Burning Life 2009 preview – part three

You’re walking in a desert through an extravagance of imaginative builds on all sides, but then you see something strange, a rectangular build, orange and yellow in color, with some spheres and other shapes inside. If you enter the property and hit the "Play Media" icon on your Second Life viewer, the magic begins.

Music plays and every surface comes alive with video. One brief moment is captured in this picture, but it’s only one moment. It’s constantly changing. You can see more moments of it in the slide show that follows this article. It’s "Personal Video Dome" by an Australian, 1Earthling Rang (say it aloud), "Unique SL Video/Color Experience … designed to play video from all surfaces." This writer found it mesmerizing.

Nearby, you’ll see the colorful "Rainbow Serpent Lodge – R/SL" in the camp of Sundog Branner, whose self description is "Creative soul in Oz … Colour alchemist, rainbow warrior, cosmic composer". Words fail to describe Sundog’s build. His own description of it is, "13:20 Time = Art The Dreamspell – 13 moons : 20 tribes r/evolve – r/sl".

You’ll find "Honest Punky’s Used Cars and Foreclosed Buildings" a little south of Sundog Brenner, in Noiz Noyes’ camp. It’s a petrol station with fuel pumps, a space ship between pumps, a collection vehicles, a machinima you can watch, and boxes, piles and piles of boxes containing items such as "Nashville Tomb of the Templars" and "Nashville Stonehenge", virtually all of which you can get copies of for free. Most of the items being given away were created by Punky Pugilist.

Nestled between Sundog Branner’s and Noiz Noyes’ camps you’ll find "Candlemania" in the camp of Arrow Inglewood. Here you’ll find a variety of flames, including a candle headlight in the basket of a "@Delux Hobo Bicycle". The bicycle was created by Athos Murphy.

Return to 1Earthling Rang’s Personal Video Dome just north of it you’ll find a very different camp, "Beyond my lifetime", in the camp of zeusdinne Baroque. At one end, a spaceship blasts off while at the other end, a mammoth stands over a camp with a campfire, an animal skin stretched out to dry, and fish hanging from a framework of tree branches. In the middle, between mammoth and rocket, there’s a rug with meditation pose balls. There’s picture of the campsite in the slide show below, but it was taken a few days ago. Zeusdinne Baroque has added items to the site since then.

At the southest corner of the sim, next to the Burning Life-Elko sim, you’ll find the camp of Hellahond Nightfire. Here, gargoyles and dragons stand guard over several animals and what appears to be a bee perpetually raises and lowers a basket between the ground and a "Birds Dance Platform" overhead.

You’ll find ten more pictures of the builds mentioned in this article in the slide show below, and you can learn more about Burning Life at its website, burninglife.secondlife.com. The pictures in this article and slideshow were all taken in the Burning Life-Quinn sim. The sim is closed now while builders are still constructing their creatings, but you will be able to visit it from October 17-31, 2009.