Even after yesterdays seemingly endless trek, my thrist for pointless trekking is not yet quenched. Today… Going Walkabout, Part Deux: Circumnavigating the World!
If anyone wants to join me in this completely insane venture, meet me on the south side of Abbotts at noon, SL time. We’ll go clockwise and stop every 20 sims (as marked on the map).
To misquote Dickens, “It is a far, far stupider thing that I do, than I have ever done.”
Update:
We set out in high spirits, heading west through the Cordova sandbox. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves already at our first rest stop, at the Ahern/Dore border. At this rate, it wouldn’t take long, would it? Well we were wrong.
We continued on through Indigo, our second rest stop, climbing cliffs and ploughing through the frigid depths of the coastal waters. Although we were making good progress, a quick glance at the clock revealed our foolishness. We estimated that we would reach the finish line in slightly over fifteen billion years!
At 4:00, I posted this in the forums:
Soooooo…. tiiiiired
Why am I doing this again? Well we’re making good progress. Four hours into this thing and we’re in Bowness now. We had a couple of problems with reall obnoxious ejection scripts. No warning or anything — they just blast you across the sim for setting foot on their land. I really don’t see how that should be allowed.
Anyway, we’re on a break. Resuming in about 3 minutes, so I’m going to grab a snack.
At six hours, we had only reached Alviso, where I posted again in the forums:
Six hours! Count ’em! Six!!!
We’re now taking a break underwater in Alviso before pressing on to our next waypoint — the southernmost sim in SL: Hoodoo.
Eyes are bleary. Fingers hurt. Need more snacks to hold out.
From time to time, bystanders would fly overhead to tell us how crazy we were. And they were right. At one point, I shouted, “Whose stupid idea was this anyway?” To which Ice Brodie replied that it was my stupid idea. She then changed her group title to “Cubey’s Fault”.
Yes, it was my stupid idea, but we couldn’t stop now. We had to see it to the end, in spite of hazards and mind-numbing boredom. And some hazards struck the unwary like a seagull striking a discarded bag of potato chips.
I was walking along a hillside, when I came upon a train track. Aha! It was exactly the barrier-free route I’d been hoping to find. But high spirits quickly turned to elation, which then turned to ennui with a helping of melancholie, which was suddenly supplanted by sheer panic when I was struck in the back by an unexpected rail car! A graffitti-bearing train of death attacked me from behind, and before I knew it, it was the end of the line for me.
Literally! I found myself pinned against the wall where the tracks ended with a train pounding me relentlessly into the concrete surface. After several moments of panic, I managed to extract myself. I was alive and even unscathed! Who knew such dangers existed!
Apart from the killer train and a sore finger from holding down the up-arrow key, by far the biggest hazard on our trip was obnoxious ejection scripts. What is it about certain landowners that makes them blast unwitting passers-by into the sim corner? Land ban bars are annoying enough, and we encountered our fair share of those, but there’s a certain variety of ejection script that gives absolutely no warning.
The scripts mostly had a similar pop-up message, which makes me think that somewhere in SL, some complete so-and-so actually creates and sells these things. He’s making money from this.
By seven hours into the trip, we’d run into literally dozens of these things. At best we’d be pushed a off-course. At worst, we’d be blasted into a sim corner and have to restart SL. Some ejection scripts pushed me into someone else’s ban-lines, which pushed me into someone else’s ejection script, and several sims away, I’d collect yourself, find my bearings, and swear hideous curses at the landowners as I tried to make my way back to the trail, trying to avoid the invisible ejection hazard.
7 hours
It’s just short of 7 hours into the walk, and we can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. More mishaps with ejection scripts along the way, which makes it virtually impossible to navigate through a sim without getting booted way off course. Also, I got killed by a train. Well, nearly killed anyway.
We’re in Hoodoo, now. Only a couple more hours, I’d guess.
At last we reached the final rest stop:
Last rest stop, 7 hrs 45 minutes
Well here we are at the last stop before we rush onward to the finish line at Abbotts Aerodrome! We met up with a bizarre number of banishers and ban lines in the snow sims. It was so bad, it was like walking through a minefield — you never knew when one of us would get blasted into the corner of the sim and get stuck. Again.
So… five minute break, then onward!
At this stop, we stopped for snapshots on some octagonal steps (I’ll post it later), before continuing.
It was just after 8:00, when we reached the finish lines and handed around the celebratory sporks. We’d made it! In eight hours, by walking around the outside edges of every coastal sim, we’d travelled the distance of approximately 230 sim-lengths, which equates to about 58 virtual kilometers of walking.
Well done, everyone!! Now rest your walking fingers for about a week before logging on again!
Links:
- Ardith Mifflin’s photo gallery (login is Ardith.Mifflin@gmail.com, pword is spork)
- Jillian Callahan’s blog
- Second Life forum