A Mini Holiday!

WOW! Yesterday was interesting!

First off, I woke up early... as I believe I reported, actually. Yeah, I totally did.

Okay, so after I blogged I listened to some more FOOL MOON before Brian got home from work. He got home early, which was cool! I chatted with him a quite a bit, then retired to my perch here in his room (he was on the PC in the living room) and continued listening to Dresden until I had to run a errand for Mom.

When I got back, Brian asks how many $Lindens I have. A few days ago we noticed that there were several parcels of land next to our Whitelight Ent building, one of the parcels we've owned the longest in SecondLife. They were just L$6,000 and Brian pointed out that my account allowed me to own another parcel without having to raise my "tier" -- which just means "pay more per month" for my SL account.

I had more than L$9,000, so I snatched up the one that attached directly to the 2 parcels we owned.

Well, yesterday, Brian asks how much I have in-world... He's thinking about buying another of parcel. The way these parcels for sale were situated, there were 3 more that lined up with the 3 in a row we already (together) owned. So the more we owned, the bigger our strip of land would be. Then there was another parcel that extended down, which would widen our strip of land, then there were 2 more parcels that extended in an "L" from the end of the nearest 3 that were for sale, then there was a last parcel that extended from the short section of that "L" to form a kind of "Z" shape.

If I'm remembering correctly, that's 6 parcels that would connect directly to our land, and a 7th that connected to the first 6.

A surprising aspect of Brian's personality, one that we probably never would have discovered if not for SL, is that he possesses a sort of land-lust. His imagination fills with the possibilities that arise from larger patches of land and higher prim allowances.

We've already filled up most of our lands nicely, with all his stores, our ridiculously large Build Platform, his Space Cafe and graveyard, my drive-in movie theater...

We really could use a blank canvas on which to begin anew, without having to get rid of what we already have.

And Brian considered it, and thought it might be worth it to raise his membership tier so that he can buy more land. It means that what he makes from sale will no longer pay his monthly bills, though. He'll have to start paying part of it.

But he's okay with that.

So I gave him the L$6,000 he needed to buy another parcel, and we rejoiced and celebrated and giggled and became generally silly.

The patch was next to my land, and Brian told me I could put my space station on it.

I should explain: Some time ago I built a space station for a friend who had purchased one, but it was created with too many prims to fit on her smaller parcel of land. I discovered this when she IMed me (in-world; we didn't know each other in RL, and just barely knew each other in SL) asking if I could figure out why she couldn't put out any furniture in her new space station. It sounded like a prim-count problem, and it was. She teleported me to her and I had a look at how many prims her land allowed and how many prims her space station was, and the math was simple.

I had become confident at my building abilities, and I could see how the creator had wasted a lot of prims putting aesthetic before practicality. I felt like I could create, essentially, the same space station, but use far less prims.

A small parcel of land holds 117 prims. The space station she bought was about 97 or 98. In a day, I built her a space station that was about 27 prims. That would allow her to furnish her space station. Not quite as lavishly as she had hoped, but comfortably.

I, of course, kept a copy of the space station myself, just in case I ever had enough land to put one on.

(I like space stations, hehe.)

When I bought this newest parcel, I thought "Hey! I can finally pull out my space station!"

Turns out, I couldn't.

It was just TOO BIG.

I hadn't realized how LARGE it was! I was building it off someone else's design, so I was just recreating that design, but using far fewer prims to do it.

But when I tried to plop it out on my new slice-o-land I discovered prim-count wasn't the only issue. ACTUAL, PHYSICAL (well... virtual) SPACE was a consideration, as well.

So I had put several hours toward creating another space station, one that would fit within the actual dimensions of my newest plot. I was pretty close to being finished with it, too, when Brian bought his newest plot of land last night.

(Bringing it all back to the original topic. You see how I did that? No narrative slouch am I!)

Brian had purchased the land just because we had the opportunity, and there was no way of knowing when/if we would be able to scoop up land that attached to our own land again. (We went through a phase of development when Brian would snatch up more land for more stores, but it was all scattered throughout SecondLife. And that's a bit inconvenient. You can't build big then.) He didn't have any specific idea about what to do with the land. So I asked him, and he allowed me to replace the teeny-tiny space station I was working on with the huge one I had already created!

YAY FOR ME! FINALLY I got to enjoy the fruits of my own labor!

