-term care facility.
-termcarehome
Regina city councillors work towards providing more long-term bed spaces.
City councillors agreed to rezone a portion of the land by the Wascana Parkway to allow for the development of a long-term care facility.
-termcarehome
v some of the Gryphons can be rly very long . this Gryph the Gryphon's often rly very long too V
Apparently according to the WHO infection control should be based one ones values and preferences (I guess whether you prefer to infect your patient while wearing a more comfortable ineffective mask like a surgical aka medical masks or whether you prefer to not infect them by using a respirator mask better able to reduce airborne spread diseases).
COVID
1 percent of had through last year, CDC says
By the end of last year, about 92 percent of those 17 and younger had indicating a previous covid-19 infection, but long covid remains rare, especially in children younger than 12, the reports authors wrote.
By comparison, a separate CDC report on long covid among U.S. found that nearly 7 percent (1 in every 14 adults) have experienced long covid, and about half of them still had the condition.
Happy ! Or Long Weekend Where Some People Also Eat Turkey!
We don't celebrate the day in our house, but does get the weekend early as opposed to the US where they double up with BATShit day - Buy All The Shit day. So, it's still an excuse to get the family together for a nice meal. Which may incidentally involve Turkey.
Mom hasn't been with us for 7 years now, but I still use the handwritten recipe cards she wrote out for me 28 yrs ago when I went to college.
Achterbanraadpleging!
De regering geeft geld voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar Covid. ZonMw is de organisatie die dit onderzoek financiert. Om dit geld goed te besteden zijn de patintenorganisatie PostCovid NL en de patintgroepen Long Covid Nederland en Kinderen met Long Covid, gevraagd onderwerpen aan te geven waarvan zij vinden dat het binnen klinisch en zorg-gerelateerd onderzoek onderzocht moet worden.
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Iron butterfly - 1968
Nimm heute am Schweigespace auf Twitter teil. -Covid
.
newsukraine.rbc.ua
"US Army ready to send ATACMS to Ukraine fast after Biden's approval"
-range .rbc.ua
Been a since I last watched ..
What a :ablobsadrain: show ...
That ending :immeasurablesadness:
Pure sobby
Regina residents upset after learning long-term care home plans to end services
A continuing care aide at the Regina Lutheran Home says she is 'very broken' after learning the 62 residents she and staff cared for will need to find a new home in six months.
-termCare -termcare
Regina residents upset after learning long-term care home plans to end services
A continuing care aide at the Regina Lutheran Home says she is 'very broken' after learning the 62 residents she and staff cared for will need to find a new home in six months.
-termCare -termcare
In einer neuen , die auf dem Preprint-Server bioRxiv* verffentlicht wurde, bewerten Forscher den Zusammenhang zwischen und Symptomen der -Coronavirus-Krankheit 2019 (COVID-19) anhand eines nichtmenschlichen Primatenmodells.
Global News BC: Profit outpacing costs in B.C. long-term care facilities, seniors advocate says 'Advocate -termCare
OpenSimFest 2023 doesn't only offer the latest and greatest in OpenSim creativity. It also shows some classics made by Arcadia Asylum in Second Life and legally preserved in OpenSim. This includes her space themes which are exhibited on three large displays.The pictures in this post are digital 3-D renderings of exhibition displays at the annual OpenSimFest () which has started on September 15th and will continue until September 30th. They were created using shaders, but without ray-tracing, as they were taken inside a virtual world based on OpenSimulator.
OpenSimulator (), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and it mostly became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.
Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.
OpenSimFest takes place on its own grid. It is connected to the Hypergrid, so it isn't necessary to have an avatar on the OpenSimFest grid because you can visit it with an avatar that you have on another grid. It features a schedule of 12 hours each day, starting at 9 a.m. PDT. PDT is the standard time zone both in Second Life and on all OpenSim grids. On most days, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., there are live performances or DJ events on one of the four neighbouring event sims. Most of the other sims are much larger. They are so-called "varsims", something specific to OpenSim that doesn't exist in Second Life. They stretch across multiple regions arranged in a square without borders between the regions. Two of them are merchant sims where OpenSim creators offer mostly payware, but also a few freebies. Others are, for example, exhibition sims.
The motto of OpenSimFest 2023 is the Jazz/Blues Era.
These pictures were all taken on Sulfur, one of the two merchant sims. What they show, however, are displays of creations by the famous Second Life creator Arcadia Asylum. She started around 2006, and she was banned from Second Life several times, likely because she refused to charge money for her creations. Instead, she offered them for free, under a free, non-commercial copyleft license and with full permissions. Due to always being banned after a while, she went through several names. Arcadia Asylum was the first, followed by names such as Aley Arai, Lora Lemon and finally, when Second Life had removed the last names feature for new users, Aley Resident or simply Aley.
Her creations were mostly preserved by exporting them from Second Life and importing them into OpenSim. She wasn't opposed to this, she actually eventually gave her own official permission to do so. But she was never in OpenSim herself.
What is shown here are the preserved creations from her Space Pirates and Galactic Trade Union themes which she created from 2008 to 2011 under the guise of Lora Lemon except for a few items which she had to release through her Aley avatar. Most of them are static, unscripted objects. The displays are mostly surrounded by cubes which she had made, too, and which are amongst the items which she released as Aley. These cubes show space pictures on the inside, and they are fully transparent from the outside. Normally, they are the size of a whole region, but they were resized for OpenSimFest to work as display backdrops. The sides show various nebula while the top and the bottom only show a star field.
In the foreground, there is always a small bit of the broad walkways that connect the displays on Sulfur. Their textures give the impression of polished tannish stone tiles cut into two rectangular sizes, one wider, one narrower, but both with the same length. Between the walkways and the space cubes, there is always a very slightly sloped "ramp" with a medium grey texture that shows a stylised moon landscape covered in craters of various sizes.
The direction of view in the first picture is not perpendicular to the edge of the walkways it is rotated to the left by about 10.
The space cube in the first picture shows a photograph of otherwise nameless IC 434, as it is designated in the Index Catalogue, on the left-hand side. It is a part of the Orion B molecular cloud, a star-forming region in the constellation of Orion. However, the image seems to be altered. For starters, it is mirrored with the north to the right and the east to the bottom.
IC 434 itself is shown as a rose-coloured nebula extending mostly horizontally with an almost sharp lower edge below its long and thin brightest part, but flaring upwards from there with its brightness increasing in a number of steps. These flares increase in height, the farther to the right they are. In front of it, almost in the middle, there is the dark shape of the Horsehead Nebula, also known by its designations Barnard 33 and LDN 1630 in Lynds' Catalogue of Dark Nebulae.
Below and to the right of the Horsehead Nebula, the star HD 37903 can be seen shining with a faint lavender tint, but not so much the reflection nebula NGC 2023 which it would normally illuminate. What is even stranger is that Alnitak or Zeta Orionis which should be a very bright star to the right of IC 434 in this picture is missing there is another, smaller purple nebula in its place. The Flame Nebula, also known by its designations NGC 2024 and Sharpless 277, is in its usual place below where Alnitak would be, glowing orange-red while being partially obscured by a darker cloud in the middle.
The texture in the back is a photograph of the Crab Nebula, also known by the designations Messier 1, NGC 1952 in the New General Catalogue, Taurus A and Sharpless 244. It is the remnant of the supernova SN 1054 that was observed on Earth from July 4th, 1054 on, and it is in the constellation of Taurus.
The Crab Nebula generally consists of two components. The remains of the supernova explosion have formed thin, thread-like and chaotic structures that glow from lime green near the upper right limits above the edge of the image to yellow slightly closer to the centre already to orange farther to the lower left to a deep red on the lower left limits. In addition, there is a diffuse, faint aqua blue cloud of glowing gas created by the Crab Pulsar which is what is left of the exploded star. It is smaller than the supernova remnants, and it doesn't reach nearly as far to the lower left.
