This week was all about the great and the small. We started small, on Weelandia, Digiworldz grid - full HG Addresses, as always, at the end of the post.
Small inconvenience getting to Digi - well, a very big obstacle for quite a few, who could not navigate the rather daunting ID process. So our group was not as big than it might have been, which is a shame, because Digi is a nice grid with lots to see. But that's part of the Variety of Opensim, everyone has their own strategies and concepts about grid security and community. You have to like difference to love the HG. 
Because none of that could stop us from visiting with the lovely Nebby Newman, in company with aminata Potez, for an extraordinary visit to a true gem of a sim, Weelandia.
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| Left to right, aminata (and chimp) and Nebby |
Nebby Newman: WEELANDIA is an opensim home for Dinkies and Tinies, who are known to be a fun, friendly, and caring community. We welcome friends of any size or shape, from anywhere in opensims, to visit anytime. Digiworldz Dinkies and Tinies can even reside here for free! aminata Potez and I held the Weelandia Grand Opening Launch Pawty on Friday, May 15, 2020, with Cuddles Weston (Rosy O’Grady) singing, followed by tunes spun by DJ Jack Stone. actually, DJ Jack Pebbles - who is riding around right now. On the second Sunday each month, cuddles (aka rosy o'grady) sings, and then The Fabulous Wailers play an album from their favorite group, The Wailers! All friends are welcome, any size or shape and from any grid!
Nebby Newman: On July 16 at noon, Snoots Dwagon will be performing at the new Catnip Brewery! We have things scaled down here for tinies/Dinkies. I do not know of many Tinies avatars in open sims, except for Dinkies and koalas. Dinkies are kitty avatars that are a rigged mesh creation of Etheria Parrott. They stand around roughly 3 feet tall and they use most of the standard “biggie” animations. They originated in Second Life and later were in Inworldz, and we are very happy that Etheria decided to bring them to the open sims.
Thirza Ember: was that complicated? i mean sit poses and such
Nebby Newman: not for Dinkies. In SL, there are other types of Dinkies, too. You can get the landmarks for the two stores in open sims where Etheria sells them. Note: Their shapes are slightly different than those in Second Life, so creators need to adapt any designs that have been made for the Second Life versions.
Loru Destiny: so cute :-)
Nebby Newman: For Dinkies clothing and other things, there are quite a few clothing designers for them right here in Digiworldz! Weelandia offers free stores for Dinkies and Tinies merchants. We do have a few Tinies avatars in our Freebie Shop. We'll add more as we find them. You don’t have to be a Dinkie to visit Weelandia – there is a lot to explore anyway.
James Atlloud: I look forward to trying a free avatar!
Nebby Newman: There is a shopping area, a boardwalk with rides and games (some have prizes), a clubhouse, waterfalls, beaches, a residential area, the Pirates' Grotto (complete with treasure chests) Another wonderful place to explore is Rascal Flats, designed and presided over by Snoots Dwagon! He has built an impressive racetrack there, something that you should not miss!! There are landmark boxes for Rascal Flats in several locations here in Weelandia. If you wish to join the Dinkies group, there are joiner boxes at the landing point. If you are in a Dinkies group in another grid, please join this one also as notices don't cross grid lines.
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| Nebby Newman and her lovely Weelandia from the air |
Thirza Ember: What made you choose to be dinkies?
Nebby Newman: choose to be? nooooo, Dinkies choose US!!! tinies love fun, and they care about each other! and they are FRIENDLY!
Thirza Ember: it's such a particular style here it's like an pure and eternal childhood place,
Nebby Newman: 'cept we're not children!
aminata Potez: and we dinkie rock this place even with biggies, we luvs party
Nebby Newman: YES! friends of any size and shape are welcome!!
Thirza Ember: having rosy in the 'family' must be great, she is such a force of nature
Nebby Newman: she's wonderful!
aminata Potez: we was with her inworldz
Thirza Ember: When inworldz died, being that inworldz was closed like SL to the HG, how did you find this grid and not lose each other?
