Thursday, March 5, 2015

Blue Safari

There are two kinds of people in this world, those who do, and those who don't.

          This week Safari began with music and a big ole crash. Wolem Wobbit played the blues for us on the dance floor on hgsafari sim. Wolem is working on a great performance sim on Metropolis grid, called Chicago Blues. Go visit if you get a chance, you'll like it.



          It took a while for stream to kick in. Wolem did back flips while we waited. I was thinking of all the signage I should have put up to make it easier for people to understand where we are and where we're going, but let's face it, nobody actually reads anything. So
why not simply relax and enjoy the chaos. 
Truelie.Ellen: wolem is jumpy today,  but what else would we expect from a wobbit
Wizard.Gynoid: gets tired watching wolem. 
Wizard.Gynoid: siwwy wobbit trix r fer kidz
Truelie.Ellen: it's just hard to play guitar And sing And jump around like that
Scottius.Polke: why is there no my suitcase in OSgrid?
Scottius.Polke: am I visible?
Thirza Ember: you're complicated
Scottius.Polke: wooo, I am somebody now
Truelie.Ellen: I still don't see any bod, Scottius...
Wizard.Gynoid: i see you Scotti
Chip.Angelvi: hello
That's cool cat Keve
Truelie.Ellen: but we are getting a good crowd! Hi Chip 
Spike.Sol shouts: KEVE
Keve.Magic: wünsche schönen guten Abend
Beth.Ghostraven: OMG! I found you guys!
Wizardoz Chrome: Buona sera :)
Atom.Hax: I appreciate Spike's homage to Spock. Live long and prosper Leonard!
Wizard.Gynoid: can you believe it? we've been doing safari for 42 weeks! the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything is 42. Week 42!
Art Blue: week 42! my performance was post phoned. I ask for compensation!
Beth.Ghostraven: wow! and I finally got here! I usually have an Hour of Frivolity at my pub in SL at this time, but I had to cancel it today.
Truelie.Ellen: the more I hear Wolem, the more I like him... and I liked him a lot to start!
Aime.Socrates: we have a slow rock'n roll
          Wolem gave us about 40 minutes of really great music. He mixed it up with rowdy numbers and moody blues, it was just what we needed to get set for going on the road. 
Some piano shenanegans. The Wolem tee shirts are top right in this picture.
          We really appreciate the musicians who play on the Free Grids of open sim without a thought for money. We have some Wolem tee shirts available on hgsafari, so if you feel like showing your support by dressing as a fan next time, come over and get yours, or make your own, perhaps. 
Arriving on Indigo Expanse. BlueWall Slade: it looks like a picture :)

          Usually we manage to lose all the newbies when we make our first jump, but for once, most of them got to our second destination, Bluewall Slade's Indigo Expanse (URIs at the end, as usual) which is a small grid where he runs tests and experiments. 
          It's up 24/7 and there is a Sandbox sim, so if you're looking for somewhere quiet and reliable to do some work, use the URI at the end of this post and get yourself a LM. The grid is full of Virtual World history.  
 BlueWall Slade:  The Island over there was on the Linden OGP Beta grid. It has a whiteboard that says "Welcome Gridnauts",  as far as I know, the first jump from LL OGP to OSGrid came through there. It was setup with the OGP + the newly developed Hypergrid. Over in the other corner is a place that looks like a wreck, it was originally a region on the LL OGP. We had no inventory, so all regions were the initial turtle islands, and I figured out how to load the region using backups w/o inventory. In the other corner is the first build I had on OSG, it was beside Charles Krinke's regions.
Thirza.Ember: How did you get involved in open sim?
BlueWall Slade: It was sort of an accident. I started making some bots. Before that, I saw OpenSim and was interested in running it, but I was very new to SL. I didn't understand it all. But I didn't like SL too much, not the griefing, etc. so I kept OpenSim in mind. When I started making libomv bots, I decided to try OpenSim, and boom. That was spring 2008, I think.
BlueWall Slade: Whump Linden made the first jump through those regions and was the first person AFAIK to jump between to grid.
           There is quite a bit to see on Indigo Expanse, but being a big group, the simplest thing was for us to head over to The Grove, where there is an amphitheater, a piece of VW history, it's where Snowdrop Short taught C# classes on OSGrid.  The group asked 'why the Lindens gave up on hypergridding' and suggested some reasons: investor's interests, permissions anxiety, competition, xenophobia, and general bloody mindedness. Blue gave a nice diplomatic response.

