Calendar Girls

October 27, 2015, 4:09 am

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Ever since we began going on our HG journeys last year, it's been in the back of my mind to make a real world HG Safari calendar.

Whatever there is of ephemeral about virtual worlds seems to be amplified in OpenSim. Grids and regions come and go, and so too does the companionship of some of our fellow travelers. 

Across the often bewildering vastness of the hyperverse, it's easy to lose touch as people either move to another grid, or move on to other interests, leaving no sign of their passing except (if you're a compulsive friender like me) a greyed out name on your contacts list,  or a defunct Landmark in your inventory. 

Over the past couple of years, the sense of community across grid frontiers has developed, in large part thanks to OSGrid's 6 months offline. 
That's a good thing, but it would be wrong to see the disappearing act that some people - and entire worlds - do as a problem. This is a characteristic of OpenSim, and our Motto, if we could ever all agree on a motto, ought to be "Liberty, Variety, Instability" . 
These three values are what shape the worlds we occupy and visit. If you want a homologous experience, you can always go back to SL.

This calendar is dedicated to the fearless friends who have stuck with our adventures since May 2014, and to the grid and region owners who have welcomed us to their lands. Every photo, you might say, represents at least ten other people and places who have been part of our adventures at one time or another.
My very special thanks to those kind ladies who agreed to pose for the calendar. Each one brought their own unique look, and a wealth of patience and good humor to the process. 

They are, in 'chronological order' - Harthelie Deux on the cover, Cherry Manga, Wizardoz Chrome, Sunbeam Magic, Nara Malone, Isolde Caron, Jessica Pixel,  Fuschia Nightfire, PatriciaAnne Daviau, Truelie Telling, Spike Sol and Lucy Afarensis. 
In the true spirit of the Safari, each one was photographed on a grid and sim other than their own. 

Thanks too to the grid and region owners for immediately giving permission to use their locations. A special thanks to Art Blue and First Prim for specially opening an older .oar of Futurelab so that Isolde could be photographed there.

AVAILABILITY
The calendar will be available as a free full perm item a the Clubhouse on Teravus Plaza. I'll be putting it up some time over the coming weeks.

If you want the paper version, which is a large size, high quality wall calendar, you can buy one at Lulu.com - just search for HG Safari. It is not cheap, so don't feel you have to buy it, but this format seemed to show off the loveliness of the people and places to their fullest effect. 

ANNIVERSARIES
This calendar is unique in that I have added some special OpenSim event days - things like Hypergrid Day, OpenSimulator day, along with the birthdates of grids including OSGrid, Craft, Metro, FrancoGrid, and Kitely - a big Thank You to Crista, Nara. Walter, Maria, Roddie, Neb, Lena, Ilan, Nino, Dorena, etc., for letting me know the correct dates. 

For those grids who did not get a mention, and of course there are well over two hundred of them, my apologies, - dare I say ' next year' ..? That's a scary thought!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With this kind of project, it's inevitable that somebody will feel that their art or contribution has not received the acknowledgement it deserves. 

Rather than fill the calendar's pictures with a laundry list of names and acknowledgements, I have created a special page called HG Safari Calendar 2016 and there is a Bitly link to it in the calendar description on Lulu.com.
Note - this is a Page, not a blog post. You'll find the link in the side bar of this blog.

 If you and/or your region are featured on the calendar, please take a good look at this page. There are links to your web pages, blogs, grids, but if you have more links, or would like me to add or correct the information there, please send an IM and I'll be happy to do that, within reason.

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Zafari with a Zee

October 29, 2015, 5:58 am

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If there is one thing worse than being mauled to death by a zombie, it's when the zombie that mauls you is a clone of yourself. It's bad for you, but it's super fun for those who see it happen. 
This is not a B move, it's an A+ immersive experience available on OSGrid thanks to the creative gorgeousness of Total Sorbet and Michelle Theiss.

Left to right: me in awe of script genius Total Sorbet and builder Michelle Theiss

This game is open 24/7 on sim Outbreak, OSGrid. HG addresses as always at the bottom of the post.

Relax in the main square, and cam out to watch other players - a great layout

The game has a straightforward shoot 'em up format, but to make this work in OpenSim, when you've got about 25 avies all running on the same region, is a tour de force. 

Snowbody enters the game through the blood red portal

Both Michelle and Total modestly credit the other for the beautiful blending of excellent scripts with wonderfully atmospheric buildings, modeled on an old French or German town, rather than the usual post apocalyptic setting people usually go for in Zombie games. 

Spike kills yet another

It's huge fun to watch other people play, and many of us sat in the town square and just followed other players with the camera. 

Arca being killed by zombie Arca

Standouts were Spike Sol, Arcanquest Frank, snowbody Cortes, Sunbeam Magic

Sunbeam the Fairy - armed and dangerous

and Aime Socrates who blew us all away with his amazing time of over 6 minutes and more than 30 kills. Not bad at all for his first effort!

Bragging rights

Total Sorbet's computer did an amazing job, and of course the zombies deserve credit! They included Jessie Campbell, Ange Menges (a skeleton),  Prodyck Theas and two Dan Banners!

The demise of Sunbeam at the hands of Ange and the Banner Brothers

After about an hour we finally managed to crash the sim, but not before we had all agreed this is one of the most fun things you can do in OpenSim this season. Which is saying a lot, when you think how many events are planned!

Serra Royale at the landing point

Our second stop is a work in progress, but the progress is already so far along. It's JT Eyre's build on Mobius, dedicated to The Legend of Zelda games. 
This hunt, chase, covers a region as big as 16 sims - but thanks to clever use of collision TPs and levels, it's more like 64 sims, appropriate since it was originally a game for Nintendo 64 ! 

The first rule of Zelda -  cardio !

Our guide, Serra Royale, accompanied us to some of the features of the build, including the Temple of Time and the Lost Forest. 

We also got a view of one of the dungeons, the desert which features in Ocarina of Time. 

Serra tried to quiz us on our Zelda trivia with questions like 'What does the Super Sword do - lucky we had Jessica and Sunbeam with us with better memories than most, but I think our general ignorance showed. It has been several decades since we played though, in our defense.

JT's work is wonderful, with both attention to detail and vast proportions, Serra commented on how quickly he works, using Blender to create many unique parts. The build textures give it an authentic feeling, but it's not stale or dated. Serra's mission is to bring more interactive hunts and quests into open sim, giving people things to do, and this Safari proves that we're well on our way to that. It's a ncie change from SL where everything is about money, too.

This opportunity to see a work in progress was much appreciated by us all, and in no time, having walked, flown, teleported and jumped all over the place, it was time for us to head to our last destination which was on great Canadian Grid.

Hot Rod's Diner

Jen Smith was in SL and the InWorldz for several years before joining Great Canadian Grid some months ago. She is the proprietor of two music venues, a mall and a fine collection of classic cars. I really love the texture work on her Poor Monkey Blues bar, and Hot Rod's Diner is also a great example of 50's chrome and color.

Poor Monkey Lounge, also on Dreamland sim

Today's event was DJ'd by Nox Darkness, and he treated us to some fine rock and roll tunes. That hair has its own zip code, I'm told. The turnout on GCG was very nice, and we were delighted to meet so many local residents, and it was a fun way to end our journey. After that much rushing around, no problem falling asleep tonight! 

Nox Darkness showing that Big Hair is still in style

HG Addresses:  
Outbreak by Total Sorbet and Michelle Thiess  hg.osgrid.org:80:outbreak

Legend of Zelda by JT Eyre    grid.mobius.us:8002  and look for the portal (rotating giant gold ring) to their teleport hub and then go to the portal for sim Meraden - it's a triangle (or 'triforce')

Hot Rods Diner by Jen Smith   login.greatcanadiangrid.ca:8002:dreamland

The Trick of Treats

October 30, 2015, 4:27 am

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      Kodinpump is the latest build by Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges. Available contemporaneously on two different grids, Metropolis and OSGrid, it is a Hunt, and celebrates the Autumn season with a Halloween theme.

      Kodinpump is a mesh build, richly embellished with capricious pumpkins that answer you back when you speak to them. Some will give you gifts, some insult you, and some will throw you off the sim.

        The regions will be open for a limited time, just a few weeks, so do not delay your visit or you could very well miss it. The HG Addresses are as always at the bottom of the post.

      The setting is Kodinpump, a care-worn, weatherbeaten port, complete with sailing ships and netshops, and a bridge to nowhere. Or is it?  In the center of town you will find a rowdy tavern, merchants and their goods, and large stone-faced houses fringing a broad square that looks out onto the endless Offsim Sea.

      Venture inland and you will find a maze of dim streets. Strange, gloomy figures stand in dank doorways. Silent windows hide the secrets of the city.

      Alleys and courtyards branch off bewilderingly from the main thoroughfare, many full of hostile pumpkins sheltering in the glow of of dubious old streetlamps.

      What mysteries do these merchant ships hold? What immense journeys have they undergone to get to this dismal dock? We may never know, although we can dream of the possibilities.

 Venture a little further, search a little bit harder, and you will find your way down onto an underwater reef.

        This colorful world, in stark contrast to the muted tones of the city, is inhabited by sea monsters, and less-than-friendly sea pumpkins. But here too there are plenty fo hidden treasures! Among other sights to see in this intricate orgy of gorgeousness are the Fish Theater, a marine Cemetery and a gruesome pile of chum.

       Two environments, and endless opportunities to take photos and stop and enjoy the build, to feel the atmosphere, and to appreciate the builders, Ange and Nani, and to reflect on the message it inevitably transmits to a receptive mind.    

       It's a hunt, sure, the idea is for you to find the freebies, in the case of Ange and Nani, these are always fantastic treats as their standards are very high. This is their art, an interactive 3D opera where the search for gifts is the engine for exploration, not just materialism. In the past, during other Hunts organized by Nani and Ange, they have discovered that some visitors have been passing around Notecards with the location of the free items, so that their friends don't have to waste time on the build, but just get straight to the free stuff.
      This makes the creators a little mad. Why?

Ange and Nani. Don't make them mad.

      On the one hand, the creative process can be an end in itself. Think back to childhood, to the hours spent making a puzzle, playing a video game, or building a fort, perhaps. The process of figuring it out, designing, fitting together the pieces, is often the most satisfying part of the game.
      There is, however, a tipping point at which the maker becomes an artist, a shower of  art, a sharer of visions, an individual seeking dialogue with the observer, through provocation and catharsis.

      And here, OpenSim offers a unique dialectic between consumption and production.
      In OpenSim, with so many prims available, the urge to realize grand projects is limited only  by talent, time, and (sometimes) temperamental technology. This has released a phenomenal amount of creative energy in the community denominated as 'non professional' - a rather harsh term that is probably fair, in terms of best practices in 3D construction and design, but makes no allowances for the craft and ability of many self-taught amateur builders who have built up an impressive level of experience over the years.
      Think of them as pioneers shaping a hitherto uninhibited territory of superabundant proportions, an expanding universe of worlds and systems.

Fish food is disgusting, but people who sell free items are worse.

        Art production then - not a problem. But can we say the same of art consumption? Here the pioneering spirit hampers native Opensimmers, often so intent on their own projects they have little time to notice or compliment their fellow workers.

        This is not to say that support and appreciation have been absent from these grids - far from it. But the lines of communication between spots of civilization are often tenuous. There is the hypergrid, of course. A way to connect. But with so many worlds, time zones, language barriers, an air of unknowableness persists.
      Social media helps, but even there, people's preferences and prejudices - and the constant invention of yet another way to connect - can create a climate in which you can't see the wood for the trees.
      Any creator you ask will have stories about being on their sim when some random stranger shows up, doesn't even bother to say hello, and starts raiding the free items. In previous years, when there were fewer creators, this happened so much that some grids simply stopped allowing their content to be exported.
      More recently there have been some notorious cases of people with shops on commercial grids taking free items and then selling them to their fellow residents - essentially ripping off their friends and neighbors, which is inexcusably contemptible behavior. When caught, they usually fall back on the 'everything good here was stolen from SL' fallacy. That's depressing to content makers, and anyone trying to build a community.

       In Second Life, there is a huge pool of consumers, admirers, attendees, cheerleaders and enablers who have a symbiotic relationship with artists performers and creators modeled largely on the real world economy of money and insincerity. The no-money, share-alike philosophy of the best part of OpenSim is its most attractive and endearing quality, but it also creates tension between the expectations of the artist and the public's reaction.
        How can these artists be paid without regressing to the dull method of money? The goods and services may be 'free' but they are not without cost. That price is... to pay it forward. To show appreciation, in words and deeds; promote, support, contribute, participate, protect, and associate ourselves with the content makers who enrich our lives.
        Don't be a taker. Or the pumpkins will get you.

HG Addresses:           hg.osgrid.org:80:kodinpump
                                hypergrid.org:8002:kodinpump

So Wrong it's Right

October 31, 2015, 10:55 am

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        A giant smart phone in a soup of whatnots, the wistful implications of insanity, blocks and heads, and  a sort of glorious heavenly carrot cake - these are just some of the impressions to be garnered in the the playful, imaginative atmosphere at The Wrong Grid, a biennial digital art festival, which starts Sunday November 1, on Francogrid. 
       Organized by Frere Reinert and Ellectra Radikal, sometimes known as Step Flow, it's an opportunity to see art in OpenSim as never before.

Frere Reinert and Ellectra Radikal.

      This is a fresh and exciting art show featuring work by artists who, with one exception, FrancogGrid's own Cherry Manga, have not previously used OpenSim to display their art.  The art show is hosted on the sims of Claudius Utopy who also made the HUD for the event. Nice work Claudius! This post contains photos of just a handful of the installs, just a quick glimpse a the wonder that awaits you when you visit.

The round house on the hills [left] contains help for new users, as well as the Gallery HUD, while the waterfront area [right] will be where the opening party is held.

       This is above all a serious attempt to draw an international audience into virtual worlds to explore the subjective possibilities which this type of immersive experience offers. I asked Ellectra aka Step Flow, to tell me about it.

       First of all, who all is exhibiting here?

Artwork by GrandLapin

Step Flow: Sixteen artists. They are Cherry Manga, Esauph Hatener, Fotis Begetis, Mammifero, Mark Klink, Michael Borras aka Sistaime, Nikolas Korolov, Paul Hertz, PotentieL, GrandLapin, multi media artist  Ronen Shai, who will be doing the music for the opening,  TTY, TU;UK'Z, Antonin Laval aka Vash Yeah, Ynfab Bruno , andZves Konstantinos.
        Artists from many different backgrounds and different parts of the world, what brought them together?

Bitey Art by Vash Yeah

Step Flow: I have been working with them on other curations I drived or I was part of as an artist. We are part of the net art scene we use Facebook to share art and discuss about emergent art practice on the web - Twitter and other networks too - we create digital art events, online exhibitions, open a lot of groups to develop aesthetic thematics.
        Some are people she has known for a while in the real world, like fellow Art School alumn TTY, part of whose installation is shown here.

You're never alone on this Artwork by TTY

       These artists work primarily in programs like Blender, and the challenge was to help them navigate the process of bringing their works into this environment, which they managed to do via a discreet little artist's help center on Facebook.
       It's easy to see that very little fazes these curators, not even the prospect of showing newbies how to move about the sims. Each aspect has been carefully thought out.
 Step Flow: I am used to drive big team in curation, even if the tool was new, I trust my artists and I knew they will manage. My problem is : how to bring a large audience in the opensimulator because of the loading stuff affair. I hope the developers of opensim will bring us soon an add on to bring visitors inworld in one click.

Souper stuff by Vash Yeah

       I thought about explaining the joys of hypergridding on a bad connection day, compared to logging in to a largely stable and user-friendly platform like FG, but decided to say no more. If she wants to believe in the One Click, then she should.

Art by Mark Klink

Step Flow: The Wrong is an online exhibition that most of all in introduced through website as a creation. Our specific choice of an exhibition in the metaverse, made us choose to think the website in The Wrong as a portal to the metaverse. We insist : the experience has to be immersive.
          And so it is.

Artwork by Cherry Manga

       Each build is instantly distinguishable from the next, and it is a delight to jump around from one to the next, no knowing what you're going to be presented with at the end of the teleport.
Step Flow: each artist has his own universe, this is probably also because they are not used to SL or OpenSim so they developed their installation in a very personal way. What i can say is that we feel that they have a real fun building here.

Art by Mark Klink

       To visit the Wrong Grid, you should go to Francogrid and find Residence-20 sim first. There you will find a sort of Hobbit house o the hill. Go inside and you will find the hud and posters illustrating each install. You can also find portals down in the bay area, which incidentally is where the music will be at the opening event.
hg.francogrid.org:80:Residence-20

Non Stop Safari

November 5, 2015, 4:34 am

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       Nothing but movement, movement, this week - heck, even the musician was whirly  - Whirli Placebo, to be precise, but we will get to that later. All hypergrid addresses are of course at the end of the post, so you can go and see these places for yourself if you wish.
       We started out at the Clubhouse, as we always do, on Teravus Plaza OSGrid, with 3 destinations lined up starting with Kodinpump, a prize hunt build simultaneously available on OSGrid and Metropolis. 

