Day 2: Jade Snake

Toby and I made the decision to get a place to live and work together after he 'officially' moved into the Japanese House that Fabi built for us. We asked Fabi if we could build our own house on her land and she said to go ahead. The problem with building in SL is that building takes primitives (prims) and that prims are usually in short supply as their number is strictly controlled depending on the type and size of the plot you are inhabiting.

A prim is the  primary building block of everything in SL; it is one of a number of  simple maleable (allegedly) shapes that can be resized. For those of you with mechatronics backgrounds it is collection  of vectors that define each face  and for the rest of you this is already way too much information.

So in simple terms, we didnt have enough prims, despite Fabi's generosity, to play as we would have liked so we upgraded to a homestead of our own.
Bits of land are called parcels and the largest units are known as simulators (sims) and are 65536 square metres in size. Sims can be either homesteads with 3,750 prims or full sims with 15,000 sims. Your choice  of 'parcel' size is usually determined by cost whether you rent or buy.

Toby's and my sim is  a homestead and it is called Jade Snake Island  and we rent it at an excellent rate from one of the best landlords on SL, Kristaki Hudson, owner of Coral Estates.
When we first took over the sim it had obviously been used by another tenant (we have since found out it was some kind of club as people still drop in looking for it) and as we didn't like the landscape we had to raise it to the ground  before we could terraform it as we wished.

We already knew that the snake would be an important motif  to us as both of us are born in 'snake' years under the chinese calendar and so not only did we name our sim Jade Snake Island, but we also chose to terraform it in the shape of a curled snake.

You can  see the head of the snake is on the left (Dragon Point) and the tail on the right (SnakeTail) where we have sited an Art Nouveau  build called The Roundhouse.

Here you are looking down the island from Dragon Point.

Here you are looking up the island from the Round House. I will show more detailled pictures of the sim in other posts.