Kitely: somewhere and no wear

           You know that sweater in your wardrobe, no, not that expensive one you shrunk but don't have the heart to throw away, the other one, the one that's not a weird color, or too small, or anything like that, yet every time you're looking for a sweater to wear, you think no, not that one, not today.

          That's me and Kitely. But wait! Hosoi Ichiba is in Kitely, and has been for months!

          You know, there probably is a reason you don't wear that sweater, if you really think about it. Something subconscious maybe. 

With Kitely, I don't go there because of the minutes. In March 2012 I joined up and got my free sim Chocolate and it was great but only kind of great because sure, it was free and that's always nice, but you could only be present on your sim for something like 100 hours a month for free - any more than that, and you had to pay. You could go see other people's stuff - if those other people have the right kind of membership - but you couldn't hang out gratis in your own place for more than those hundred hours. Which, if you're already paying in SL, Craft and Veesome, is going to make a girl think twice.
          There was something about that concept of the tick tick tick of the meter that drained all the creativity away, too. Perhaps you're the kind of person who already has OARs prepared, or at least a plan on paper, but for those of us who like to contemplate the land and develop it slowly, 100 hours a month seemed way too few to form the basis of something like a relationship with the grid.

          Time went by and Kitely developed in my absence, and there were murmurings of neat builds like this one, and (by all accounts) great strides being made with their commercial website which hopefully is better than that dreadful one SpotOn3D had with its Double Dutch system. It speaks to the affection in which SpotOn is held that nobody could be bothered to point out to Tessa and co what 'double dutch' actually means. 
          The thing with websites and selling is, if you came to open sim to make your own stuff and occasionally share it with others, how much is a place where you buy stuff going to have you whooping for joy? If you're committed to capitalism, wouldn't you just stay in SL, or if you really have too many enemies there, go to InWorldz?

          But OK, Kitely promises they have a lot to offer, and hey, they're going to find a way to make being a commercial grid compatible with hg travel to no-money grids. Right? With lots of lovely content. And that would be good, because this is what Kitely Thirza looks like. Back in 2012 apparently Kitely noob outfits included undershirts made in Appearance. To fix that, instead of going to Kitely Market, I went for Import textures, because I have a whole store of freebie clothes on my own grid.

          Because why buy what you already have? 
          Although, I may be missing the point.
          Face and sweater, leggings and undies, easy peasy, texture uploads, all free. But when it came to shoes, there was a problem. I have neat .obj boots I made on my grid, but to import an object to a new world, you need to be somewhere you can Build, like a Sandbox. OK, there were a dozen listed on the Map. Oh dear. I tried them all, and wasn't allowed to visit any of them. OK then, perhaps my famous free-hundred-hours-a-month sim that I've barely used shall now come in handy. Taxi to sim Chocolate, right away!

          Newp.
          You may say - 'Things changed while you were away.' and 'Kitely is obviously looking for consumers, not freebie hunters and the self-sufficient.' or 'They're looking for commitment, not people passing through, you're just not their target audience,' or 'Get some KC, you cheapskate.' Maybe.
          I kept thinking of fried chicken.
          So, OK, give up on the hair and the shoes and the earrings and other goodies of my own invention that would typically be my first uploads to a new grid. Let's just be a barefoot traveler, and go in search of Edo villages.

            Years ago, my mother would make us all go and spend Easter with an old aunt who had a sprawling house and garden in the country. Dad would sort out the vegetable patch, Mom would get the spring cleaning done, and the children would help out with both. Auntie was glad enough for the help, and we were on our best behavior. She was a nice old bird but she had the irritating habit of switching off lights all the time. If you went from sitting room to library to get a book for five minutes, you'd find the light switched out in the sitting room when you returned. The same if you went to the loo at night, you'd come out of the bathroom to find the corridor bathed in darkness. It was a pessimistic, penny pinching, claustrophobic habit not caused by a shortage of money, but a reaction you often find in people who have lived through Tough Times. It paid off in a way, for when she died, the Donkey Sanctuary got enough money to keep the lights on in the stables for another ten years.
          The 'on demand' feature of Kitely gives that same rather depressing sense of everything being in darkness until it's absolutely essential to turn something on. True, the Hosoi Mura sims loaded very quickly, but there was something of my old auntie about the process.

          But the build is a joy. The Matsumoto castle, the gardens, the hiroba, the walls and the houses, the countryside with fields and hills, even the spare buildings, hovering just off the ground as though waiting for aliens to take them off to another planet, it's all so well made, and charming. True, a 9 or 16 sim build is not the big deal in open sim that it would be in SL, but Ami has made excellent use of the wide open spaces. It feels like a real place. Once that 'wait for me to turn the lights on' feeling has passed.

          Walking around was cool, but there weren't any poses or moving vehicles and with no interactivity, it wasn't long before I started wondering what else there might be to see.