Nebby Newman: people ended up all over the open sims, and it has been hard to find them
aminata Potez: i been in kitely for a long long time also, i moved with some people from inwoldz to here before it poofed, but lost 6 sims of items as i was on holidays
Nebby Newman: I came with a role-play group to 3RG, then to here
Thirza Ember: how many dinkies and tinies are there in opensim do you think
Nebby Newman: that's VERY hard to say
Thirza Ember: do people ban dinkies like they do child avies?
Nebby Newman: they don't ban Dinkies, but they have a height ban, so we are accidently banned
Lux Tergeste: I did not know child avies were banned
Nebby Newman: they are avoiding child porn, since there are a lot of adult grids
Lux Tergeste: I see. Being a teacher, I did not understand - children are children to me
Nebby Newman: right. unfortunately, it doesn't matter to some.
Then we went to the Boardwalk. There is something of the genuinely antique here, I saw things that Arcadia Asylum brought into Opensim more than a decade ago, and that brings a wonderful aura of days gone by to the fair.
*Steam Fair* Wonder Wheel: whispers: Wheee! Loru.Destiny is spinning the wheel! Wait for wheel to completely stop.
Hook a Duck!: whispers: Lux Tergeste , sorry, picked a lame duck. Please try again
Nebby Newman: our two newest areas are Island Art (in preparation for Art Crawl on June 25)
Thirza Ember: what is the Art Crawl? who is involved?
Nebby Newman: Art Crawl happens every year, the group of art lovers visit different galleries in Digiworldz, it is only for a few hours, but the galleries are around for a lot longer!
Lux Tergeste: Oh, love this!
Nebby Newman: sorry about all of the lame ducks, Loru
Loru Destiny: like in RL life, sometimes you meet a lame duck *g*
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| Loru gets lucky |
Hook a Duck!: whispers: Mal.Burns picked golden duck, you win a prize
Nebby Newman: Mal wins a prize!
Loru Destiny: ui and sometimes a golden one, a true friend :-)
Mal Burns: i got ukelele
Loru Destiny: so next time, Mal will play Ukelele and sing for us
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| Island Art |
James Atlloud: Thank you Nebby. This region is so special - I love it.
Thirza Ember: i think the art walk is a great idea, a good way to know your neighbors
Mal Burns: my sl avie would be at home here, lovely liddle puddy cat, he is mesh avie with HUD over there but fits tiny places when not being trodden on.
Nebby Newman: kewl!
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| Some of the art on Whale Island, ready for the Art Crawl |
Nebby Newman: /me points to self .... KITTY!!
James Atlloud: I'm definitely going to find a freebie tiny here.
Thirza Ember: well that was super fun, time for destination 2 now though, this has been lovely, it is so serene
Loru Destiny: it's a very nice place beautiful trees and flowers as well you created your own, unique tiny world
Lux Tergeste: yes, this place is relaxing
Nebby Newman: you are all welcome to return anytime!
~~~~SIWSHY TELEPORT NOISES~~~~
Lone Wolf: Welcome :-) Hi Frank, Hey Lux, great to see you
Lux Tergeste: Hi Lone Wolf, nice to meet you
Lone Wolf: rofl, I've put the wolves away today. Hi Mal good to see you again
Lux Tergeste: from kittens to a wolf, that's weird!
Mal Burns : Heya Lone, been here afore methinkx
Thirza Ember: we're a small group today, but curious to know about the grid!
Lone Wolf: well that's good - not that its a small group, lol it's good load testing!
Thirza Ember: why wolves? I'm curious
Lone Wolf: So wolves. Well about 3 years ago - I started a wild west themed area in second life, it was 3 low prim sims, and i just kinda landed on wolf territories, and that's what it stayed as, and I love wolves lol
aminata Potez: stays on distance in case wolf get hungry and wants a snack
Lone Wolf: Of course now its 725 square KM or so, which would cost roughly 3 million dollars a month in second life - 11500 second life sims
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| The wild welcome area on Wolf Territories |
Lux Tergeste: gosh
Lone Wolf: we are the 3rd largest grid in terms of area, according to hypergrid business, only Kitely and OS GRID are bigger, and everything is joined together.