But the night wasn't over yet...

Brian couldn't stop trying to come up with ways to get more money. He wanted to snatch up those other available patches of land. When would we get another chance to expand out land like this? We are not likely to ever afford a sim, or an island. (The RL monthly fees alone are ridiculous. Like US$100 a month, or thereabout.) Yet we had this opportunity to own a considerable chunk of this one sim, just by adding on to the land we already owned here.

So I checked my bank account and discovered that some contested purchases from last week (someone phished my credit card number online and charged my account fraudulently) had been refunded, so I had a great deal more than I thought I had!

I could buy enough Lindens to let Brian buy 6 of the 7 remaining parcels of land!!!

Also, our buddy Tommy was willing to let Brian borrow enough to buy the 7th!

So we spent the next several hours in-world, playing on our new land. Brian extended this platform he had way up in the sky above our previous land, so that it covered our new land. (It's now ETERNAL! You can't see one end of it from the other anymore, lol!) I situated my space station about 400 meters above the land. (I found this EXCELLENT spot where Brian had recreated the moon and just hung it up in the sky, and the cargo entrance looks out onto it.)

Around 9:30 pm Tommy came back in-world and we three ran around my space station, blasting target practice dummies. After Tommy went to bed, Brian and I chased each other around, shooting each other.

We haven't spent that much time together in SL in MONTHS! It was really cool to experience that again. I mean, it's fun just hanging out with my li'l bro, but there are infinitely more things to do in SL than RL, lol. I mean, we can shoot stuff, create stuff, drive reclessly, fly attack choppers, name it! In RL we have this tiny little apartment that can't really hold all our stuff. (Not comfortably.) In-world we have vast tracks of space and any environment we can imagine and create!

I kind of forgot about how cool that feels.

So while we're building and shooting each other and just generally being giddy about expanding our SL land, we were also drinking, lol. And after a while Brian crashed.

I returned to FOOL MOON, and passed out after listening to it for a few more hours.

Since I was awake during the day yesterday, I went to sleep earlier than I usually do. And thus, I woke up earlier. About 5:30 am, too late to catch my baby before she goes to work. So I watched a couple of KISS videos (KISS KONFIDENTIAL and X-TREME KLOSE UP) and re-read a few chapters of Gene Simmons' autobiography to answer a couple of questions that popped into my head, then went back to sleep. Woke up around 9:30 am and resumed listening to FOOL MOON.

I finished it not long before I sat down to type up this entry.

It's GOOD!!!

Jim Butcher is amazing! It's mind-boggling the way he can torture his poor hero so viciously, alwasy taking Harry Dresden and the reader to place they never imagined they would possibly be going, and just generally beat the snot out of the guy for 30 and a half chapters, then making everything okay in a chapter and a half.

I guess I've become used to TV shows lately, where nothing gets TOO bad because you've only got 45 minutes to get your hero into hot water and then bail him out.

Actually, I've noticed a new trend in some of the shows I watch: In character-driven shows (which are the good ones) you spend at least 10 minutes setting up the emotional problem of the show, and the last 5-10 minutes wrapping it up. The emotional problem also has to deepen and evolve while the action story is going on, so you're talking about maybe 20 minutes of action.

Which is fine, really. I mean, you have to consider that talking is quicker and cheaper to film than action. And whether you realize it or not, it's the character's emotional dilemma that makes the story gratifying.

And movies have similar time/financial restraints to TV. (Recent budgets and running times not withstanding, lol.)

But even a lot of the novels I've read in the last decade or more haven't been as downright brutal as The Dresden Files! Butcher is a rare and thrilling author, indeed! It's as though he's taken the writer's rule-of-thumb "Stick your hero up a tree, then throw rocks at him" to sadistic extremes, lol.

But that's not to say you won't be laughing out loud for most of the novel! Butcher is just as generous with his wit as he is with his torture. And MAN do you care about his characters!!! I am positively exhausted from from the first 2 books, but I find myself tempted to jump into the third, just so I can see what the characters are up to now, lol.

Thinking about where the forth book picks up, though, I may take a breather before returning to the Dresden-verse, though. I'm not sure I'm gonna like how GRAVE PERIL is gonna end.

Though I do trust the author, and I know he's not going to let me down.

Anyway, I've been writing for a while, so I'm gonna go away now.

:D