One of the reasons I apply for a store at Fantasy Faire, although I'm really a rather amateur creator using other real artists' models and textures, is so that I can come in to see the builds early before the crowds. Yes, it's $2500, and yes, as an amateur creator I nearly kill myself trying to make all the new stuff, but when I can finally zoom out from my tinies after the Faire matron has checked my store and approved it, and I can begin to fly around and see what the World Builders built, it is all worth it. Really, these are the most precious moments of the year for me lately.
Note: I am not a "professional" photographer and don't do all the fabulous pre- and post-processing that so many SL people do on Flickr -- I take decidedly amateur snaps for the sole purpose of chronicling my explorations and telling a story. If you want to see the extraordinary photos from the Faire, go here.
So I remember last year, I was invited to put in a store at the last minute at FF when they had an opening, and then I had to move in RL, and cut myself while we were moving boxes -- and landed in the E.R. at the height of COVID, because with my rare immune disease, a cut like that can escalate, and did. Soon it was described as "life-threatening" streaking up my arm -- so annoying!
So I lay there on an IV trip just waiting all day to be sprung, seeing in my mind's eye the beautiful forest that Gidgette Adagio (Gidgy) had built, and hoping I would not be so sick that I couldn't come back on. Fortunately, I got better in a few days -- although landed at the ER again a few weeks later, and so it has been all year. But I'm awfully lucky that I'm alive and my immediate family survived, which is more than many, many people can say, including our friends in SL and at the Faire in particular. I miss Noke Yuitza, the amazing creator of E.V.E. I last talked to her on 3/29/20, the very day in fact she last logged in last year in March. She was supposed to have a store at FF -- and never came back to finish it. She told me she was going to a remote village in Spain where her mother was very ill with COVID. Spain has been terribly hard hit. I fear the worst, as Noke has not reappeared...No one has heard from her at all.
Of course the Faire is a time when you remember those who have passed away particularly from cancer (the Unweaver's deadly work) and you try to affirm life hopefully and move on. At the Faire Junction, where they have $100 candles this year to donate, I lit one for my father, John Fitzpatrick, who died of hemachromatosis, which causes liver cancer.
When I went to Touryuumon's shop, I found this lovely golden deer applier for $200. I'm pretty hazy on what appliers are because I don't have any mesh bodies, just the Slink feet in order to wear my 30L Saturday sneakers lol. Then I got the hands when making some rings as I realized how ugly the SL system hands are. I may eventually get the mesh bodies but they seems creepy and expensive to me right now.
I had visions of myself gamboling through the Fairelands in my lovely golden deer outfit -- except it required an avatar to apply it on. I figured that out eventually. And it wasn't an avatar that Touryuumon sold, as I discovered looking through every single one of his vendors and realizing there is some great stuff there and buying some more props. Then I figured out when he said TWI avatar this was Timber Wilds Industries and found...it's a $3300 avatar ($3000 inworld). The price is steep, but it wasn't so much the price that gave me pause, it's all the CHOICES, all the STUFF you have to click on and set. That sort of thing just scares me off. I do plan to get it eventually...
So fortunately I wandered into Static's FF store -- I love nama gearz' things and play her gatchas assiduously -- and she had a new (I think) Wendigaunt Avatar. Now the Wendigo is really the only indigenous monster we have in New York State. All those lake monsters are kind of Loch Ness copycats. There's the Headless Horseman, but he's not so much a monster as a soldier whose head got blown off who haunts the guy in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". So the Wendigo is a mythological creature from the First Nations of what is now Canada and the Native Americans in what is now the Great Lakes Area. I'm happy to claim him for NYS. The source of the English word is the Ojibwe word wiindigoo . Apparently that means "owl". Not sure how we got to "deer head" here but Tofalar is devoted to the Tofalar people who live with deer and make it a point not to kill them off. While the Wendigo is generally a negative creative, with insatiable thirst and hunger, greedy and murderous to boot, this particular "cinders" flaming rendition of him seems friendly enough and the only "insatiable" part I will keep out of this legend is the desire to see everything in FF -- and shop!
It was the dead middle of the night at a time when both in the US and Europe everyone seems asleep and there literally wasn't a soul on some of the FF regions, or maybe one AFK FF chronicler (in a nearly-invisible...jellyfish?...avatar) so I didn't want to wait to raise the 3K for the golden deer, I decided Wendigo was just the thing. And really, it's so handy, as you'll see.
Wendy has an applier for "blaze fluff" which took me the longest time to figure out -- I thought it was something I had to somehow add in edit. Turns out all you do is click and it goes on automatically, duh. And just in time for the rather frigid Scrimshaw region which is so unique and glorious, I've never seen anything like it.
Scrimshaw is that delicate art of carving on ivory tusks -- don't expect my pictures to do justice.
So now I'm in Khol Dracy region and this is exactly why Wendigaunt was absolutely the right choice, because these types of monsters -- and carnivorous at that! -- are exactly the kind you meet at the Faire. And normally I try to avoid looking them in the eye, and cross to another sim, you know, like you would in New York City, sometimes to no avail, but now I can confidently march right up!