The texture on the right-hand side is a photograph of otherwise nameless NGC 604, the ninth-largest known nebula. It is a star-forming region that resides in the Triangulum Galaxy which in turn is in the constellation of Triangulum.
The gases that make up the nebula are slowly contracting under their own gravitation to chaotic fibrous structures which might eventually form stars. The brightest parts are in the middle of the nebula, in the upper right corner of the image, where a cluster of about 200 young and massive stars are making the nebula glow by ionising it. Close to these stars, it is shown glowing in a cream or champagne tone. With no gradient in-between, the outer parts are glowing in a much less bright Burgundy red.
On the edge of the walkways towards the ramp, way to the right of the picture, stands a sign-like structure. It is actually a scripted teleporter on which destinations all over OpenSimFest can be chosen, but not outside OpenSimFest. Its basic structure is a flat, rectangular, upright box with a texture that roughly mimicks stainless steel brushed in an elliptical pattern. At the very top, still on the stainless steel texture, there is the name of the device or most of it in vantablack in an unidentified monospace typeface: "MD Teleport System".
Apart from the wide margin, the rest of the front is occupied by various rectangular panels, most of which share the same full width which is about 90% of the width of the whole device. Also, most of these panels are vantablack with yellow writing in the DejaVu Sans Mono monospace typeface on them. The top panel names the destination chosen for teleporting, "Steam Fair by Aley c.2015".
Below it is an image that shows a preview of the destination. The centre of this is a semi-elliptical arch construction that serves as the entrance of a Victorian-age amusement area on a wooden boardwalk. The structure itself is fairly elaborate with a texture that resembles slightly yellowish light wood.
At its front, there is a partially transparent sign that gives the impression of being three-dimensional through highlights and shading, implying light falling in from the left. It shows a light grey silhouette of a boardwalk with four different buildings in various sizes and shapes on it, two of them with one triangular pennant standing off a small flagpole on the roof towards the left, one with two of these. To the right of the left-most building, there is a silhouette of a ferris wheel that bears a strong resemblance to a ship's steering wheel with its eight spokes and no visible cabins.
The boardwalk silhouette is standing on a medium grey horizontal rod. Above it and connected to the rod at its end, there is a semi-elliptical double arch in the same medium grey. This double arch carries the writing "SEAVIEW" in sky blue letters in a very ornate but unidentified serif font which follows the shape of the arch. There is a light grey cartoon crab with big googly eyes and a happy expression with an open mouth and pincers spread wide wearing a white bowtie and a black top hat with a white hatband below the left-hand end of the "SEAVIEW" writing. Likewise, there is a light grey kraken with curled tentacles on the right.
Between the "SEAVIEW" writing and the boardwalk silhouette, there is the horizontal writing "Amusement Park" in a less ornate, Western-style typeface with small capitals, seemingly held in place by two horizontal rods that connect to the inner medium grey arch, one at the bottom and another one at the top only holding the actual capitals. In the same typeface, also in medium grey and with small capitals, but in front of the boardwalk silhouette and only slightly above the horizontal rod that carries it, there is another writing, "Est. 1869".
The floor of the entire structure is textured to resemble longitudinal and transversal wooden beams made of darker wood with diagonal planks made of even darker but still medium brown wood filling the large spaces between them, held in place with one large blue nail at each of their ends.
The point of view is above the bridge that leads to the boardwalk, going slightly uphill. It is lined with fence-like guards on both side, the same as those which surround the whole boardwalk, with a wooden texture that is about as light as that of the wooden "beams" in the ground texture, but more yellowish. These mostly consist of four long planks, the top one being oriented horizontally and mounted against the tops of the support poles, the other three being oriented vertially and mounted against the boardwalk sides of the support poles.
The sides of the bridge are also lined by two strings of small pennants that lead past the on-looker and end on the arch. The one on the left shows eight pennants in, from front to back, green, blue, yellow, blue again, yellow again, red, green again and blue again. The one on the right shows six pennants in, from front to back, green, this one is barely visible, red, green again, blue, yellow and red again.
To the left of the arch, there is a lamp on a lamppost. Both the lamp and the post seem to be made from the same wood as the fence except for the lamp glass which shows a yellow glow. To the right of the arch, there is one dark wooden booth. Behind that booth, there is another different arch with the same wooden texture as the one that is the centrepiece of the preview image.
In extension of the bridge, a wheelbarrow with a market stand with six boxes textured like they contain various unidentified items is standing on the boardwalk. Various other structures are on the boardwalk, mostly in the background, like tents with tarpaulins striped in beige and red or cream and brown as well as a target and another string of pennants.
All objects in this preview image so far were made by Arcadia Asylum.
Above the whole scene, there is a "ceiling" with a transparent texture that refracts the dark purple night sky. Farther in the background, barely identifiable through the "ceiling", two structures can be made out. To the left, there is the semi-transparent, black, box-shaped display booth of the Focus virtual art magazine. The fourth nebula texture of Arcadia Asylum's space cube can be seen through it it is part of the third Arcadia Asylum space display which will be described along with its image. To the right, there is an enormous static wave with a constantly moving aqua blue texture on it.
Back to the teleporter itself: This image also triggers the actual teleport. If you click it, you are taken to the chosen destination.
The ten vantablack panels below list ten possible destinations. They show these destination labels in yellow writing: "A Whale of a Tale", "Diamond Queen - Ruth 2.4" which refers to the free, open-source mesh body Ruth2 v4, "Fashion Temple", "Kimberley's Fashion Lab", "FOCUS Magazine of Virtual Art", "Galactic Truckstop", "Space Pirates by Aley Arai", "More spaceships by Aley Arai" which is where this teleporter is standing, "Steam Fair by Aley c.2015" which is what is currently selected and "Chez Faire Beach display". Clicking them will select them as the teleport destination. These ten destinations are all on this sim, so they can also be reached by walking which would take a while due to the size of the sim, though.
At the bottom, there are four square vantablack buttons with yellow labels on them. The leftmost one has a question mark in the middle and "(DE)" in the bottom left corner. It gives you a notecard with a manual for the teleporter in German. The rightmost one is similar, only that "(EN)" is written in the bottom left corner. It also works the same, only that it provides an English manual. The buttons in-between are labelled "Pg Up" and "Pg Dn" respectively. With these two buttons, several pages with up to ten teleport destinations each can be flipped through.
On the far edge of the grey ramp, a few metres to the left from where the teleporter is standing, there is a vantablack sign that names and describes the display. In the same yellow DejaVu Sans Mono as the teleporter, it reads, "Name: More spaceships by Aley Arai Owner: Ada.Radius Description: Assets from the Arcadia/Aley library owned by New Media Arts, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation. Complete Opensim collection in Kitely grid." Kitely is the third-largest OpenSim grid and one of the oldest, launched in 2011 after preparations had started as early as 2008. The pipes in this transcription, the vertical lines, mark line breaks in the original.
While the sign is actually hovering above the ground, it is seemingly held by two more of Arcadia's creations, two robots facing the sign from the sides, both of which were released through her Aley avatar.
On the left, it is Rosie the Robot Maid which can also be used as an avatar. She is mostly a darker sky blue. Her head is "cylindrical" with a horizontal, transversal axis. On each side, along the extension of the head axis, sits one horizontal, conical antenna which is about 60% as long as the head is wide and ends in a bright red, double-conical knob. The sockets of the antenna consist of a short cylinder a bit more than 20% the diametre of the head and a slightly longer cone with about 20% the diametre of the head. Two red cylinders are the eyes. On top of each eye, there is one black protrusion in a shape roughly resembling a much-widened obelisk turned slightly outwards, mimicking eyelashes. A red box serves as the mouth with a sky blue box below it serving as the lower lip and another sky blue feature in a harder-to-describe shape above it serving as the upper lip and the tip of the nose.
