Monday, June 30, 2008

Ride Like A Girl!!!

WOW- all i can say is OMFG - KILLER HILLS. Didn't expect that on this ride, but there they were. I made it 53 miles before my knee gave out - GO ME!!!!! - WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOO
Thanks
Graeme - you're the best coach ever!! =) (next goal: 100 flatter miles by September)
Here are some pics from the ride. The other riders are my sister and a friend from school.





Monday, June 2, 2008

The Compass Always Points to Terrapin Station

Inspiration, move me brightly...

The new Terrapin Station is one of the great places on Dark Star, built by none other than the talented Starling Glitterbuck, where deadheads and hippies can listen to awesome streams of shows courtesy of Casey Jonas.

The story behind the building of the new Terrapin station is really interesting. Last night, Starling shared the story with me.

I think I was about 4 months old when i built the first terrapin. I was on the mainland. Sutherland was the name of the sim. It was next to a bridge, but actually there was a terrapin station before that. I found it one night it was a very small place. I met a guy named Conrad there, and then a guy named Lovesmiley. The three of us spent one night dancing and talking about music in this old Terrapin Station. And that night we made the further tribe.

And I started building the new Terrapin Station because the old one which was owned by Conrad sucked so we started buying land and I built the new Terrapin Station. I was pretty newbed out, still it was a box and really besides my little house was my first real build.

At some point, well, I had that first station for a while. There wasn’t really much of a live music scene then. It was mostly just I played gd radio and like no one came. Maybe a couple people a week would stop by but really it was so few. After a while I had a few people who came sometimes, but really it wasn’t much.

Conrad went away, and basically, I had the station with a Darkstar room, a smoking lounge, and I was making my bus. Then I got this offline from this guy. It said something like, "This place is great!!!" Something like that. I was making the bus one day, and that guy came by. We started talking, and he never left. It was Casey. He hung out at Terrapin with me, and then he started helping me and streaming. And I told him about my ideas and he told me how this could be possible. And then we got Darkstar. That was about a year and a half ago.

We wanted a hippie community and I wanted to build a shrine to the Grateful Dead, recreate as much of the scene as possible, and also pay tribute. What was unexpected to me and the best surprise to me is that as I make these things I learn a LOT and I reconnect. And like for instance, I made this game - it’s in the lobby of the hotel - if you click on the phone you get a message and a choice of room numbers. The message is for a Grateful Dead character, who is supposedly staying at Mars Hotel. You gotta figure out who the message is for and then figure out what room they are in. To build this game I had to learn about all the characters in the songs. I have 48 characters in there. Now when I hear these songs I get sooo much more out if it. It’s like they are new again. And I’ve loved these songs all my life. And that’s the best part about making Darkstar, because I'm the lucky one. I get more out of it than anyone because I am creating it.

As far as the new Terrapin Station goes, like i said, it was one of my first builds. It was my first, it was messy, haa, and it was out dated. So I decided that I would model it after the limited edition Terrapin Station album. Since I made a Terrapin station already, I didn’t think I could do it really, because I couldn’t see it very well in any of my images. But Casey scanned his poster and I was able to create an interpretation that’s pretty close to the art.




Here are some shots of the old Terrapin Stations

Sutherland


Darkstar


Many many thanks to Starling for sharing her story and pictures, for her wonderful builds, and her beautiful tribute to the most amazing group of musicians I know. Many thanks also to Casey Jonas for putting together a great community of Deadheads and for streaming such great music for us. Finally thanks to Haily Jewell (cuz) for contributing some of these pictures.