The birthday has landed! At least, that was what it felt like yesterday. KT Syukami has done awesome work. In less than two weeks, she has organised 20 sims – some landscaped a little ready for stage builds and the Welcome Centre, others parcelled. When it became clear that the demand for exhibitor slots was going to exceed supply, she went back and wrestled an additional 50 or so parcels out of the odd corners of sims … and then she decided that everyone could have 23 prims more for their builds.
Then she started sending out letters to all the successful applicants, explaining how they would claim there land – and telling them all individually where that land would be. About 75% of those letters had gone out before the official launch of the building process – and the main reason it wasn’t 100% was that the final few applications were still being processed.
And, at a point were many people would have rolled over, waved their legs in the air and moaned faintly (all this in Less Than Two Weeks, remember), KT got a glint in her eye and went and built the Egyptian stage – a two sim build of quite staggering awesomeness which will host DJ events.
Well, yesterday the community building phase started. Waiting, along with everyone else, in the group chat, I was reminded of the scene in Trading Places. You know the one – on the old New York Stock Exchange, where the traders wait breathlessly for the start of the trading in Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.
The clock ticked till 10am SLT … and then the room exploded with people asking for access to their plots. A team of Exhibitor Assistants had been trained for just this moment – as the exhibitors begged for admittance, EAs responded, invited them to the group, took them to their plot to get them settled … and then returned to the fray.
It was two hours of breathless madness – all credit to the EAs who remained enthusiastically cheerful throughout – and to the exhibitors who heeded the warnings that it would be pandemonium and waited their turn with good humour (and very evident excitement).
Out on the twenty sims, it was downright dangerous. I felt a bit like the Wicked Witch of the East, strolling along, minding my own business, when houses from Kansas landed on my head … well, all right, not quite, as long as I stuck to the roads. And they weren’t houses. They were houses, statues, trees, gardens, art installations, boats …. people had heeded the Angel of Death’s advice and pre-built and places weren’t so much springing up as landing forcefully.
After the initial hours the dust settled and requests for access in chat began to seem almost sedate. Out on the sims, all sorts of creations are appearing. By the late afternoon SLT, I was relaxing with friends on a dragon boat on Gala, one of the water sims, where we had been fortunate enough to find tea laid out … you can see, from here, the beginning of the builds. There’s the brightly coloured tower … the black box you can see in the picture is actually a cylinder and holds, like Tutankahmen’s tomb, “wonderful things”, and so does the white tower next to it. To the right, you can see the guardian cats that mark the start of the path to the Egyptian ruins created by KT.
It’s going to be an amazing birthday – I do hope you’ll be there.
Let’s do a jigsaw.
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Catch up with your Prim Perfect jigsaws (showing images of Second Life and other virtual worlds).
If you’d like to submit a photo of your own to feature as a jigsaw, send it to the Prim Perfect Flickr Group. It should be sized 800w x 600h, or else it will need to be re-sized.
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