it's been exactly two months since Veritas Raymaker began his adventures in earnest. in this quest to explore the possibilities afforded for geography education in Second Life, i have been thinking for some time about investing in a snow-covered plot.
this was when i discovered that if there's one thing more difficult to find than a believably-accurate underwater plot, it's a snow-covered plot sited in an aesthetically-pleasing and hospitable area. it seems a lot of people like to live on tropical islands, but shun the idea of an alpine environment.
i looked long and hard, even (in sheer desperation) visiting Anshe Chung's two sims in her Arctica series (for the record, i did find land for sale, contrary to what the webpage claims, but i rejected it because of the multiple ban-lines erected by the occupants of the surrounding plots, and also, because the supposedly arctic sims were surrounded by those which were suspiciously tropical).
in the name of geographical accuracy, the investment would have had to be on the Linden continental masses themselves, and not on private island-sims. the highest plot i found was at the Lippert sim, at a dizzying 170 metres in altitude. that's basically at cloud height, and although it was fun to walk in fog, the fog itself wasn't very realistically rendered (at least, not yet), and, more importantly, i didn't really like the neighbourhood (those pesky airborne spinning ads!)
after scouring every fair-sized plot-for-sale in the Snowland region of the original Mainland Continent of Sansara, i found (somewhat to my surprise) that the most suitable plot was also the most obvious.
it turned out to be the nearest available plot to the lake at Zermatt, which is the largest water-body in the entire region.
if that weren't a plus in itself, the entire southern boundary of the plot is along Linden Protected Land, because the plot is at the foothills of the mountains in Bydalen and Voss. in fact, the Protected Land my plot borders is possibly the only (and if not, definitely by far the largest) Protected Land in the whole of the region, comprising ten Linden-administered sims, namely, Kanin, Bydalen, Voss, Zermatt, Moritz, Wengen, Toggenburg, Anzere, Valmorel and Ordino.
most of the land in the sim is owned by Shiryu Musashi (RL: Giuseppe Nelva), who is the CEO of Musashi-Do fashion and Musashi Motorsports. of course, the fact that there's a car-showroom and a boutique in the same sim as my new plot - which i've christened Carte Blanche - is pure coincidence :-)
as for the house which i've chosen for Carte Blanche, well, the most appropriate one i could think of was the Villa Klosterneuburg, by Glox Parisi of Parisi Design. it is, in fact, based on a Real Life house in Austria :-)
(photo taken on the island in the lake at Zermatt - please note, bling-snowman is not my creation, nor does it represent my values :-) )
