Fun With Rivers & “Ribbon Water” –

Tuesday – June 8th, 2021 —> +23˚C / +70˚F – Sunny with heat warnings for later @ 06:30 am in Atlantic Canada – I think today is J.J. Kacick’s Birthday – and any discrepancies between ˚C & ˚F is probably due to the two different services that tell me what they think my air temperature here might be. –

— I complained to the right person about the problems I was having using the { – new to me – } Ribbon Water – while I’m trying to get one new multi-area “Newbie” landing zone “created”, prettied up, clean and ready for inviting beta testers in – hopefully sooner than later.

— The problem I had was exacerbated by the silly fact that I tried to add ‘ribbon water’ from the ‘assets’ pull down menu link at the top of the developers’ ‘blade. – That loads a fully formed squiggle of a river about ten feet above the builder character’s / avatar’s head – pulling that snake-like river down presented problems – bending it around to fit inside the ‘river/canyon’ I’d carved into the landscape was frustrating – a lot of weird things happened. sections of the river disappeared underground – other sections curled up into the air and didn’t want to settle down into the ‘canyon’ home I’d carved for them. —> AND – when I started out – that snake-like river didn’t reach the boundaries of the area it would hopefully settle into. But when I finished moving the unruly twists and turns into place – the river had decided to lengthen itself and stretch out over the ‘ocean’ water that I’d hoped the river would happily become a waterfall and splash down into without acting like a once lovable kid who’d grown into his or her “terrible two’s” – no such luck. —>

— And then – the ‘boundary tool’ couldn’t cut off the excess river ribbon. And when I tried to pull it down under the sea – it rebelled – twisted and turned and flipped over and around and acted like it wanted to become the wildest design for a roller coaster in any overpriced theme park on planet Earth in the ‘Real World’. —>

— The above is a mild example of the problems I encountered the first time I tried to hide the errant runaway ends of a river under the surface of a sea.

— After the best support person in the real world pointed me to the tutorial that wasn’t there ten years ago when I started this – The above was my first attempt at starting from the ‘create’ menu – which gives you a small square of ‘mirror/water’. – When you change the type of water you want to ‘River’ and ‘Ribbon’ you find the ability to turn it around to tell the currents to go in whichever direction you want them to travel. Then you use the boundary tool – which doesn’t act the same with ribbon water as it does with anything else you’d like to shrink or grow or widen or deepen or whatever –

— That { above } screen shot shows several circles and bars that tell you where the points are that you can edit the river at – & they don’t always play nice … 😉 –

— This was before I tried to pull a lot of it down –

— This is what I saw when I thought this was working out well –

— This is what I saw when I zoomed back out a bit –

— The crazy twists and turns are now underwater – but dangit – they’re plainly visible – I blinked a couple times and shrugged, “So maybe I’ll plunk an island down in that spot to cover the mess.”

— After cosmetic surgery / plunking an island down over the mess … Still not perfect – but heck, it’s a million per cent better than what was there before I watched the tutorial …

— Sigh.

— &&& After an hour break to do my pranayama exercises, breathing exercises and Raja Yoga meditation attempt that lasted 30 minutes after the more or less isometric exercises with internal concentration – sensing energy flows-  and then the esoteric breathing stuff – I kind of floated into the kitchen and looked out over the glassed in porch and saw some ears bobbing up and down about six inches from a window out there – and then a deer’s head rose just enough to look at me – I went and bothered Cathi in her office and she followed me back to the porch where we guessed the deer was starving and eating some of her flowering plants. I went and grabbed some bread. The deer looked up, right at Cathi through the window. Cathi said ‘Hello -” and the deer didn’t run away –

— Cathi walked out onto the small bit of deck and continued her conversation with the deer, who looked a little ragged – I handed her three pieces of bread and she tore it { the bread, not the deer } into pretty good sized chunks and tossed them away from the garden, but still in front of the deer –

— The deer – the one with the hooves – looked like it considered alternatives and then walked over, tasted the bread and then gobbled up the other bits, glanced back at Cathi and might have thought a little bit of that bread might have been worth the risk of maybe becoming our lunch –

— We left the deer alone and it wandered around in our little bit of yard for five or ten minutes and then wandered back toward the ‘deer hill’ where they often come sniffing for yummy grass and stuff – and he or she happily munched on whatever looked appetizing there and didn’t even think about going back and chomping down on the Hostas again.

— 🙂

~~~~~ Jim