          A number of SL friends have set up homes and builds in Kitely, and one name came to mind, as a possible source of good places to visit. Opening her profile, it was kind of disappointing to find the Picks closely resembled her Facebook posts - nothing more than a long tribute to Self. Unappealing. When someone lavishes that much public love and attention on their own creations, there really is no room left for the rest of us to admire it without feeling a bit sick.
          Back to the Map, then, as a source of inspiration.

          Back to Evergreen? That sighing, slightly long-suffering little grey window 'oh, ok, if you really must, just a second, and we'll turn it on' message again. I felt guilty at making them waste the electricity, and decide not to go after all.

            But then Woot ! The Map and I got lucky and found Time Vault, a region by Paislee Myrtle, one of the Devokan storytellers. It loaded pretty fast, and was way nicer than my dim recollections of Evergreen.

          Nobody around doing RP or anything, thank goodness, (good lord, memories of Grimmrfell! Urk!) Instead, a strange, thundery landscape and fabulous flights of alien fancy, with steampunkesque buildings and mechanisms littering the land.

           This might be turning a corner. The never-worn sweater might become a favorite after all! More hunting for regions on the Map, and pretty soon it yielded another big build, Brian Robert's Dragon's Bane. Tp!

          No, sadly no Bane for Thirza. The same thing happened about ten more times.
          Sigh. Well OK, you know what, all this faffing about sticking a pin in the map, it's not the way to do things. Every grid has its Welcome sim, where all is made clear, and newcomers or prodigal sons can return and be made, well, welcome. Let me and Kitely give each other a proper chance in the orthodox manner. Wow, and maybe I'll even find an A/O and a pair of shoes! Yay! I am still not giving up on Kitely!
          Oh noes...

          Except Welcome Area is only for Premium Accounts.
          OK, OK, hold on, there's a Welcome 2, maybe that's for folks like me...  shows they don't know me well, if they've got me down as Moderately Mature.  Although, I did find the Edo village moderately interesting, so perhaps they're partly right. Let me pop the whole thing back in the wardrobe.
          Aren't Paislee's mushrooms nice, though?

What dreams may come: FrancoGrid

         Pixel for pixel, Francogrid is probably the most beautiful grid in the metaverse. If you enjoy art or are involved in education, or heck, just want to be somewhere with a gallic flavor as deliciously diverse as baguettes, Chanel number 5 and Veuve Clicquot, then this may be the grid for you.
          Praline Barjowski is an artist, researcher and curator. She works with African artists, getting them involved in digital creativity, and was based in Dakar when she first learned about SL via an artist she met at a conference in Marseilles. That was in 2009. The jump from SL to Francogrid was a natural one... for a researcher.
Praline B: I realized that the most resources were in English and I'm in a French zone, and my students are French speaking, and also I'm involved in open source system, so I did a research and I found OpenSimulator and FrancoGrid. I came here for the first time in 2010 and at the same time I discovered hypergrid. Open simulator is a very different way to move but very interesting. I feel me more free here to create, it's also more experimental and that adds something more pepsy !  and yes, I feel more at home too. And I have this mad dream, lolol, that Linden Labs decides to go to open source, to liberate their code and to be a part of the huge metaverse.

         Dream on.
         It's very attractive, this businesslike approach to art.  Everything above board, designed for low levels of pointless drama and high levels of real world exposure, with a strong sense of respect for creator's rights. The goal, one guesses instantly, is to be taken seriously in a world where playing about online is still often viewed with derision and suspicion. The whole grid is that way, and it came as no surprise to find that Praline is a bit of a tech person, as well as an art person.
 Praline B: Well, here I'm studying code, I'm learning how to manage a Linux server. It's funny but not so easy for someone who is always dreaming! The first time i got a pc, I de-constructed it immediately. I think I'm very curious, I love to know how things are inside, so naturally now I want to know how is the backstage of a virtual world. For now here, I don't have artwork, I have an archipelago of regions.

        The regions are going to be home to a number of virtual artists, principally coming from West Africa, via her MetaTrame project. Diversity, and a different 'look' are the hallmarks of Francogrid, and that's obvious from your first arrival at Accueil sim, seen above, recently re-worked by Cherry Manga and the wonderful, beautiful DJ Phil who you can see in the last picture as a very adorable white bunny!
         The the big blue blob is a cave that contains TP machines and a 'Guide to the regions' that owners can update  with their latest developments. It also shows if a region is offline, which in opensim, is a handy tool, since teleporting is a little bit hit and miss.
         So, which is better, SL or FG?
Praline B: I think both are good. Diversity is a very great thing  disadvantage is definitely the closed side. Its like a frontier. Also the fact that your art , your objects are not yours. that is a mistake from LL. You have to let people improve new system, new territories and they will learn how to be nice and ethic. I always think that we have to be trusty there will be always bad people but SL is always a very amazing place for artists, creators, because they can have a feedback quickly they have a public in opensim, this is the disadvantage, population is less you may feel sometimes alone but you may experiment more things here, you may push the limits Here at FrancoGrid, this is a community very newcomer friendly and people help participate to your projects you don't have to be good in script or all the stuff.

