A few days ago I wrote about good change in SL, such as a renewal in sim design.  This post is about change that is sadder.

Life is Good was a favorite with SL residents.  It was a combination landscaping and furniture store along with hosting various cultural events.  LiG was beautifully designed and many screenshot fans spent a lot of time there, including myself.

Recently I discovered that LiG will be closing.  And I'm not sure if the designers will return to SL again in the same roles.  Many of the original designers I loved when I first came into the world are gone now. And with drastic changes set to appear with LL's new marketplace plans, I'm not sure if we will have their like again.

Life is Good will be closing next week.  So visit as soon as possible.

slurl.com/secondlife/Life+is+good/128/128/0

Renew

One of the best elements and sometimes the worst elements of SL is that it is continually changing. People move in and move away from land plots.  Stores come and go.  Private sims appear and then disappear.  Many times it is the nicest parts that melt away with only screenshots left as reminders to SL fans.

But this isn't about sad change but happy change.  Tableau is one of my favorite destinations in SL.  It is a shopping sim with a shared design vision among the creators.  The only other sim to match it is Drowsy.

Tableau is constantly renewing itself.  When I first visited the sim, it's theme was the Louisiana bayou.  Then it changed to a New Orleans Mardi Gras look.  Now in it's newest incarnation, it has been turned into a small town that seems to have missed most of the 20th century.  Its stuck somewhere between 1920 to 1950.  Truthfully it looks like the film set from "The Night Of The Hunter".

Here are a few shots I took recently of the new design.

Visit Tableau via this link : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tableau/128/128/0

The Quiet

The ubiquitous AM Radio Sims, everyone goes to visit, so should you.

And more shots of the sim.  Radio specializes in landscapes.

Go directly to the sim via this slurl:

slurl.com/secondlife/IDIA%20Laboratories/150/79/23

Rustica and Lagnmoor

The biggest and more successful shops in SL have their own sims.  Those sims can be quite beautiful.  A wonderful example is Rustica and Lagnmoor.

The Lagnmoor sim contains a village with prefab houses that customers can buy.  They are nicely made, low prim and contain beautiful textures.  The builds also come with a small amount of furniture included in the box.  So its ready for avatar living almost immediately.

In the above picture, is a view of one of the houses for sale.  Its a called the Crooked house and it has a very fairy tale feel to it.  It is one of the smaller builds, so it doesn't take up a lot of space.  Which is nice, especially if you have a small plot.

Lagnmoor is connected to the main sim, Rustica.  Rustica contains a huge castle which houses the furniture store.

The castle contains many labyrinthine rooms and halls which are fun to explore.

The castle store has many furniture collections for sale that will fit the style of a new Lagnmoor home.

You can visit both of these sims by following the links listed below.

Lagnmoor
http://slurl.com/secondlife/LagNmoor/128/128/0

Rustica
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rustica/128/128/0

Garden Fantasy

My favorite places in all of Second Life are gardens.  I love looking at how other residents set up their small plots of greenery, which makes Flickr's Second Life Gardens and Homes groups some of the regulars that I watch.

Getting land in SL is not cheap.  So that puts a limit on what a single landowner can do.  But the greenery merchants have the resources to create spectacular sims filled with dream gardens for every season.

The first of these gardens that I visited in SL was Creative Fantasy.  I believe on my first visit it was only two sims and shared a third with another merchant.  But now the garden has four sims dedicated to each season.  All of the sims are beautiful, but my favorite by far is Winter.

Winter at Creative Fantasy bucks the Americana/Britannia Victoriana vibe of other gardens and takes it's inspiration from Russia.  Which makes it very unique and a bit exotic for Second Life.

Hidden in the nooks and crannys of the Winter Garden, you can find animals frolicking in the snow. Bears and wolves are the main residents of the Winter Garden but there are deer and others.  Of course, Winter Garden has loads of Holiday decorations and greenery for all an SL resident's needs. Everything is for sale and its hard to exert some self control when wandering around the sim.

You can visit this wonderful area by clicking on this link:

slurl.com/secondlife/spellbound%20woods/145/143/41/