The Epic Voyage of the Blind Babe

Written 7 March, 2010

The Epic Voyage of the Blind Babe

Columbus?

Balboa?

Magellan?

They got nothing on Chey and Sweetie!

Last night we teleported to the Nantucket sim to see an art exhibit. After we had finished sneering at the artwork, we walked to the quay, where there was a rez zone.

As it was a most excellent night for sailing, I pulled my customized Flying Tako sailboat from my inventory...


... and we boarded.

By the way, you can see the name of my trusty Tako isn't Blind Babe at all, but Pele Princess.


We had no specific destination in mind, so I sailed east and then south.

It soon became apparent that I had forgotten almost everything I knew about sailing the Tako. We were pretty much dead in the water.


The Tako responds to the Second Life wind just like a sailboat. You can make headway only by manipulating the sails to take advantage of the prevailing winds. I had forgotten the commands to change the direction of the sails, and it took a while before I was sailing semi-competently. Here's a nice picture showing my considerable sailing skill:



Fortunately, Sweetie acted as navigator, telling me which direction to head and using her windsetter to keep the winds friendly. That's why the title of this post references the Blind Babe. That would be me.



We sailed for nearly two hours, crossing more than one hundred sims and facing pirates, no-script zones, stupid builds that took up all the waterways, and sea monsters.

Sea monsters!

Eventually we made our way to the Blake Sea.

I had just read in Peter Stindberg's blog about a Linden-mole-made skeleton of a Leviathan:

Approximately 2500 prims were used for the huge Leviathan skeleton on the new Ahab's Haunt sim. Of those 2500 prims, quite literally only a handful are sculpts. All the other prims are regular prims. Not a single prim I found is larger than 10x10x10 meters or - in other words - this humongous build was constructed without a single megaprim... The skeleton was built by "moles" - content creators contracted by Linden Lab.

There was the leviathan! Dead, fortunately!

Here's Sweetie's photo of the deceased beast:



And here's mine:


I fancied my shot because it reminded me of a painting by J.M.W. Turner:


Actually, that's not the Turner I had in mind, but it works. Turner often put something colorful or bright in a sea of darkness to attract the eye.

Like, I hoped, the red boat in the foreground of my photograph would attract the eye.

Here's my photo again, this time GIMPed by Sweetie. Compare it to the original above:


Despite the danger from still-living members of the species being about, I took the time to get a screen shot of a portion of the skeleton.

Here's a photo with the interface off:


And here it is with an edit box for one of the ribs:


As you can see, the single rib is composed of 19 prims. It could be easily have been done with one prim as a mega sculpty, but as Peter noted, Linden builds almost never use megaprims.

As you can see, we had many adventures during our evening under sail. Here we are, intrepidly sailing into the sunset, ready for yet another adventure.