This is monsieur le president, ssm2017 Binder (no, I'm too shy. You ask him!)  He was on his way to the weekly grid get-together on LeVillage sim, which if you're planning on coming to check out the lie of the land, would be a good thing to attend. It's every Wednesday evening, French time - that's 9 pm in Europe and midday in California - I leave you to do your own math. And it's village life, but not a grey concrete arena or hopelessly huge theater that dwarfs rather than embraces the group. It's another Cherry Manga build.

          OK it is grey, and it is huge. But in good ways. No rows of samey cinema seats. No stale poses.  That alien is the lovely Gill. Wave! No, not the giant figure below, on the box, which is actually a building. LeVillage in its various incarnations has inspired machinima by people you've heard of like Morlita Quan and WizardOz Chrome. Sounds like a cleaning product, actually a film maker.  Which raises the question - where does Francogrid stand in relation to the SLuggernaut?

ssm2017 Binder: in FrancoGrid, there are some people from the art, from education, from research etc... actual FrancoGrid residents are in a sharing point of view instead of mercantile.
         Which is the sexiest way ever of saying they're not in it for the moolah.
         Now, you may be thinking, sheesh Cherry Manga is all over that grid like a rash. Is there room there of other artists? Or has she kind of bagged the big stuff? Well, she knows you might think that, so - let's ask her - " Hey Cherry, is there room for other voices on Francogrid?"
Cherry Manga: Of course there is, see, I just gave the opportunity to JadeYu Fhang to try opensim by giving her my region, childhood, and there are other projects like Praline's, Metatrame which will involve African artists. I personally think that artists bring something important to any grids- candies for the eyes. They make us think about how combine visual effect with ideas. I am not here to be THE ONE Thirza, you know, if I was looking for art lovers recognition, I would stay in SL. Here most people don't care about my art :)
         So there. Speaking of other art, Praline was keen for Katia from Parc des Arts to show her stuff, and immensely impressive it is too. The organization is based in real life Bordeaux, France, and it is all about real working artists showing their stuff both in virtual and physical environments. Katia is a stunner in palest blue. 

         This is their clubhouse and the photos behind her are the founding members. They have that whole 'this is serious stuff' down at the Parc des Arts (unlike artsparks, yeah yeah) and these two sims are just stuffed with things to see and spaces for performance and exhibition. 
         Don't be alarmed if your French isn't up to much. This is an International grid, and they are very accommodating; Katia's good at Italian as well as French, and of course many others like Praline and Cherry are perfectly fluent in English (and typonese).

          Again, everything is designed with panache. Here in this beach-grunge outdoor hangout, last year, they had an evening with a two-handed performance piece called La Planque (watch it here on youtube) by Arlette Fétat with Myriam Douhi. The playwright came into Francogrid to talk to the audience, how cool is that. Katia also showed us the work of engraver and painter Julien Schuster whose March 2014 art show in Honfleur Normandy will be echoed by a parallel exhibition in Francogrid. Tere's a neat little news stand on Parc des Arts where you can pick up more info about all the events here, and tp to regions in different parts of the metaverse where art rules supreme.

         Praline is right, it's this kind of organization with room for diversity that makes the difference. Katia actively encourages independent artists on the grid, and they make a point of showing up to see exhibitions, and offering landmark links to shows and installations, wherever they may be in opensim.
Praline B: What I love here is this mix between reality and new creative territories. Also, its very important , to feel you are not alone, to feel friends around you. You may stay alone and work and you may have them around you for all discussions around your doubts! I really enjoy the spirit around Frangogrid, people here knows what they want, be happy in their projects and share this happiness and in the build, you have always people to help you, to push you more further.

         Another aspect of Parc Des Arts is the big AIDS memorial. It's a reminder, as Katia said, of the people who haven't made it, love ones lost... but also a celebration of the ones still fighting, still fighting in elegant clouds of red. Extremely effective. On the other side, the 'protected' obelisk that reminds us all that this is a very French grid. I totally love it.

         Terra Mater is Cherry's home sim, scroll through in this blog and you'll find a post about it ages back. It's another great feature of Francogrid, well of open sim in general. You've got the space to keep up builds that in SL would have to come down for reasons of space. 

