I have to confess I’ve neglected the blog recently, mostly because I can’t get excited about SL at the moment. Right now it feels as though the loss of the jewel in SL’s naturist crown, Eden Naturopolis (it still exists, as a shadow of its former self) was a bitter blow.

So where do we, SL’s naturist community, go from here? A few, genuine naturist sims remain, but Eden was such a huge part of it all that it feels like the heart has been ripped out of SL naturism. As a result, I’ve been reflecting where the blog goes from here. I’ve basically covered everywhere in SL that exists as a naturist location and we’ve ignored the sims where naked avatars performing public sex is being passed off as ‘a naturist location’. These places aren’t and never will be naturist.

So a rethink is in progress. Where does the blog go from here? It seems that a new-conservatism so evident in society…a rise in far-right policies and support feeding this…also feeds off into SL, with nudity increasingly barred at photogenic locations, on pain of being barred from some sims (and it has happened to one or two of us, with one or two sims, where using their photogenic landscape to take naturist photos (usually, we’ve been trying out new, naturist-potential poses).

I’ll be posting less for a while until I can rethink our policies. No, we aren’t going to suddenly embrace these naked sex sims that purport to be naturist. Yes, the blog will continue. But it will have to be a little more circumspect in where we visit for a while. It feels as disturbing to find Eden gone as it would be to find a real life naturist beach suddenly lost to textiles, for example.

I have a week off next week, so I’ll be spending a lot of time in world, observing, researching, exploring, and we shall see where we go from there. In the meantime, here’s a vintage gallery from real life, as one of my first explorations will be to see what vintage sims (1920s Berlin, for example, has an ‘FKK swim session’ one evening a week at their pool) can offer. Ella