       There was a distinctly post-Halloween feel to the event, with Aime Socrates looking like part of the Hunt, more than a hunter. 

Nani Ferguson our gracious hostess at Kodinpump, photo by Wizardoz Chrome

       Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges the creators of this amazing landscape greeted arrivals on the two  Kodinpump sims. So much fun to be had, it is sad to think that in a short while this sim will be gone...

Scottius studies the fishies

This build is heartbreakingly lovely, and it is hard to hunt when all you want to do is take photos.

Sea dreams...

       In no time at all, we were off to Metropolis Grid to experience the Fireworks of Wordfromthe Wise. Some dithering with my poorly labeled landmarks, but thanks to Jessica Pixel most of us were soon back on track. 

The fireworks in the center of the arena, all ready to go!

       The sim, called Fireworxxs - a name both easy and difficult to guess at - seemed empty to start with, but once we rezzed we could see a sort of sports field with four grandstands, super deluxe grandstands with loungers for lying back to enjoy the lightshow. 

Our host is the blue guy flying above the arena.

Wordfromthe Wise shouts:
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Please take a seat so the server can calm down
Please stop all Scripted attachment

as you dont need it for the show
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thirza.Ember: we have to go to where the group are reclining
Max.Hill: bonsoir à tous
harthelie.deux: coucou tout le monde
Jessie.Campbell: where do we sit ?
Cendres.Magic: good question

Reclined and ready to be dazzled

      This is all classic hypergrid conversation. But amazingly, Wordfromthe Wise's servers absorbed all our craziness, and we were treated to a most brilliant sound and light show, a combination of music, particles and windlight effects.

Wordfromthe Wise: welcome ..all of you .. some may have seen the show .. some don't .. i will do the land radio today myself .. hope all can hear the land radio at the moment. If not, please activate the Radio Stream .. here we go ... or does anybody need to go to the toilet or get some sunglasses ?
Jessie.Campbell: popcorn?
Cherry.Manga: I just need to marry you because windlight is like honeymoon



Cherry.Manga: (damn it I'll marry this dude)
Thirza.Ember: can I borrow him sometimes on a share-alike license ?
Cherry.Manga: absolutely lolol 
Jessica.Pixel: the windlight is awesome
Wordfromthe Wise shouts: we have a bit of lag
Cherry.Manga: we have only wonders for now
Total.Sorbet: we lurrrrve lag hehe
Sunbeam.Magic: second that! wonders and magic!

       There is an automatic version of this show, so if you go to the sim on your own, be sure to look for that.  

Wordfromthe Wise

       After about twenty minutes of pure delight on our loungers, we got up and headed for the equally awesome dance floor. Here, a very strange thing happened.
Thirza.Ember: sorry to anyone i tp'd when you were already here, I know sometimes radar shows people as being far away when they are not... so I literally cammed in to make sure the person I was going to tp was still in the grandstand... I saw them on the grandstand, but I guess they were really here...  radar plays with time and space continuum!
Cherry.Manga: someone is filming?
Jessica.Pixel: this is the best dance floor in the metaverse. 

        Yet again, the time flew by and soon we were saying our goodbyes and heading off to our next stop, on JIIE grid, for a concert with Whirli Placebo, hosted by Gwenette Sinclair and to be filmed by Fuschia Nightfire*see the video here on YouTube!*

Whirli as always put on a fantastic show, mixing covers and originals, he was also wearing the best socks ever to be seen in OpenSim, period. Not only is he a really accomplished musician, he also has a down to earth attitude, and a love of nonsense, that makes him a joy to be around. 

Whirli Placebo

      You can find his music all over, and buy some downloads too, for example here on IndieSpectrum . He took our slow and late arrival all in his stride, knowing from his experience in hypergridding just what perils are out there for the frequent tp-er. 
       Not everyone's hair made it, but that was OK. We will do better next time. Fuschia Nightfire put on a great light show, a mixture of attachments all glowing and moving, and there were some lovely Cherry Manga artworks thrown into the mix.
Jessica.Pixel: its also so nice that opensim folks are so much more into them than sl folks >:3
Thirza.Ember: what are we into? What have you heard...
Sunbeam.Magic: Special Effects!
Jessica.Pixel: attachment effects
Jessica.Pixel: whatever you want to call them
Gwenette.Writer: love the SHINY!
Jessica.Pixel: lol i'm sure opensim folks are into that other thing you were thinking too ;] we just won't tell anyone
Thirza.Ember: moi?
Gwenette.Writer: EYE CANDY!
Sunbeam.Magic: Original so the bomb!
Thirza.Ember: believe it or not many people complain about the attachment art, Gwenette
Isolde.Caron: screw complainers!!
Jessica.Pixel: ppl hate chaos for some reason, or have no idea how to have fun in the virtual world
Thirza.Ember: or don't know how to derender
Isolde.Caron: they need to get their big girl panties on.!!
Jessica.Pixel: lol yes

JIIE Welcome sim,take a look around!

      The JIIE is an interesting grid even when there is no premium live music going on. There are a number of displays on the default sim that allow you to see how these students use new media to tell true stories of injustice in a way that can really capture the imagination, and attention, of the public.
Gwenette.Writer: Juvenile Justice Information Exchange - one of a kind journalism project itself see at jjie.org.  See the machinima is about a man incarcerated for 40 years as a tagalong at a pawnshop theft age 14 . . these interns def rawwwwk!  Never such a fun vw dev project for me:)

       HG Addresses:
Kodinpump (open still for a short while) is on mirror regions on 2 grids
hg.osgrid.org:80:Kodinpump
hypergrid.org:8002:Kodinpump

Fireworxxs look for the automatic fireworks display
hypergrid.org:8002:fireworxxs

JIIE journalism project
hg.virtualworld.jjie.org:8022 

Safari goes to the shows

November 12, 2015, 3:09 am

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George.Equus: Now stuff makes sense  :)

      The one thing that is always the same about our safaris is that they are never the same. Most weeks, two or three new friends join us and even when we go to places we have visited before, it always seems to result in a different experience.

      Take yesterday's trip to Metropolis and Francogrid, for example. 
Billy.Bradshaw: I have some chores in RL, will join the safari a little later
Alya VonZ: so glad it is wednesday, I could use a break:)
Thirza Ember: they are restarting the sim for destination 1 in a few minutes, so all should be ....dare I say perfect?? is that tempting fate?

Alya VonZ: hehehe
Lucy.Afarensis: probably
Thirza Ember: hey Lyr!! welcome!
Selby.Evans: hi everyone
Lyr.Lobo: Hiya Thinkerer *grins*
Thirza Ember: Lyr almost all the sit poses in the jeep are non embarrassing
Thirza Ember: also the elephant - apart from the tail seat of course
Truelie Telling: yeah, I'm sitting with my feet in elephant brains
Thirza Ember: how come James never sits on the elephant?
James.Atlloud: I don't know about never. Usually getting myself sorted at this time.
Alya VonZ: hehe, haven't sat on it either yet:)  - have to be earlier on I suppose to do that, hehe
James.Atlloud: lol - right after the elephant ... spoke?  the music started. lol
Selby.Evans: I can sit on the elephant
        The conversation turned to operating systems and new laptops, and then poof it was time to go to Futurelab on Metropolis. HG Addresses at the end of the post.

Arriving on Futurelab

      There was some climbing of ladders, and some jumping jack poses, then some sitting and having our cam control taken from us. Futurelab currently hosts the gigantic model of a sterile lab, which is part of a project for a real world company not named here by request of Art.

Art.Blue: Welcome everyone to the showing of today. the music stream today is: http://metroradio.hypergrid.org:8000
Art.Blue:   THE FACTORY :   We put on two sims some ideas together about miniaturization, about process management and refurbishment in the medicine sector. 
Art.Blue:   The factory you see exists in real http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1069533& https://youtu.be/mAUox4GBSjg In addition we set some elements for hypergridding and for fun into scene for the HG Safari and for artists who want to contribute and information about the Santorni Bienniale 2016 at http://immersivia.com One technology – infinitecamera – is an innovation in presentation. Just step on the ladder at Futurelab and press ESC to explore. We lure visitors by doing so to points of interest in the installment. You are invited to see the "luring in". Just press ESC at the beginning ...

Jomac Silvera: I feel a like being at the greenies       
James.Atlloud: agree @ jomac - looking for greenie
Art.Blue: press ESC - only one time needed, then wait.
Selby.Evans: seeing camera view
James.Atlloud: OK
-: The camera system will start now. Please press ESC!
-: Station I: Front View
-: Station II: Presentation Frame View
-: Station III: OP
-: Station IV: PC
-: Station V: OP2
-: Station VI: Sterile
-: Station VII: Seats South Horizon
Art.Blue: this shows where you may go soon on your own, that's it. Now the next group
James.Atlloud: that was fun
Lyr.Lobo: yes, very cool
Alya.VonZ: lol glad I made it work the second time 

       The second part of the entertainment was a particle show by Venus Adored. She was up in the sky. Opening your Radar, and double clicking on the name of the person you want to see  is perhaps the quickest way to cam in on someone, although Radar on a busy sim can sometimes produce unexpected results. But that, as you know, is the name of the game.   
        Venus looked like a goddess in royal blue, standing within a celestial sphere, on the golden tower that is part of the famous Blue Elephant.

Thirza.Ember: toggles... and gets sound!
George.Equus: "It's full of stars"
Dove Rhoad: now I too thank you for mentioning the sound
Truelie.Telling: the music of space
Lucy Afarensis: wow!
Art Blue shouts: i hope you all see the great performance, the CALL FOR BLUE THIRZA her birthday present!
Truelie.Telling: smiley moons
Thirza.Ember: thank you ! 
alex54 Salamander: :-)  

       A fantastic symphony of light and sound, all the more enjoyable because last week Wordfromthe Wise treated us to his big show over on Fireworxxs, and here we were, with another artist, another vision, another choreography. OpenSim is packed full of talented generous performers!

Frere Reinart with Ynfab Bruno - I think her head exploded!

  Speaking of talent, we rushed off to The Wrong Grid biennial next, on FrancoGrid. This art expo is curated by Frere Reinart and Step Flow aka Ellectra Radikal.
Thirza Ember: everybody... meet a GREAT PARTICLE ARTIST Venus Adored,  she just did an amazing show for the Safari... you must go see it some time
Cherry.Manga: someone said particles? *jumps*
Truelie Telling: we just saw a great particle show, thanks to venus
venus.adored: oh..hi everyone
snowbody Cortes: venus it was super !
venus.adored: thank you
Jess Campbell: oh gee I missed it :-(
snowbody Cortes: hello Jess
Jess Campbell: always late...that's me
Lyr.Lobo grins and thanks Venus
Step Flow1: Welcome Hyppergridderz! merci d'être avec nous! WrongGrid is a child of The Wrong, which is the Digital Biennale we are part of. We have invited 15 artists at Francogrid, and they created an installation each. 
Alya VonZ: Franco grid is the most artistic I have seen so far:)

GrandLapin with his carrot colored install

The show is massive, really more than one can absorb on a single visit. Many of the artists, including Nikolas Koroloff, Ynfab Bruno. Mammifero, GrandLapin, and Cherry Manga were there to greet us. Find them on Facebook.

Mammifero's bright mapscape

       On sim residence-20 you will find the teleport HUD made by Claudius Utopy and there are also TP boards making it easier to reach the dozen or more platforms that form the biennial. 

Praline B and Nikolas Korolov on Nikolas' interactive, sound producing  geometric build,

        

Nikolas Koroloff: i hope you like geometrik ?

Nikolas Koroloff: :) fly to the second level :)

Cherry.Manga: you bet Praline is adding interesting sounds to the installation lolol

Alya VonZ: so far all builds are amazing:)

Lucy Afarensis: Spent several hour last week looking around

Alya VonZ: I can imagine

Lucy Afarensis: still haven't seen all

Alya VonZ: will come back another time to, so much to see:)

       Good idea!

      HG Addresses:

Art Blue's Factory                            hypergrid.org:8002:futurelab

The Wrong Grid Biennial start point   hg.francogrid.org:80:residence-20

On Ynfab Bruno's install

Safari starts at a fest and ends up in Jail

November 19, 2015, 7:36 am

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It was highly inappropriate, to be on a cathedral sized art installation doing a girl gangnam style dance but that's how we roll.
      Two trips, and a shorter safari than usual, yet it felt like we encompassed the universe in this our 79th outing. First up, a visit to AvatarFest. This four day festival, part show and tell, part concert, was a huge success both socially and technically.

     
But first some elephant action. And Teravus Plaza chit chat.
Thirza Ember: I'm so glad we get to celebrate your Fest tonight
Han.Held: I am too! I'm glad y'all are coming and that Truelie is performing for us. I'm really proud of everyone and the way we all came together.
Thirza Ember: this time, I plan to actually go look at the exhibits on avatarfest, not just dance
Han.Held: I think a lot of people are, and I hope that they come by before the end of the month
Sunbeam.Magic: it's such a nice small town feeling , easy to walk paths and not too many exhibits to overwhelm you. and Tom had his DJ debut there, he is great bluesy jazzy guy lol
Tom.Frost: now that the Metro stammtisch [grid meeting] is only once every month I will have much more opportunity to be with the safari !

      From Caro Fayray's interactive Starburst install and the HyperEvents display, to the Avatar Rep theater and the Hypergrid Stories build, to Leighton Marjoram's charming rainbow tower, the Festival has something for everyone. Take a look in this photo, you have a Star Trek confection, a native American canine build by Timber Wolf, and Hogwarts, all side by side in perfect harmony!

    And Ferd Frederix's pirate game is probably more fun if you are not trying to make a gif while playing it.

         OSgrid had a giant hiccup this week, resulting in such things as default clothing textures showing up missing from database, notecards not saving, and other weirdness which you may have thought was just you, or the new Firestorm Viewer playing up. The result for our Safari was patchy performance by the Landmark, which is why I always put the HG address on the notecard as well, because sometimes copy and pasting that into your map is quicker.
Han.Held: AvatarFEST first and foremost is about the community which lives and builds out here, the renters and owners of standalones. Han Held thought of it in Sept and along with the hard work and skill of Eryn Galen, Isis Ophelia and Tom Frost ..as well as the Metropolis crew and a score of others made it happen. Over the course of four days we had an awesome display of Talent including live performances by Truelie Telling and Torben Asp, live readings and performances - DJ Strannick played for over 7 hours for instance. On top of that we had some of the hypergrid's most talented builders come out and display their projects for us, such as Sunbeam Magic,Ferd Frederix, Franziska Bossi, Eryn Galen, and Nara Malone as well as the 3rd rock grid's Star Trek project.

Han Held

Han.Held: I left SL in 2005 but around 2007 I heard it had open sourced things (I didn't know what), that piqued my interest. I had been inworld for two years when I heard about inworldz and osgrid. I joined osgrid, fascinated with the idea of an open hypergrid, metaverse and struggled with making my own region.

HG memories - Photo of Han meeting the guys from Miki Kiti Tiki in the stone age of hypergridding

Han.Held: There was a lot of nothing in those days, something  Linda Kellie changed. But before then -I was hanging out in lbsa a lot and one day ...strangers!...that's the photo on to my right -the first ppl I saw from the hypergrid. It was so rare I took a snapshot that you see over there.I went over with them to their grid, they had known each other since 2006, I had heard of the hypergrid back then but that was my first experience with it. They had 4 islands on a desktop, as I remember and I was fascinated. Since then, since 2013 really, it's been amazing to see the hypergrid grow from a few isolated pockets to a major social force, I'm always amazed when I see clubs with SL numbers of people in them.
James.Atlloud: great photo

Truelie Telling plays for a super Booper audience

Han.Held: AvatarFEST has had 30 ..often 40-something people in it, and it's been amazing to see our community grow from a few islands out on the net. I think our future can be bright and I feel lucky to be a part of it.

JadeYu Fhang

Our next stop - JadeYu Fhang's brand new build, Ego Jail, on  sim of the same name on Francogrid. The install opens officially on Saturday at 10pm Paris time, with a concert by Morlita Quan.

Foreground, Cherry Manga, with JadeYu dancing and Praline on the phone (left) and James Atlloud (right).

        Layers of greyness, and the counterpoint of man and machine, of the turning, almost grinding words, incomprehensible and unyeilding, create a magnificent atmosphere. Something between oppressive and liberating, crushed and unutterably light, animated by some mysterious Morlita music.