          Here, Cherry can maintain a big install like Red Riding Hood (built for SL in collaboration with soror Nishi and Fragile Fanou, as well as her Collection, and still have room for more. Cherry's latest venture is learning anough Blender to make all her own mesh and leave the full perm sculpties and mesh of the past behind her. But art breeds art, doesn't it? Perhaps more installs, and photography, or machinima?
Cherry Manga: I think la collection is one old work I like still thinking it's like wine, goes good with time lol.  I don't want to inspire art, but creativity, I want people imagine they can be free from reality here, physics, imagination, there's no limit. I wish people creative and dreamy, not specially arty.
Praline B: Cherry Manga absolutely has a great impact on the grid. She is very strong and her artwork talks for her.  I think that opensim and Francogrid  gave Cherry a new boost. Here she has the time to learn more technical stuff and with her talent is amazing. 

omg DJ Phil he is such a hot bunny

         So, what is the future for Francogrid? More art, more fun, more family! They also encourage all to make an avatar here, so you can enjoy Voice in all its splendor. There are some things hypergridding doesn't quite do right. 
Praline B: I think that is the magic side of this grid if someone is a true one a real creator, all the grid is under the charme. That gives to the community the desire to put the level more high and that is a very good thing, that is what i was expected here.  I think we will see the same phenomena in opensim now because of LL politic for one part and in another part because open simulator is now more efficient. ssm our President confirms that he would love that we have here at Francogrid one region for permanent exhibits and one devoted to the artist in residency; a season for exhibits and artists in residency here.
         So might that be you, the 'artist in residence?' Might be worth a thought.... and in the meantime, drop in on this exquisite grid and its happy denizens.   

Artz and Mindz : Visions of InWorldz

O Canada

        If you like visions of flight, then you should get over to  InWorldz  soon to see the latest edition of the Dreamz & Visionz Art Festival. This time the theme is 'Wings' and there are some diverse, beautiful and thoughtful installations. This delicious mind game is called 'Cloud's Gate' by Ub Yifu. 

The 'Wings' in this case bring to mind a Du Maurian anxiety; should the avatar take the plunge, and where, beyond the swirling dark security of the little house, will that cloudy leap take him? Is there anywhere to go? Like so much of Ub's art, which continues to bring enduring pleasure in Second Life too, of course, you're going to want to experience it for yourself to get the full inner effect. Videos and photos are great, but nothing beats being there. 

         And 'there' in this case are the four exhibition sims where Jeri Rahja, with help from curator quadrapop tree has been holding Dreamz & Visionz shows since late 2011. At first it seems the idea was to hold a once-a-year event, but it was so popular now they do them three or four times a year, this being the third Fantasy Festival. 

quadrapop tree: The D&V Art Exhibitions started out as judged shows with 3 residents being asked to review all the work and so we had winning entries as well as participation awards. There were also people's choice awards for one year. We are now doing only participation awards which are a share of the total tips received. All moneys for the awards comes from tips made by visitors and some sponsors (most of whom wish to remain anonymous but who want to truly support the arts in IW)
        So everyone's a winner, which is nice. Quadrapop, seen here in Male mode, is of course an artist too, and has a big gallery complex called Dolphin Bay, which is full of treasures, both home-made and belonging to other artists, including an Arcadia Asylum collection and a space for Tuna. Quad also does lectures from time to time on textures and windlight and that kind of thing. A vibrant mass of color greets the visitor, and with 14 tps to choose from at the landing spot alone, there is no reason to get bored on Dolphin Bay! 

        Coming back to the Festival, though, it was interesting to hear how quadrapop came to choose InWorldz after leaving Second Life.
quadrapop tree: In 2010 Linden labs sacked the 1/3 of their workforce who actually cared about the residents, many Lindens who I knew or who had championed things I cared about were gone and so was their voice within the company. This along with continued lack of effective communication between Linden Lab and SL residents prompted me to look for alternatives. I decided that LL would not get any more of my IP. IW came up as the best option for me of the OS Grids available at the time.

        Next to Ub Yifu's install, there's another engaging sculpture, this time by Maximillian Svarovski. Tiles narrate an ascent, a sort of hard-scrabble progression through stages of flight, undercut by the enveloping cage. One wonders if the figure knows it's closed in, or if it minds. 
        With four sims and a whole sky full of stuff, you will enjoy a visit to the exhibition, but I'm going to say it: a couple of the builds were too scary for me to take pictures of. Go over there and see if you can see which ones...
        Any builder or artist moving out of one world and into another has to face the challenges of rebuilding Inventory, sourcing extras like mesh, animation and sound components, and the dreaded Script Gap, in which scripts that worked just fine in Second Life give all kinds of horrible errors in other worlds. How had that been for quadrapop? (this is q in lady mode.) Not too bad, on the whole.
quadrapop tree: The odd script might not work (mostly because the SL script engine forces scripters to use workarounds that are not necessary here) and occasionally you might meet a scripting function that is not fully implemented - however unlike SL if that happens here you can file a support ticket or speak up about your problem in the IW Scripting Forum and have the grid devs either implement the function or explain how or why they can't, usually a case of yet rather than never). However all the scripts I am likely to use work fine - in fact since Phlox (the IW script engine Tranq rewrote from scratch) was introduced scripts run so much faster that this removed yet another lag issue which has plagued SL for as long as it existed. When I moved to IW I decided to start from scratch - the only thing i brought with me was textures. I've not attempted to import anything from SL and my work does not rely heavily on scripting. So for me the move to IW has been painless. I know there have been hiccoughs for some over the years but in all cases the issues were resolved as quickly as the small team can manage - often within days. Some things like vehicle physics got held up by higher priority issues and it is the concentration on the basics and string foundations by Tranq and the team of devs that inspired me to choose this grid over any other.

