Safari Afield

It has been 44 days since OSGrid went down, and today on Facebook [via Ron Brown] came the good news: " The array was not able to be rebuilt from the cloned drives due to logical partition errors so the recovery service has performed a full recovery, restoring everything to a single 6 tb drive that the engineer said should boot and that all the files are intact. The additional costs, less the $2302.56 we have already paid them, comes to $2510. We currently have $3432.88 which would make our budget very tight (we still have hosting costs, etc).
Thank you very much for your patience and support! ~ Dan Banner "
if you would like to help by donating you can follow the link below 
http://www.osgrid.org/index.php/donate
Saying 'No news is good news' has not been great news for OSGrid's image in open sim, but they saved all our stuff, which is wonderful, and going on about the PR disconnect between management and users is pointless and anyway, has already been done.

Last night's Safari went to Metroberfest, but it wasn't all cakes and ale. This is the landing point of the fabulous four sectioned sim, but last night there was water and bare earth where there should have been buildings and free stuff, and I spent a significant amount of time up to my neck (thanks Miso). 

Considering the strain all of us have put on Metropolis grid recently, re-uploading all our OSGrid stuff onto their asset server, it is a miracle they were even able to run the event at all. Anyway, there is a Safari stand, if you can drag yourself away from the art show and the beer pavilion. Jessica Pixel put a load of really lovely photos in real time on her Ello feed, so if you have that, go and follow her!

It wasn't only Metroberfest having issues; Outlands sim was not cooperating, and so we met at Safari's second home, the zoo on Art Blue's Futurelab sim, home to The Annoying Light. That giraffe has growth hormone issues. The complication of the festival not rezzing was bound to make our jump to destination number two a bit rough around the edges, and it took a record 25 tp attempts to get the lovely Tina Bey across to Littlefields grid where we met up with her fellow South American Aaack Aardvark. I am not entirely sure all Tina's clothes made the trip, but luckily she has Lady Godiva hair. there was a nice beating heart sound in the big room at OBA, which is the Opensim Builder's Alliance, a group started in OSGrid and carried over to Littlefield when they became an independent grid a year, or is it two years, ago. Aaack generally uses voice, which is great for his tutorials, but text chat works best with us. After all, we have people among us whose first language is Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German, Dutch, French, and whatever it is that Fuschia speaks. Oh right. Winegarian.
Aaack Aardvark: I can't remember seeing so many people at OBA before lol
Jessica.Pixel: Art, I think I hear you heart beating.

Aaack Aardvark: ok so were at OBA
Aaack Aardvark: This is the grid's sandbox and the resources for builders of LF. I do videos about blender specifically for metaverses & SL. Basically my plan is put here whatever we do on Sundays so other people can take it if it finds it useful
Thirza Ember: he has a youtube channel you need to subscribe to it!
Aaack Aardvark: this is one of the official sims of lf and my fav place to gather for the Sundays Q&As
Fuschia Nightfire: i already did that today
Aaack Aardvark: Aw Thanks Fuschia!
Wizardoz Chrome: quale è il nome del canale di Youtube? it/en What is the name of your Youtube channel?
Aaack Aardvark: https://www.youtube.com/user/AaackAardvark

          We sat on the patio where Aaack conducts his seminars.
Aaack Aardvark: it's a nice place the sim is super fast and we have enough room to rez crazy big thingies
          Littlefield grid owner Walter Balazic came over to meet the dozen of us who jumped.  
Walter Balazic: sorry most of you show as Loading at the moment.. :) so if I don't reply it's just that I don't see the names yet
Miso Susanowa: It's OK, Walter; usually we are all half-loaded anyway

Jessica Pixel and Miso Susanowa go shopping!

             Aaack has the only shop on Littlefield in which all the items are exportable; otherwise the goods are free, but restricted to the grid. The reason is, well, reasonable. 
strannik.zipper: How about the export permission, just for things created here that people are willing to give away?
Aaack Aardvark: also I do my stuff from scratch so yeah no licenses
Walter Balazic: but the Mall has a very strict policy. You can export your own stuff of course, but the creators here are a very tight knit group, this grid is very community oriented, so everyone kind of builds for the residents here
Jessica.Pixel: I don't think it's bad you don't let people take stuff out. It probably makes for a strong community by default.
Wizard Gynoid: and the reason is you are afraid others will sell your content on other grids?
Walter Balazic: well no, I don't care what people do, but the people who own the licenses do. For example people purchase licenses for Mesh content that is permitted here on this grid as we have a grid license, but it can't go off the grid or it would be a violation of the agreement we have. We have a lot of SL refugees here that don't want their content off this grid and back at SL for sale, we've had that happen already.
Aaack Aardvark: or in kitely marketplace, that happened too XD

We went to see Aaack's store, with its timeless romantic garden. The textures for the shop were all hand drawn, it took Aaack a month to do it. They all talked about Walter's impressive gigs and RAM, which basically translates into Littlefield being an extremely smooth, high-end and stable operation. Fuschia and Wizzy sat on Dr Who, and most of us sat on the Naughty Dinosaur. How is he naughty? Go and find out for yourself. 

Then we ran across the bridge to view enormous blimp. It's like 2 sims long! There was so much to do and so many things Walter and Aaack told us about on other sims, we could have stayed for ages - but no problem! We can see some more on our next Littlefield visit! 
As if that was not enough, our last stop was in Nara's Nook. The girls over there have been putting together a series of storytelling displays for the upcoming open sim conference. They are particularly interested in showing off the interactive narrative possibilities of virtual worlds.

strannik.zipper: Nara, you look good as a queen!
Nara.Nook @world.narasnook.com:8900: We call this geeked out fairy tales. We're demonstrating how to use NPC characters, story and gamification to engage visitor exploration of regions.
The exhibits include Siobhan's story telling tutorial, Shanna's Dragon Shifter riddle game, Courtney's firedancer NPCs, Dora's lizard marching band, Fuschia's granny fairytale, and Nara's falling tiles word game.
Nara.Nook: if you manage to figure out the phrase left when you knock all the tiles down and get the magic door open to free the hero.

          If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. 
Nara.Nook: the number of hurdles put in our path defies probability. it has been a massive effort by these folks. we ran into a new bug in the last opensim update, deleting a scripted NPC crashes the region. So every NPC is scripted and they all get rezzed and deleted when someone comes near. This started happening a week ago, took us most of that to find the problem. Fred figured it out, now we have to rebuild the NPCs to be without scripts.
Fuschia Nightfire: i think Nara has been working 24/7 for the past few weeks!
Nara.Nook: Not all elements are in place, so it won't be easy but it is doable. The drawer game there is still a work in progress, but have fun explore and come back and see the full thing at the conference!
And so our 20th Safari ended. With - what else? The Annoying Light.