A Safari Year

 What a year it's been! The Safari started up in January, in the usual timeslot, Wednesdays from 12 noon SLT, but with a new sim on OSGrid courtesy of Ange Menges. The immediate response by old fans and new of the weekly group hypergridding concept was great - thank you all. 

Prodyck, Lux, Frank and Truelie

The more familiar clubhouse on Francogrid had become unworkable - just teleporting to the grid had become difficult, and regions would often be unavailable for days. The heart of the problem was an issue with server hosts, and as much as Francogrid was the home of the Safari, it seemed unlikely to have a future there.

For that reason, I got busy immediately with porting most of the Safari's Francogrid assets over to other grids. 

Aphra, Cherry, Lifted Pixel, and Mal

It was a time consuming process, with permissions and scripts playing up a lot of the time due to

Mouse Look

 If you like ice and mice and gnomes and Hunts with useful gifts, then the upcoming OSGrid hunt by Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges - an opensim season stretching back a decade! - is for you.

The sim's name is Khione, a wintry figure from Greek Mythology - daughter of an Athenian princess and the North Wind - who has risen to fame thanks to the Percy Jackson novels. But let's stick to openim ... this Hunt as always begins with a little backstory and aHUD, supplied by the Snowman.Use the HUD to find the next place to go. 

Bugged out

You've got one. We all do.

It's not a Big Mac, and it's not an Apple Mac. It's not even a rain mac.

But it is a MAC. 

This is the definition by some dudes at Bluecat  ...  Either you already know this, or else you don't care. Why should you? Well, ordinarily, no reason, but for your hypergridding pleasure it may be at issue. Because people are getting banned.

Take the lovely Eva Noir, the least bannable person in opensim, probably. Sweet, creative, helpful, respectful of all. 

Yet she got the heave-ho from a grid I won't mention (there were LoTR elements to the build, so that leaves the field wide open) because I'm at my legal limit of 'European dramedy' this week.

Those of us who get a lot of haters and dufuses in our Chat would probably just shake the dust from our feet and move on at the mere mention of being banned/blocked, but -dear grid owners- please take a moment to think before you just ban the ass of some poor soul. They may be completely innocent, and the experience of being banned can be quite traumatic. 

You're under a lot of stress, sure, but let's try to be civil.

Anyway, Eva reported this situation to Licu Rau, opensim guru and owner of Craft grid, and it turns out that, thanks to some kind of bug going around, multiple people are showing up as having the exact same MAC - physical address. So if you travel with a pal, as Eva did, both of you appear to be on the same machine. This of course raises red flags to a grid owner trying to deal with the constant threat of griefers. 

Licu very correctly opened a MANTIS on the subject. Go here to read all about it.

Wrong mantis

Let us pray.

Canadian Advent - ure

It's always a warm welcome at Novale. As every season comes along it offers a unique opportunity to explore the landscape. The winter is of course an enormous part of the culture of this part of the world, and so the snow lies thickly over the sim, the perfect backdrop to the colorful festive fun.

But there is jeopardy here too - of course! We are, after all, in the land of Alec Trebeck.

 Seriously, take heed of the warning and do not touch Rupert's nose.  Or if you do, be sure that you're wearing warm and tightly fitting underclothes.

Nell'ora del dolore

 Ed è una musica che va

There are perhaps only three Toscas in the world worth knowing about: Tosca the opera by Puccini, the singer Tosca Donati, quoted above and featured below, and the sim Tosca on Soul Grid. 

Tosca is the social heart Soul Grid. Soul is a predominantly German grid, but this sim has an Italianate feel, as though you had stumbled into a village  in Emilia Romagna. A church and an arengario, a piazza, subtle brown stone buildings under terracotta roofs, and a long table set for a village feast beneath a floral pergola.

One sim - but multiple venues. It's no surprise that sim Tosca has often topped the charts  on OpensimWorld for the number of active avatars. Events on Tosca at have a family feel, where no-one is a stranger for very long. The wall of friendship is testimony to this.

The Magic Auer

Shapeshifter, by Elif Ayiter, the Turkish artist and academic known in virtual by names such as Alpha Auer and Felix Ringtail,  is a magical sim on New Genres Grid, owned and maintained by Max Moswitzer. Over the many years that is has been here, there have been sea changes - alterations as irrevocable and gradual as the work of ocean waves.

It is a playground for ideas, a counterpane of imagination, a toybox full of concepts and genres. 

Sand Castle

It is an island, and yet it it not. It is an important religious seat, and yet only sometimes. It is a unique place, and yet not exactly. It is a place of sanctuary, and yet not always. It is a piece of ancient architecture, and yet not entirely. Mont Saint Michel, on the Northern coast of France in a sandy bay where Brittany meets Normandy, is a spectacular paradox in space and time. 

Mont Saint Michael, Serenity Grid

Erwan Elan has reconstructed Mont Saint Michel on his Opensim grid, Serenity, and it's a realistic piece of magic. The island takes up an entire sim, and is walkable in a way that creates a perfect sense of place. There are gaunt defenses and soaring vaults, dizzying heights and a warren of narrow streets. It is a tour de force, and most of the images here come from Erwan's build. Why not make the trip to see it for yourself, the HG Address is, as always, at the end of the post.

RL Photo of  Mont Saint Michel in the late 1800's