Thirza Ember: but this is wolfier
Lone Wolf oh yes this is about as wolfy as it gets lol I have over 1.2 petabytes of storage and that can dynamically grow if required. We have at the moment around 100 which is a good number :-) but growing. There are different themed areas, we have a pirate area, lord of the rings which we're working on, and shops, etc and if you check out our destination guide, that if you are using firestorm you can seejust by clicking the little map icon on the left that gives you an idea. I'm trying to implement a lot of things that are missing in opensim. I've set up a couple of links because we have so many places you can visit
Lux Tergeste: You made a nice welcome notice for us, lone!
James Atlloud: I clicked the sign and left for a moment - grateful for the back button in firestorm!
Thirza Ember: that's a good button to have, shame we don't have one in RL
James Atlloud: oh yes, and where's the RL undo?!
Lone Wolf: So, having come from 3 low prim sims on second life, to 11500 here, its been quite a journey. Let me show you the exhibition first
Wolf Territories Exhibition Link: Teleporting you to : Wolf Territories Exhibition
Lone Wolf: so this is where i talk about some of the tech. We have a cluster of 3 big bare metal servers which are running 11 virtual machines. You might say this is mad scientist stuff, or mad wolfist. We are the first grid to use something called wolfy object storage so we can avoid being offline for 3 weeks while we have to transfer assets, so the grid is really built for the future. Also - we can move a region from one server to another just by changing some data in a database so if one region gets a bit busy it can be easily moved and in fact we can even move whole servers from one server to another live, so right now i could move this whole server to another server while you're here and you wouldn't even know, which is pretty sweet :)
Lux Tergeste: this is impressive
Lucy Afarensis: Indeed
Lone Wolf: thank you. That screen up there is a snapshot of the system we use to conttrol it all
James Atlloud: actually it seems almost impossible - so cool.
Nebby Newman: /me knows a lycan like this
Lone Wolf: plus we are happy to work with other grids to help with the tech stuff and in fact have helped 2 grids implement object storage so far. I've explained a lot of it on my Youtube channel
James Atlloud: linky for youtube?
Lone Wolf: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzyzYXxLm7lPPCFUnIlcxwg
Nebby Newman: what occurs when you have transferred an item but it can't find the assets?
Thirza Ember: you scream (or is that just me)
Lucy Afarensis: I scream a lot too
Nebby Newman: so frustrating!
Lone Wolf: there's LOTS of reasons that I can see why it happens. Why don't assets transfer accross grids? 1. - the grid has blocked transfer 2. - there is a network issue and it kinda misses 3. - they are running different versions of opensim that are not using the same message system. How to get round it. (and this is a bit long i know) if you rez the objects on the source region, then save an oar, and then load the oar on the destination region, that ALWAYS works (well most of the time unless the oar is corrupted) - doing things between grids is always a matter of luck with opensim lol
James Atlloud: We safarians know matters of luck!
Nebby Newman: How do you save the oar?
Lone Wolf: You need console access to do it, or ask your grid host, basically they login to the console for your region, (that's like the underlying thing that runs it) and type save oar filename and it will save the oar to a file which they give you and then on the new grid load oar filename and you can load it back. Teleporting between grids as well can be just as frustrating
Nebby Newman: if you have console access to load it, right?
aminata Potez: nebby i stil have some from inworldz, from my sims
Nebby Newman: kewl, ami!
Lone Wolf: in wolf territories grids our customers get oars and IARS loaded, even crazy big ones, sometimes we get 35/50 gb files,: but its not a problem. And if anyone needs any help please ask, especially in our discord, you don't have to be on our grid to get help :-) incidentally we have 10 robust servers running on this grid, that's the server that controls everything, most grids only have 1, but we have a way of passing the work between the 10
Thirza Ember: it's amazing how opensim has evolved such a good communication system through things like discord and social media, help is never far away
Lone Wolf: yes absolutely
aminata Potez: but is this grid only for wolfs
Lone Wolf: this grid is for anyone :-)
Lucy Afarensis: Sounds expensive
Lone Wolf: cost wise yes its, erm, not cheap about half of it is covered by rentals at the moment and half funded by my company that I own (because it's technically owned by the company)
James Atlloud: This technology feels really important to the opensim community.
