I've re-written Chapter One, and I like it a lot better now, and this morning I finally broke Chapter Two, which I plan to pound very soon.
But I've been a little busy in SecondLife, as well, hehe.
Not NEARLY as busy as Brian has been, though...
Brian created us a city!
It's HUGE, too!
And I think you'd be surprised by the amount of detail he's gone to.
In the pic above, I'm the dude with the blue hair and the HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE shirt (naturally) and Brian is the evil Martian from MARS ATTACKS! to my right.
He made that avatar, by the way. :)
And, you know, what city would be complete without...
...an invading Martian army?
Ever since I was a kid and learned about Orson Welles's famous (or infamous) 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, I've been a bit obsessed with it.
My imagination was so struck with the idea that, had I been alive and listening to the radio on October 30, 1938, I might have believe, for 40 minutes anyway, that Mars was invading Earth! I mean what BETTER Halloween trick AND treat?!!
As a teen I owned a vinyl copy of the album, and on the back was a brief account of the hysteria that is said to have taken place that night. (Current historians tend to believe that the actual confusion and reactions were probably exaggerated by the media back then, so we can't know how freaked-out people ACTUALLY were.)
I've long lost the album, but I -- naturally -- have a cd version (I think I've bought 2 or three as an adult: I'd buy one, move, loose it, then buy another next Halloween when they were available again) and this Halloween I converted my most recent cd version into an mp3 and have that loaded on my iPod along with Lux Radio's adaptation of the film version and Lux Radio's adaptation of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, hehe. :)
I think what inspired Brian to create these GORGEOUS -- and HUGE -- Martian attack vessles, though, is that I happened upon complete sets of the faces of Topps's 1963 trading card series MARS ATTACKS!!! (The exclamation points there are mine, not part of the title, as in the Burton film version, lol.)
Every single card!
In 1994, Topps reissued the cards and released a comic based on them, so at one time I owned several of the cards and some of the comics. But I never had more than half the set.
So to find images of these cards online was AMAZING!!!
Plus, this came alongside my reading HOW I CONQUERED YOUR PLANET by John Swartzwelder. That novel plays on many of the "invading Martian" and "alien invasion" cliches and stereotypes (to hysterical effect) and that made me wanna play DESTROY ALL HUMANS for a few hours at a time...
And that might have lead to Brian's desire to recreate the MARS ATTACKS! Martians in SL...
Then finding those cards (which I now have as pics in my iPod, so I can stare at them whenever, where ever I go, hee-hee), I think, may have put it over the top.
And it's interesting... When I'm inspired by something I want to put it into words. When Brian is inspired by something he wants to MAKE it, reproduce it in 3 dimensions.
This started LONG before SecondLife. When he was a kid he was taken with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and recreated Freddy Krueger's glove! He's A KID! I mean, he was, like, 9 or 10 when the movie came out!
And then when he was married, I remember visiting him at his apartment and seeing the things he was making with plastic, action figures he altered or customized or whatever (there's a term for that, but I don't remember it right off hand), seeing space ships he had whittled, lol!!!
THEN he discovered FLASH ANIMATION! He was lost inside Flash for YEARS, just always pumping out a new animation whenever he got a new idea, lol. And always trying to do more with Flash than he knew how to do before!
Then we discovered SL a couple of years back, and so now he can create THIS...
You can see us down there in the pic just above... I'm the blue spec and Brian's the green one, lol.
At first, this was just a set of skyscrapers that we could take pictures on. A photo set, basically. In the picture below you can see two of the buildings I created. (But Brian expanded them when he turned the set into a full-on city. So they're his creation, now.) But Brian looked at the tops of skyscrapers and decided he wanted a city you could walk around or drive around. So he made it.
Then we both got obsessed with the ideas invading Martians, lol. (In a playful way, mind you... Not a realistic way.)
So I decided I needed to take a photo tour of the place and share Brian's devilish genius with you! :D
And walking around a city being leveled is hungry business.
So we stopped at a hot dog stand for some grub.
I actually made that hot dog stand! :D
Brian mentioned that he wanted one, and I've been lucky at creating or altering pictures to create textures that save prims (for instance, I might build a phone booth that was made up of 49 prims, take pics of it from all angles, turn those pics into photos, then I can recreate the phone booth with 6 prims), and I had finished rewriting Chapter One and needed a break before I could figure out Chapter Two, so viola!
And, more importantly, Brian liked it!!! :D So it's now part of the city!
After lunch we took a tour of a part of the city most visitors probably will never stumble onto...
That's shallow water, by the way, so you can drive a car or motorcycle around in there! :D
The grate in the ceiling leads up into one of the buildings above ground.
My brother is A friggin' GENIUS!!!
All the nooks and crannies you used to play in as a small child, Brian builds them into the worlds he creates in SL!!! Our lands in SL are his imagination unleashed!
And, being an overgrown kid myself, I get to play and play and play, lol!!!
Life can be SO SWEET!
:D
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