         Praline B, Cherry Manga, Gill Beaumont, Cendres Magic and of course, the Lady of the Moment and JadeYu Fhang were there to welcome us and joined in with the dancing. The frenchies are not big fans of typing on the whole, which presents problems of communication cross the language barrier.
Thirza Ember: Jade, please tell us here in chat something about your build!
Cherry.Manga: Jade is thinking ahahaha
JadeYu Fhang: pffffffffffffffff
Praline.B: ahahahahha
JadeYu Fhang: bananaaaaaaaaaaaa
George Equus: This was VERY different...
Neo.Cortex: first person view flying is really great here!
JadeYu Fhang: ça exprime ma vision de l'humanité
Cherry.Manga: it expresses Jade's vision of humanity. Human beings stuck into his ego
JadeYu Fhang: il construit son chemin avec lui en pensant qu'il batit des cathédrales alors qu'il s'enferme dans l'illusion  ....univers sans couleur

Cherry.Manga: Human builds its path with his ego thinking he is building cathedrals with it while he is closing himslef in illusions
JadeYu Fhang: ou règne l'illusion et l'apparence
James.Atlloud: oh - color is just an illusion it is said
Cherry.Manga: where illusion reigns
Cherry.Manga: ...and I translate like a potato
Sunbeam.Magic: profound!
Praline.B: the must to do is to fly all around ;))
       And so we did. camming, flying, absorbing the strange little angles and interesting combinations of textures and notes.
James.Atlloud Is there a place to start exploring?
Praline.B : no place, no limits, go as you feel it ... merge yourself in textures
Cherry.Manga: no, visitors should be free to see by themselves, jade adds that she likes to fly through the moving textures, yet everyone is free to explore by its own point of view
Cherry.Manga: white =illusion = ghost, something we are imagining to ourselves to ....damn she says things ...

Praline.B: For Jade, the difference is like something you imagine, you create to confort the illusion
Cendres.Magic: côté obscur
Praline.B: The dark side is on sl here it is the white side lolol
Cendres.Magic: in opensim
Nara.Nook: ahh


Don't miss the Saturday event, it is going to be very beautiful.

HG Addresses:
AvatarFest (open for a few more days only)           avatarfest.net:6000
Ego Jail (Vernissage at 1pm Pacific time, Nov 21)   hg.francogrid.org:80:ego jail

A Scifi, Scofi, TP try and try Safari

November 28, 2015, 1:23 am

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 Beacon opensimworld: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: 
Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.   

        So, back to Metropolis for the Summer of Arts which has morphed into an Autumn and almost a Winter of Arts, which is fine by us - the more the merrier! If you have not been to Wanda Shigella's regions, you have time until the end of the year to enjoy the 40+ artists on show. 
       The addresses, as ever, at the end of the post.
       The Safari visited SoA about a month ago and met up with some five or six of the artists, but this time our appointment was with just one, Po Toocool, of 3rd Rock Grid. She does a lot of Star Trek related roleplay and her exhibit was an interactive short story, giving you a small taste of the kind of adventures they get up to, out on the Final Frontier.

Po Toocool: hello, if you have voice and wish to use it, please turn it on, and I will also share in text
Alya VonZ: thank you for text
Po Toocool: Welcome and thank you for coming. What you see around us here is an exhibit I made for the Summer of the Arts event, this exhibit began as a simple idea for some prim sculptures and a garden, a place of rest and refuge. The whimsical statues I created started to tell me a different story. As I built the exhibit, they spoke to me, and I designed it so that you can travel through this ‘world’ and experience the journey. I then took images of the journey and created a slide show to assist in storytelling. It is that story I wish to share with you today....

       Oooooh no you don't, dear reader, I am not going to steal Po's thunder and tell you the exciting and slightly bloodcurdling story she shared with us. 
       You will have to go over to SOA2 sim on Metropolis and see it for yourself. Watch out though, the 'free gift' doesn't contain anything, it is just a lure, to get you involved... I got the feeling they don't know much about the free community on 3rd Rock. In fact Po, who came to OpenSim from SL almost five years ago, only found out about the rest of the hyperverse quite recently when 3rd Rock Grid became HG friendly. But back to Star Trek...
Po Toocool: if you would like to take that journey, there is a transporter to my right... feel free :)
Unadecal Masala: that was a rivetting read, thank you
Sunbeam.Magic: nice narration voice too Po ;)
Atari Patrucci: i have some questions about the OS Starfleet Presents, it´s on another Grid or in Metropolis?
Po Toocool: Starfleet Nyota is the base in Metro polis Grid
Wanda Shigella: We're very glad to have you and the RP with us :)
Sunbeam.Magic: do you role play in voice or typed words ?
Alya.VonZ: I do in text only
Po Toocool: we rp in text
Alya.VonZ: a bit out of it, used to be a semi paragrapher, hehehe
Tom Frost: and you can find the rp times on http://hypevents.net/ of course :)
Tom Frost: </shameless-plug>
Atari Patrucci: Starfleet is probably the most widespreded RP Community in the whole Virtual Worlds, isn´t it?
Tom Frost: i've been around at the 3rg colony a few times, really nice builds as well
Alya.VonZ: Could be, I don't know, never rp-ed it:)
Tom Frost: alya: you should, it's fun :)

        The conversation went on about the various Star Trek series, and the opportunities to get involved with roleplay, and one couldn't help but be impressed by the sheer amount of creativity and passion that the series have created, and the way it has lent itself to virtual world activities, whether it is going on an adventure, or thinking about the technology, or trying to make accurate builds Po's work is Trek inspired, but the stories are all her own, and the one she shared with us showed her flair for creating a sense of jeopardy.

       Speaking of jeopardy, it was soon time to jump again, this time to the 
hgsafari sim on Francogrid, our underused home away from home. 
       When OSGrid died, this space was donated to the Safari by Gill Beaumont, and it has a Clubhouse, a small freebie fair, a clothing store and a music venue called Phew, as in, phew, we made it through another gridjump marathon. Also for Fuschia Nightfire, our much-missed Safarista and film maker, who recently retired from the Safari to focus on real world projects. 
        Scofi Robson was singing for us, and Cendres Magic was there with his new particle HUD, which Scofi's partner, the lovely Zany Foxtrot, showed off to the audience. 

      The plan had been to get Cendres to say a few words about this very interesting new  venture, a HUD that makes it possible for anyone to configure particles in real time. But you know, between the music and the light show and the fact I was distracted by filming, not to mention the sim briefly crashing, we never did get around to hearing all about it. So we will reorganize with him so he can do a proper presentation. 
       The HUD like everything in Francogrid will be freely available to all, so make sure you come along and get your copy when we figure out a date for that.

       I recorded Scofi's concert, exceptional as always, and enhanced by the particle show. Filming is stressful, hence the distinct lack of photos here. It was really nice to be able to show off the music venue to such a big crowd, and Cendre's particles made the place even more special. Thanks to all the frenchies for showing up and supporting the event, and to Gill for keeping the sim going despite all our HG detritus!  There hasn't been time to look at the media properly yet but if it came out reasonably OK, (which is not guaranteed since my filming and recording skills both leave a lot to be desired) I'll put it on youtube.

Avirtualworld Welcome sim

       Our last stop was on Avirtualworld, the creation of Boba Solo. We were invited to meet with Boba but also to dance on Dreamworld the region belonging to Ultra Foxtrot and LadyJoanna Martineeque. 
       Boba has been running Avirtualworld for six or seven years, and has known LadyJo and Ultra for about as long. How did they meet?
Ladyjoanna Martineeqe:christina wildrose introduced us
Bob.Solo: good friend Christina Wildrose told me to watch over her - 7 years
Bob.Solo: and Christina still comes home,  I run regions on OSG for her and here as well

Dance Club on Dreamworld

Ladyjoanna Martineeqe: yes she's a sweety
Bob.Solo: yes. I have adopted several folks. Some folks are worth helping them with there Dreams. I love to hear peoples dreams. One person I have been helping is also waiting for me ..as her place isn't fixed totally yet
Bob Solo: lots of buggers in the new Dev Git
Ladyjoanna Martineeqe: oh my
Lucy.Afarensis: safari can shake them out

Ultra Foxtrot showing off his mooves

Wizardoz.Chrome @hypergrid.org:8002 (it>en): difficult journeys tonight:)
Bob Solo: what is bad is if other simulators are earlyer than this one tp is impossible, it seems...  but we will find out why
Nara.Nook: so that is why it was so hard today?
Bob Solo: poor tired eyes
Lucy.Afarensis: might be
Bob Solo: yes

Boba Solo

Thirza Ember: we will do better next time, a big old visit, these sims are really nice i am looking forward to coming back and exploring
Bob.Solo: I will surely have it all correct
Ladyjoanna Martineeqe: bob's grid is awesome and so is bob
Lucy.Afarensis: wonderful
Nara.Nook: So many wonderful builds here

LadyJo flashing some shapely thigh as we all dace on Dreamland

Bob.Solo: blushes
Nara.Nook: had someone holler at me the other night because took 3 tries to get to my grid. Shrugs. Sometimes HG makes you work for it.
Lucy.Afarensis: Ya gotta sacrifice to the hyper gods
Thirza Ember: you know how it is - the first visit is always a little shaky

Ladyjoanna Martineeqe: love this song
Sunbeam.Magic: Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Ladyjoanna Martineeqe: woooohooooo
Nara.Nook: the planets could use some peace
Ladyjoanna Martineeqe: yes
Sunbeam.Magic: you can type that again Nara
Nara.Nook: and some love
Nara.Nook: love always wins

HG Addresses:   
Summer of Arts (open until the end of December)            hypergrid.org:8002:soa
HG  Safari sim and music venue                               hg.francogrid.org:80:hgsafari
Ladyjo and Ultra's sim on Boba Solo's grid       avirtualworld.org:8002:dreamworld

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Safari Goes Jogging

December 5, 2015, 5:13 pm

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      GeR.Orsini @craft-world.org:8002: benvenuti in Craft grid e in Italia

        If you have been thinking OSGrid is a bit off color these days, between Notecards and prims and Landmarks and Friends acting up, then you are not alone. 
       Hypergridding has always been ...unstable is the polite word, but with the state of things generally with this latest horrible release, we were braced for a pretty bumpy ride this week. 
       And we were not disappointed by the crashy stuff... but equally, not disappointed by the absolutely gorgeous regions we got to see. 
        HG Addresses at the end of the post... but you knew I was going to say that.

Gondolas and gorgonzola??!  Italian heaven!

           First stop was on Craft Grid, an easy jump from OSGrid, which made a pleasant change from all the crashes that HG has been causing over recent days. 

GeR Orsini (it -> en): welcome to the craft grid, and in italy
Laura Bernasconi (it -> en): the pleasant Italian peninsula
Spike.Sol: oh so many people here
GeR Orsini (it -> en): Ana, the creator of this region wearing a dress of the renaissance era.

GeR Orsini: if you distance the cam from the sim you will see that the shape of italy
Selby.Evans: 20 people here

Etna... Italy seen from South Sicily

Jessie.Campbell: well done Ger, that's a neat idea!
GeR Orsini: Italy is subdivided in 20 regions and in each region, we have put tables, food, drinks and the characteristics of different regions. My region is Campania and was curated by the Settima and me. At this time we are in Emilia Romagna created by Terry Bond with the famous towers of Asinelli. You can hear our DJ Barbara has put a song typical of the Emilia-Romagna region. If you look at the objects and dishes around the sim, you can make a click on them and there is the description.
       It is all fascinating, but perhaps the most extraordinary part is in Sardinia, where plates with names like Panada di Oschiri and Culurgiones di Ogliastra are on display. I am pretty sure if you eat more than two culurgiones you have to go to the hospital.  
       This is the Mediterranean, the 'Mare Nostrum' with Sardinia in the foreground.

       Tao.Quan: I hope you can look at the tables and see the wonderful food of the various regions
Mal Burns: yep ,- found mozzarella and happy!
Tao.Quan: this is the calorie sim only equalled by our annual chocolate party hehe hehe
GeR Orsini (it -> en): Italy is rich of different foods and drinks, and each region has its own specialities but also differences in music, art, dialect, etc
Tao Quan: please feel free to walk around (if you can) or swim to Sardinia
GeR Orsini (it -> en): or Sicily, two large Italian islands. Even though Italy is full of many small islands.
        Ger Orsini explained that the builders of this cultural feast are Ana 57, alongside Laura Benusconi, Michelle Tech,  Eva Kraal, Terry Bond, Vicus Serenity, amaranta Verino, xSIBERIAx ILFREDDOPURIFICA,  xyonne fauno,  Giliola Allen and grid owner Licu Rau.
GeR Orsini: It took a while for us to put this build together, becase the project was done by several people, working over time. People took on separate regions, and as you can see, there are different styles. It has been very nice to get different people involved, and we were very pleased to see how many wanted to participate.

Crafty lag

          The Craftians are always a friendly, hospitable bunch and it was great that so many of them were able to welcome us... including a certain Mr Clooney, I didn't get his first name, but he seemed charming. 
      But the lag was on us, strong and sticky, and we were just out of luck. 
GeR Orsini: visit us again, perhaps the many scripts that are giving some problems
Alya VonZ: Have been walking around, all looks so nice, thank you for sharing this with us:)

Lagless Sunbeam

   Some people like Sunbeam rezzed pretty good, but my own avie was a scary mix of half formed Cloudfix and missing attachments. Couldn't even take a pic by that stage. But I went back and got this one that conveys the build as a sort of Model Village, with cookery.

Tower envy

       Craft is a super grid, and we've been there in droves before now. 
          If you drop in on this build, now housed on the appropriately names Bel Paese sim, you will absolutely love it. And learn a lot too.

       Next stop Japan Open Grid, a world away in every sense. Most of us kinda left Craft in a crash, and those who ended up back on OSgrid couldn't get the landmarks or hg address to play ball. 
       Endless crashes... but one way around them was to go to Sanctuary and walk through the gate there... although even that didn't work for everyone.
      About eight of us finally got to JOG. The locals were not up, and why should they have been in was 6 am local time, but we had a semi local, the always delightful Sarah Kline. Our visit started at the Abyss Observatory.

      The Abyss sims are all educational gems. The Observatory is a giant spiral telling the story of our planet in the context of the other celestial bodies, and is full of really well made models and signs. 

Mal Burns: think is OSG problem - all us OSG avies have glitches wherever we are
Thirza.Ember: i had to go with my francogrid avie my osgrid avie no longer loads at all
George Equus: Ok Mal. seem so yes...
Thirza.Ember: I had a skirt on when I left home. Just saying.
George Equus: I seem to miss a shoe.. hope you can see most of me  
Alya.VonZ: blood sweat and tears to come here, lol
Sarah Kline: its on the other side of the world
Alya.VonZ: yup, explains a lot

Sarah Kline, JOG version

Sarah Kline: It's run by Tokyo university of information sciences and a man called Fumi Hax is the lecturer in charge. He does a lot of good research for opensim and worked with kinect recently. He's working on Unity conversion of sims, he did a weather simulation of wind patterns too. Anyway he looks after us here like we are a little family. We are given a sim for our use after a while  and that forms the mainland here, so we have sim recruitments every few months or so, but others can connect outside  just like we do on OSG.
Alya.VonZ: Kewl, so can make a continent? one thing I miss in osgrid
Sarah Kline: yes. We have a money module working here, but its just play money, residents can go to the atm and draw cash when they run out of J$ but most of the things are free anyway. The University is near Tokyo. TUIS you can find it on web, it is a big campus. 

Alya.VonZ: wow my pixels in Japan:)

Lucy.Afarensis: hehe
George.Equus: Just my thought

Sarah Kline: Just by the central landing point is a copy of the university campus. It's in the process of being built by students there. i came some months ago and they were friendly,: so I got involved ^^ - always liked Japan.

     We checked out the Observatory and then headed to the shops, of course. As Sarah had said, it was nice to find free content. I really like the setup on JOG, that when you upload a texture or sound it charges you just like in SL, so you are aware of the cost that you put on the system when you introduce another element for the asset server to remember - while at the same time letting you replenish your money supply. So uploads are free but not carefree, and that is how it should be.

Billy romances his latest girlfriend... she is a model!

        Anyway, pretty soon Billy Bradshaw found himself a Japanese miss, and even though George had lost his legs, he was zipping all around the mall. Somebody found a kimono with built in a/o allowing you to bow appropriately, and we all enjoyed seeing a unique take on freebies, in some cases very different from the standard stock you find on Euro-American grids.

George faces with stoicism his temporary leg loss.

           It was definitely a struggle to get to JOG but it was a great experience and everyone agreed we should definitely return soon. 
       JOG has regular social events, for example they recently had a very beautiful Lantern festival, however bear in mind that these are all held in the evening Japan time - that is early afternoon in Europe, and early morning in the US, so when you visit at other times of day, those green dots you run towards hopefully will probably turn out to be only NPCs.

       So finally we returned, battered and bruised by the hypergrid, to good old OSGrid. Our final stop was Pleasure Island, the home of Alya VonZ.
      If you don't think you could survive a Safari, then think again. Here are Alex Salamander and Yara Eilde who are German with only minimal English, and they regularly make it to the end, despite the late hour and the dodgy notecard and the unreliable landmarks. Not neccesarily with their hair, but still.

      Alya had lovely gifties under the tree for us, and dancing in a winter wonderland, but there is much more here, and more planned, of an industrial chic-grunge nature, including a club and stuff to grab - she makes nice clothes which you can also find at her shop on sim Festa24.

     Even George's legs returned for the occasion, but my skirt never did bother to come back. Lucky I have glitch shorts, really. Or I would have surely gotten some chilblains.

A final festive fling on Alya VonZ's sim Pleasure Island, our last stop.