The upper body is a trapezoid with separate rounded sides that widens more at the front and the back than to the sides. It has three small, cylindrical, bright red buttons at the front. Both arms consist of an upper and a lower arm with separate joints. The shoulder joints are held together and in place with one big bright red slotted pan head screw each. The elbow joints only have one sky blue cylindrical pin each. The hands are two-part clamps with cylindrical pins.
The lower body is shorter, black and can best be described as two trapezoids with rounded sides on top of each other. The top one is rather low and widens downward the upper body protrudes through the rounded sides. The bottom one is basically of the same shape, but turned upside-down and stretched to about three and a half times the same height. The only foot is sky blue again. It consists of a cylindrical leg, an elliptical, conical upper part, an elliptical, but non-conical lower part and two simple black cylinders as wheels.
Rosie wears multiple white objects shaped like something between half an eight-point star and half a bloom with eight petals. One is standing on top of her head. Two are surrounding each of her wrists. Another two, arranged in an angle of 60 degrees, resemble an apron. Finally, there is a white bow made of two flattened cones on her lower back, right above where her upper and lower body meet.
Due to the low resolution of the meshes, everything that is supposed to be round is actually octogonal.
The robot on the right of the sign is Asteroid Al. He is much more humanoid and uses fewer, but more complex shapes. He also makes more use of complex textures, especially for his body and his head which are mostly covered in detailed metal-like textures. The head is stretched upwards and backwards with large deep cavities for eye sockets and where the ears would be. The mouth is a grille and part of the head texture. The eyes are almost completely baby blue and more reminiscent of two headlights, but they aren't glowing. They're textured onto the ends of what roughly appears like two black cylinders bending into the head towards the back with several golden rings around them.
He is wearing a brick red sleeveless shirt which is textured on rather than a separate object. On the front and the back, there is a picture of a "galactic truck stop" which looks completely different from what Arcadia had built and given the same name and rather resembles that in the Mel Brooks film Spaceballs. From what can be seen in the very-low-resolution image, it seems to have been built on top of an artificially flattened asteroid with the debris from the flattening still around it, and it has three circular landing pads with spaceships on it and structures both above and below landing pad level. The highest point is a purple "GALACTIC TRUCK STOP" sign. The same writing is on the shirt as well, "GALACTIC" above the image, "TRUCK STOP" below it.
Another robot is floating above and behind the image, closer to Asteroid Al than to Rosie: the tiny maintenance bot Widget. Widget is basically a sphere with things attached to it. These are two short clamp arms, three jointless legs with suction-cup-like feet, two eyes similar to Al's, but with silver rings around the cylinders, two tool-like hexagonal attachments on the upper sides, a structure on the back built around an elliptical orb glowing teal and two cylindrical red protrusions, one at the top, one at the bottom. The one at the top serves as the attachment point for a small "satellite dish" that is oriented more forward than upward.
Most of Widget's textures have too low a resolution to be able to identify them. The full-resolution textures might never have made it over from Second Life. But the dominant texture for the attachments is black with diagonal yellow stripes. And the texture of the cylindrical body, probably mostly black with diagonal yellow stripes, too, shows circular blue signs on the left and the right, each surrounded by a silver rim and showing two crossed white tools which may be a pickaxe and a hammer.
Behind the sign and the three robots, slightly to the left again, there is a vortex-like object that is not textured onto the space cube. It looks like the accretion disc of a black hole. The inner half is mostly white, lavender and baby blue whereas the outer half is rose and brick red. It implies a clockwise rotation, but it is static. In order to appear blurrier, it was made of two semi-transparent objects with similar textures. The one up front has a texture that is blurred more, and it has a higher transparency. The object is labelled as a wormhole, but non-functional.
As for spaceships, this display shows tens of them, three of which are parked on the grey ramp in front of the space cube.
The leftmost ship in the foreground, oriented with its bow to the right, is named Retro Rocket Ship. Its fuselage is cylindrical in the middle with slightly elongate spherical ends. It has five fins with a curved, back-swept shape reminiscent of Buck Rogers aesthetics, but with a rectangular cross-section. Two of them are mounted on the sides of the cylindrical part like wings. The other three are mounted on the rear, one on top, the other two rotated slightly downward from the sides. The ship has a short nose that ends in a sphere. Fuselage, nose and fins have textures that suggest that they're riveted together from steel plates with no surface treatment. The ship has no visible landing gear.
The interior of the ship can be seen through 15 portholes which are riveted into the fuselage. The spherical bow contains the cockpit with two padded seats and eight portholes. Behind it, in the fore half of the cylindrical section, there is the crew compartment with a double bunk bed. It has two portholes on each side and more control panels like those in the cockpit below them. The other half of the ship is the engine room with a "rocket engine" that leads to a dark grey rocket nozzle on the back of the ship. It has one porthole and the ship's only door on the port side, two portholes on the starboard site and even more control panels below the portholes. The compartments are separated by double sliding doors which are closed.
While this ship was only inspired by Buck Rogers, the tiny ship in front of its nose, bow oriented roughly towards the front, had its design lifted from actual 1930s Buck Rogers toys. It is one out of only two ships on this display with no visible interior, and it is one out of only two with a glossy surface. Unlike the toys, but following Arcadia's style, it still looks like it's riveted.
Its front contains the cockpit. It is spherical with a strongly semi-elliptical cross-section. On top, there are six roughly rectangular windows in side-by-side pairs of two with light blue panes. Farther back, there are two short, stubby wings, one on each side, with partly elliptical fore edges and straight aft edges. Above each wing, there is one porthole with a light blue pane in it. There is a partly cylindrical, partly conical tube on the nose from which a structure made out of two long, thin, very slight cones protrudes.
Right behind the cockpit, nine elliptical pipe-like objects are arranged in such a way that they appear like 18 small thrust or exhaust nozzles, judging from the soot on their ends and the fuselage aft of them. The soot also covers the door with porthole on each side. The longer aft section of the fuselage is semi-elliptic in shape again, but stretched more than the cockpit section. Four semi-elliptical fins are mounted on it, one on the top, one on each side, one on the bottom. Between these fins, there are four slightly larger and much longer nozzles. Unlike those behind the cockpit, they aren't straight but protruding from the fuselage in a curve. A small normal rocket nozzle sits on the rear end between the fins.
This ship has landing gear. Two wheels are located under the cockpit at the same length as the portholes and the wings. Dark patches in the fuselage texture suggest that they can be retracted actually, they are static. The third wheel is mounted on the bottom fin slightly aft of the larger nozzles. All three wheels sit in streamlined shrouds which add to its 1930s-style looks, tying in neatly with the motto of OpenSimFest 2023. None of the wheels touch the ground, though.
The ship behind these two is near the ground of the space cube, facing out of the cube, but rotated about 20 degrees clockwise away from standing perpendicularly to the walkways. It is labelled as the Retropolis retro future spaceship. At first glance, it is very similar to the Retro Rocket Ship, but shinier, neater and less grubby. It has a more elaborate nose which ends in a cone. Instead of the two wings, it has three fins around the cylindrical section. These wings are more simple in shape than those on the Retro Rocket Ship. They have multi-part, largely conical insertions vaguely reminiscent of early aircraft jet engines, one sitting on the outer edge. Between the outermost two, the wings are extended towards the back. The stern is surrounded by four diagonally-mounted fins now, similar in shape, but each with only one two-cone construct on the outer edge. The rocket nozzle was replaced with a different, more obviously octogonal and non-conical one, surrounded by four "cylindrical" objects above and below it as well as on its sides which could have been booster nozzles earlier. It's rather obvious that not all original textures have come from Second Life to OpenSim with this ship. Arcadia's space themes are rather problematic in this regard.
