One of the jewels in SL’s naturist crown has to be the lovely, charming, photogenic Lupe’s Magical Forest.

I’ve been meaning to do a major article on it for ages, and have only recently got around to joining, as I previously relied on Pookes to cover it for me. And what a ‘miss’ it was, for me, to have wasted so much time not joining, because seen first hand it’s a stunningly beautiful build.

I’ll begin with a few photos from our library of shots from it, and just ask you to marvel at the beautiful detail involved, right down to the dandelion seeds floating in the breeze in the top photo.

It really would be possible to wander its tracks for an hour, simply taking SL photos of nature, and create the most wonderful album of its vistas.

What I particularly like about it is its dismissal of ‘modernity’. No cars, or even tractors or bikes, to be seen, and it has an aura of peace and tranquility, not always available in SL because there’s no commercial aspect to be had. People do love to build, build beautifully and create wide, empty spaces in SL, but the tier cost (i.e. the cost of renting some SL space) can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. Thus, people are drawn to building shops and selling items of SL clothing to claw back some tier costs. Which is fine, but sometimes it feels we’re missing large chunks of ‘the SL natural world’. I’d have thought a way to build and grow SL (or the planned ‘Samsara’ V2 version of the game) would be to reduce tier costs substantially, practically to zero, for those who wish to create the natural world just for the sake of it existing, and being there for us all to explore.

As the summer progresses it’s my intention to revisit the major SL naturist sims, Eden, Turtle, Su Casa, Lupe’s (again) and report on the state of naturism around the grid.

Ella