Mole Crickets?

My nice green land was brown when I logged on, last night.

How is that possible? I haven't raised or lowered or smoothed or roughened or done any Edit Terrain on it since the first day or so that I had it. So that's not the explanation.

This is Mainland (I think I said), on one of the newer Class 5 sims, near a 'coast' (within a few yards of an inlet---there's an unsold 1024 in between the inlet and me. I knew that my nice view could vanish at any moment, if anyone were to buy that land and build something big....but it's a nice area even without the view. On the Mainland, you can't count on views remaining, after all.)

But, point is: I know there are layers to terrain, but I didn't realize that they could manifest themselves without my having done anything.

(It's not a 'trick of the light', either---I routinely go to the bottom of the World drop-down menu and change the Environment to Midday, should it be 'night' when I log on. It's fun to look at places in all the options--both Sunrise and Sunset can be very beautiful. But for making things, I want Midday. So it's not that my grass suddenly looked brown last night because I had a different hour-of-the-day setting.)

And my post title is facetious, of course. I suppose it's possible that some Second Life resident has created mole crickets (notorious eaters-of-lawns in the US South). But they could hardly script them to actually turn people's land from green to brown! Surely Linden Lab wouldn't permit such a thing!

(Would they???)

Nah.

Anyway. Getting over my dismay at the color of my land, I resumed looking through all the freebies I'd acquired the other night. Finding two swimming (scripted) koi, I happily put them in the back pond--the one that I'd made by first 'digging a hole' in the ground, using Edit Terrain tools. This is important, I think, because I doubt that the koi could swim 'in' a pond that's been made flat to the land.

I should check on that. But it would make sense--unless one had flat, 2-D koi that only looked 3-D while 'swimming' just under the surface of a pond-on-land. And that would be hard to pull off, visually.

I guess I should make plain that I am not a graphic artist nor engineer, and I have no experience whatsoever with 3-D modeling or even with 2-D graphics programs such as Photoshop. Of course, if my desire to get good at building things in SL continues, I will have to gain some familiarity with such programs.

But I think this is one of the most interesting things about SL: the way it can inspire people like me---people who have never before felt any impulse toward learning about 2-D and 3-D programming---to not only want to learn, but to be willing to put in hours doing it. And to have fun in the endeavor.

The creation of a world that can motivate people that way is a pretty unusual and notable achievement.

And I'd say so even if LL did put mole crickets in my lawn.