BlueWall Slade: As you know, OpenSim has continued to build on Hypergrid. I see it as a way to build out a web of 3d spaces, of course it doesn't work as smoothly as we would like. We are missing a few things tom complete it. And that is what occupies a lot of my free time - how to connect the dots. I have done a lot of "Blue Sky" development here to experiment with a few things. So, I'm pretty happy to be able to open a grid to put into practice some of the things I have been learning and thinking about.
Thirza.Ember: we need you to fix a lot of stuff, Bluewall
Beth.Ghostraven hands Bluewall a hammer and some wrenches
BlueWall Slade: And, hopefully will be able to connect the parts so we can travel around better than in the SL grid. We need a distributed search - that is a project that I want to tackle. What challenges plague you all most on your excursions?
Serene.Jewell: Addresses. Can't communicate in groups across grids.
Unknown UserUMMTGUN9: losing my hair
Nova.Saunders: losing my ava
Thirza.Ember: not being able to talk when you're frozen in a tp
Billy.Bradshaw: Friends is a big one
Jeff.Kelley: intergrid IM, first failed teleport...no maptiles on map
Unknown UserUMMTGUN9: when a teleport fails you lose all your attachments. that's annoying.
Aime.Socrates: we do not all have the same priorities in using opensim.This is the real problem.
Mal.Burns: Different grids with different OS versions is awkward. Some stuff works and improves, but old versions don't connect right. Nice if OS was stable enough for auto-updates to grid owners.
Wizzy a cloud, and Scottius with half his mesh missing - some typical HG problems.
Billy.Bradshaw: I think Bluewall is very brave
          Billy's right. But if it seems like we want Bluewall and other devs to to wave that magic wand and give us an instant seamless hg experience, that's not so. It was heartening to look at the group. Ten different grids were represented, half a dozen countries and at least five languages, all these hardy safaristas who show up week after week, crash after buggy crash, to explore and share and learn. The hypergrid  experience is really worth fixing. We don't need display names, we need "Unknown User" syndrome to go away.
          But it is a fragmented 'accident of geography' rather than a consolidated empire, this open sim of ours. For every choice, whether it's monetizing, permissions, upgrading, security, and so forth, you'll always have those who do and those who don't. No two grids are going to have the exact same preferences when it comes to parameters, and that's what makes it a wonderful, yet frustrating business, to manage hypergridding.
          It was a great discussion, and hopefully the first of a series of encounters with Bluewall and other devs. 
Hidden Leaves on Bubblesz grid

            From Indigo to Bubblesz, Taarna Welles' little grid. Taarna chatted in voice as Mal Burns asked her a number of questions on behalf of the group. 
           Taarna explained that her grid began just a couple of years ago. She had been active on a number of grids, including OSgrid and Metropolis, before she started Bubblesz with her husband. She has been making sculpty objects for years, and with the advent of mesh she's been busy making even more stuff, notably the BEST footware in opensim. 
          There is however a lot more to Taarna than her gorgeous boots. She has always  made a lot of sculptures, inspired by the natural world, but also by images she sees online, and her sim Hidden Leaves is a creative archive going back over a long career. it was interesting to learn that when you import a sculpty it loses 75% of the detail. Wow. No wonder everyone loves mesh. 
Brain or no brain? Talk to the Patefatio Mens
          Taarna is quite a perfectionist, she takes something like 30 to 40 hours to make a n item, be it art or a wearable. The woodland of Hidden leaves is studded with sculptures, often hidden in the truncks of trees or nestling in the hillside. Of particular interest is  Patefatio Mens, this head. Does it have a brain? 
           Other lovely pieces include harps, hands, and her naughty-looking toadstools. 
Face in a harp
          We wandered for a long time before heading to sim Savvy where her beautiful shop La Baronnie can be found. Shoes, hats, furniture, goggles and more are available here. She is a huge fan of Steampunk - hooked on all that detail - and she shared with us her latest, not yet finished project, a Steampunk streetlamp. We also visited a little house full of grungy, delicate beds and dressers, and the darlingest rocking horse.
La Baronnie


            The high quality of Taarna's free, mostly full perm, creations was bound to bring to mind the  content-theft/permissions-angst/money-making debate. 
 Taarna Welles: I don't want to sell items. I want to share and make people happy. For me it's a learning curve, and if it makes people happy, why not. It's a free metaverse, so I contribute too! Sometimes people take my things, they can change the content owner on their own grid, I can't do anything about that, so I don't let it worry me. When I see people selling my items as their own, it is a very big compliment.
Aime the pirate studies the steampunk lamppost.
            May all thieves and opportunists be shamed into quitting, and may the rest of us be inspired to create and freely share all the more.

This week's URI's
HG Safari Clubhouse:               hg.francogrid.org:80:hgsafari
Wolem's sim on Metropolis:      hypergrid.org:8002:chicago blues
Bluewall's grid:                        indigoexpanse.net:8002
'Historic' amphitheater:            indigoexpanse.net:8002:the grove
Taarna's art:                            bubblesz.nl:8002:Hidden Leaves
Taarna's mesh store:                bubblesz.nl:8002:Savvy

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