Safari hops for the best

Meet Tosha Tyran, builder, benefactor and all round bella donna. How did a nice girl like her end up in a place like this?

Tosha Tyran: I got kind of frustrated with all the commercial stuff in SL and I was sick and tired of having to pay for every upload and wanted to advance building then some Italian friends told me about OpenSim and now I think it is really great - I wouldn't want it different I came - and hell it was frustrating too - more crashes then anything but with time and patient it changed :) I started later with Tao and Licu and Lumiere in Craft and - well - now I am here in Sanctuary which is one of the best cared for grids I think it is just great and the owner very friendly and helpful :) and I can build all I want I am present in Craft as well, but my favourite place is Sanctuary.
Her latest build, a Hopi Indian village, is on a sky platform above her sim Fire, on Sanctuary grid. URIs as usual at the end of the post.

Hedging your bets with bases on multiple grids is essential! Past builds by Tosha include Moscow's Red Square, and the Taj Mahal, So why the Hopi Indians? 
Tosha Tyran: i am inspired by Virtual Christine's builds and expositions, and i started reading about the Hopi and couldn't stop. As I am for some time now working in mesh, it was a great opportunity to make all this
Truelie.Telling: Tosha, have you spent time in New Mexico/4 Corners area?
Tosha Tyran: nope - all from books and internet :) I am in Germany and you don't find so many info about the Hopi here!
Serene.Jewell: This whole area has a cohesive sense to it. Makes it feel more real. All the colors in the same value range, etc.
Truelie.Telling: ah... I have visited a few times... there are old communities like this where people still live... but they have all the modern conveniences inside
James.Atlloud: My wife kept wanting a kiva ladder from Taos. Wouldn't really fit in baggage on the plane tho.
Tosha Tyran: I put all this up on the platform, because the round thing in the middle is a Kiva, it had to be underground and I didn't want it to be in the water. I work with the textures in gimp, unwrapp the stuff in blender and then upload texture and model and then put it together - that is the easier way for me - blender still is a big secret for me in many ways :))) I have to go step by step

Wizard Gynoid: Blender is an intelligence test of which I fail
Serene.Jewell: Blender is like a multi-level game, just when you think you know it, you go into a whole new mysterious level.
Fuschia Nightfire: makes me want to throw my pc through the window

            The build includes a rug room, the characteristic ladders, dwelling places, ovens, and underground chambers, and is surrounded by some impressive mountains. But there's more to Tosha than reconstructions. We took a moment to thank Tosha for another metaversal treasure - her A/O collection. Tutsi, Angie, Camilla, Moo... Chances are, you have one, maybe several, in your inventory.
          Another popular contribution made by Tosha is the Noah sim on Craft grid, where you'll find one of the most comprehensive collections of sculpty and mesh animals.
Wizard Gynoid: Noah needs a zebra
Tosha Tyran: patience, patience, hahaha
The Hopi village is a work in progress, she still has many rooms, and the Museum to complete, so I'm sure we will all return in months to come
Lucy.Afarensis: Maybe we could work on some Katsina avies for next time
Tosha Tyran: hey, if you get some, let me know!

               Next stop was Metropolis Grid, which celebrates its anniversary this week. We met two of the Metro team in the great tower that all hypergridders have landed on, often without visiting properly. below the domed room that forms the grid's main arrival point are two more chambers, a Teleport room, and a dance hall. We went down to the dance hall for a proper chat.

Thirza Ember: First of all I want to say, and I think all will agree... THANK YOU so much, Lena and all the Metropolis team, for what you have done for us this year. Without the kindness of Metropolis grid.... what would we have done ? It must have been a lot of work for you all.
Lena Vanilli: thanks a lot, thirza and all. It was not so easy, cause we had to enlarge our capacities: quickly! but we we got so much back from from osgrid citizens. For us it was an amazing time. We learned a lot ;)
snowbody Cortes: Lena, why did you decide to start a grid ?
Lena Vanilli: snow, I didn't start this grid. it was Peter Jacob, the former sponsor. He sponsored the grid for 5 years then he gave it to the public, to the metro-citizens. 
His dream was a community with a self administration. The grid should be owned by everyone,and now we are very near to build a society. The founding meeting will be this week. Then the grid will be owned by all citizens and we will discuss all in our own parliament That was the will of our founder, 7 years ago
Thirza Ember: does Peter still follow what happens in the Grid?
Lena Vanilli: yes, he will take also a small position in the society. On the second level ;)
Thirza Ember: tell us a bit about what happened when osgrid went offline. You must have been crazy busy. Was it a bad thing or a good thing for metro?

