Safari Insanity

The first destination of the first Safari of the month, every month, is Art Blue's Futurelab.

Insanity, you say, and this time you'd be right: Cherry Manga's Insanity, a strangely ecru, disturbing, moving installation complete with not-right-in-the head avatars. Art talked about Faust, we kind of knew he would, that's how he rolls. 
Cherry floated through the air, we all did, including first time safaristas Dorothea Lundquist, whose legendary 1001 was one of our first attempted destinations when Safari started, and hopefully will be back on the calendar soon, and poet and artist Karima Hoisan whose Kitely based build Vector's Vortex is on the docket for next week.
John Pathfinder Lester: The Safari is mindblowing!

We can see that, Path. Good luck with the chiropractor, my friend.
Art Blue: i start now the introduction
Art Blue: you have 5 minutes to sit
Thirza Ember: apologies to everyone I tp'd to a bad place.
Mal.Burns: lol, took a while to figure
Thirza Ember: I really shouldn't drink wine before the safari begins. I know>
Karima.Hoisan is totally enthralled..already
Han.Held: I don't think I'm seeing what I'm supposed to be seeing ;_____;
Thirza Ember: if it is my butt, again, i apologize
Alle Zeb: would someone please send me a picture of what I do not see
Jessica.Pixel: most of the 'action' was on the middle platform

Metropolis is getting more and more stressed as the weeks go by, which probably explains half the confusion and all the lag that people were experiencing. I sure hope the guys at OSGrid who have let an eye-watering EIGHTY DAYS go by since the grid went offline - I say, I sure hope that they buy the Metropolis grid people a few rounds of beers, considering all the work Metro (and to a lesser extent, other grids) has had to do to take up OSGrid's slack.

At the end of the insanity, we were due to jump to 3DColab, which is a great grid with a number of interesting reproductions of real world buildings - casias Falta and his team is putting the finishing touches to Detroit's main railroad station, for example. 

Our principal destination was going to be Titanic, the monumental build by Stiofain MacTomais and crew. 

I always loved visiting this build on OSGrid, because of the way they have woven real world connections into the construction. The Titanic was constructed just about a hundred years ago in Belfast, and this build celebrated its centenary. There are some nice interactive touches like the Mopper and the chance to dance with Leonardo Cappuchino, and a lot of photos that provide a fascinating history lesson. Very kindly, casias falta (aka Paul Emery) set up the OAR on 3dcolab really just for our benefit, which is a huge compliment to all Safaristas. 
Because it's an underwater build, you need to open your Graphics in preferences and turn off Shaders or all you'll see is murk.

In past weeks, jumping to 3dcolab has always been perplexing; I'd get there, from Metro, or even Francogrid, using either Singularity or Firestorm, and after about 5 minutes, I'd get logged off.  The safari crew were warned of this foible, but set off to try it anyway. Within a few minutes, though, Stoifain let us know that the server was spewing errors, and after I should say some dogged perseverance by some of our tougher Safari goers - an Honorable mention to Miso Susanowa in particular - we decided to move on to our final destination, the Norwegian themed Xmir grid. 
Here's the thing... until the safari mob descended on 3dcolab, I had never been able to stay logged in there for more than 5 minutes, and yet today, I went there and stayed there for ages, no problem.

Gavin Hird is an enthusiastic and generous builder,  he is just getting going with come interesting skin and mesh stores, easily accessible from the jetty. 

Sometimes on the Safari I feel underdressed, but then I look around me.
His stark, atmospheric, landscapes have a  distinctly Scandinavian  feel, and would be perfect for writers trying to capture a Nordic note.   

Out final stop was back on Futurelab, among the animals. Birch Wind swore she was stuck on the giant hand, but we could see her just fine. Fine.

This week's URIs: Metropolis               hypergrid.org:8002:Futurelab 
                          Virtual Titanic         3dcolab.com:9015:belfast 
                          Gavin Hird's Grid      grid.xmir.org:8002