The interior is easier to access, also because the single door is open it opens downwards. The engine compartment has some additional handles and pipes and a larger rocket engine. The other two compartments can be access through the sliding doors, one of each is open now. In fact, one of the cockpit doors is misplaced and clips through the fuselage on the port side. The crew compartment has a small round table, a chair, four cargo shelves, eleven wooden crates all over the port side place and a third bunk. The four shelves even extend into the cockpit where they hold another five crates. Also, the cockpit not only has one handwheel in front of each seat, but it also has a ship's steering wheel in the middle and, for some reason, even a periscope above it.
Another vessel is half-hidden behind the retro future spaceship. The Centurion cargofighter of the Galactic Trade Union has a strong resemblance to post-war jet fighters. It doesn't have a modelled interior the glass of the cockpit cupola is completely opaque and black. The long nose is slightly curved from the sides, but hexagonal in its cross-section. The two wide wings have winglets on their ends, slightly tilted outward. They also carry what appears to be four hexagonal ray weapons on their weapon mounts.
Most of the rest of the ship is more rounded except for the four square engine nacelles, one mounted into each of the four fins arranged in an X. The nozzles at the ends of the nacelles are round again. Most other details are drawn onto the textures. These include 14 "portholes" similar to those on vintage Buicks, four behind the cockpit and above the wings and three below the wings on each side, as well as several safety markings with black and yellow diagonal stripes, different safety markings with black and red diagonal stripes on the rayguns and a painted-on "shark maw" on the underside below the cockpit.
The "landing gear" consists of three rather elaborate, but unarticulated vertical legs. They suggest or rather require vertical take-off and landing capabilities of which the rest of the Centurion doesn't show any traces.
Right above and farther to the back hovers another, larger, less elegant ship: the Behemoth Freighter of the Galactic Trade Union, facing to the left and slightly to the front. This ship was a cooperation with Jim Carter. It is covered almost entirely in a texture that looks like a wild and chaotic "patchwork" of rectangular metal panels, only that these aren't riveted.
The centre-piece of this ship is its boxy main cargo hold. On each side, two massive cylindrical engines are mounted with intakes at the front which make them partially seem more like turbofan engines. On top of the cargo hold, there is an empty dome which can be accessed via a ladder. The trapezoid stern features the loading ramp which is the only access to the ship's interior. The ramp is lowered almost completely. Above the ramp sits a third engine which is as big as the other two, but of a different type. Invisible from the on-looker's point of view, there are also twelve cube-shaped crates of different kinds in the cargo hold.
Forward from the cargo hold, the fuselage not only narrows, but also rises both at the bottom and at the top towards the elevated cockpit. This section two crew seats, a bed, a touch panel, a microwave and a "Mr. Coffee" coffee maker from Spaceballs. The cockpit has only got one seat which is surrounded by control panels. It is also the only part of the ship with windows. Two rows of ten rectangular windows with rounded corners each are wrapped around the semi-elliptical cockpit section.
The landing gear is lowered again. It consists of four legs, each with four feet with four extending pads each, connected to the upper struts via double shock absorbers. One pair is installed under the rear end of the cargo hold, the other one under the rear end of the "neck" between the cockpit and the cargo hold.
To the right and farther above, there is a ship simply named Saucer that looks the part. It is basically the stereotypical flying saucer. Most of its details are painted onto the texture again. It is oriented in such a way that the open hatch which doubles as a ramp faces the on-looker. The improperly installed double sliding door behind it grants a glimpse into the interior of the ship which, however, lacks any notable details except for the ladder up to the cockpit.
As usually for flying saucers, the cockpit is under a cupola on top and in the middle of the vessel. It shows a great deal of part recycling by Arcadia: Not only are the textures for the control panels standard, but the textures for the 16 windows surrounding the cockpit are the same as on the Behemoth, and the three black padded seats are the same as those in the cockpit of the Retro Rocket. On top of the cupola, there is a structure which is identical to the Retro Rocket's nose except for the texture and the pulsating blue glow around the narrow part below the sphere at the top.
Three partly diagonal, partly vertical struts with round feet make up the extracted landing gear. Also, glowing, translucent purple rings are slowly descending from the bottom of the ship to where the ground would be. Normally, four of them are visible at the same time.
Another much smaller flying saucer is hovering to the right of the Buck Rogers ship. It is simply named the Small Saucer. The very detailed texture on the main fuselage gives it a worn-out apperance. Above it, there is an egg-like cupola with the now-well-known window texture and 32 panes altogether, but the tiny vessel lacks an interior. It emits similar purple rings from the bottom as the Saucer, but they widen on their way down, and only two are visible most of the time.
The light-grey ship seen from behind below the Saucer is the Orion Jump Freighter, another cargo ship. Its rear is facing the on-looker with its rather inconveniently installed cargo hatch open, showing an arch-shaped black and yellow safety marking around its outer edge and granting an easy view into the cargo hold. The surface is mostly covered in identical rectangular texture panels which have rectangular safety markings with diagonal black and yellow stripes and rounded corners in two corners and slightly darker patches with one large circular structure between two smaller ones in the other two corners. The seams are shown as being covered with silver metal stripes.
Its fuselage mostly consists of two half-spheres, connected by a half-cylinder. The bottom halves of all three are actually flattened. The rear half-sphere contains the cargo hold. It also carries four fins with cylindrical engine nacelles at their end, two sloping sharply upward, two sloping slightly downward. The engines have white and orange textures on their rear ends. Between the upper nacelles, there is a rear wing much like on a sports car. The cargo hold contains the usual cube boxes, this time in various sizes. Together with the rear wing, they suggest that the ship has been made in jest.
The front section contains the spacious cockpit with three brown seats with black padding. It is half-surrounded by four rows of ten rectangular windows, re-using the same window texture yet again. In the middle of both the cockpit and the cargo hold, there is one column each carrying what might be a holoprojector. A semi-translucent cube is rotating slowly and clockwise above the one in the cockpit, but showing an animated standard plywood texture because the original texture is lost. Three dark grey ranged weapons are mounted next to each other under the cockpit.
The landing gear consists of three legs of the same kind as under the Behemoth, one under the cockpit, two under the cargo hold, but with different textures.
A rather unusual vessel, created in cooperation with Jim Carter again. is located in the background to the right of the Orion in the image. The Dromedary Super Freighter of the Galactic Trade Union is basically a space-going big rig. It doesn't have a fuselage in the traditional sense. Instead, it has a structure to which six standardised, octogonal cargo containers can be attached, two on each side and two on top. This structure also carries the six landing legs like those on the other two freighters which don't look like they can be retracted here. Three big drive engines are attached to the rear end, the middle one being mounted higher than the other two by a bit more than half its diametre. All four have the same white and orange textures inside their nozzles as also seen on the Orion.
The front, mostly obscured by the Orion and shaped like two joined trapezoids, looks more like the driver's cabin of a lorry. It is mostly red with one wide and two narrow stripes on the sides, the front and the roof. Said front is also adorned by two double headlights and a chrome-plated grille, all of which are part of the texture. There are several hatches and even two stainless-steel fuel tanks textured on the sides.
Access to the cockpit is granted by a door on the port side which leads into a room clad in red artifical leather padding except for the inside of the door and the ceiling which are covered in structured stainless steel. Other than the ladder that leads up to the actual cockpit, it only contains a bed. Likewise, the cockpit is mostly clad in the same padding except for the stainless steel floor. The single seat is the same brown seat as in the Orion's cockpit. The window texture has been re-used, too, but tinted red. On the roof, there is a communications dish aiming forward and slightly upward.