HG Addresses:
Reginal Cuisine Map of Italy       craft-world.org:8002:bel paese
Japan Open Grid - observatory   jogrid.net:8002:abyss observatory
Alya's sim                                 hg.osgrid.org:80:Pleasure Island

Safari goes Hunting

December 10, 2015, 3:19 am

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       In Open Sim, as in the real world, two things are guaranteed, nobody reads anything, and travel is dangerous. Well, of course, that's not true. It is just that sometimes, there is such an information overload, that reading doesn't cut it. 

Gif shamelessly stolen from Serene Jewell

       This week the Safari did some recycling, for we did nothing more than hop over to the OpenSim Community Conference grid, which is a small purpose built grid hosted on the servers of the University of California at Irvine. Our goal - to visit the four Expo sims on the Conference grid, and then to try the Hypergrid Treasure hunt which is described on the four red posters you can see in this gif.


       Addresses at the end of the post.

You know you want one.

       The conference was last Saturday. There were a lot of good presentaions about subjects like 'Fun with 3D Headsets' and 'What you can do with NPCs' and 'Virtual Epidemiology' (honestly, that is an actual thing) and most importantly in terms of shaking your fist at the purveyors of all those recent hiccups in OSGrid that have made you waste time re-doing stuff like building, applying textures, setting permissions, writing notecards, taking Landmarks, or crashing ten or twenty times when trying to make a simple hg jump from one place to another... -  'Who has been poking about in OpenSim code recently'.
       If you missed the conference or would like to view it again, then click here to go to the Ustream page. 
         Each of the Expo sims can hold as many as eight booths but this year most of them have less than that, so visiting them is a pleasant and stress free experience. The regions are handily positioned in a row, so you can easily navigate between them by simply opening your Map.



       To add to the fun of visiting the Expo (and to the confusion about this week's Safari) there is an 'OSCC Treasure Hunt' prepared by Sun Tsu in which you answer questions in chat and find tokens. To make that happen, just click on a Hippo chasing (duh) a token, and all necessary information will appear like magic.

     Another example of people not reading stuff, I have walked past this hippo pretty much every day for the past few weeks without once realizing you could or indeed should click on it. But then I was focused on the HG Expo and (if I say so myself) accomplishing the difficult task of making hypergridding sound even more complicated than it really is, with typos. 
Anyhoo, on Expo 1 there are, among other things, a building dedicated to Blender..

Serene ponders the mesh

... and some space stuff...

     While on Expo 2 there is the HG Expo, plus some commercial booths selling services like grid design, hosting, and the 3DLES grid which is a language acquisition grid run by long time friend of the Safari, Nick Zwart. Here's the MeetInstantly grid's booth. It always makes me thing of Nescafe, I don't know why.

       Expo 3 has cupcake info-booths, which you KNOW I did not stop and read) and a dragon that swoops all over the place, but annoyingly will not let you ride it (I bet that was a permissions thing)

...while on Expo 4, the stand-out exhibit has to be Francogrid's whimsical column of stuff, and pick up the collection of full permission Avatars they have generously gifted to the community, but you can also hang out in the lounge on the comfortable Littlefield booth.

Francofun

       After about an hour of looking at the expo and people asking me questions about the Expo Hunt which I didn't even know existed, it was time to change pace and go off into the wild blue yonder in search of the HG Hunt prizes. 

Let the Hunt begin!  Landmarks and Hunt Clues are inside the poster with the map on it. Just buy the contents.

       The idea behind the HG Treasure Hunt was to get people hypergridding, and also make them aware of the free free content available across many grids. 

Five creators generously offered their creations and took the time to set out their goodies, providing a clue to help you on your way. The five prizes represent a sort of HG survival kit...

On Steam you can find a hat. 

       This gorgeous region on OSGrid is by Vbinnia Radek. Look for the treasure map signs, and you will find it, although fair warning, the richness of the textures on this sim mean that it takes a really really long time to rez here.        My advice, teleport over here, put your graphics on low, and go make a drink or a phone call or something for about 5 minutes. Then raise your graphics up to your preferred level. Otherwise, it is frustrating.

On Savvy you can find footwear. 
       Taarna Welles of Bubblesz grid has some amazing stuff on Savvy, so there is a good chance you will not even go and wander into the forest to look for the prize, because you will be too busy buying men's and women's accessories in the shops. But when you do finally go into the wood, it will be worth it! 

       Look for the Acornoble family, sitting among the rocks... cam in close, not only for the free shoes which are darling, but also to see this amazing miniature spider.
On Virunga, you can find a rideable animal
       Outworldz grid is always a delight, with a range of games and adventure sims to explore. Ferd Frederix kindly took time out of his busy pre-conference prearations to set out  prize in the Marketplace on Virunga, a jungle themed var region. 
       Var regions are of course much bigger than ordinary sized regions, and that causes some serious headaches when hypergridding as the HG pixies who make the teleport happen do not like coordinates  higher than 256. So it is a good idea to jump to the Outworldz Welcome sim first and then type Virunga into your map. Then look for the marketplace.... good luck! it is a huge region!

On Freebies Garden, Francogrid you can find a handy weapon
       Archael Magic donated his special cyber gloves to the Hunt, they are in a banana, and this has to be the hardest prize to find, just because eve tough the region is set out in simple, easy to navigate aisles, there are just sooooo many trees on Imperator Janus' free tree sim! I cheated and let Mal help me find the banana, which was much less rude than it sounds here. My advice here, don't look up in the branches - look for a fallen tree. Or just go over there with Mal.

On Littlefield Welcome there are his and hers clothes
        Amy Storm has been donating to the community for years... she is one of the creators behind the resources on OSGrid's Newbie arrival sim. I have her cloud fix pack, and useful newbie cloud advice notecard from 2013, till very helpful!  
       Here is the beautiful hoodie that is just one item in the Treasure Hunt prize. There are items for the guys too, and this is a really easy prize to find, so if you struggled to pick up the others, this one will be a nice change of pace.


       In terms of hypergrid these days, she is perhaps less well known than many of the other designers, because her home grid Littlefield has a No Export policy. 
       However, she kindly placed a prize on the LFGrid Welcome sim, where you can find portals to all their major regions.

     Meanwhile, back on OSCC, the party went on to the Tunes of the 80s, and three Thirzas joined Rhiannon Chatoir, aka Joyce Bettencourt the coordinator and fairy godmother of this year's conference, and one of the many iterations of Lucy Afarensis whose photography and landmarks are a wonderful addition to the HG Expo. 

       Having multiple avies is really confusing as well as very handy. Probably time to lie down in a darkened room.
HG Addresses

The OSCC grid  cc.opensimulator.org:8002
The expo sims are called " oscc expo zone 1 " and 2, 3, 4 ...
The Treasure hunt regions
event ends on Saturday 12 December
Steam                hg.osgrid.org:80:steam
Virunga              outworldz.com:9000  then find " Virunga " in your Map
Savvy                bubblesz.nl.8002:savvy
LF Welcome        lfgrid.com:8002
Freebies garden  hg.francogrid.org:80:freebies garden

Var Out

December 17, 2015, 8:39 am

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≪ Previous: Safari goes Hunting

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Aime.Socrates: i'm looking much more intelligent with those horns
Dabici.Straulino: certainly more brilliant
snowbody Cortes: lol Aime

Lucy.Afarensis: Like your Xmas decoration Snowy
snowbody Cortes: oh ty Lucy .. a gift at Friday party , mattie mcbride
Lucy.Afarensis: she makes nice things
James.Atlloud: Do love the horns.
Lucy.Afarensis: lost my glasses
Prodyck.Theas: hello all
PatriciaAnne.Daviau: ok going to try and get to first stop...without crashing
       Bob's your uncle... or at least, he is uncle to quite a number of OpenSim residents with dreams to chase, virtually. 
       Bob Solo invited us to come over a few weeks ago, but that dratted new version of OpenSim caused all kinds of hypergridding mayhem, and so here we are again, hoping the dust has settled.

Bob Solo on Teak Forest sim

      Here is Bob in his signature cowboy hat; he has recently adopted 'realistic proportion' in terms of avatar height, so we were prepared to see a smaller person than one might expect... but we were equally prepared to encounter a big heart, and so will you, if you go over to A Virtual World.
Bob.Solo: well hello everyone, I am Bob Solo, Boba Solo on osgrid and Bikerbob Solo SL - long ago for SL.... welcome! so, after a briefing, we will all go to the Teak Gardens and view a build I did some years ago. The teleport to the Teak Gardens is on the wall surrounding us in the back, and reminder the teleport back is the sign where you land.
Selby.Evans: this grid is running OS 0.9.0  Look for improvements and problems.
Bob.Solo: yes it has issues the 9.0, I have spent tons of time look fixing etc., I can get the r31183 working fairly well.
Lucy.Afarensis: are we still on osgrid ?

Dabici.Straulino: is this version integrating some of Avination codes
Thirza Ember: Bob, when did you come to open sim? how long you been here?
Bob.Solo: I have been on the hg for almost 8 years - nearly 8 years on osgrid, and a couple years before that on SL...  addicted to virtual worlds
PatriciaAnne.Daviau: wow!
Selby.Evans: thanks for fixes, Bob  -- and thanks for upgrading to 0.9
Bob.Solo: you're welcome, we all have  to work together, make it better for all. This is not OSGrid, it is a separate grid, 150 regions built... I don't run them all, but maybe 50 or so at once, till I can get things very stable.
Lucy.Afarensis: what hardware are you using ?
Bob.Solo: I use three servers all .net  - windows... so after several Grid makeovers, moves, data base renewals, this is the outcome...
Thirza Ember: you got many residents?
Bob.Solo: I have a few diehards that have weathered the storms with me... so folks were going to the Teak Gardens, a place I built when my Mother passed, some is tribute to Her..
Bob.Solo: notice the Beautiful Lady climbing the stairway
Nara.Nook: wow
Dabici.Straulino: nice
Bob.Solo: that was the day after or so my Mother passed I was giving her acention... to ascend to heaven
PatriciaAnne.Daviau: how wonderfully sweet,Bob
Dabici.Straulino: very inspiring
Bob.Solo: it has weathered many a storm... so many changes, from a Mega region to a Var was a challenge, and keep the build together and really its better texture wise
        Our next stop was a towering mountain with waterfalls that Bob modestly calls his splash pool. 
Bob.Solo: it was the first Splash in opensim, I believe, it is really neat, and some really good help from Amber
Dabici.Straulino: pioneering
Bob.Solo: the roots
       We jumped over there, and the conversation continues on the lines of OpenSim in general, rather than just Bob's grid.
Bob.Solo: in reality it down to heart rate,the heart of opensim is to slow, at the moment. We need to resuscitate it
Nara.Nook: how?
Bob.Solo: make the core run on a clock, so we can turn it up across all physics. I have done it already but it had some side affects, the fastest I can get a simulator to run is 30 FPS. Its default is 11 - way too slow
Lucy.Afarensis: What happens to those with slower computers?
Bob.Solo: it's worse on them, the low frame rates, if it were near 24 would be perfect
Nara.Nook: I see 20
Bob.Solo: thats not bad here. Remember the core isn't that, so it's super charged.
James.Atlloud: I'm below 20, but that's my system at this point.
Bob.Solo: shall we investigate more sights?
    We did. The clam breeding ponds, the volcano and the dragon, 

...the lava arriving at the sea, and the pirate cove. 

         Finally we flew out to the dance floor overlooking the great Offsim Ocean that bathes the shore of every grid, and it was time for us to go.

         Our second stop was another Var region, on another grid, and kudos to this latest build of OpenSim, teleporting between them was a piece of cake. 

          Icing on the cake, perhaps, for Novale sim on Creanovale is all wintery. Snow-laden trees, snowmen, and flakes gently falling. 

Truelie Telling

        On a beautiful icy dance floor surrounded by blue ice-chairs which Mal and James immediately took advantage of, we congregated for a concert, and Truelie Telling gave us a fine rendition of her best seasonal repertoire. Our kind hosts were Dabici Straulino and Kelso Uxlay, who use their grid to give a flavor of their home in Canada. 

Nice hat, Kelso

        Using a Var region has allowed them to build a seamless set of activities across a much wider area, which is ideal for tobogganing or skiing, or the romantic balloon ride. But who does what?

Our hostess Dabici with James Atlloud

Kelso Uxlay: I do most of the scripting, Dab does most of the building
        Kelso also does the bright and beatiful dancing in this gif. 

        If you get a little lost on the sim, don't worry there are numerous teleport stations, tastefully integrated into the build.t he one by this dance floor is in a wood hut and there is another in the big glass house at the other end of the region. 
        Look  for the chapel and the old mill, and the Observatory, which includes a telescope much like Kelso's real life one... only perhaps a little smaller. Or should that be larger? You can also take a panoramic view of the whole place by taking the balloon ride.

        Dabici and Kelso have done a lovely job at re-imagining their winter sim from last year, bringing together some of the classic elements of the cold season, sport and tradition and a lot of fun.
        They got one of Aine's NPC balls just the other day, and quickly set it up with a hunky Mister Claus... 
       ...he is a bit of a tease, as you can see, here he is showing off his moves with Arcanquest Frank, and then before you know it, here he is romancing Lucy Afarensis...
        Then, what do you know, Serene Jewell showed up and got her twigs into the guy...
        I guess it is a NPC...hristmas this year.

Dabici Straulino: do not forget after Truelie to try the toboggan ride, the saucer ride or visit the xmas market and LM to come back.

        There is a lot of fun to be had with the snow saucer. I hit a house, several sheep and finally got splatted on a couple of big rocks which unlike lot of the obstacles were not phantom. Got to agree with Serene's comment...

Serene.Jewell: I will definitely be back to explore more.  Thank you for hosting, Dabici!

HG Addresses   

Bob Solo's Teak Garden.....     avirtualworld.org:8002:teak garden

Novale winter wonderland.....  hg.creanovale.org:8052:novale

The Snowind Swansong

December 22, 2015, 6:14 am

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          It is their swansong, and so it is up to you and I to make the most of it.        

          After many years of providing fun and delight to their fellow residents, in the form of their seasonal treasure hunts, Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges have decided to take a break.  
          Welcome to Snowind, on OSGrid and Metropolis. HG Addresses at the end.

          The Hunts marked things like Easter and Christmas, which provided a convenient deadline to them, and a signal to us that there would be hours of fun to be had.

Kodinpump

          The signature of these hunts has always been rich pickings in a richly detailed environment.

          Whether it is a snowscape or a pumpkin-filled Halloween feast, or (my favorite) a fantastic Alice in Wonderland inspired board game for Easter, the prizes were really only incidental.

Crazy Easter

          Personally, I am less into the freebies and more captivated by the creativity and atmosphere, and the opportunities to photograph these splendid scenes, some of the absolutely best in opensim and probably most self created virtual worlds. I love the ancient feel of the buildings, the lopsided organic constructions that have a wonderful depth and warmth and invite exploration and admiration.

          They met in Second Life, around the Paris 1900 build by the legendary Yadni Monde. Nani was one of the managers there, and talking to Ange and nani together about their history, you find that their mutual admiration and modesty are both refreshing and endearing.

Ange.Menges: One year after, Paris 1900 (the real one) closed. We leave SL one year after for opensim, because one of the creators of Francogrid asked us to come. Our first regions were on Francogrid, with Fabrice [Metopen]. Later, our server was connected to Osgrid, and when the osgrid broke, we moved to Metropolis, Now we are half on OSGrid, half on Metro. About our sims, you know my Youtube channel, so you can see.
Thirza Ember:  How many regions have you built?
Ange.Menges: I can't answer, as I have not kept everything, but I have 62 oars on my server. First time I look, hehe
Thirza Ember: who is the harder worker? Ange or Nani?
nani ferguson: both
Thirza Ember: do you always work in harmony? or do you sometimes have different ideas
nani ferguson: always in harmony, more easy for working
Ange.Menges: Mmmm easy : Nani had the ideas and I work on them, so no pb - I explain : Nani has 5 ideas/second, me one each day
nani ferguson: ppfff
Ange.Menges: lol
Thirza Ember: I know it is hard for a creator to play favorites, but is there an item on this build that you particularly love?
nani ferguson: maybe the boat, cos we can go away, but I really like the dragons

Thirza Ember: do you begin the build with a plan... or is it an evolution in 3D
Ange.Menges: Ah this is the Nani part....
nani ferguson: with my imagination, no plan , nothing just imagination i search a good idea. i can reate something one day and the next day, I delete all
Ange.Menges: She has first the global idea, then we search or build objects corresponding to the ideas I assume the mesh part Then Nani terraforms and builds the sim using if she want the objects we have. She modifies a lot of them. Then I work on the scripts and sounds... easy, no ? Only a lot of time...
Thirza Ember: lol easy to say, I do not think easy to do
nani ferguson: and then I can del or trash
Ange.Menges: if she is unhappy yes, she can trash a whole sim, and begin a new one
nani ferguson: easy :)
Thirza Ember: that is a great luxury we do not have in real life!
Here is an article Ange wrote a while back about Nani's building style and philosophy: http://francogrid.org/evenements/utilisateurs/453 

        From the arrival point, you wander down the sim into an old village, where you will find a little marketplace and an inn with line dancing. You aren't at the hunt yet, you're hunting for the portal to the hunt.  It is easy to get distracted in the beautiful rickety shop, where you can find some nice winter items, including skates... which are bound to come in handy when you get to the skating pond.                 It was hard to keep up with Ange and Nani as they rushed around the - to them - familiar landscape. Whenever someone says 'follow me' my heart always sinks, since I am invariably camming out to take a photo, or busy writing a question, and don't have enough fingers to use the arrow keys as well... and then Mine Host shoots off in some undetermined direction, and I am immediately lost.