         Across the water from Ub and Maximillian's builds is Mira Karu's off-the-page feathery fantasy. Pegasus presides over the leaves of books, as light and illuminating as the ideas they spawn in the mind of the great wire man. Also there is a very nice umbrella, but you're going to have to figure that part out for yourself. 

        Coming back into InWorldz after many months elsewhere did feel a bit odd. This Thirza is fourth or fifth eldest out of 14 different Thirzas created over the past six years to visit various worlds that all required, back then, a grid-specific avatar, so you can imagine how small and old her inventory is, yet the feeling of difference wasn't just the crazy looking hair. (As a side note, worrying about your avatar appearance has its place, but it's a limited one, and when people start going on about 'honing' or 'inhabiting' their avatar, it's very hard not to be creeped out, often to Lovecraftian proportions, regarding what that suggests about their real life appearance.)  Coming out of open sim, it is also kind of depressing to be on a closed grid again, where you can't just tp from home to home to home on half a dozen wild and woolly grids; it's sad to be in a place where the norm is paying for stuff (gosh, paying tier! remember that?) and where it's considered a semi-big deal to let others use your land rent-free. 
        I know many InWorldz residents consider themselves in 'open sim', which technically maybe it is, though it's a closed world. But it's a bit like when someone says they've 'been abroad a lot' and then you find out they mean they've been to Canada, not Fiji or Istanbul. Not that there is anything wrong with Canada. Nor is there anything wrong with InWorldz being the cheaper, broader, saner northern neighbor of Second Life. Better, quite likely, but not really 'abroad', and hey, that might be exactly what you're looking for.
        A nice thing happened. By sheer lucky chance, Kapi Kinder was in world. This is his build. He said he'd seen me at Pirats years ago, which seemed apposite as this is a very Pirats-reminiscent build. 

        He said the installation was about planet earth, about what we humans are doing to it. The figures flying around prompted to me to ask if they were 'earth angels' . It was a  silly superficial remark, but look at his reply - a poetic explanation not only of his own build, but a picture of what is at the heart of all artistic communities, wherever they may be. 
   kapi kinder: i can tell you what happened to me ...so you will understand....at list the angel parts
   kapi kinder: almost a year ago i broke 1 rip 1 leg 1 hand and was half way to heaven
   kapi kinder: some how  i got ability to make a call so they found me and i survive
   kapi kinder: very simple
   kapi kinder: i am still recovering... but  it give new prospective how fragile we are.
Wings, a Dreamz & Visionz Art Festival, starts February 7 in InWorldz.

Craft Turns Four

Tonight was the big party on Craft, celebrating the grid's fourth anniversary with a building competition, a ceremony and of course a knees-up. There were 23 of us, by the end, and I don't think a single one of us didn't get kicked off the grid, or the sim, at least once during the night, although (as always happens) it got much much easier once the speeches were over and the prizes all handed out.
At the beginning though, the lag was eye-watering, and did scary things to some of the guests.
I've never seen a clustersit quite like this one.

Taking photos was challenging, between the clouds and the mesh and the grays popping in and out but it felt all very familiar and deliciously nostalgic. 

About an hour after I got there, the prizes were awarded. Debbie Lighthouse took third place, Rumegusc Altamura came in second and Dade Catronis got first place...  but they're all winners on Craft, not because the grid doesn't occasionally shrug everyone into temporary oblivion, but because when it does, you just have to go back. That is the secret of the grid, the sense of loving community, and they know it.
Tosha Tyran: Craft is the place where I feel at home, can wander about, meet the nicest bunch of people and can build all I want to build :) and I love it to be absolutely non-commercial! I am here since the very beginning and have seen it grow and become the nice place it is now - and I feel very proud of having participated in the making of this wonderful grid.

Another long-time resident is Ger Orsini, and he is proud of the way the grid has been growing, especially since this last summer, and has been sought out by educational initiatives like edu3d.
Ger Orsini: Craft is what Italy ought to be like, and not just in this time of economic crisis. Here we help one another!

Prize-winning teacher Michelle Tech seen above has been here three years and loves it too. Hey try out your translating skills! There will be a quiz at the end.
Michelle Tech: Io sono entrata qui in corrispondenza del primo anniversario. C'era una grande esposizione dei lavori e subito ho capito l'ottimo livello tecnico quiil mio ingresso qui ha fatto si che potessi utilizzare i mondi virtuali per la didattica. C'era una grande esposizione dei lavori e subito ho capito l'ottimo livello tecnico qui. Il mio ingresso qui ha fatto si che potessi utilizzare i mondi virtuali per la didattica perchè la comunità aveva quello spirito di condivisione delle conoscenze che mi ha aiutato.