All six container bays are occupied. The front left container is orange. It shows a white label with the black writing "TITAN SHIPPING" and "UNIT 14 ANDROMEDA SPACE DOCK" on it. It is the only one without graffiti. The rear left container is dark red. Any writing it might have is covered in graffiti. The front top container is green with lots of graffiti on it and labelled "GRIDLAG SHIPPING INC." in a white stencil typeface. Grid lag refers to a phenomenon that might happen if a server running an OpenSim grid cannot keep up with its tasks. The rear top container is yellow any labels on it are covered in graffiti again. The front right container is brown with lots of graffiti and "GREY GOO INTERSIM TRANSPORT" written on it in a yellow military stencil typeface. The rear right container is grey and unlabelled except for the number 3669 and the usual lot of graffiti.
Finally, standing on the grey ramp all the way to the right, the tenth and last spaceship is also the most unusual one. Its shape is mostly defined by a seemingly wild arrangement of ellipsoids, and its glossy surface texture is separated into panels with a large variety of "greebles" on them. Even electric wires appear to be strapped openly across the dome-like shape that makes up the top. The nose object from the Retro Rocket re-appears yet again with the same flashing blue light as on the Saucer, but since the object is much smaller now, the flashing is more easily visible.
The cockpit is almost entirely surrounded by black control panels with mostly white, red and blue buttons on them. It features a single medium grey, dark grey and dark blue seat. It cannot be accessed because the bottom hatch is too small ironically, the open lid is way too big for the hatch. It can only be seen through the windscreen which is covered in a pattern of ellipses. One ranged weapon is installed on each side. Radiation warning signs on them suggest that they use something radioactive at least internally. The ship is standing on three strangely shaped and actually asymmetrical legs.
To the left, behind the rear end of the Retro Rocket, a bit of natural ground can be seen with the default diffuse green texture with irregular patches of light brown. It ends at a somewhat irregular and steep shoreline. Beyond it and all along the left-hand edge of the image, the ocean is stretching up to the horizon. It is mostly a bluish lilac with slightly less saturated reflections of clouds on the lower parts and a gradient towards purple near the horizon. The sky above it shows a gradient from a faint rose on the horizon to purple near the top left corner.
Close to the horizon, right next to the left-hand edge of the space cube, a single star is glowing.
The scene is illuminated by ambient light and by "sunlight" coming in from a low position opposite the display. There is no actual sun in the scene.
The second picture shows the second display of space-themed Arcadia Asylum creations. It has a direction of view which is straightly eastward and perpendicular to the walkways. These and the grey ramp area between the walkways and the space cube are basically identical to the first image.
The space cube is pushed back by about a metre and a half, uncovering the ground below which has the same mostly green default texture as the ground described in the first picture. It is the same space cube as in the first picture, but rotated counter-clockwise by 90 degrees. The Crab Nebula is on the left-hand side now, and NGC 604 is in the back.
On the right-hand side, there is a photograph of the Lagoon Nebula, also known by the designations Messier 8, Sharpless 25, RCW 146 in the Rodgers, Campbell & Whiteoak Catalogue and Gum 72 in the Gum catalogue of emission nebulae. It is a star-forming region in the constellation of Sagittarius. The nebula itself is greatly shifted to the left on the texture and thereby towards the background from the on-looker's point-of-view.
In comparison with NGC 604, the Lagoon Nebula appears much more as an actual nebula. The gases are more diffuse and spread more homogenously. The brightest spot is also known as the Hourglass Nebula or NGC 6523. On its left-hand edge, hardly separatable from the Hourglass Nebula itself, there is the very young star Herschel 36 which ionises the gases in the nebula and makes them glow, is left of centre in the picture, but far to the right in the nebula. The Hourglass Nebula shows a light teal glow. In turn, it is surrounded by darker clouds through which some more young stars manage shine, including smaller, very dark and dense clouds which are slowly collapsing under their own gravity and may eventually turn into stars themselves. Immediately to the right of the Hourglass Nebula and below it in a dark cloud, there are a few bits of nebula glowing purple.
To the left of the large dark cloud to the left of the bright centre, there is NGC 6530, a particularly striking open cluster of young giant and hypergiant stars which contribute to the brighter glow extending farther to the left than to the right. The cluster extends to the top left of the bright centre behind a very large dark cloud, contributing to the unbalanced spread of the glow some more. Towards the edges, the nebula fades through a faint taupe to Bordeaux red. The faint glow to the left of the star cluster NGC 6523 is designated as an individual nebula, IC 4678 a small part of it is cut off at the texture edge.
Outside the Lagoon Nebula, way to the right and above the bright spot that is the Hourglass Nebula, on the bottom right edge of a Bordeaux red nebula cloud, there is a bright star designated as HD 164385 in the Henry Draper Catalogue. Farther in the same direction are two more, less luminous stars. The brighter one is HD 314895 I couldn't find a designation for the one nearby to its upper left.
In front of NGC 604 on the rear side of the space cube, what appears to be an image of Earth edited into the texture towards its top left corner is an actual sphere with an Earth texture on it. It is oriented so that open international waters east or northeast of French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean way to the west of South America are facing the on-looker.
On the edge between the walkways, a few metres right of centre, there is a teleporter that is identical to the one in the first picture. I myself have set it to the same teleport target as the one in the first picture so that I wouldn't have to write another description for an image within an image with over 4,000 characters.
On the far edge of the grey ramp, right in the middle, there is a vantablack info sign with yellow writing in the DejaVu sans Mono typeface on it which is similar to the one in the first place. This one reads, "Name: Space pirates by Aley Arai Owner: Ada.Radius Description: Astonishing artwork created in Second Life by the avatar known as Arcadia Asylum, Aley Arai, Lora Lemon, Aley and other alts, exported with the artist's permission by many volunteers to OpenSim." "Alts" are short for alternate avatars, avatars which users may have in addition to their primary avatar. In both Second Life and OpenSim, it is possible to have multiple avatars. The pipes in this transcription, the vertical lines, mark line breaks in the original.
To the left of the info sign, there is an info kiosk built by Arcadia Asylum and, like most other displays, published under the guise of Lora Lemon. It has a square footprint, and all four sides are identical. The uppermost part is a symmetrical trapezoid that narrows downward. Its top surface has a science-fiction-style "structured" grey texture which is also used on the sides of the lowermost part with vertical edges. Its sides show a trapeze-shaped image of a dense field of small asteroids in front of a star field, surrounded by frame in very light and medium grey, again, with a "structured", relief-like appearance. On the image, there is a writing in teal letters in a science-fiction-style, unidentified typeface: "The EXCITING History of Asteroid Mining!"
Right below is a semi-translucent cube that serves as an image display. It circles through 16 pictures and changes them every two seconds. All four sides always show the same image. Here it currently shows a picture of what appears to be a small mining vessel in an asteroid field. The latter is shown as about a hundred big and small rocks before a grey "haze" which is tilted from horizontal orientation to the left by about 30 degrees. The ship appears mostly black, so details are hard or impossible to make out. It has a vaguely egg-shaped main fuselage with a single ignited rocket engine nozzle at the back. It also has two probably cylindrical nacelles on the sides with rounded ends and position lights on their rear undersides, red on the left, green on the right. It is located way to the left within the asteroid field and aligned with it, the rear end facing the left, but it is rotated around its own longitudinal axis to the left by almost 90 degrees. It also appears to have made contact with an asteroid slightly smaller than itself on its bow, and the active rocket engine suggests that it is pushing the asteroid.
Between the screen cube and the lowermost box, there is another trapezoid of the same size and shape as the one on the top, but turned around with the small side up. On its top, it has a fairly abstract black and green science-fiction texture which can be seen through the screen cube and which is the same as on the bottom of the upper trapezoid. All four sides show a science-fiction-style control panel which is way too elaborate for an info kiosk with 45 square buttons, three round buttons, nine dial knobs, 34 rocker switches, a 3.5-inch socket and four black-and-mostly-green displays, including at least one radar. All displays are static.