        Thank goodness for Radar and the double click tp. I simply double click on the person's name on the Radar list, and just watch to see where they go... here is a shot of Nani and Ange flying across the region.

          Eventually, whether you have help or not on Snowind, you'll find yourself at the Portal which leads to the next part of this build, the part with the presents. Speaking of gifts, and hunting...

Thirza Ember: how did you evolve the idea of building a region with a hunt? What is your main motivation?
nani ferguson: cos it's fun, we're not serious.
Ange.Menges: We are players, together, we play on MMORPG. So Nani had the idea to "import" the more easy facets of these games ...at the beginning, gifts were the only means to have a lot of people on SL, to the events. On opensim it's different. We had the idea to give what we own, but by the way of games, because it's more fun and this needs also some effort. I don't like too much the collectors who take every freebies everywhere. With us they have to search and deserve their gifts. This is our idea, perhaps we are wrong, don't know...

          Once through the portal, you can cam away to admire the truly massive castle. It is interesting enough on its own, but there is more - it hides a series of tunnels. 
        If you have a very big avatar, you will not be able to move around in the tunnels, so you may want to check you are 'normal for opensim' in terms of height before trying to use the tunnels...

        ....here is an example of what the prizes look like, wedged into the ice wall of the tunnel... there are 100 so I will be amazed if you find them all, and this week on Safari, we only have an hour, which is really only time enough to look for the entrance. Lucky, the build will be open for the whole festive season, both on Metro and OSGrid.
          There is so much to see here, it is bewildering, and you will soon be caught up in a delightful sense of the Great Outdoors, Indoors. Nani has managed to enhance the feeling of size even further, with some offsim mountains and so forth, so be wary of flying too close to the edge of the sim, you may get jammed!
       If you are really smart, or (like me) you get Ange and nani to help you, you will find this wee beastie...

...... touch him and get a sled, and then whoosh! you are off on the Death Ride! This will you down into an underground town where the gift-laden frozen maze of tunnels is located.

         So, it's their last hunt build open to the public. 
         They seem pretty certain about it, and of course I wondered why. Some of if is clearly a reaction to the more adversarial big-city brashness that has begun to filter into OpenSim on the backs of some of the new arrivals. 
         Many people deplore the idea of a big influx from SL for that reason; people coming in with little idea and no respect for the culture they will find here, although Ange and Nani are too nice to say so.

          Yet much of their reasoning is to do with needing to take a break, I suspect. Builds of this size and quality take many months to put together, between sourcing, modifying and uploading the mesh, to designing the set and adding sounds and animations, and then of course placing the gifts in interesting locations.
          Setting deadlines can be a great motivator, but it is also exhausting after a bit, and you suddenly wonder why you're making all this stress for yourself. Lord knows I think that every Wednesday lunchtime so it's probably the same for them. Add to that ridiculous people who do nothing for others, yet feel like they have the god given right to come in and nit pick or gripe.... well, there you have it.

               Most of us came to opensim to make stuff quietly for our own satisfaction, and that sort of morphed into community... our gregarious human nature eventually gets hold of our best intentions. Is that a bad thing?
             No, of course not. And Snowind perfectly exemplifies how that thrilling combination of personal creativity and generosity to others can come together in a celebration that will last on and on.
HG Addresses
Snowind on Metro   hypergrid.org:8002:snowind
Snowind on OSG     hg.osgrid.org:80:snowind

Smokin' Safari

December 24, 2015, 8:05 am

≫ Next: Az... good as it gets

≪ Previous: The Snowind Swansong

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        It's that time of year when we are all subjected to a sort of mass hallucination that the whole world is knee deep in presents and snow, family and mistletoe. 
         That makes it refreshing, not to mention healthy, to take a minute to realize that not all cultures, lifestyles, or climates, are the same. 
         Safari began as usual on Teravus Plaza.

       
It helps if you join us here, rather than jumping ahead to the first destination, because it makes it easier for the organizers to see how many people are in the group, and it is also good way to test how your connectivity and your viewer are doing. Also it is a good way to meet people before the chaos gets going.

         First up you had a choice of two destinations which were the same destination... confused yet? Well, don't be. In an attempt to circumvent lag caused by a lot of visitors, plus the chance that one or other grid might be offline for some reason, many builders choose to hook up their servers to more than one grid. In this case, the two grids where you will find identical builds are Metropolis and OSGrid, HG Addresses as always at the end of the post.

           Snowind by Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges is such a fantastic region (or do I mean regions?) full of interesting poses, photogenic views, intriguing buildings, spooky corners, fabulous mesh and of course a heck of a lot of free gifts... 100 at the current count.

          The gifts are a great incentive, but I really enjoyed the line dancing (that is Harthelie Deux as a stylish Mrs Claus) and the skating a/o is exceptional, with a great speed skate anim if you double tap the arrow on your keyboard.  The sled ride is also excellent...

Nani Ferguson and Snowbody Cortes stand by as Lucy Afarensis arrives at the bottom of the sled ride

           It was pretty to easy to get lost, you simply get sucked into the wonder of the sim and stop noticing where other people are. This is  Kris Elfe a new friend of the Safari, with a cute-as-all-get-out avie. 

         Definitely a destination worth visiting with friends or alone, make the most of it, this is ephimeral art, and won't be here for long!
         Our second destination was Vicky Dreams. Victoria Logan invited us to come and discover her sim, which tells the story of her homeland, Argentina through photos and 3D builds.

         This build is a lovely, fun, educational experience. One of the best things about virtual worlds is that they let you travel the globe without leaving home. Here, you'll learn about the Malvinas, about the indigenous peoples, and come to realize that Argentina has a fascinating and varied geography and history.

Joa... too hot for the holidays?

               Who better to sing a few seasonal songs, then, than Joaquin Gustav. He brought to life the vast difference between the festivities in the northern hemisphere and the south, but complaining about what a hot day it was in real life! 

Space Cadet: yay applauds
Michelle Theiss: *applause*
Cheops Forlife7: Encore!
Art Blue: well done! summer is here?
Space Cadet: lol, southern hemisphere
victoria logan: aca hace mucho calor
victoria logan (es>en): Here is very hot
victoria logan: ahora invitamos con helado y cerveza fria
victoria logan (es>en): We now welcome with ice cream and cold beer

Billy Bradshaw enjoys a ciggy and some vibrant art

        Wondering about these pictures on the walls? Some are Victoria's own fractals, and the rest...

Mal Burns, Victoria Logan and Aussie Envee explain what a fractal is

victoria logan: estamos en el museo escuela
victoria logan (es>en): We are in the school Museum

victoria logan: del pintor Benito Quinquela Martín, estas son fotos de sus cuadros, esta ubicado en Caminito, origen del tango.
victoria logan (es>en): painter Benito Quinquela Martín. These are photos of his paintings. It  is located at Caminito, birthplace of the tango.

Safari trope

        Keeping up our South American adventure, we moved on to another sim hosted by the lovely Ken Savage, Waterworld film, and while the film is not South American, the builder is.

          This incredibly detailed build is a creation of the brilliant Tina Bey. She was away on the day, so not able to join us as we took a trip around the build, which has a serious message about climate change and how we should treat one another. Tina was a little shy when approached about a safari visit, she's a very modest person, but always very approachable and interesting to talk to,and as you can see, extremely talented. Visit this build and you'll soon see the photos do not do it justice.
          Examine the transforming trimaran, and the rafts, walk around the fort, imagining yourself in the exciting scenes where the Mariner is found to be a mutant, taken prisoner and then... 

...well, I better not give away any more spoilers... maybe you'll be lucky enough to watch the film over the holidays, like Space Cadet, and then the build will truly come to life for you.

          Watch out for those smokers, it all I'm saying.

HG Addresses
Snowind by Ange Menges and Nani Ferguson
Metropolis   hypergrid.org:8002:snowind
Osgrid         hg.osgrd.org:80:snowind

Argentina showcase, by Victoria Logan
hg.osgrid.org:80:vickys dream

Waterworld build by Tina Bey
hg.osgrid.org:80:waterworld film

Az... good as it gets

December 31, 2015, 11:53 am

≫ Next: Who Dereos Wins

≪ Previous: Smokin' Safari

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         Snakedance Moonwind's lovely avie said it best...2015 was on it way out. Some of the  Safari regulars met to talk about what they thought the year had brought. 

          It was a two stop Safari, the second half on the heart-breakingly lovely region created by Azi Az. Azi and her partner Danger Lytton, who hosts the region on a fabulous server connected to OSgrid which took in its stride the arrival of a dozen happy avies, despite the colossal amount of detail on the land.
       Arriving in the main square we immediately tp'd over to the ballroom where Danger was spinning some fantastic tunes. That made it easy to cam out ant about on the var region. It's pretty awesome, is open sim. A fair sized group of people, with my viewer set to Ultra and the maximum draw distance possible, and not a whiff of lag. Bliss.

Azi is from Portugal, Danger's in California, and the sim reflects the landscapes and cultures of these gorgeous parts of the world. The Var region includes a museum of antique furniture, a village based on a real world place, an art gallery and a mall, access to other regions created by Danger and Azi, this lovely ballroom, and some great landscapes. 

Our hosts, Azi Az and Danger Lytton

               You will find photos of Azi's Village on OSGrid throughout this post, although the actual conversation took place on Cookie II, a not-for-profit enclave one might say, on Kitely Grid. It is home to Selby'Thinkerer'Evans. You may enjoy his website, virtualoutworlding.blogspot.com
Sunbeam.Magic: i tried to go to Clubhouse first lol :)
Thirza.Ember: it's been 2 days that something is wrong there, it is a residential sim and I think a neighbor has some script that is out of control... restarts aren't helping
Sunbeam.Magic: awww
Ange Menges: hello everybody
Sunbeam.Magic: Greetings Ange
Selby.Evans: could not get into osgrid
Thirza.Ember: i put notices but people only read things on social media when they are unimportant, I find
Sunbeam.Magic: i shared the event earlier on G+ :)
Cherry.Manga: aloha everyone

The meet, Hobo Sandbox, Cookie II on Kitely

Thirza.Ember: so technically, what vote do you give HG this year, if 1 is TERRIBLE and 9 is AMAZING
Selby.Evans: I vote 8
George Equus: 7-8
Nara.Nook: I think it works better. Used to be like loading yourself in a tin can and firing from a a slingshot.
Sunbeam.Magic: 7-8
Neo.Cortex: i think 7 for the technology, 9 for the way ppl start to use it
Selby.Evans: Yes -- 9 for users
Cherry.Manga: Have no idea what voting is about but I vote for Snow's panties, anyway.
Unadecal Masala: I vote between 7 and 8. It takes a while to get used to the vagaries of hypergridding, like TP to a plaza first, then to my region on the way back... little things like that

Azi's Village - the waterfront

Sunbeam.Magic: but LM's seem to work much better I believe
Thirza.Ember: yeah but Sunbeam, think of 2014 and hair up your bum all the time
Nara.Nook: Or before when they had the 4096 error and it was really complicated to teach someone to hop
Selby.Evans: Life's Little Lessons from virtual worlds:  Frustration tolerance --
Neo.Cortex: the story we worked on showed all the ups and downs of HG connectivity
Nara.Nook: I think the story gave us a glimpse of what we can do with the hypergrid in the future
Selby.Evans: Creative Collaboration -- that is it
Thirza.Ember: it has been an amazing year ... the hosts have really been generous to us, taking a lot of time to get their regions in shape for a 20 avie shock wave

Tom.Frost: there's also still grids forcing everyone coming in to go to one central region instead of allowing direct teleports, that's a bit annoying too (no direct hgurl jump possible)
Nara.Nook @world.narasnook.com:8900: isn't the landing area because of bulletsim incompatibilities with older Opensim?
Lucy Afarensis: Can you tp to wherever once on the grid ?
Sunbeam.Magic: i don't mind landing in welcome region first and rezzing up before hopping to region
Unadecal Masala: and not everyone who wants to self host has the knowledge to configure a HG enabled grid properly. I'm still sucking my thumb and hoping for the best after a year of this

Explore the sim to find this collection of amazing miniatures by Danger Lytton

Thirza.Ember: some gridowners believe it lessens the impact on the grid if you go through one central sim
Neo.Cortex: sometimes it is neccessary to land in a starting region because it would bring down e.g. a party region if all would rez there
Nara.Nook: Really HG works best if you go to default region first.
Thirza.Ember: i think if you understand the underlying principal of default regions, you can improvise if a direct tp doesn't work
Harthelie.Deux: bonsoir tout le monde
Thirza.Ember: we also need more tourism groups in different languages! not just english!
Nara.Nook: Or we could use a decent translator. If someone knows where to find such.

Azi's Village, the town by night

Unadecal Masala: I speak Spanish but that is it for me. Translators work sort of OK, though
Sunbeam.Magic: Waves to Harthelie
Wizardoz.Chrome: yes, è difficile trovare un traduttore che funzioni ovunque ..
Wizardoz.Chrome: Yes, it's hard to find a translator that works everywhere.
Nara.Nook: They get shut down after so many messages
Unadecal Masala: do SL/OS translators work through Google/Bing translate? then it's going to be very difficult to improve on those. Our translators will improve as their backend improves
Wizardoz.Chrome (it>en): I use a translator that I have "donated" in Metropolis by Emil Jannings... It's not the usual translator of Metropolis, which after a while no longer works
Unadecal Masala: so basically we need google to open up the service for VR applications and perhaps provide a server add in like Vivox, with further viewer extensions?

The landing point on Azi's Village, a lovely old village full of personality

                          There was much talk about the new Firestorm, whether you can see Videos using the 64 bit version of various viewers, and the mystery of the missing My Suitcase, all of which seemed to depend on perception and chance - no to people reported an identical experience and folks going and arriving, provoking another question: how many new acquaintances have you made over the past year, and does the increase in population in open sim improve it?
Cherry.Manga: no idea, I'm a wild one.
Lucy Afarensis: maybe 50,75
Selby.Evans: 261 friends --
Nara.Nook: I think 50-75 sounds abut right
George Equus: No idea...
Tom.Frost: given that it is my first year: all of them :)
Unadecal Masala: same here. 57 friends... call it 50 cos some are from my grid... but the HG is sooooo sparsely populated. Always the same 10 faces at all the events I go to
Sunbeam.Magic @login.greatcanadiangrid.ca:8002: 100 or so I'm sure, perhaps more
George Equus: probably me too. Don't collect friends.
Wizardoz.Chrome @hypergrid.org:8002 (it>en): I have no idea ... many:) ...
Nara.Nook: I have some 125-200 visit the grid each month and 90 percent of those are hypergridders
Selby.Evans: Knowing more People  makes any virtual world better
Sunbeam.Magic: it depends really how often one hops, b/c of my magazine I hop at least to 20 different grids per week
Nara.Nook : I meet so many people. I think it depends on whether you stay on your grid or you go everywhere.

Azi's Village, the ballroom

Unadecal Masala: I suppose it depends how much you get out there and explore and talk to people...
Sunbeam.Magic: I believe the large events attract the same people, but I meet many new faces when hopping around randomly
Cherry.Manga: yes Sun
Lucy Afarensis: that has been my experience also
George Equus: Pretty solid group on Maritime, but past couple of months have seen quite a lot of new fresh faces from all over the HG
Ange Menges: we have generally 150 people coming to our events, I think 80% of them are the same each time :-)

Azi's vVillage - spot the giraffe

Thirza.Ember: there is also the time zone factor
Sunbeam.Magic: oh the dreaded TIME factor lol
Cherry.Manga: yes Thirza, by the way, now, are there people out of europa?
     Turns out, we had group members from Australia, the US, and various European countries, from Sweden all the way down to Italy. Cherry seemed pretty satisfied with that answer. but certainly the time zones do affect the viability of a community like ours where every person present is precious. Well, almost all.
          But is 'community' the point of open sim, or does it serve as a loosely linked network of pioneers, lurking in their own personal sandboxes, intent on seeing what they can make code and scripts and meshes do. In the past, traveling in opensim might mean not meeting anyone, or meeting people quite hostile to any mention of SL, and even to other hg enabled grids with different ideas about what should be allowed or acceptable in virtual worlds. Regular social events open to all could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
           You may have seem the poll asking what OpenSim is 'for'? If you consider the question only superficially, you may say that opensim is not 'for' anything, but of course it is. It has a direction, one that may zig zag a little but like any designed environment, there is purpose behind it, and one that may be evolving. What do people think.

This lovely modifiable dragon avatar was being handed out by Satyr Gator in the OSGrid sandbox, a classic example of the community spirit of  building and giving

         Most people, grid owners and their tenants, standalone operators, and core developers, came here after some time in Second Life. But why? Creating and exploring seem to be the big two motives.
Sunbeam.Magic: in the very beginning of OS I believe all were recluse, building frenzy ;)
Lucy Afarensis: I was a recluse for years
Cherry.Manga: I explored HG the very first day I created an account in FG.  I went to OS and Craft and Metro
 Mal Burns: i like collaborating and seeing interesting things others are doing - but don't do dancing or music things (social only) very much
Thirza.Ember: the favorite answer on the poll about what open sim is 'for' seems to be 'sharing'... would you guys agree with that?