Blogger, 'builder'  and collector Virtual Christine hasn't been here as long as many, but she's here to stay. She has a collection of Arcadia Asylum treasures that makes her the envy of the metaverse, and it's on display right here in Craft at Monte Gorgo.
virtual christine: I chose Craft, because had I not stumbled onto this grid and met GeR and Licu and Tao, I would have left OpenSim and never come back!  I have been here two years.  I have gone from having a region full of junk  to having  the first Arcadia Asylum museum in OpenSim! Craft actually donated an extra region to the museum, instead of saying 'make it smaller!!' They dumb things down and give me articles to read They never complain no matter what crazy bullshit Shawn and I try. To someone like me, with virtually no technical knowledge, Craft has been a godsend. I tell EVERYONE to try Craft first on the hypergrid. This grid has a tremendous amount of heart and soul. It is an honor to be here, with these people.

Well done, Licu and Tao. May they bask in this much deserved praise, and may their Craft go on virtually forever!
And now, some more dancing!

Life's Illusions: the end of Cloud Party

I really don't know clouds at all

Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell

Cloud Party is closing because they got busted by the WWF for allowing residents to shoot transgender unicorns. OK, that may not exactly be what happened, sigh, it may just a boring money thing. I bet that's what it was. You can find out what happened here because Maria Korolov and her team are all over it.
It's been ages since Thirza went into Cloud Party, so it's all my fault, and yours too, you bastard, for not creating a paying account or whatever it is that would have kept it afloat. 

It seemed only right to pop back in. 

Got my little paradise island, messed with all the settings as you do, managed to actually flip the land upside down and ended up trapped underneath it. 

Then followed a tremendous battle with the camera, I heroically resisted all offers of help, tutorials and common sense.  

In the end, I broke down and gave the tutorials a shot, but I hate learning new viewers and I hate the hair. 

If they'd had less greasy hair, this thing would have been the next SL, as so many gnomes predicted it would be, as recently as last year.

It is amazing how much your avatar appearance matters. Arrive in a grid, and the first half hour is spent - wasted, really - on not looking like an idiot or at least attempting the same. Grid builders beware! make quality skins and clean hair available to all!

There were a few builders on, they were commenting on the end of an era. Someone said 'what am I going to do with the 15 Cloud Coins I still have!' but she was only joking. They can't be cashed out, but then again, you play, you pay, right? Someone else said that maybe Kickstart could save Cloud party; someone else set up a forum as to 'where to go next'. This is a community in meltdown, after all. I asked them where they were planning on going when CP closed. Open sim seemed the number one choice.
Jesse Thompson suggested some places worth seeing before the build closed so I went to check them out. The first was Rustica by Maxwell Graf , which failed to load. Maybe it's already packed up in the artist's portfolio. 

I tried Failed Inventor's Land of Lulz next, which Jesse said should have some content (in fact there was pathos in the "work in Progress' doormat to the fort. It has a Legoland meets Minecraft look about it, and while the structure was interesting, there was not anything to do - and indeed why should there be?

Ylvis: The Fox by Emma Wordsmith was more engaging. Unlike SL or elsewhere, youre avatar is immediately grabbed by the build and involved in the action. 

No clicking on Blue permission windows here! The foxy dancing was a sequence of poses, colors and magical cutouts (there were horses, but I was too slow to get a screenshot of them. Plus I was having too much fun.) It has a brilliant chilling misty pagan feel about it.

Into the dark by Lilli Thompson again throws you in at the deep end. A dark night, and yours is the only lamp. No boring atmosphere-ruining notecard with an overblown explanation. A forest of dead trees, with one live one in the middle, and these creatures, white, mysterious, perhaps bunnies, perhaps wolves, that follow you. It took me ages to realize they wanted me to take them to the tree, and I ended up tarrying on the build, trying to lead them. This build makes an instant and genial connection to your inner nature. The dark simplicity makes it literally enchanting. 

There were quite a few visitors on CP today, no doubt, like me and Cody Rhapsody, all had heard the news and were wondering what they had missed. Everyone I spoke to seemed to have presences either in SL or open sim or both. Like we were all remembering a garden shed we'd neglected for years, and now that it was collapsing, wanted to check out what had been stored in there. 

Sarah Kline very kindly suggested I visit Reflection by Ashara and perhaps this build above all suggests the 'Post Photo to Facebook' imperative that seemed central to the raison d'etre of CP. There are loads in Picasa now, and probably everyone's look the same, but in the moment, it feels like you've captured a moment. As minutely unique, and vastly unrepeated as the sea.