The large display in the centre has a writing on it in the same typeface as on the trapeze-shaped picture on the uppermost part, but it is green and much smaller now. It reads, "80 years ago asteroid minng (sic!) was still a vibrent (sic!) buisness (sic!), With the advent of more advanced atomic fules (sic!) and subsequent improvements in intersteller (sic!) drive engines the need to refule (sic!) from asteroid minning (sic!) pased (sic!) into the glorious annels (sic!) of galactic hstory (sic!)... Blah blah."
The vantablack display info sign is also surrounded by altogether four robots. A worker robot labelled Sculpty Robot (Industrial Model) is standing between the display info sign and the info kiosk, facing the latter. It is similar to Asteroid Al in the first picture, but in a more simple posture, without the sleeveless shirt and with silver rings around the "eye apparatus" instead of golden ones. It seems to be the basic version of these robots. Apparently, it was released by Arcadia under the name Aley Arai.
The same applies to another derivative of this robot which is standing to the right of the display info sign, facing the on-looker. It is called the Bell hop bot (Bellbot). It is identical to the robot looking at the info kiosk except for a red cylindrical bell-hop cap with black and golden trim, a red bell-hop jacket with black and golden trim and many golden buttons, a white button-down shirt underneath and a black bowtie.
Another robot creation released under the Aley Arai guise is still in its original package and lying on its right side underneath the display info sign. It has a much more humanoid and actually female look. Its face is that of a human. She has the same eyes as the two other robots, only that they are elliptical now instead of circular. She has an ellipsoid on her head that stands in for hair it has an angular cutout for the face all the way back to the ears which are built into the head. She has a more pronounced chest with two round features on the texture that suggest a pair of breasts, a slimmer waist below and a skirt-like attachment around her waist farther below. Also, her arms and legs are somewhat more human-like.
The package box has metal grey science-fiction outer textures all around except for the mostly transparent front where it re-uses the spaceship window texture. The inside is completely textured in what looks like aqua blue padding. There is an opaque, light blue rectangle extending from the left-hand edge of the window about 70% across and from right below the robot's knees to about a third of the way up to its thighs. It has the product name of the robot written on it in black letters in the same science-fiction typeface as used on the asteroid mining info kiosk. The upper line reads, "ROBOMAID-3000", and the lower line reads, "ROBOT DOMESTIC".
The gap between this rectangle and the right-hand edge of the window is closed by another, upright rectangle in the same tone of blue which extends beyond the upper and lower edges of the first rectangle by 75% of the latter's height. It shows the logo of the manufacturer. In the middle, there is a black rectangle with rounded edges surrounded by a thin black line with a light blue robotic hand modelled after a human's left hand in front of a background of zeroes and ones in dark grey digits in an unidentified monospace typeface. "Positronic" is written above the rectangle in what appears to be a bold, italic and condensed Helvetica variant except for the quite stylised, science-fiction-style capital P. Below the rectangle, "ROBOTICS" is written in a different, unidentified sans-serif title typeface. All this writing is in black again.
Below the first rectangle, there are two barcodes. The one to the left appears to follow the Universal Product Code standard as per International Standard ISO/IEC 15420. The code number is 1-33023-81220-0. To my best knowledge, it is either a fantasy code, or it has expired years ago. The barcode to the left is a fantasy code that makes use of what appears to be a 16-colour scheme in three rows with various heights.
At both the top and the bottom of the window, "CAUTION HANDLE WITH CARE" is written in a stencil typeface which can also be seen on one of the containers on the Dromedary Super Freighter in the first picture, but in yellow with thick black outlines. On both sides of each writing, there is a triangular caution sign with rounded corners, a red frame and a black exclamation mark in front of a yellow centre.
The fourth robot in the group, released under the Aley guise again, is another female robot and much more well-known. It is modelled after the robot Maria from Fritz Lang's 1928 silent movie Metropolis. Unlike the other robots, it looks like it was entirely made from brass. It has also got a very detailed body instead of details drawn onto the textures. It is standing to the right of the Bell hop bot on a trapezoid pedestal which has the official logo of the film on the front, surrounded by a golden rectangular frame. The pedestal is partially sunk into the grey ramp below, however. This robot was actually made to be used as an avatar. The avatar variant can be acquired for free elsewhere, and yet another place which I've described several months ago uses it as an automated non-player character.
Above Maria and slightly to the right, a spherical contraption called Confederation Police Drone is hovering, another product by Aley. It is mostly spherical with bright yellow-orange cylindrical extensions at the top and the bottom, similar to the red ones on Widget in the first picture. Again, only a low-quality version of its main body texture seems to have been preserved. It is mostly Prussian blue. Two stripes full of technological "greebles" with dark grey trim along both edges surround the body below the top and above the bottom. One night blue stripe each goes around its vertical axis and its longitudinal axis with black, silver and black again trim along both edges. The "greeble" stripes cut through the blue stripe around the longitudinal axis, but their dark grey trim doesn't.
On both sides, where the blue stripes meet, there is a circular police badge with medium blue as its basic colour. It has a multi-layer frame around its edge which starts with a thin silver grey or bright golden circle, followed inward by a gradient from what appears to be dark grey to medium grey, followed again by a thick golden inner frame which appears to be elevated due to the shading on its edges. The same applies to the other golden elements in the badge. There is a star with four points at the top, at the bottom and on the sides which connect to the thin outer ring of the surrounding frame and cut through the elevated golden ring and four less-than-half-sized points between them. In the middle of the star, the outlines of the number 42 are cut into it. "Confederation" is written across the top of the badge and "Police" across its bottom, both cutting through both the inner frame and the star. "SECURITY DRONE" is written in two lines on the blue stripe to the left and to the right of each badge. All writing uses the previously seen science-fiction typeface again.
It has three horizontally arranged identical weapons at the front. What kinds of weapons they are remains unclear. Otherwise, it doesn't have any farther attachments.
Farther up and fully inside the space cube, there are also four different spaceships. The highest up, right in front of the nebula NGC 604 in the background and the farthest back in the space cube, hovers the Pirate Shark Ship which belongs to the Galactic Trade Union theme. It is pointing past the on-looker to the left. Its fuselage is mostly cylindrical with semi-spherical ends. On the top and slightly below the middles of the sides, three fins are mounted, backswept like those of a shark. Each one of them has an engine installed near its end. The engines have ellipsoid, hollowed out casings with a funnel on each end. The funnels have both the same chaotic blue and teal texture which might originally have been made for water surfaces. Here, however, it is animated. At the front of the engine, it moves inward, at the end, it moves outward. Also, each lateral fin has three dark grey ranged weapons mounted on its front edge.
The name is justified by the front design. From the upper half of the frontal semi-sphere protrudes an ellipsoid that emulates the nose of a shark. On each side of the nose, there is one bulgy, menacing eye with a red iris on a black eyeball mounted on the seam between the cylindrical mid-section and the sphere. Below the nose, on the frontal semi-sphere, there is a shark maw with two rows of pointy teeth on a dark red background which is shaded in order to appear like it's actually built into the ship rather than painted on. And on both sides of the maw, there is a dark grey structure that resembles a cogwheel with no hub which might even imply that the shark maw can be opened. In spite of the many "greebles" on the grey texture that covers almost the whole ship, it doesn't seem to have any hatches or other openings.
Also, it doesn't have an interior. The cockpit is not much more than a cupola on top of the ship, mostly on the nose, with four opaque black panes, one at the front, one at the back, one on each side. Right behind the cupola and in front of the top fin with its engine intake, a small communications dish is rotating clockwise, about once every three seconds, slightly tilted upward.