Cherry.Manga: Yes for those who answered, but because those same persons are caring enough to share their answers Thirza :)
Nara.Nook: To me open sim is where I work
George Equus: Suppose sharing... and collaborating with a small group. Or, rather the opposite
Aussie Envee: yes i get lotz of new ideas of making things and how to do things
Cherry.Manga: In my "neighbourhood" I would say most people are there to experiment their own things, whatever it is about building, scripting...but 75% are in their own corners and 25% are into collab and sharing knowledge
George Equus: Building is main
Sunbeam.Magic: OSgrid was a University originated grid, when it was taken over by private citizens I felt a big change there
Tom.Frost: thirza: i can only speak for myself, but for me coming to metropolis was mostly about 'not corporate', and then about 'building on my own self-hosted servers that i control and that provide cheap land'
Cherry.Manga: I chose FG not only because of the language but mostly because it isn't owned by anyone, it's a non profit association, that gives it a lot of meaning.
Sunbeam.Magic: I think the non-profit grid is gaining more popularity, 3rd Rock just changed to that
Unadecal Masala: I came here cos my RP group became homeless and we are broke, and found the philosophy and ideals of OS appealing, so we stayed I came to the Hypergrid (OSG and mine) for those reasons, and to see what other people are doing applying their imaginations without all the economic and policy restrictions of SL

Romantic dancing on Azi's Village

Sunbeam.Magic: I have to admit I came to OpenSim due to the economics
Nara.Nook: I came to both worlds at the same time but stuck with open sim because it was more useful for the creative tasks I needed it to do. It was also easier to teach other authors without all the griefers around.
Lucy Afarensis: I am still a solitary builder but I am starting to enjoy getting out more
George Equus: Same here I think
Thirza.Ember @grid.kitely.com:8002: ok so my last question is... do you think the safari should continue? do you like what we go to see? or do you think that now people are hg savvy enough that it has served its purpose
Mal Burns: yes yes yes
Sunbeam.Magic: YES yes and yes
Lucy Afarensis: YES !
Cherry.Manga: OUIIIII
Nara.Nook: Yes!!!
Aussie Envee: i like the idea
Unadecal Masala: YES it should continue. Can't like everything, but everything is interesting
George Equus: Safari... YES!
Sunbeam.Magic: you'd be amazed at how many have never even tried HG ... seems silly since its really just a tp from point a to point b just like inworld tping ... go figure....  and its more fun to travel in packs :) Safari is the biggest Tour group too ... it must continue!

Azi's Village- the ballerina

Tom.Frost: i'm hg savy but i've seen so many places i would never have heard of without hg safari
 Nara.Nook: There was huge growth in Opensim this year and I think HG Safari fills that need of teaching people how to get around and get to know each other.  It's been a really long time since I heard anyone ask what the hypergrid was and that is usually a newbie from SL
Art Blue: of course safari must be or my events are empty!
Cherry.Manga: Safari IS the social media on OS
Mal Burns: safari is shared interest in exploring - a niche of its own and very worthy - you do a great job Thirza!
Thirza.Ember: wow thanks for that... my heartfelt thanks to you all for coming along and supporting it, and making it work... thanks to Wizzina here, for her help, extraordinary kindness, and talent, and a thought to our much missed Safarinas, Wizard Gynoid and Fuschia Nightfire
           And thank you for reading this blog, and sharing in the adventure. May the new year bring you love and serenity, joy and ... more adventures in hypergridding!
HG Addresses:
Selby's Hobo Sandbox   grid.kitely.com:8002:cookie II
Azi's region                   hg.osgrid.org:80:azi's village

Who Dereos Wins

January 7, 2016, 1:35 pm

≫ Next: Radiola

≪ Previous: Az... good as it gets

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            It's fun to visit new places, and in open sim, 'new' often means places that have only recently come into existence. This week the Safari took a trip over to visit the predominantly German language gridDereos, founded by Akira Sonoda and a small group of friends, with the technical wizardry of Freaky Tech. We were there to wish them well for their upcoming first anniversary celebration, at the end of this month.

Malon's fabulous loft on Dereos

Fancy.Day: Can you see me ok?

Truelie Telling: yes, you got all your parts, hehe

Fancy.Day: Good. Never sure with this platform :)

Truelie Telling: but we haven't gone too many jumps yet

Unadecal Masala: there's still plenty of room for chaos and mayhem

Fancy.Day: I am using Radegast on a windows phone emulator

Unadecal Masala: that's really interesting, Fancy.  Are we all rezzed fine for you?

Fancy.Day: Yes all rezzed but the graphics are a little crude

George Equus: this new 0.9 code is sure making some stir in the pot

Lucy Afarensis: I have found that it causes asset problems if you let it run more than a few days

Truelie Telling: apparently, there are certain scripts that no longer work... including NPCs

Thirza Ember: una, didn't you say you couldn't find inventory you had bought on another grid?

Unadecal Masala: I did say that the inventory I bought at Clutterfly arrived corrupted at OSG... it arrived fine at my grid though.

Lucy Afarensis: never arrived at all for me

Unadecal Masala: Lucy it did arrive, but it generates XML errors and doesn't rez

Thirza Ember: sooo bizarre

       On that note, our first stop was Freakyo sim, home to Freaky Tech, who has developed the Arriba software, a fork of Open Sim, on which Dereos Grid is based. But first, some Teravus fun.

No nudes on Teravus

Lucy Afarensis: Am I naked ?

Thirza Ember: no Lucy

Aime Socrates: yes Lucy..like million years ago !

Lucy Afarensis: whew

James Atlloud: No naked avs that I can see.
Thirza Ember: I apologize for that James, maybe next time.

          Let the close questioning of Freaky begin...

Freaky Tech @dereos.org: hi! still some room left, I saw a pretty amount of slow requests on sim log

Aime.Socrates: what is Dereos ?

Freaky Tech: name has undergone a change from an original shortcut, so the name was original related to a shortcut declaring German language regions in OSG, which lost that meaning some years ago... now, it is simply used as a name, since about a year. So current writing is Dereos Grid.

snowbody Cortes: Freaky, what's the top 5 features in Arriba ?

Freaky Tech: I never went after the feature driven nerd story. Our intention is get something stable out of the mess. Luckily the fork started before avination merge, but still too much broken code inherited. I tracked the oldest bugs back to around 2007 being still active today

snowbody Cortes: may I change my question into : what's the top 5 wrong features in opensim ? non-regression may be one of them ...

Lucy Afarensis: non-regression ?

snowbody Cortes: Lucy, usually we do a non-regression test to avoid some bug to be reopened... I mean in software development

Freaky Tech:: still calling it an alpha. Alpha means normally something that you do not give out to other people. Normally something handed out is a beta not called alpha.

George Equus: how about pre alpha?

Spike Sol: I think the greatest difference is, if you have a Prob with the Arriba, you talk about with Freak. Change out the Log files, and solve the problem. In Opensim are not so. It gives a merge and that's it. It's not important what you think about it.

Freaky Tech: it should be that way that regressions are detected earlier, and not in the hands of the final user

snowbody Cortes: i agree

Thirza Ember: when did you start to develop Arriba?

Freaky Tech: mid-2014... pretty much proven during the time that opensim is too much relying on some .NET subtleties. I have a list of pages of bugs that I could write up to their mantis, just making several more pages to be ignored for years...

snowbody Cortes: uhm that's very bad

Freaky Tech: The biggest misfeature in opensim is duplicated code everywhere, the group specific viewer protocol is implemented four times in total ... if any guy tells you Linden specific stuff resides in LindenUDP, than it is pretty much half the truth. I found when starting the fork five times the same code, four being thrown out for a simple queue mechanism.

snowbody Cortes: well I see, poor code-review , we have another item for the top 5 ;)

A leetle lag on Freakyo

Thirza Ember: you think it would be better to stop moving forward, and take time to fix bugs, then? Is that a realistic proposal? I bet that is boring work for devs.

Freaky.Tech: they should be doing that, but in reality they just go for part-implemented features

Thirza Ember: I was sorry to learn they broke Aine's dancing ball

valerie llauke: omg thirza, she's trying to actually fix it, it will  be days of work

Freaky Tech:  The next misfeature of OpenSim... expect it to be decades for fixing things

Lucy Afarensis: just don't run 9 if you want to dance

Freaky Tech:  the UDP handling code is pretty much broken - works only up to 80% of the cases, as you can see right now anyways, the UDP part gets blocked by slow requests easily. If anyone has scripts that are not running in OS at all, I am collecting the more complex scripts for testing.

Aime.Socrates: there is a huge bug in opensim...parabolic trajectories do not work :(

Snowbody Cortes: yes Freaky, what about a future change from UDP to TCP, maybe WebSocket ...

Freaky Tech: it does not solve anything. It is not a problem of UDP, it is a problem of the UDP handling code in opensim.

Fancy Day: ++Freaky

Freaky

Freaky Tech:  The map teleport is known to crash sims. My fork is at least capable of continuing to run, even though it might just drop all agents at worst. That is one of the main differences. Opensim git tends to slow down to a grind. I have seen my fork running full speed until a big road bump. If you want to crash a party, teleport home via map ;)

Thirza Ember: I can't say that has been my experience, but then I rarely go home

Freaky Tech:  works well with opensim.git and a lot of other derivatives. Most started to logout instead.

Thirza Ember: so can anyone get arriba and try it?

Freaky Tech: Yes, see http://www.github.com/ft-/http://www.github.com/ft-/ The better a grid performs as backend, the less issues you see.

Spike Sol: For region and Robust, if you want.

Freaky Tech:  yes, should be possible since I added in October those tolerance codes... that is where I put builds tohttps://github.com/ft-/arribasim-techpreview-builds - but be aware that OSG is not the best option to test... lots of foreign influences.

Lucy Afarensis: Are they compiled ?

Freaky Tech: Yes the second are pre-compiled ones. There is a little difference in ini files to be aware of. This hanging half an hour ago comes from the issues with the teleport code. For a party location it is best to disable things like profile and groups, because of the issues the code holds.

Thirza Ember: Freaky, how can you have a party where people cannot look at profiles??? that is 90% of the fun.

Truelie Telling: I think our third destination is a party location

Thirza Ember: on our Poll in Facebook, seems most people think that 'Arriba' is the name of Spike's favorite beer... what is the real origin of the name?

Freaky Tech: the real origin was a little comic with a speedy mouse

James Atlloud: arriba arriba andale

Aime Socrates: speedy gonzales ! 

Freakyo palace.... we managed to break it

          It may have been the fault of Aime's truly terrible Mexican accent, or perhaps someone perving the profiles, but suddenly most of us got kicked from the sim. Turned out neither theory was correct, it was tp related.

Truelie Telling: I used the map to get the avvie count... but it was way before we crashed, before he told us about the map

Aime Socrates: ahaaa, now we know!!

Thirza Ember: TRUELIE YOU BROKE THE GRID

Truelie Telling: remind me never to confess to anything around you guyz

snowbody Cortes: ok, we'll open a mantis bug report: Safaristas know how to crash a sim, are you interested ?

Wizardoz.Chrome: (too much hair and skirts and hat ..)

Freaky Tech: the receive code for UDP messages gets blocked for too long. It was a Map teleport that kicked you.

          Our hour was pretty much up anyway. It had been an interesting conversation, but we were ready to see more of Dereos.

Aime Socrates: lets go to Malon's Loft !

Truelie Telling: ok, not everyone at once

Unadecal Masala: WWWWEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!

Truelie Telling: this is like Greenies! an oversized world! hi Equus, you are way below us...

George Equus: was on floor, wondering where you all where...

Unadecal Masala: Yes, this does remind me of Greenies. should we look in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers?

Malon Wyngard: Huhu! wanna have a nice tan? take a nice bath in da cup..))

Ange.Menges: I soak my feet in chocolate

Aime Socrates: no danger in here...

George Equus: Beware of cat!!! Looks hungry...

Lucy Afarensis: hungry kitty ?

George Equus: uhum,  but Aime is safe. standing on the head

Aime Socrates: head of what ? I'm on a hill

Malon.Wyngard: Hello..it`s announced that I`ll perform a part of my novel For Ever Vampire. In case of technical difficulties we will do this on an extra region here in the DEREOS

valerie llauke: this is awesome malon

Thirza Ember: hehe nice camera Malon.... big lens!

Malon.Wyngard @dereos.org: yeahh..:))) is doing good pics

Thirza Ember: so Malon, how do you like dereos?

Malon Wyngard: DEREOS is a LOVELY place.. we are growing....:))) and are a part of the huge open grid.

Thirza Ember: open sim must be huge... just look at the size of its kitchen!

Aime.Socrates: great coffee machine Malon

Malon.Wyngard: hehehee..... thanks...))  there you can do coffee for a MONTH

Mal.Burns: I am getting endless script warnings from something called "Dasher" - anyone else?

Arielle. Delamerlibre: dont know what it is... hmm someone said it is a flight assistant.

Wizardoz Chrome: hi Pathfinder.Lester

Aime Socrates: Pathfinder !

Snowbody Cortes: Path you are in late we already had first sim-crash in 2016 !

Pathfinder.Lester: better late than never. :P

   Finally, we went downstairs to enjoy the Blue Wave Club. The weekly dance favored by a nice sized mostly German speaking crowd, is a regular Wednesday night event, which you can attend either on Dereos, or on OSGrid at the sim called Pyramid which, incidentally, also runs on Arriba. 

        Here's Loft builder and author Malon Wyngard showing of his Blue Wave moves... those vampyrish good looks are to die for!

There were particle fireworks and some amazing rocking tunes by our hostess and DJ Samira Satanko who is also a stylish builder... 

....the palace that serves as an impressive backdrop to the dance floor is her creation, complete with divans an hookahs! Take a moment to explore it when you visit the sim.

       Opensim has an impressively large population of German speakers, and I wondered how may here were SL emigres
Malon.Wyngard: I entered the SL in 2008
Vivienne Clary: I was in SL 2007
Arielle.Delamerlibre: yes me too
Arielle.Delamerlibre: 31.01.2007 bday
Thirza Ember: Me too class of '07
Luka Lin: Cool!
Truelie Telling: me too
Malon.Wyngard: I`ve entered the open sims in 2009 - since today enjoying..)))
Arielle Delamerlibre: march 2015 and found new home.... hg the best invention ever
        You can't argue with that.
Dereos Grid will be celebrating its anniversary during the last week of January.
HG Addresses
Freaky's sim...  dereos.org:80:freakyo
Malon's loft (at 3000m) and Samira's Blue Wave Club... dereos.org:80:bluewave

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Radiola

January 9, 2016, 3:03 pm

≫ Next: What Is OpenSim For?

≪ Previous: Who Dereos Wins

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There is something of the divine at Radiola.
          It is a land that provokes lightheartedness and a light step.
          Tread carefully, for you tread on dreams.

          And what dreams may come, after a visit to Livio Korobase's  small OpenSim grid, Radiola, remain to be discovered with the closing of your eyes. But first, eyes open, senses on alert. This is a whimsical, sometimes mystical, place of impossible beasts juxtaposed with strange and familiar shapes.


          Turn on the radio.
          Real music flows and sews the installation together.  Flying up into the uncluttered sky, you will find a building, an industrial basilica, perhaps dedicated to the Patron Saint of AC, St. Tesla, with its sparking mast, a sort of child's windmill, electrified.
          Radiant.  


          This is an ode to awe.
          To the awe of childhood, from the awe of the past and of the promises of science, to a deep appreciation of the spirituality of form, sometimes riotous, sometimes profound.

          A scattered pattern of fragments fill the pale landscape. Pieces of childhood, devotion, and memory that recall and represent the tenacious, heady power of random remembrance that only a scent, a song, or a faded photograph can re-evoke. A beam of primal connectivity joining now to a time before we knew we had a memory.
         A fallen bust ripples just above the surface, its never closing eyes full of the ocean, an ocean of classical proportions.
         Melancholy. We have all been on this wavelength at one time or another.

          Childhood is here. The observant infant entering into an always already created world, a nest, a jumping off point. Memories formed by objects, a way to find yourself, and find your self within the random world of toys and fads and statues, the contents of a well worn toy box, the box room in the mind.
          They stir in our parental lobe those grave sleepless moments of anxiety, thoughts of nature and nurture, and how the casual choice of a plaything might spawn a Mozart or a Manson, and how can we know if we have made the right choice? And can we really be expected to be eternally vigilant? And then time and tea and lazy reasonableness sooth us out of that frothy fear.

          There is nothing to be done for it. 
          The child's eyes, that un-revisitable point of view, will take the burden of choice. 
          Making their own sense of our tiny purchases and the long cultural shadow that they cast, they will transmit it, on another frequency, far beyond the compass of our ken.

To visit Radiola 
Log on to any HG enabled OpenSim grid 
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What Is OpenSim For?

