A visit to the Garden of NPIRL Delights

I took a trip there with kalosss Gausman, a dear friend. (About time, too, as it closes very soon indeed!)

We started out with the air tour in a wooden ship in the shape of a fleur de lis (I'm a bit embarrassed at how long it took me to notice that...), and then wandered around some at ground level, at least initially.

First we went to a spectacular factory, all full of things moving on shafts and electricity. Near it were amazing aerial displays... fireworks would be the closest RL phenomenon, but this did things you'd not see in RL. Were we in hell? Were those Blake's "dark Satanic mills"? I tend to think not, that we were in purgatory instead.

We knew we were in hell when we came upon a very disturbing scene that one must walk through a lake of blood to see. After that, we decided we had enough of hell, and went off in search of heaven.

Fortunately, as Mike Oldfield sang, "Heaven's open--fly right in." In our case, though, we teleported to a huge sphere with ever-shifting and spinning blizzard, and thence to a door that led outside. kalosss teleported and offered me a teleport in turn.

That took us to earth--a bright, candy-cane park-like scene--and from there we ended up in a dome with a glorious sky painted inside. Within was yet another, smaller, dome and inside was something curiously labeled "God's Bed."

Well, they do say that He rested on the seventh day...

We had to lie down on it--no thunderbolts ensued, though there are some features that we, um, made a point of avoiding.

By then it was getting late, and the extreme density of hard core graphics and probably scripts was taking its toll even on my lovely new 2.8 GHz dual-core system. The load average had shot up to 13, and the RC client was intermittently freezing, but so often and for so long at a time that it was no longer really usable.

I'll have to go back with the official client to see whether it makes a difference, not to mention that the above is the tiniest fraction of all the things to be seen in the Garden.