Both sides of the cylindrical mid-section are labelled. In the middle, there is a white human skill in front of two crossed sabers with black outlines in front of a black playing card spade with a white outline. Next to it, towards the bow, there is a sign made of three black chevrons with cream outlines, one from the top, two slightly tilted from the sides. On the other side, towards the stern, there is a hexagonal badge with black and yellow chevrons and a black outline which has previously appeared on the Orion Jump Freighter in the first image. The chevrons point towards the bow in the usual direction of movement. "PRIVATEER SPACE PIRATES" is written above these three emblems and "RESISTANCE IS FUN!" below them, both in the now usual science-fiction typeface and in black with beige outlines.
The tail consists of a cylindrical cone with a circular cross-section that is mounted against the middle of the rear semi-sphere plus two thin backswept hollow fins with two pointy ends each, one at the top, one at the bottom. Each fin has another one of the same engines installed as the fins on the middle fuselage section. On each side, there are two yellow lightning bolts pointing backwards the lower one is a mirrored variant of the upper one.
There is no landing gear on the ship.
The ship below the middle that appears to be almost immediately below the Pirate Shark ship is actually a lot closer to the front. It is the Sloth Armored Transport, another ship from the Galactic Trade Union theme.
Its main fuselage section is about three and a half times as long as it is wide or high. It is octogonal from all sides, but differently from ahead or astern than from above or below and from the sides where it has the longest stretches of diagonal shape. It carries two large brackets on each side, consisting of a thick vertical connector plate and two thinner fins protruding from them diagonally which carry the actual turbine-like drive nacelles with the same white and orange rear nozzle textures as the Orion and the Dromedary, one from the top, one from the bottom. The fins also cut through one curved shield-like plate on each side which seems to be part of the brackets, and which seems to imply that the drives are not to be trusted. Most of the outside shows a texture that emulates slightly rusty steel plates with sometimes widening gaps between them.
The rectangular cargo hatch at the end is open, and since the ship is seen from behind, it reveals the interior which mostly shows a different, lighter, embossed texture. The same arrangement of twelve cargo boxes shaped like slightly flattened cubes is standing on each side, but rotated by 180 degrees towards each other. Only the boxes on the port side are visible in the image. Towards the stern, there are four stacks of four boxes each. Farther ahead, there are only two boxes. There are four different boxes, all with the same texture on all sides, arranged in alternating pairs in all directions.
Within the rearmost stack, the box at the top and the second one from the bottom have lids with a picture of a planet apparently made of melting cheese below the centre, slightly cut off at the bottom. A sleek, dark golden flying saucer comes dashing around it from the left, leaving a golden trail behind. Another mostly green flying saucer is in the top right corner, surrounded by a magenta halo and with a beige trail behind it. The planet is surrounded by an arch of golden embossed letters in a serif typeface which spell out, "PLANET CHEESE".
The other two boxes in the stack seem to be held shut with two yellow rectangular brackets riveted around each corner. In their middle, there is a rectangular logo with a medium blue background and a frame with diagonal black and yellow warning stripes around it. Towards the top right corner, there is a somewhat large grey cogwheel with six spokes and black outlines. Another slightly smaller and lighter cogwheel connects to it from the opposite corner. In the top left corner, there is the capital letter "C" in the bottom right corner, there is the capital letter "G". Below the logo, "CAPITAL GOODS" is written. All writing is yellow and in a stencil typeface.
The boxes ahead of each Planet Cheese box have lime green corner reinforcements. Most of each side shows black and yellow diagonal warning stripes. In the middle, there is a circular logo with a faint golden frame around it and a crossed shovel and pickaxe together with three identical cream-coloured dodecahedra standing in for rock pieces on it. In black letters in the usual science-fiction typeface, "PROCESSED" is written above the logo and "ASTEROID ORE" below it.
The remaining boxes ahead of each Capital Goods box and above and below each processed asteroid ore box appear like they've got internal cooling systems and bolted-on lids. In the middle, there appears to be a window surrounded by black and yellow diagonal warning stripes through which various food items inside the box can be seen this is of course only part of the texture. On each side of this window, "REFRIGERATED FOOD STORAGE" is written in yellow stencil letters. The writing is always vertical to the left of the window, it is rotated clockwise, to the right, it is rotated counter-clockwise.
Ahead of the cargo hold, there is a box-shaped "neck" with the cockpit in a structure that can be described as a transversally-mounted barrel. Across the front, two rows of eleven windows using the standard space ship window texture allow for views inside or outside. The cockpit itself has two seats. The control panel ahead of them and below the front window is animated. Underneath the cockpit, there is the ship's only landing leg which is identical to those of the freighters in the first picture. Apparently, the ship uses the lower engines and the curved shields as rear landing gear.
Towards the right, below the Lagoon Nebula as seen in the picture, there is a smaller freighter with a quite angular fuselage whose most striking features are the four big engines protruding from the stern, each again with the white and orange textures. It is called the Tarsus II Tramp Freighter, another Galactic Trade Union ship, the smallest one of the cargo ships and the only one with an elaborate interior, but no access from outside. Its outside texture has lots of hatches, black and yellow safety markings, vents and other "greebles", but it does not have any door or hatch.
Most of the trapezoid bottom of the fuselage is used as the cargo hold which contains six boxes, two Capital Goods and refrigerated food storage boxes each and one Planet Cheese and processed asteroid ore box each. The top part is a bit more complex in shape. At its front, there are two rows of five windows for the cockpit the usual window textures had to be modified for this use-case. On each side, a ranged weapon is mounted on the angular seam between top and bottom. A static dish is mounted on top of the ship.
The upper level, connected to the cargo hold via a ladder, has to be the most comfortable one on all ships. Apart from lots of control panels and the same brown seats with white seams and black padding seen on other ships before, it has a double bunk bed, and it is also equipped with the column of touch panel, microwave oven and Mr. Coffee also found inside the Behemoth freighter in the first picture. Camming through the ship would reveal a bathroom with a sink, a toilet and a bathtub filled with a slowly rotating bubble bath. Outside the bathroom, the upper has even got a patterned green carpet on the floor.
Last but not least, there is what may be the most unusual vessel of all. Fairly down low and a bit to the left, seen mostly from behind again, the Slee Banana Cruiser 2 is tagged as published by Aley again. Its main fuselage is yellow and actually shaped like a banana, riveted together from steel plates. At the rear end, there is a rocket nozzle which consists of three riveted funnels nested inside one another. The fin shape from the Retro Rocket in the first picture is re-used for one single fin on top of the nozzle, but with a simple brushed metal texture now. The front is decorated with a rusty figurehead shaped like a stylised bald female human.
The wings re-use both the rear fins from the Pirate Shark Ship and, like most of the ship, the riveted steel textures from the Retropolis retro future spaceship in the first picture. Each one holds a hexagonal vertical pod through its leading edge. From each one of these pods, a pair of double-bladed fans like on a gyrocopter protrude upward on a long shaft, and what gives the impression of a machine gun is mounted underneath. The guns seem to also double as landing gear.
The cockpit is inside a yellow sphere which holds onto the banana below with two humanoid arms. The lower half is made of riveted steel on the outside and covered in control panels on the inside. The upper half uses the window texture for a strangely asymmetrical arrangement of 15 windows. Inside, there is a padded red seat behind a hooded yellow instrument panel with a yoke.
To the left of the space cube, a bit of the neighbouring space cube from the first picture can be seen with a small part of its Crab Nebula texture. To the right, there is another bit of land, sea and sky as already described in the first picture. In the top right corner, there is a bit of a cloud. One particular bright star is shining right below the cloud and a smaller one farther below on the edge of the space cube.
Again, the scene is illuminated by ambient light and by "sunlight" coming in from a low position opposite the display. There is no actual sun in the scene.
The third picture shows the third and last display of space-themed Arcadia Asylum creations. Its direction of view has turned southward, but it is perpendicular to the walkways again. These and the grey ramp area between the walkways and the space cube are basically identical to the other two images.