January 13, 2016, 3:59 am

≫ Next: Zan and the art of Hypergridding

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          What is OpenSim for?
          Many things. It's like a large garden, with different flowerbeds, trees, rockeries and ponds, maybe a vegetable patch, and a compost heap too. Each zone  has its own needs, but they are all connected.
          By what? Paths, weather conditions, hedges... but above all, the will of the gardener.
          So, which are you? Are you planted in the garden, or are you a gardener? Or do you belong to a middle category? And why does it matter?
          Over the past few weeks you may have seen a poll on G+ and in Facebook.
          This is the G+ Poll, as of today.

          G+ is not a very poll-friendly forum, but the immediacy of the stark question 'What is open sim for' was designed to get your gut reaction. Some kind folks apparently thought I was looking for a wiki definition, rather than a 'choose one' opinion from each participant, but hey, that's G+ for you.

As you can see, the absolute winner in this poll is sharing. It thoroughly beat 'building for yourself' which most people would probably admit was what got them into open sim to start with. Over the past couple of years, the community aspects of open sim have blossomed and seem set to go from strength to strength.
          Here is the Facebook poll. The structure of Facebook polls allows for more options, and lets you choose 'all of the above' if you want. But in the end, the top two, 'making stuff', and 'enjoying other's builds', were way ahead. So again, sharing is significant in people's minds.

          The least surprising thing is that nobody wanted to admit they are inworld looking for love. I don't believe that, but hey.
          Almost nobody voted for making money. Is there anything wrong with admitting you are in it for the cash?  On G+ making money and work are combined, yet it still only managed to get a small percentage of the vote.
          But the really quite shocking thing is that so few people voted for 'improving the code'. Now, I know most devs don't 'do social' and are still walking with the dinosaurs over on IRC (don't worry, they won't be offended by that, I'm pretty sure devs don't read blogs like this one) so for sure, they did not vote on either poll, and we are missing their voices. But this poll suggests that, despite dev meetings and mantises and whatever else, there is a massive disconnect between, to continue the metaphor, the plants and the gardeners.
          Wait, no, that's wrong. It is not a massive disconnect. It is a difference in perspective.
          Let me give you an example.
          Freaky Tech has developed a fork of OpenSim called Arriba, which a lot of people love. I am sure it is great, I'm not a code person so I can't really have an opinion. However, one thing he brought up in our recent visit to his region on Dereos illustrates my point. 
          Freaky explained that he has special settings for a party sim. Profiles are disabled, to reduce lag. There is also an issue with people clicking on their Map to tp to the place where they see the little green dots representing the group of party-goers - if you do that, you may crash the sim, or get kicked. So he plans to disable the green dots, so as to discourage people from clicking on the Map picture. 
          Makes sense.
          When Freaky, who is very smart and very kind,  came up with these two solutions to lag and crashing, I imagine he was basing himself on the tight knit, familiar community he calls home. Not being part of a single grid community myself, my first reaction was - That is a terrible idea! Why would anyone NOT want/need to look at people's profiles?Plus - hasn't it ever happened to you, that you were unsure if your clothes are going to rez, so you tp to a quiet spot on the sim, wait for your appearance to normalize, and then tp over to the group? You ladies know what I mean.
          There has to be a point where the efficiency of a region serves the purpose of the region - and that purpose, that 'what is it for?' is a question with a more complex answer than we may at first think.
          In the short term the disconnect or difference in perspective between plants and gardeners means ..what? Problems are grumbled about instead of being reported. Is this because reports are not taken seriously, ignored, or acknowledged and then forgotten? Is this true? If it is, what could we 'Joe Ordinarys' do to help that situation?
           Everyone is a volunteer here, and nobody is obligated to do a whole lot of boring work in their spare time.
          Fixing code is - it's got to be - boring. Even if some say it's relaxing, it's kinda boring. You know how I know that? If it wasn't boring, all the bugs would have been fixed a long time ago.
          The good people who do this work donate valuable time to the project, and they deserve our thanks and respect. The question is - does only the code-maker's time have value? Do the end users matter to the devs? It's one of those questions that makes you think of The Matrix... are we alive, or are we cascading green numerals?
          If, just to give a silly example, it takes me 20 minutes to make one hg jump to organize a safari trip, do those 20 minutes have the same value as 20 minutes spent by a dev looking at the code?
          I suspect if they were brutally honest, they would say no. People always think their own time and talent is worth more than other people's. What do you think? Do you get a different vibe?
          In the long term, the disconnect between users and makers might be even more significant. This is where that middle category, neither all plant or all gardener, could make the difference. Experiencing OpenSim in the way that the majority of its users do (as opposed to being inworld, but just tucked away on your own region) requires a little bit of a different mind set, perhaps, but it is surely a healthy way to run things. Don't forget, what we do with open sim as a community affects how much money people are prepared to contribute to its development.
          The fundamental overarching purpose of OpenSim ought to form a sort of road map that all of us could contribute to.
          Did it ever have one, and has this changed over recent years? Perhaps not... what do you think? 
          What features do we need to make it a viable place for people to do their stuff? You may say, an infinite number of features. In that case, what do the majority need or want? What features should be protected? What matters more to you, (again, just to give an example) that your Friends List doesn't suddenly go walkabout, or that you can smoothly cross a sim border in a physical vehicle? 
          Maybe you don't care about your contacts, maybe you only come inworld to sail around your own region by yourself. That is certainly the way OpenSim used to feel, a lot of very loosely connected folk just doing their own thing. The polls suggest those days are waning. 
          And maybe both Friends and Physics are possible.
          The word on the street is 'it's going to be a bumpy ride'. My question is - where is this ride going?

Zan and the art of Hypergridding

January 14, 2016, 5:56 am

≫ Next: Safari Goes Boldly

≪ Previous: What Is OpenSim For?

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       So now we know. 
       The secret to an absolutely perfect Safari where nobody loses their hair, gets lost or freezes or has chat lag is...   to predict that everything is going to go horribly wrong and we all need to be ready for multiple crashes.
          Or was it the fact we were all invited to keep our attachments at a minimum? 
          Hmm... it might be that, but we all looked stunning either way, so I'm not sure who paid attention to the 'low lag' dictum. 
          Making rules about what people can do or bring on Safari would defeat our main purpose, which is that the grids and regions should be the ones that toughen up for the onslaught of visitors, not the visitors pussyfoot around the sims. That may sound selfish, but it is done with love - love of making places visitor friendly, because visitors and appreciation and networking are the lifeblood of any community. 

Teravus Plaza keeps losing its prims. The clubhouse is next to the hill on the right.

           Plus nobody actually reads the notecard, so it would not work anyway.


          But there is one thing you should pass along to friends who don't read notecards....  the main departure point of the Safari has changed. Teravus Plaza on OSGrid, where we have a clubhouse, is a residential sim with about a dozen houses on it. For a few weeks now, the sim has been experiencing severe problems, from all the prims disappearing, to impossible lag, to your appearance being completely borked after an attempted teleport. It is unclear what is causing the problem, someone said it might be physical prim in a linkset or an out of control script.
            I love Teravus, and OSGrid, but we have to have a reliable starting point for the Safari.

The lounge on hgsafari

            The Francogrid sim is called hgsafari. Donated by Gill Beaumont last year during the OSGrid downtime, it has a clubhouse, performance area, dance floor and a clothes store too. You will still be able to find the weekly Landmarks at the OSGrid clubhouse, but the group will meet at hgsafari sim on Francogrid from now on.

Radiola is such an amazing grid, and was Destination 1. 
alex54 Salamander: hi all
Sunbeam Magic: Alex is sleep walking: lol
Thirza Ember: 15 AVIES AND COUNTING
Cendres Magic: hello alex
Sunbeam Magic: oh there he stopped ;)
Yara Eilde: Guten Abend :-)
Livio Korobase: hello welcome :)

Alya VonZ: Hello ! Place is amazing:)
Cendres Magic: yes
Sunbeam Magic:♥ BIG THINGS ;)
Radio Now playing Warpaint -- Ashes To Ashes (David Bowie Cover)
Serene Jewell: Bowie songs.This is lovely.
Livio Korobase: Radio CiBiGiBi like sincronicity
Thirza.Ember: Livio is a well known SL artist who has shown his work many times there, notably on LEA, and now here he is in open sim.

Aime Socrates (right) pirouettes around the landing point on Radiola

          Wherever you are on the sim, you can cam over to the top of the old fashioned radio set, and you'll find a duck that is also a dance ball. It has some great choices, like marionette and ballerina, Aime chose the ballerina dance. People continued to show up. Eight grids were represented. The sim didn't miss a beat.
alex54 Salamander: die Figuren sind ja riesig
Chip Angelvi: manque le tutu Aime
Aime Socrates: ne me déconcentre pas
Sunbeam.Magic: nods over to Max

Max Hill looking like an Admiral on Radiola. (Left, George Equus with legs. I told you it was a perfect Safari.)

Wizardoz Chrome: Funzionano anche le foto ad alta risoluzione ..
Wizardoz Chrome: io non Crash
Spike Sol: if we crash, no problem, i have a helmet
Cendres Magic: nice idea for the whale with the house on her
Livio Korobase: :) my first work at LEA, was Musiclandia
Serene Jewell: Do you think having these huge region leads to more experimentation with large scale art?  The canvas is just so huge.
Livio Korobase: i hope so
Unadecal Masala: hello everyone, Hi Livio, this place is weird, like stepping into a painting by Dali
Samuel Loire: These are all very nice vector graphics, Meshs.
Thirza Ember: was it easy to make your own grid Livio?
Livio Korobase: for a grid so basic yes, not difficult, and costs are very low
Thirza Ember: easy for people to come and visit you too!

Livio Korobase

Livio Korobase: yes
Thirza Ember: imagine if all SL artists got a small grid like Livio, full freedom to do what they want and invite people to see it, no more having to fulfil conditions, or rules...
Livio Korobase: i am pushing for this Thirza... the dj table over the radio is built by Cica...  and Eupa [Eupalinos Ugajin] has his sim here, Meilo already has a sim, and Alpha also.
Serene Jewell: Opensim really lets artist stretch out.

George Equus: I have all settings maxed out, not a shred of lag so far
Alya VonZ: looks and feels good, even have the max draw distance to have a good look
Aime.Socrates : Pink floyd on radiola...
Livio Korobase: yes, why not Aime :)
Wizardoz.Chrome @hypergrid.org:8002: La musica di Livio è sempre bella e "insolita" ..
Livio Korobase: this year i want become a musician :)
Sunbeam.Magic @hg.francogrid.org: and do live performances?
Livio Korobase: 30 years that i say so...
Livio Korobase: yes i want try. if someone like to play as dj or do performances, just tell me
Sunbeam.Magic: Radiola is great name for a music place

Thirza.Ember: who is hosting this grid?
Livio Korobase: me. Host is OVH, this is a little virtual server 1 processor, very simple to use, i don't know Linux, but i did all alone. https://www.ovh.it/vps/vps-ssd.xml
Spike.Sol: Thank you Livio... great here....

Thirza.Ember: wow we have a lot of grids represented here

Livio Korobase: yes is very nice to see, and first time that i see
George.Equus: As for stress test -  I'd say  pretty stable here
Livio Korobase: smell freedom

     People picked their favorite piece from the build. Do you agree?
George.Equus: Snails are great
Unadecal.Masala: I love that whale up in the air
Cendres.Magic: me too i like the whale
George.Equus  Spelunking  around the ladders was fun
Wizardoz.Chrome (it>en): I'm going to go in the egg, to dance with the giraffes:
Thirza Ember: I like the diver with the webbed hands... and the frog!
Livio Korobase: all is not finished well, still working... for 6 months rent of server is payed, we are in a place that cost very low price,so i think to remain open for long. This are 4 sim in SL, 1.200 euro month... is crazy. Here, we are in a grid that cost 6 euro month, i smoke 2 cigarette packets less and i have my place. It is different maybe for who have a business, but for me is perfect so. Change and open mind can be very difficult.  Me, I don't see a fight - " SL or OpenSim " -  i like to use all this tools. 
Ging Artful: yes , sl and opensim :)) Both!
Livio Korobase: Here is something important I place in all my works, the 10 Truths

Nice way to start a grid... the freebie store on Radiola

         We all looked over the Truth list, and made a mental note to return soon to Radiola for the promised free pizza and beer. Well, for the good music and visuals then. And it was time to go. 
George.Equus: You will be able to host parties here, def. One of the most stable and smooth region I've been on with  Safari.  Thanks Livio!

 ZanGrid was Destination 2 and a smoother ride over you will rarely find. We arrived on Hyperzan, which is an excellent resource if you want to learn more about the regions of Zangrid that are open to the public. We didn't stay here long, and were soon teleported over to PartyLand one of the prettiest var regions we have been to, where we met the regular Zan residents (Zanites? Zangridians? Zanese?) who were already dancing the night away with the help of DJ Rique Giano.
Isolde.Caron: i love this music-)
suz blessed: Rique must have known you are coming Isolde! I would like to tell you very short about ZanGrid, and its short history, if that is ok with you all. It was an honour to us when Thirza came and asked if it was ok for the Safari group to come over to visit ZanGrid:) 
Wizardoz.Chrome: Thanks suz

suz blessed: This grid is now 3 years old, however I am the owner since last year January, when i took over ‘Zandramas’. A few changes where made: The name was changed to ZanGrid. We openend up to public ( was on invite only before). And since December 2015 we opennd some regions for Hypergrid. Why not open the whole grid up to Hypergrid?  At Zangrid we have a stable and very loyal community. People who stood by us also during difficult times. And Some of them do not want their Regions to be open for Hypergrid. ZanGrid respects their wishes and decided to give the people the choice.
Sunbeam Magic: I like that suz. People's choice
Isolde Caron: i actually like that idea

suz blessed: It is set up that way, that we all can Hypergrid out from every region.but people from outside are not able to hypergrid into every region. This means that only a few regions are opennd up 2 ways! We give people the time to get used to Hypergrid and if they want we can open up their regions for them anytime:)
Digital Digital: Up to the region owner
suz blessed: We have 1207 users, ZanGrid is hosted by Zetamex, who helps us also during the rough sometimes very buggy OS times:) We have events from Thursday till Monday and those are put together by our smart and passionate Event Manager Sofee Supermarine. 

Gif shamelessly stolen from Sunbeam Magic

Rique Giano, who will spoil your ears in a few with his great and powerful , is also my help on the grid and at the backend when it comes to custumer service. And when i am frustrated i use Rique as my Boxing bag! 
Rique Giano: yeh i have 2 black eyes lol
Sunbeam Magic: awh poor Rique
Buddy Aaron: nono rique like it, hehe

Suz Blessed

          Turns out, Zangrid is a rich mix of nationalities, from the US to Greece, and they really know how to party. But also how to build. The regions are to die for.

The gorgeous scenery on PartyLand

 suz blessed: we are also the only grid as i know with regions with unlimited prims, we tested and it works.
Thirza.Ember : what does unlimited mean?
suz blessed: well we offer regions with 100 k prims, but infact it is not a hard limit
you can go over it. ofc you can make your region very laggy but good builders know how to use a region wisely

Sim Cinema on Zangrid

Digital Digital: And I can vouch once got over 200 k prims and no issues ofc that was just prims and sculpts you have to be smart when using that many.
Thirza.Ember: what is the key to a successful grid?
Billy.Bradshaw: people
Digital Digital: I think the key is happy people. I think also staying out of the grid wars

Marsif Stormwind: no drama
Rique Giano: yeh so true no drama
Sunbeam Magic: lots of parties ;)
Digital Digital: I come to ZanGrid because people are friendly and the management doesnt push anything on me like I have had happen at other grids
Buddy Aaron: Drama here? what is that ?
Pattisue Haefele: NOOOOOOOOOOO DRAMA EVER HERE---ONLY WONDERFUL PEOPLE:))))))))))
Marsif Stormwind: great support, zangrid has of the best and fast ever support
Digital Digital: Well it is concierge style that's for sure, my tickets closed usually same day or next
            Dancing, and laughing especially at Art's oversized avie that suddenly came into the room looking ... x rated frankly. This is just a bit of it...

Out on a limb... Art Blue joins the fun on Zangrid

          And it was time to go, again.
George Equus: Great grid by the looks, and with good user policy. Thanks!
Pattisue Haefele: yes a great party:))))

Isolde Caron: hugs to all you fine peeps!

Arriving on Digiworldz

          And then we were on Digiworldz, no problems grid jumping, everything as smooth as a baby's bottom... and no hair stuck to that bottom, either. There is loads to do on Digiworldz, including visiting Pangea, a racing sim, and two Harry Potter vars.

Pangea

           TR Lifter was our host, and welcomed us onto the grid.
Sunbeam.Magic: TR has his laptop out, he's ready to share ;)
TR Lifter: Digiworldz was created by Terry Ford; the creator of 3rd Rock Grid. Terry and I were co-owners and had disagreements with management and Terry branched off and started Digiworldz almost a year ago. 
Alya.VonZ: how does it work here, people rent regions or can they hook up there own place like in osgrid?
Digital Rayne: Alya, Here the regions are rented from Digi... but they are very reasonably priced...
Alya.VonZ: how is the activity? how many users?