Lone Wolf: yes i hope it is, and I've built my own opensim front end, including registration etc, in php from scratch
James Atlloud: I think that deserves a howl.
aminata Potez: and how much it cost for a region
Lone Wolf: For a 1024x1024 region, 80k prims, $24.99 a month - that includes everything, loading oars, iars, free hugs, etc - and its in our ocean, so you can sail anywhere
aminata Potez: also food, catnip
Lone Wolf: yes catnip for kittens
aminata Potez: yayyyyyy
Mal Burns: meow
Lone Wolf: indeed, meow! So please do join our discord if you want to, its quite an exciting community growing there https://discord.gg/V9HhMsgRBV
aminata Potez: Lone which grid you been before you started this
Lone Wolf: okay - Second Life, Kitely, Zetaworlds, and here we are - getting bigger every time
Thirza Ember: so in all this huge space, what is your favorite part?
Lone Wolf: oh wow thats really difficult... okay definitely LUXOR, that's built by Luna Lunaria, its so awesome, but there are so many
Thirza Ember: let's go see Luxor then
Lone Wolf: okay if you want to see luxor easiest way - open map - type luxor - and teleport
Lux Tergeste: the magnifying glass is really handy!
Lone Wolf: yes it gets you around lol. Please set your environment WORLD - ENVIRONMENT - USE SHARED ENVIRONMENT. This will be Luna's main store, but i just wanted you to see her amazing work
James Atlloud: There's a partyboat down on the river!
Lone Wolf: You can get here by boat as well or plane, or walk, the grid is 720 km square
Nebby Newman: wow, what a trip!
aminata Potez: how is sim crossing wen you fly or ship
Lone Wolf: well its pretty good, i've tried to tune it as much as possible, and in fact sometimes that's why regions get moved to different servers
Thirza Ember: so what drives you to keep working on this, Lone?
Lone Wolf: the drive - it's a special interest. I got fed up with SL, it just couldn't give me the space i wanted. Here it's very different being able to build a mountain the size of 5 regions
aminata Potez: you got darn good skills, build and technic
James Atlloud: I noticed that the big pyramid has 'exhausts' underneath - are those rocket engines? Can it fly? (^_^)
Lone Wolf: erm yes they are rocket engines, but due to the price of diesel we can't afford it to fly at the moment :-) tbh i dont know if she will make it fly, but nothing would surprise me, luna is an incredble artist. She likes gold by the way
James Atlloud: the gold works here for sure
Thirza Ember: are you going to be as opensim fest Lone?
Lone Wolf: yes we will be at opensim fest, i have 2 areas and in fact they are pretty much built, just got a few final touches to do
Nebby Newman: geez, I'm so behind in building my exhibit for OS Fest!
Lone Wolf: when we get to 150 residents i'll get another bare metal server and probably add andother 500 regions. I just thought you know i'm gonna just get on with it lol
aminata Potez: he wants to beat sl
Lone Wolf: yeah got a way to go, i suspect in a years time this will be the biggest grid in the hypergrid, even bigger than osgrid *BUT* it will be all joined. I'm also looking at working on some RL stuff taking terrains from real life and implementing them
Lucy.Afarensis: Can one link their own servers to this grid ?
Lone Wolf: no i don't allow that, only because of security, because to do it means i have to open up the public port, which means it would be easy to break the grid. Opensim has 2 ports generally the public port and the private port, so the private port if you open that up the world can send commands to your grid that can break it, plus i'm keen to keep the performance of the grid up
Thirza Ember: I have learnt a lot today, about 2 completely different worlds
James Atlloud: Yes, what a great visit!
Lone Wolf: thanks so much for coming its been great having everyone, and i'm happy to chat about it all on a one to one basis if you have questions
Nebby Newman: most interesting, Lone Wolf!
Lucy Afarensis: It has been interesting
Thirza Ember: Nebby, Wolf, thank you both for being wonderful hosts to us, two places to revisit for sure!
Lone Wolf: yes there's a lot more here please do visit, we can keep you busy for hours, oh and you'll probably get lost, even i get lost
Nebby Newman: tyty Wolf!!
HG Addresses
Nebby Newman's Weelandia login.digiworldz.com:8002:Weelandia
Lone Wolf's grid (Welcome area, then use the Destination guides and Tps to explore the grid)
grid.wolfterritories.org:8002:Wolf Mountain
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