Unlike in the second picture, but like in the first one, the space cube aligns with the ramp. It is placed with the same orientation as in the second picture, but it is being looked at from a different side now, thus showing NGC 604 on the left, the Lagoon Nebula in the back and the mirrored and edited picture of IC 434 with the Horsehead Nebula on the right.
On the edge between the walkways, a few metres right of centre, there is the same teleporter as in the other two pictures again. And once again, I have taken care that it also shows the same teleport destination.
To the left of it, there is a white sign which can also be found between the other two displays, but which cannot be seen in the other two pictures. It is white with black writing on it. It counts down Arcadia Asylum's main avatar names in Second Life and the themes associated with them: "Arcadia Asylum 2006-2007 Slum City/Urban Blight, Hobos, Street Urchins, Subway System, Modular Sewer System, Greenies, Loli Caverns", a blank line following, "Aley Arai 2008-2011 Space Pirates, Robots, Space stations, asteroids and wormholes", another blank line following, "Aley 2011 - 2015 Flotsam Pirate Town, Pirate ships, The Abyss, Nemo's world and submarine, Mer, sunken ruins, Clockworks, Mad Scientist, Aquatics, Steam Fair". Again, the pipes in this transcription, the vertical lines, mark line breaks in the original.
The vantablack display info sign is in its usual place in the middle near the far edge of the grey ramp. This time, it reads, "Galactic Truckstop and Honest Zorg's by Aley Owner: Ada.Radius Description: Astonishing artwork created in Second Life by the avatar known as Arcadia Asylum, Aley Arai, Lora Lemon, Aley and other alts, exported with the artist's permission by many volunteers to OpenSim.." Once again, the pipes in this transcription mark line breaks in the original.
The centre-piece of this display is the Galactic Truck Stop in the back and almost in the middle. Its most striking feature is the two-level cupola on top. It uses the same texture for its ten rows of windows as some of the ships in the first two pictures use for their cockpit windows. The top level is a social area with eight dark grey armchairs. The level below has eight sleeping compartments, each with a double bunk bed, a hard-to-define piece of furniture and a scripted sliding door. Still, all these rooms have "glass walls" to the outside all the way to the floor, no curtains and illuminated ceilings.
The structure extends downward in a cylinder with a smaller diametre than the cupola. Directly below the cupola, there are four structures which appear to be fuel storages. They have a label on the side which consists of the Shell logo, a white rectangle below with a red and yellow logo that might be original and "FUEL" written under it in yellow letters with red outlines in a previously unseen science-fiction-style typeface and finally another upside-down Shell logo below that. There is a large porthole divided into 25 panes below each fuel storage.
Between the portholes, there are cylindrical airlocks protruding with two sets of doors. Each airlock leads to a landing pad shaped like a section of a circle. On the edges and towards the airlocks, these pads show striped black and yellow safety marking. The landing areas themselves are marked with white circles from which short white lines protrude into four directions. Inside the white circles, each landing pad has a label with an individual number, always written in red narrow and stencil-like characters with the number at the top, "PAD" below and a horizontal line between the number and the word. The landing pads on this level have even numbers the ones towards the fronts are numbers 2 on the left and 4 on the right whereas the ones in the back are numbers 8 on the left and 6 on the right.
On the inside, this level contains a diner with a robot similar to Asteroid Al and two tables with four seats each. By default, when trying to enter any of the airlocks by clicking on them, one ends up sitting on one of these chairs.
The bottom level has its own set of four shorter landing pads. These, the corresponding air locks and the portholes between them are offset from those one floor up by 45 degrees. They have odd numbers number 7 is oriented towards the on-looker. The portholes even have fuel storages above them again which are hanging underneath the upper landing pads. The airlocks appear to be standing wide open because the doors are misaligned the outer door for airlock number 5 to the left even lacks textures. They are scripted nonetheless.
On the inside, the bottom level holds a big souvenir and duty-free shop with Asteroid Al himself behind the counter as the shopkeep.
All levels inside the station have brownish metal panels with lots of small slot-like holes in them on the ground. They are connected via a lift with red buttons inside which is actually a set of teleporters in disguise.
Above each airlock, the writing "GALACTIC TRUCK STOP" in the same fashion as on Asteroid Al's shirt in the first picture re-appears, but without the picture. In the typical science-fiction typeface from the second picture and the same tone of purple, "Last fule (sic!) n Restrooms for 20,000 Lightyears" is written below. The writing is not connected to anything.
Way to the right and near the front, there is the other part of this display: Honest Zorg's Used Spaceships. It is located on a small, slightly irregular round asteroid with a brown, crater-littered surface and an almost flat top. Interestingly, even the flat top has craters on it, so it came to exist naturally rather than through mining.
Four riveted steel poles are holding up two strings of pennants that surround the dealership. It's a pattern of 16 pennants in five colours: blue, white, red, yellow, green in this order. The 16th pennant to fill the number up after three repetitions is red again. The front left and rear right poles also carry signs painted onto riveted steel plates with the same structure texture as on the Dromedary on the back. The larger part of the sign with a slanted right-hand edge and a pointy upper right corner is painted denim blue with "HONEST ZORG'S" written on it in a heavy stretched Futura typeface and a thick yellow arrow pointing downward on its left-hand side both are yellow. To the right of the arrow, there is an additional red and rectangular panel with the red writing "USED SPACESHIPS" on it which is made to appear like neon lights.
Within the strings of pennants, there are six small vessels which appear to be personal spacecraft, three on each side, most of which have rather odd shapes. In the back to the left, there is the only ship with transparent windows, another small flying saucer, which doesn't have any cockpit interior, though. Opposite of it, a rocket-style ship stands vertically on eight rear fins. It doesn't even have a cockpit, and with the sleeve around more than half its length, it rather resembles a big turbojet engine with a long pointy nose. The almost white ship to the left in the front has a chubby, mostly ellipsoid fuselage, a "collar" behind its small cockpit and eight tail fins. The oddly shaped one opposite of it in various tones of grey with a cockpit cupola similar to that on the Pirate Shark Ship has even got 16 tail fins. All these ships have in common that they lack visible drive components this only doesn't matter for the flying saucer. But they all lack landing gear as well. Except for the upright rocket, they are sitting on their bellies.
The office in the back is basically a Retro Rocket Ship as seen in the first picture. However, its wings were cut off with no traces of their whereabouts. The rocket engine was removed it is standing in front of the ship in two parts with a picnic table in front of the engine. The door is not only open, but dislodged and lying on the ground. The separation wall towards the cockpit including the doors is missing, as is one of the doors to the former crew compartment where the bunk beds have been removed, too. The former engine room is the office with the sales counter now. Honest Zorg turns out to be a grimy worker robot based on the same shape as Asteroid Al again. And the whole ship is slightly tilted forward because it seems to have dug itself into the ground, somewhat like in a crash landing.
There is a sign above the door which is completely obstructed by the dealership sign at the front. Through the porthole ahead of the open door, the bright teal sign on the counter is partially visible. In the same slightly stretched Futura as on the sign on the pole, but in blue, it reads, "Welcome to Honest Zorg's! We sell the finest in used and reconditioned Spacecraft". Below, in red and a bit smaller, there is added, "This is NOT the complaints office!!!" On top of the counter, the dark grey cash register can partially be made out.
This time, the image was taken in such a way that nothing is visible to the sides of the space cube. The scene is illuminated by ambient light and by "sunlight" coming in from the right. Due to the space cube not having visible outside textures, the directed "sunlight" can fall in through it, so, for example, parts of the Galactic Truck Stop or the ships at Honest Zorg's cast shadows. There is no actual sun in the scene.
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If only Patrice could relax
The and the of .
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Last updated: 2023-10-29
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