I love the way one sim segues into another, even with a very different look or climate. But if you saw these chaps at the entrance, I ask you, wouldn't you want to be a Wendigaunt rather than a Dinkie?
These chaps are going to ask me over to play cards and have a beer in a minute, though, no fear. Totally fam.
There are so many mysterious inscriptions at the Faire...
Chatting with my new bud who I believe is a Stygian monster...turns out we go to the same hairdresser, who knew...
And guess what, he went to grade school with my little brother... I thought he looked familiar, but all grown up now!
Gorgeous nests.
I will say he did beat the pants off me on Hearts, but then I didn't have any pants to start with.
I decided to exit gracefully before I lost anything more, such as a limb, for example, as nice as those chaps were, and now I am in a valley of crystals...
Ostara is my absolute favourite region this year. This egg was made by polysail. I chanced by it when she was still building and saw it was labelled "Least Hated Egg" and urged her to have faith in herself. I know that real artists hate things they make and destroy them all the time and it's up to us norms to try to rescue the manuscripts and sketches out of the flames. In this case I urged her to name it "Bestest Egg in all the Faire" which is how I felt about it and I think many would agree. She sent me the gif from her sketches in z-brush to show what a torturous process it was. Gah. Z-brush, she explained to me, is a program where you keep slapping clay on the screen and pulling at it "until it doesn't suck anymore". You need not know how to draw or be able to draw a straight line. I have a friend who is going to learn z-brush. I find all this pretty scary and I know "a man's reach exceeds his grasp" at times like these, for me. Perhaps some day...
There are all kinds of power councils that go on at the FF and you have no idea by whom or what...
I think blue dye was poured on this grass. They couldn't get it out, and they decided, "let's go with it..."
So many angles to see every sim, so many viewpoints...
Nice guy. Says he used to work the night shift with my mom at Canco. Small world dept. Not scary. Going out as a Wendigaunt was really the best choice I ever made. As a Dinkie, I would have been trampled by now.
I have to go back and see which sim this was...
And now...that breathless moment when you are about t9 enter an entire sim made by Gidgette Adagio called "Seventh Valley" sponsored by the Realm of Rosehaven -- no shopping, no meetings, no memorials, just pure Faire Forest, if you will...
Here is where I emphatically put myself in the picture so you can have that thrill of discovery and exploration that I have. THIS is Fantasy Faire -- middle of the night, forest, unseen except by the creator and a few others, and now poised for the crowds...
Half the fun is recognizing all the same trees I have like old-growth Nadine Reverie lol - but so much more skillfully deployed, I try to learn from it...
The feeling is sort of Everglades meets Maine... it's not exactly tropical but not Northeastern....well, it's Fantasy Faire...
So I'm wending my way through the forest, confident that soon I will discover the BIG KAHUNA or the BIG W or the SOMETHING that will be the secret prize of this sim, when all of a sudden, this ostrich starts giving me attitude. They always do. If I were just a Dinkie, this would be the end of the story. But I walked right up to him and reminded him that he was actually a second cousin, once removed, and there was that time at the family reunion where he dropped his hot dog on the grass and was crying and my dad told him to shut up and...ok, that was all it took. Now I'm on my way...
So you would be content with the forest just as it is up to now, with all its little nooks and crannies and glades and secret flamingos, when all of a sudden - WHAM! You round the corner and THIS! I love eggs. I'm not tired of them -- yet, making them and spending hours on them and buying other people's eggs and admiring them. Eggs of all kind. So this is like a secret dragon nest and maybe quest things will be here. The quest is called "The Language of the Birds" which is like the Sufi poem.
I don't quiet understand Junction yet this year. It's underwater. The memorial candles are on a jetty on top.
Everyone should have the experience of walking step-by-step up the Amethyst Rift. Go to the sim and then find it. It is a glorious build. In so many ways. Walk it. Fly it. Don't miss it!
What I love about creations of geographical features in SL is that they have a real sense of place. Years from now, if I go to an SL meet-up, or chance across some FF people somewhere, and mention Amethyst Rift, they will know exactly what I mean, as if it were Devil's Bathtub in Upstate New York near our house, or Watkin's Glen.
It's dark under water. You can see the wordlings, which I guess are prototype worlds that might come into being.
Valhalla -- tremendous and overwhelming, I can't possibly take its picture...
What's interesting about Valhalla is that it has a deep forest at the foot of it, I don't recall Alia's builds having those kind of woods before. Ordinarily, my creature would set them on fire now, but I'm a nice Wendigo...
Someone will be along to do all of this right, meanwhile, just a little souvenir at how breathtaking it is to see the first time...
It's like a kind of Art Deco Valhalla. What I like about SL builds is that there isn't this drive to make a RL replica of some old ruins somewhere, but to interpret it as the artist imagines -- and brings to life in virtuality.
Alia had a kind of progress report going...
That was last night...today I've been busy scampering around putting up FF signs in all my venues, fixing all the LMs to the demo platform, etc. etc. Nothing but chores. Then I figured there must be a party somewhere, no? The first day, it's all day long on the Fairchylde...
And here are my friends, partying away...
Alia has a sort of rune hunt going on his sim, I actually managed to find the runes with the help of a more savvy avatar. I so suck at hunts. I am so grateful to friends I make at FF.
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