 Jesse Thompson very kindly also told me about his own build Tartarus, which is fantastically spooky. I have no idea how they do this particle effect, but it's great.

 That yellow stuff may be toxic sludge, or the blood of Yahoo users, it's not clear. Definitely the Tomb of the Unknown Startup, though.

Another great suggestion was Misfit Toys by Phate Shepherd, which reminded me a bit of Cornflakes Woodcook in OSGrid. Same sense of humor and love of the wheel-of-death style ride.  
 Gosh and I got to sit down! for the first and, wow, sad to say, last time in Cloud Party. What will happen to the blue dog? Do they have a blue section in dog heaven?

Lastly, I couldn't miss out on our old friend Patrick Moya's builds. The ultimate party animal, how could he not have a strong presence in Cloud Party?  There is a strong latex vibe in this build which is, somewhat ironically, a museum. 

It is sad that CP is going away, and hopefully as Cody said, they'll make their code open source, so others can build and learn from what they have done, and maybe that blue doggie will get another life.On the whole, one gets the feeling that even for the hard-core partygoers, the end of the world is not - the end of the world, if you see what I mean. All virtual lives are an illusion, after all. The learning curve these builders have followed in Cloud Party will feed into a great river of experience, which will live on in open sim (I hope most of all!) and in SL and other worlds too. 

What remains is just to thank all those creators who have invested so much imagination and talent into making lovely things for us to see, and to remember to appreciate what we have when we have it.

Dorena's World, and The Singing Sands

Depending on the day, hypergridding is five parts serendipity, four parts tenacious determination, and two parts swearing. There was no particular reason to hypergrid to Dorena's World yesterday, except that it's always easier to jump on a weeknight when the voodoo gods of internet provision are at their most beneficent, ie nobody's in the house sucking up my bandwidth watching videos of One Direction and Violetta. Don't even ask.
Dorena's World (URI:  dorenas-world.de:8002:Nihilon) has been around for a long time, in virtual terms. I've been through here before a few times, and always found it empty, so it was quite exciting to see three avatars were in world, among them the actual Dorena!

Dorena Verne and Anachron Young met in SL, and ended up getting together in RL. They built this grid about four years ago as a sort of hideaway, but now share it with over a hundred friends.
The grid took ages to load, then sim-to-sim tp'ing wouldn't work, then there was some freezing, then some crashing and having to re-start my journey from my home grid, jumping through Hyperica Lower (I don't know why they insist they've fixed that 4095 bug, because the latest Kokua and Singularity viewers both still show me the 'No go' message). When I got back to Dorena's World for maybe the third time, I was in the presence of Dorena  and  Anachron. They could see me, but all I could see was deep endless blue sea water, although when I'd seen them for a millisecond on my first arrival, they were in a fairly conventional living room. Knowing I'd probably crash again, I got some quick questions in about the grid, this way in the 7-8 minutes it would take me to come back, they could think of some really good answers. Stuff like: had they found it hard to make their own grid, and what's the greatest satisfaction it gives them? Anachron answered as his English appeared to be the best.
Anachron Young: It took a while to get into making our own grid, but some experience in computers and network technology proved helpful. The best thing is we don't depend on other commercially interested companies. We are a big family, and care for each other.
Well, that's about all I found out. I did ask what I know you're wondering, 'what's up with the people wanting to live at the bottom of the sea?' Apparently, they don't know.

When it comes to events, this week is a good time to visit, because they're celebrating their 4th anniversary and in fact tonight at 10pm they'll be holding a guided tour. They have a bi-weekly dance night on Tuesdays, from 8pm European time, and I would have liked to know more in general about their philosophy regarding community events, because as you're aware that Hypergridding is a slow, serendipitous, open-ended activity. Anachron dismissed me with a link (I hate when people do that) http://www.gridtalk.de which you'll not be surprised is all in German. It would also have been cool to get a picture because by now I'd finally rezzed on dry land, at a spot of high ground overlooking the town. Fearing that a point-to-point TP would once again screw things up, I asked if they could kindly come up on the hill for a 2 minute photo-shoot. They couldn't. They were off to SL. So that's all folks.
Here's the thing with hypergridding. It's all about patience. After those four or five false starts, the problems melted away. It may also have been that the three avies on the grid had taken off by then; that sometimes helps. Time to sight-see; there were some rough patches when crossing sim borders, but no more freezing and the crashing.
The grid has an old-world SL feel in many ways, primmy, not meshy, so if you have to fall back on Imprudence Viewer (my ancient but remarkably stable HG viewer of choice) you'll not miss out on much. One of the oldest things to see is a picture-show of, let's call it 'Big builds in the real world' (real, and a bit legendary) on sim Anachronia.