TR Lifter: We have about 1800 registered useres now and a concurrency of about 20-30 so far
Sunbeam.Magic: are we going to visit any region ?
Unadecal.Masala: what are the highlights of your grid?
TR Lifter: I think Muggleton was first on the list. We are so far a builders grid :) Seems builders have taken a fancy to Digi, lol ;) We have live music, social events and many places to explore.

The Facade of Hogwarts School

          We jumped to Muggleton 3 var region, which using the Map kinda dropped us in the middle of the snow. Var regions are like a 5 course meal. It takes a while to digest it all, and even more so when a whole group of people are trying to partake all at the same time. 
Mal.Burns: I see nothing here but snow, trees and elaborate avatars! am i missing something?
Alya VonZ: that is what I wonder to Mal:)
Thirza Ember: yep the buildings are not rezzing yet
Wizardoz Chrome: I see snow and distant trees.
TR Lifter: The School is about 1/2 mile away

          TR invited us to follow him through the Forbidden Forest, over to the great Hogwarts School. Walking through the crispy snow in the shadows, trying to keep up with the group and not get lost, was great, and it gave the viewer time to get a handle on all the prims on the region.
           This is a rare opportunity to see fine buildings without their textures, a festival of form. It is amazing that Kail Jaxxon has been able to construct in default wood texture without going cross-eyed. The detail is compelling and the photos from the films are an excellent idea. 

TR Lifter: When Kail and his business partner finish texturing this, it should be spectacular! 
George Equus: what a build...
Sunbeam.Magic: unbelievable - must be unlimited prims lol
TR Lifter: Being it is mesh, it is not too bad
Wizardoz Chrome: I'm starting to see ... beautiful
snowbody.Cortes @hg.osgrid.org: gorgeous
Thirza.Ember: wow what a room - all the paintings! This is going to be either amazingly laggy or ... just amazing

Alya.VonZ: hehe, gonna make the shifting stairs to?
Thirza.Ember: there is the dining hall that is textured and it gives you an idea of what the whole place will be like, truly an amazing job he has done, already
TR Lifter: Yup; the Great Hall ;)
alex54 Salamander: great castle
Unadecal.Masala: Bring out the Sorting Hat!
Sunbeam.Magic: r they planning on role play TR ?
TR Lifter: I think so :) Will definitely be a treat for HP fans.  We have grown as a grid with the basics; now the fun stuff starts ;)

Thirza.Ember: how long has he been working on this?
TR Lifter: About 9 months now 

 Thirza.Ember: a build this nice, worth waiting and getting the textures right I think - rubbish textures would kill it
Unadecal.Masala: totally
Billy.Bradshaw: ++
Alya.VonZ: absolutely - and all mesh, amazing:) I made some mesh builds to, but not as grand as this

TR Lifter

Unadecal.Masala: I have seen other Potter builds, all lovingly made... but none to this standard
Sunbeam.Magic: yes Potter's is very popular to do, but this one tips the scales
Wizardoz.Chrome: and what attention to detail on the tables
snowbody Cortes: Tr are the buildings in the same relative-position as they was in the movies ?
TR Lifter: Yes; everything is replicated to the T :)

          And just like that, our time was up... now if every Safari could be this smooth... Next week, havoc and crashing will resume, I'm sure.

HG Addresses

Radiola grid                     vps228543.ovh.net:9000

Zangrid                            hg.zangrid.ch:8002:HyperZan
                                       hg.zangrid.ch:8002:Partyland 

Digiworldz's Hogwarts      login.digiworldz.com:8002:muggleton 3

Safari Goes Boldly

January 23, 2016, 2:18 pm

≫ Next: Pleasure Craft

≪ Previous: Zan and the art of Hypergridding

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          The word maze means to be confused or bewildered, and may be related to Scandinavian words like mas - 'exhausting labor' and masa, a Swedish word meaning 'to be slow or sluggish'. Clearly a natural fit for any Safari.

         
The Maze on 3rdRock Grid was our first destination this week,  HG Addresses as usual at the end of the post, and if you are inworld, you can also pick them up at the Clubhouse on Teravus Paza OSrid or on our sim, hgsafari, on Francogrid. 

Isolde flys.

Zinnia.Frenzy: it's a no fly zone, no cheating! lol
Isolde Caron: i fly when i want to cause its my party.....
Sunbeam Magic: Zinnia, can you tell us something about the maze ?
Zinnia Frenzy: This is a terrain maze made by Jennifer Steele  and its going to have paintballing and huts and things added... it's a multi purpose Maze!

Art Blue gets his feet wet at the start of the Maze

Thirza Ember: Zinnia has been working hard, she has also re-vamped the 3rd Rock Grid Welcome area
Zinnia Frenzy:  Yes it was a bit dated and more for a closed grid
         That's not all, she and Kered Owl are also working on this year's ROBstock music festival, which will be in March. But we were here to be amazed by the maze, and though some of us chose to drink beer and hang out at the entrance, camming, a good few brave souls took the plunge...
George Equus: Going to get lost now....never to be seen again
Billy Bradshaw: I am not claustrophobic.. I am not claustrophobic

Zinnia and Kered Owl

          There have been some other big changes on 3rd Rock recently...
Zinnia Frenzy: Yes, we are now a Not for Profit Foundation registered in the Netherlands  And are in the process of designing a new website and reinstating the community run side of the grid.
         The goal of the foundation is firstly to "enhance human dignity in an international cultural, educational, and social exchange, modelled in an immersive virtual environment. An exchange based on  equality, empathy, respect, and compassion, and through a process of sharing, participation, and cooperation." Sounds like a pretty good basis for a community!

James Atlloud not cheating, honest

Thirza Ember: JAMES you made it out alive!
James.Atlloud: egad Yes - I only jumped a wall or two - lol
 Lucy Afarensis: The Dragon did not get you ?
James.Atlloud: No, I don't think so.
 Thirza Ember: omgosh there is another maze inside the castle!   ...this place needs at least a day to visit it would seem... no cheese, just a lot of maze
Sunbeam Magic: and Halloween stuff too
Lucy Afarensis: There is an underground maze to the east of here
Sunbeam Magic: and an very cool organ
Dolfke.Barbosa: yes the Castle hides many secrets
Sunbeam Magic: and horses but they won't let you ride them ;(
Thirza Ember: a cool organ is something we all want to see
Isolde.Caron: bah, you and your organs sunbeam....

          Definitely worth multiple visits, the fantasy regions on 3rd Rock Grid are an ideal place to pass time either alone or in company. And when you've had enough adventuring, you can always attend one of the regular concerts held throughout the week on 3rd Rock. Notices are regularly posted both inworld, at the Welcome area and on G+... so get involved!
          Speaking of music, it was Truelie week...

          Our second stop was to Spellscape Grid for a shortened Truelie Telling concert, fun as ever, she looked spectacular in her Princess dress, standing on the roof of  Pendle Castle.

The delightful Pendle Castle, no witches or tattletale children as far as I could see.

      We were present as guests of Xander Bing, the grid owner, who wanted to share with us some interesting news about a brand new kind of virtual world he is working on with some friends. 

Truelie (right) serenades Princesses and Poe on the Spellscape stop of  our Safari

          Xander and his co-creators have been very busy on a fascinating adventure in 3d code. Provisionally called the Galaxy Project, it will require a different viewer from the one we use, and that's only one of the many departures from vws as we know them...

Xander Bing: haven't got the final name, and its very early stages still but i will tell u about the basic idea, and I have some screen shots of the latest alpha release of the Galaxy viewer.    

Xander Bing: Before I get started with what it's all about, I just want to point out, its a new viewer and server, and has no connection to opensim, different server software and viewer completely. The basic idea is to create virtual worlds on a larger scale than is possible with opensim, and no borders! It should be very similar where possible to opensim, but different when it has to be for new features and such. 
Xander Bing: We have some mesh loaded... one picture you can see shows a tree we exported from opensim, it was a sculpty. Because it was sculpty it didn't export that well, but we are working on it. As you can see from the last two images, the worlds will be round, we plan on simulating planets and star systems with space travel.
Sunbeam Magic: and they said the world was flat ...
Xander Bing: the viewer will have building tools yes, at the moment its limited to just placing a model, and right now its only a tree lol, but it is very early in development as I said

Thirza Ember: We took a trip to Galaxy a few days ago, and I planted a tree, but I missed the ground... it was an air tree
Xander Bing: hehe yep, and can't move the tree after planting yet lol. The planet you see in the picture is the same size as earth, the terrain is generated procedurally and gets more detailed the closer to the surface you get.
James Atlloud: Oh wow, that's big.
Mal Burns: so now we really can send griefers into orbit
Sunbeam Magic: lol Mal
Xander Bing: yep, with or without a shuttle pod Mal lol
Carlos Loff: and can you have to planets near by and just leave one to dive into another ?
Lucy Afarensis: has a way to go then ?
Xander Bing: yes, wont be ready for awhile, still working hard and there are only 3 of us
Mal Burns: wants mega planet with lots of moons! lol

 Xander Bing: i did some math (which maybe wrong) but i think that planet has the same area as 7,775,878,906 standard SL Regions, but of course we can only run that large world at such a low cost because its empty... when you are on the surface it seems flat, but as you go higher you start to see the round sphere
Carlos Loff : so the ground is actually round but so big you wont notice.
Sunbeam Magic: incredible!
Truelie Telling: are planets shared or does each person have their own?
Lucy Afarensis: Can we take our stuff with us from opensim ?

Xander Bing: opensim models will be exportable as dae files and then can be imported to Galaxy
Mal Burns: sounds like a complex physics engine
Xander Bing: physics will not be possible server side at this scale mal, so we are going to have to use some viewer side tricks to sink things up
Thirza Ember: it surely does present some unique challenges, but also some really cool. I'm thnking every planet sill have a lot of no build ocean space....
Xander Bing: yes, any area that isn't rented and therefore is giving no income will be empty and just have the default procedural terrain with procedural trees and plants
Carlos Loff: is it possible to have 6 smaller planets instead of one mega one ?
Xander Bing: yes, planets will be any size, we also have a moon now in orbit of the main planet. The moon is new so I didn't have chance to get s screen shot. Right now all we have is a very complicated terrain system, we are just starting to get down to mesh and getting content in the worlds
Lucy Afarensis: will we be able to import OARs and IARs ? OARs could be a serious drawback
Xander Bing: not sure about that, i haven't thought about them, probably not OARs but IARs would be a great idea.. i think OAR would open a can of worms trying to get loaded
Carlos Loff: so the round planet=mainland, if I can call it that, will have gravity on every side ?

Selfie: Galaxy Thirza

Xander Bing: yes, no matter where you are on the planet, down is always in the direction of the planet center... the avatar is still a pink cube so good luck getting your pants to fit at this point lol...

           Onwards and upwards to our final stop for this week....

          Last stop was the tiny grid Relliketh home to some Bajoran roleplayers, refugees... from Second Life. 

Unadecal Masala

          Our host was Unadecal Masala, and the lovely LadyJo Martin was the DJane for a dance inside a surreal wormhole, providing a spectacular light show. We got into the groove right away as you can see! 

             There is, however much more than dancing in the solar winds on Relliketh. Of note are the fantastic Star Trek-inspired crew rooms, shuttlecraft, the holodeck and more. It is really nice to wander around and soak up the atmosphere.
           Role play is predicated on the team all being online at the same time, and the guys here seem to be for the most part based in Europe, so if that time zone is convenient for you and you want to get involved with trekkie activities, then why not sign up and get involved?

Unadecal Masala: USC Relliketh was a Bajoran centred Trek RP in SL. A few years ago we became homeless and stagnant, but 2 years ago we found out about OSGrid, so I signed up for Fibre Optic broadband, bought a bunch of second hand PCs and set up some regions in OSG

Hladson Kappler: it was quite a challenge to start up from scratch again, but we love it.
Unadecal Masala: When the Great crash of 2014 happened, I simply moved forward with a full minigrid. Virtual environments are ideal for Sci-Fi fans to explore their fandoms and let loose, and Trek is a prevalent one, along with LOTr and other fantasy genres. Hladson here is the RP chief Engineer and a very good builder too.
Hladson Kappler: I try my best!

Arrival point on Relliketh

Unadecal Masala: This is all home hosted, all 87 regions. Of course, traffic is minimal. Until today. This is what I really love about OS. We had become hobos in SL because we didn't have the big bucks, but with a minimal investment and a little ingenuity, we have a place to call home where to let our imaginations soar, build, create or simply chill out after a shit day. 

           SO true.

HG Addresses:

The Maze on 3rdRock Grid      grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002:gaul

Pendle Castle on Spellscape    grid.spellscape.co.uk:80:honeywood 

                                            the castle is at coordinates 600:400

Relliketh arrival point             rellikethgrid.ddns.net:8002

Pleasure Craft

January 25, 2016, 8:58 am

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          Congratulations to Craft, and all who sail in her, the grid turns 6 years old on Wednesday January 27 and celebrates with a party in the evening, European time, and the announcement of the results of the Annual Building Contest.
          Craft styles itself 'The Friendly Grid' and that title is well deserved. Few opensim grids can boast such a long and successful life, and the secret is assuredly the community spirit. 
          But how do you create this kind of enduring family? It starts at the top. 

Tao and Licu, taken at the 2014 anniversary party

          In 2009 Licu Rau founded Craft, along with his partner Tao Quan. Tosha Tyran and her partner, the celebrated and much missed Lumiere Noir made up the original four members, but they were soon joined by friends who had been in Second Life, or in Cyberlandia, an early Italian language opensim grid. Managing a grid, with all the hundreds of little things that can go wrong technically, socially, financially, is not work for the fainthearted, and Tao and Licu have been tireless in their pursuit of other people's happiness. 

Tao at last year's celebration

          While Licu is in charge of most of the software related issues, Tao has been a wonderful manager, design-and-builder, problem-solver, tidier-upper and question-answerer... a huge task that she has accomplished with diplomacy and style. 
            Based in Italy, Craft is a rare example of a truly international grid, with English, Italian, and German all getting equal ranking, and plenty of room made for other languages too, thanks to ties with grids around the world, in Europe and the US, Australia and even Japan.

Craft-Store

           From its inception, Craft has always been a generous grid, and (which is almost as important) well organized. The main shop on the grid is right next to the default sim, Hydra, making it easy for people to find that essential A/O or pair of shoes... times have changed, and many other grids boast fine content, but Craft's position as the go-to grid has not really changed - there are simply many more sims to visit. 

Oberon put 15k of prims on his sim in Craft. Why? Just for the heck of it.

            I joined Craft back in 2010 and had four sims there, right next to Oberon Onmura and Nicola Reinerman, two very different but exceptional creators. 

Nicola Reinerman in the garden of one of his villas. Those are my 'What was I thinking?' Capri pants.

          Back then, few people were regularly grid-hopping, but it was Tao's delight to visit other grids and she even came up with a scheme to make an Embassy sim on Craft, signs pointing to a distinct willingness to acknowledge and even foster travel, comparison, and comprehension between different worlds. 

Museo del Metaverso

            I remember too the first day we got Voice, and can boast the title of 'first person to giggle audibly on Craft'. There have been ups and downs, memorably a bit of an Inventory hiccup back in 2011, never to be repeated, and lots of comings and goings as people moved about the Metaverse, or moved on with their lives. Kindness, honesty, a readiness to admit mistakes and learn from them, these are just some of the assets that have won Licu and Tao the respect and loyalty of  their residents and 'foreign friends'.  

Michelle Tech

          Craft has grown, but in an intelligent way, not seeking merely to be the biggest, the richest, or by inflating their statistics to make themselves look more busy than they really are. It has welcomed educational and cultural builds, like Edu3d, and Roxelo Babenco's Museo del Metaverso; Michelle Tech's Mathland, and Werner Clasen's Hildesheim, as well as the group build, appropriately named sim Bel Paese, bringing together the talents of  Ger Orsini, Ana 57, Laura Benusconi, Eva Kraal, Terry Bond, Vicus Serenity, amaranta Verino, xSIBERIAx ILFREDDOPURIFICA,  xyonne fauno,  and Giliola Allen to create a regional, culinary map of Italy. These are just a handful of the myriad projects going on on Craft, from the small but beautifully imagined builds by single individuals all the way up to the Brera Academy's involvement in the grid.

Italy... il bel paese

          This post would not be complete without some words about Licu Rau. There are all kinds of grid owners, the ones who fiddle with the code and break it, the ones who are never available, suddenly disappear, or micromanage everything, the ones who are aloof, or a little bit too friendly, the ones with delusions of grandeur, or too distracted by Real Life to have a decent plan for their grid's future.  
          Licu is none of those things. This modest, patient, generous man has shepherded his grid, and the community that counts upon it, through many storms. He has done so without losing his sense of humor, or his desire to maintain a reasonably priced virtual home, a finely crafted world where people can safely build and express themselves, and share with others. I'm immensely proud to call him my friend.
          Congratulations, Tao, Licu and to all the residents of Craft.
          Please join us to honor Craft Grid's 6th Anniversary on Wednesday, January 27.

HG Address   craft-world.org:8002:suq