Draxxen sits this one out.

Lena Vanilli: haha, that's true, thirza, and (if its not enough) a stupid hacker tried to bring the grid down with ddos-attacks. it was like hell. but the metro was online all the time. we have good boys in the machine room ;)
Wanda Shigella: we did not have much sleep :)
Lena Vanilli: what is good for the metro? the people! we love to communicate and to meet new people! what is bad for the metro? the missing money every month *lol*
James.Atlloud: Did the OSgrid problem change any backup strategies for Metro?
Lena Vanilli: yes, sure, cause we had the same problem some months before, and we learned from them. We lost 20% from the assets. it was a disaster. I guess, it was 1 year before osgrid, but we changed our strategy afterwards: safety first! We were offline for 2 weeks. We have now a double mirrored databus, combined with barracuda-compression. a 10-day-backup-strategy. And everyone can save his inventory, even without an owned region. Some weeks before we changed the total grid communication to SSL / TLS
          I should point out that throughout our conversation all the Safaristas except the new boy, Draxxen, was doing weird dances.

 Wizard Gynoid tries to picture a mirrored data bus.
Thirza Ember: I want to ride on that bus
Lena Vanilli: so, we want to be the most secure grid. and why? we don't like to tell our citizens again, that they lost years of work.

Thirza Ember: It's important we also do our part not to overwork the Asset Servers. I wrote a post about the importance of clearing our trash... It seems most people in open sim don't know that sometimes trash is not emptied unless you go to the website. 
Lena Vanilli: thirza, thats true. like in osgrid, you can only delete your trash from outside opensim
James.Atlloud : color me unaware of that
Lena Vanilli: you see, we learned from our disaster in the past. but, our new society will also work on a hardly needed opensim-feature: the decentralized hypergrid. will also mean: the end of the big grids, like the metro
James.AtLLOUD: what about the federated grid?
Lucy.Afarensis: They could offer all services except assets. I glad somebody is thinking about doing this
Lena Vanilli: i mean the grids, not the communities. the Metro will survive, but not as an asset-storage for all connected regions and mini-grids. First we form the society. Then we will form the project. Not us alone, but  together with high schools and universities.

Wanda Shigella organizes the Art!

           Exciting stuff, and there's more going on on Metro over the coming months, a nice project you can get involved with by contacting Wanda Shigella inworld.
Wanda Shigella: We organize this year again our Arts festival. The Summer of Arts, 2015. Artists can exhibit their work there. Here's a video from last time 
            Take a look, it's 8 minutes of art packed ambience!

We ended the evening in a haze of crashing but much comforted by the music of our great friend Truelie Telling. She sang of love and hair loss, of the Safari and of naughty men. The francos played with some settings, making us all experience some... alternative results in dancing and staying on the grid, but no harm done. Except, shoes seem to have disappeared. hmmm.

          Plus a surprise visit from old friend but OpenSim newbie Iono Allen, looking sharp in a Franco fantasy avatar. What more could you ask for? OK, apart from grid stability and world peace. And shoes.
HG Addresses
Tosha's Hopi Indian build:   sanctuary.homelinux.org:8012:Fire
 (the landing point is on the ground, the build is at 2000m, use the door in the building to teleport up to the pueblo)
Metropolis Grid dance hall:  hypergrid.org:8002:startregion
(the dance hall is two floors below the landing point)
Clubhouse dance floor:         hg.francogrid.org:80:hgsafari
(walk or fly around the mountain to find it)