Then Vanish appeared.
Vanish Seriath (sometimes Vanish Sands) has been playing music since he was 6, and started playing the guitar at 15. he had a band, the name of which has followed him into virtual worlds: TGIB which is The Grey In Between, but also The Good In Bad and a host of other things. He did a show here in Dorena's World a few days ago, performing on this stage. I missed it, but he has several more coming up, notably in OSGrid (on Events Plaza) on February 16th, and in Metropolis on March 7th.
Apparently all the cool kids of open sim are in Google+ nowadays with explains eloquently why I know jack squat about what is going on; if you'd like to have Vanish come perform his music on your grid, you should look for him there.
Vanish.Sands: I've been writing my own stuff since 1999, so far about 60 songs or so. Much of that predates Virtual Worlds, and I'm really pretty embarrassed about many of them.   Since I've been in Virtual Worlds, I've been writing some poems, and lots of musings and stuff about VW, but no songs so far.  But honestly, the cool thing is that here I can play for audiences from all over the world, which is really the best part of being a musician.

With his partner El Firecaster, Vanish inhabits a fairy-tale grid called TGIB (of course) This is the terrace on The Loom. All the sims have poetic names; the grid is semi-private, but if you get the chance to go over there, I highly recommend it. It is a magnificent confection of light and space. It's one of the first places I visited back in the good old days of Pathfinder and the Hypergrid Adventurer's Club. So many grids fall into the trap of replicating the boring concrete boxes of the real world - actually a lot of them are worse than RL architecture, let's be honest - but this place is a fluid fantasy, a symphony of sinuous curves at twilight.

Vanish came to open sim after two years in SL, where he had been a fee-paying sim owner. Out of curiosity, he experimented with an early copybot, to understand how it worked, and got banned. The adventure had begun.
Vanish Sands: That was back in 2009. The biggest differences I've seen in open sim since then are the thousands of bugfixes that make it as stable as it is today. I don't want to sound like I'm talking about how things were back in the war, but man... it was rough. Other than that, I really like the way the hypergrid works now.
As you know Vanish runs OpenSim Creations, an excellent online resource for free content.
Vanish Seriath: We've grown roughly double the last year, both in terms of items, as well as in terms of users. Right now, we get about 5000 visits per day, which puts us in the upper spots of OpenSim related sites. There's about 1500 items and they've been downloaded about 250.000 times.
I wondered how he deals with the age-old problem of provenance on his site. You know, people in SL claiming their stuff has been ripped off and is 'selling' in open sim.
Vanish Sands: Hm. As a provider, I don't check. There's several reasons for that:
          1. I can't possibly know every single item in SL and whether or not someone has the right to upload it to OSC. 
         2. Even if I did, it's really not my job to police the site. That's the police's job.
         And 3. I would put myself in harm's way if I did so, because it could be held against me when someone does something wrong. Like: "Why didn't you remove this item when you say you're checking them; it's clearly infringing." There were a few court cases that went terribly wrong because someone gave the impression that they were actively policing items and then something slipped through. I'm kinda professionally interested in copyright law, so I keep track of all manner of stuff like that.
So what is available on the website?
Vanish Sands: We definitely have a lot of buildings, like houses and such. And all manner of oddities. Avatar accessories and clothes not so much, so those are always needed. The most popular item is a butterfly generator, which is basically just a scripted box that emits butterfly particles, but people seem to love it.  I made a small shop for myself, which is going better than I thought it would, so that's a plus. What I want to do more is make OpenSim items more attractive to merchants, i.e. creators who try to make some sort of income off them. I've started a site where you can click yourself a shop to sell your items online, but so far it didn't get a whole lot of attention. I guess the Kitely Market will be the place to go.
Having your own grid is a bit like having your own tardis. You can keep all kinds of stuff in there.
Vanish Sands: Mmmh, want me to show you something?
Thirza.Ember @tunderbird.dyndns-ip.com: sure
Vanish Sands: You remember AM Radio from SL?
Thirza.Ember @tunderbird.dyndns-ip.com: i do
Vanish Sands: WEll, hold on.Let's go to a region called "surface".
Vanish Sands: When he announced he would leave SL, it broke my heart to think that his artwork would just be gone, so I made a backup for myself.
Thirza.Ember @tunderbird.dyndns-ip.com: just lovely. This is the beauty of having your own place
Vanish Sands: I know. I loved his items so much.
Thirza.Ember @tunderbird.dyndns-ip.com: it makes me laugh when you hear in SL the artists squabbling about one poxy sim in the LEA
Vanish Sands: Haha, yeah. I've got about 6 sims full of his stuff. And with the power of OARs I can load them whenever I want.
Thirza.Ember @tunderbird.dyndns-ip.com: "with the power or oar". I like it.
If you'd like to read more, go to TGIB is the blog of Vanish and El, with lots of musings, fashion thoughts, philosophical ramblings networking and techie advice, and/or follow him on Twitter. There is a nice article by Johnny Waugh about Vanish here  - hey! that's my photo of Vanish, John you picture bandit! I tell you, these open sim people.... shocking.