In Touch, Inworld

If you're old enough to remember the early days of opensim, you will remember how hit and miss communications were. There were scores of grids, and no end of wide open spaces, but not a lot of people, and those that were one grid, often had little or no idea of the existence of other places.

Being a bit countercultural, often curmudgeonly, and also busy building, that was fine for most people most of the time. But humans are gregarious at heart. How to stay in touch?  IRC, the 80's way of communicating, was favored by many of the geeks behind the opensimulator code and you could wait literally days for someone to answer a question. 

This Map made by Pathfinder Lester back in the day gives you an idea of our horizons among the hg enabled grids.

Between hypergridders, news about events was largely a matter of word of mouth, or  habit - like the regular Friday dance on OSGrid run by Dorothea Lundquist and the late and much missed Jay Maze. Doro is Opensim royalty but very modest about her place in our heritage, this post talks a bit about the couple's contribution to early Opensim hg-socializing ay their club Close Encounters.

More was needed. Facebook groups for Opensim began to be a way to stay in touch. Like Maria Korolov's Hypergrid, started in Spring 2009, the same time she launched Hypergrid Business. It wasn't the first Opensim specific group on Facebook - Adam Frisby started Opensimulator in 2007. Lots of groups with a more social skew followed, including Miguel Rotunno's Opensim News in 2011 and Hypergrid Happenings in 2015. There are many more. Here are two of the biggest:  Opensim Community by Virtlantis and Opensim Virtual founded by the people who brought you Sacrarium grid. Both of these groups have about 1400 members and started four years ago. 

Many spammers put ads in all these groups so it's easy to keep up with the news about upcoming events. Many grids have a group, where you may find more specific notifications. Much smaller than the general groups but bigger than the grid-specific ones is the HG Safari group, founded in 2014 with only about 500 members, and zero outside spam.

HallowBreen

 Nyx Breen invited us to come for a pre-party party on his new build on Immersive 4 one of a group of VAR regions on Pangea Grid. Owned by Marlon Wayne and his partner Tutz Zabelin, Pangea is home to some of Opensim's premiere artists including Lampithaler Artist, Tina Bey, Cherry Manga,  recent arrival Mike Fleetwood plus many more.

This new build called Morpheus Oneiroi is another surreal trip through shape color and movement with a bit of a Halloween twist to it. As usual, Nyx urges everyone to have graphics set way high but obviously, you need to do what's right for your own screen and eyeballs, as the full effect of this art can be too much for very tired eyes, or the photosensitive. 

Arriving on Pangea. Even without the shared environment, it's still a unique place.

Nyx Breen: hello all welcome,  is every one in shared setting?

Lysondra June: Looks great, Nyx !!

Thirza Ember: fast rez too

Spax Orion: IS THIS what Dismayland would look like with PBR?

Nyx Breen: no PBR is used here, just EEP and effects

Spax Orion: /me picks jaw up off of floor

Safari Goes to the Lounge

First up this week with its crazy out-of-kilter start time (come the revolution, we will all go with Solar time and forget the stupid twice-annual clock change) the Safari tourists headed out to Craft Grid to a set of sims owned by Art Blue and Juliette Surrealdreaming. If you're an old old friend of the Safari, you will remember many trips to visit Art, back in the days when Safari departed weekly from Francogrid. Good times. Art really blew our minds with some spectacular pieces, on Metro and elsewhere, occasionally showing us stuff imported from SL - once, he even convinced Bryn Oh to join us. In recent years, he has made his home on Craft. This week, we began our trip on sim Oracle Lounge, full HG address as always at the end of the post.

The Nine Goddesses build on Craft

This build  consists of ten waypoints along a meandering path through landscape (and at one point under water) to the final spot where gifts and explanatory brochures await. The build and peripheral materials are a joint effort by both our hosts, although Art is always quick to remind everyone that Juliette (in RL Kisma Reidling) is the artist, not he. 

Arriving a the 9 Goddesses

Juliette Surrealdreaming: Welcome to the 9 Goddess Adventure HG Safari tour! Thank you for coming today. I will help you navigate today's 50 minute tour of my 3 regions. We will spend 10 minutes on each. I will send out a notice and tp anyone not at the next start point.

Jojo at the Cove

 Jojo Apple, also known to many as Harmony Beningborough, has a cute new grid called Harmony's Haven and this week the Safari crew came for a visit. She has been a resident of various grids across Opensim. Recently, she decided to pick up sticks from OSgrid and move into a grid of her own, bringing with her Mermaid's Cove, a region with a waterside theme. The new grid opened at the end of September, so it's a fresh new place for the group to visit, and no doubt we will be back to see even more of Jojo's sims.

Lavia LLavine: Excited much Jojo?

Jojo Apple: um. No. TERRIFIED! giggles

Lavia LLavine: I dunno why you know most of the folks. Just relax and be you

Jojo Apple: There is a LOT here :) Color, movement...I hope everything looks great to everyone!

Thirza Ember: ok here comes the group

Lavia LLavine: Incoming!!

The Tree of Forest

Our first stop this week was on Neverworld, at the Forest of Azure the home of singer, storyteller, builder, erotic photographer, and Safari regular Forest Azure. Forest was the principal guest in a really interesting episode of Inworld Review back in 2024 too, and hopefully she will soon be a guest again. As you know, each Safari is made up of two destinations, often with very different themes, and this week our second destination was in a mermaid's lagoon, that's why some of us look a little ...fishy. 

The landing point of the region is on a sky platform, where you can find both the Maze build - it looks like a one story stone castle, and also the Azure Gallery where you can see some of Forest's photos.

We quickly teleported down to ground level to meet up with Forest, under the branches of a gigantic tree growing directly out of the Opensim Ocean.

Forest Azure: Welcome safaristas!  Today we will visit this tree and the maze gallery that you saw before, but with a different content. We will start our safari with this tree: Lothlorien. There are several spots in this tree-world to explore. While you are exploring, I will tp groups of 3 to the maze. I will start teleporting for the maze in about 15 minutes. The maze is now about a story you all know: Cinderella. But mind you: this is Cinderella Azu style!

OSGrid Goes On

 SO after all that drama, OSGrid is not completely closing and disappearing at all.  Having worked everyone up into a froth with the announcement that Sunday 18 October was going to be "the Last Community Meeting",  they walked that back to simply the "Last Community Meeting of 2026". 

Big difference.

The cupboard under the podium has whiskey and vodka.
Both much needed during this meeting.

As of today (and I guess things could easily change again) the idea seems to be this:

On Hurliman

 This Sunday at 11am is the big meet up for OSgrid residents to have their say and learn more about the decision to close the grid on the last day of December 2026. Come to Hurliman Plaza with a local avie, as simply dressed as possible, and add your voice.

Event Plaza

Hurliman Plaza.... as most people know, there are a core set of OSGrid regions, they have 'Plaza' in their names. Let's take a quick tour of a few. For example, the most visited of all has to be Event Plaza where grid admin Aussie oversees the music on Wednesdays and at the weekend.

LBSA

Then there is of course LBSA Plaza, the Welcome sim for OSGrid, seen here in all its Halloween glory. You may be able to spot grid president Dan Banner center left. This sim dubs itself the social lounge of OSGrid, someone said years and years ago that LBSA stands for "Linden Bay Shipping Association", I wonder if that's true. It might be too late to find out. Despite having a web page dedicated to it, the history of OSGrid is very poorly preserved, which is a huge shame. 

However, there's more plazas out there to discover ...