HBA Island – The Road To Its Ruin

As some of you will know, HBA Island is no more. A volcano erupted in the middle of the jungle of my old home and burnt the lot down ending what was, by then, a two year labour of love for me.

I won’t go into the history of how I came to have a small plot of land as unhappy tales of griefers and the like are sooooo 2007, but suffice to say that in the first few months my wee 4ksqm plot was a real life saver. Even after I had moved back away and begun exploring the grid the island had a very special place in my heart and I’m only too glad that a) so many of my friends came to visit, and b) so many people I now count as friends called my home their home.

But all things must end, or at the very least change, and my jungle is no different. I was never there, I had stopped adding to the art gallery, the tale of the shipwrecked sailor had been abandoned and the humper bunker next to me had grown to be a small thorn in my side. So before I ended up falling out with neighbours I’d known for some time, and before I grew to see my jungle not as a place of peace, but as a creative mill stone, I knew I had to get rid of it.

I *did* think about selling it, but since I bought it in 2007 for 6L$ a sqm land prices had crashed, the measly 1L$ per sqm I would have received (even if I could have found a buyer) just wasn’t worth the effort. I simply informed the owner (the ever excellent Deoko Cassidy) that I wasn’t going to renew after the current rent ran out and he should take back the land. I then had a week or so to plan its demise… bwahahahahahaha!

Actually, my first idea was for a meteorite strike (this grew out of an idea I had in 2007 to have meteorite strike the jungle and slowly convert it to an alien landscape) but at the same time Miss Ordinal Malaprop was having a similar idea to get rid of her land in Caledon and two such strikes seemed… uninventive. Besides, somehow it didn’t feel right – as I said, the idea was an old one and with an very different purpose in mind, to wit the continuation of the Island as a story telling medium, and this was not what I wanted.

As I have mentioned on many occasions, all my good ideas occur in the shower, and as I stood under the lovely hot water one morn I felt the idea pop into my mind – a volcano! Burn the bloody island to the ground!

I had a week left and began planning that very night – Sally the crab would return (following the poll I ran) and cause the cataclysm. The volcano would grow a little each night, finally eruting and burning the whole place down for the last 2 or 3 nights until BOOM! HBA Island was no more. So with a volcano from Brenda Schoonhoven and a sculptie stream which I edited to run with lava, from the very clever Vlad Bjorenson I set about the dread deed! Below I present a pictoral record of the end of my Island and the group which I’d set up to use it – one thing I will say is that manually deleting nearly a thousand Linden trees and plants is more time consuming than you might at first imagine 0.o

First the Art Gallery and building area had to go…

Then I fell back to earth…

Where I deleted the old TP point and welcome area with the freebies and seats and stuff…

Before clearing some trees for the volcano. I buried it deep so it was just a circle of rock – as I pulledit up, more and more trees had to go until, by the time the full 60m one was in place, I had to go inside and delete hundreds of trees and plants!

Then I added fire and the sculptie stream…

And stood back with Sally to admire our work…

After the photos were taken for the story “HBA Island: The End”, all that was left to do was clear the island of all prims and delete the HBA Island group (5 members – me, Ryne [also me] and Janey, Pinkie & Annika)…

Sigh… the end of a 2 year chapter of my life