Weekend Wolf Fest

Sometimes it pays to be cheeky - we asked and we got permission for the HG Safari group to get a sneak peek at a big event happening next weekend, the 15th and 16th of June. It's Wolf Fest, on Wolf Territories Grid, which has seen exponential growth in its relatively short life - with more virtual space in which to wander than even Second Life !

The Fest is all about celebrating the community, and under a deep blue sky, Lone Wolf and DJ Illusions were on hand to welcome us and explain all about it.

Lone Wolf: OK, I hope everyone's settling in.

Thirza Ember: apart from the nakedness, I'd say we are mostly here and good to go?

Lone Wolf: Uh. Nakedness. Ah, that's OK. There's always a bit of nakedness.

Thirza Ember: can never be sure if nakedness is a deliberate choice, or a glitch

Forest Azure: if it was only naked...

Lone Wolf:It's all good. So I'm going to be your guide. But the idea of Wolf Fest was to have some really interesting creations, as well as the usual stands and exhibitions and things for people to look at. And of course we're going to have events running and things going on that makes life.

Lone Wolf began by using the speech to text feature that is built into this grid, which did throw up the very occasional wrong word, but on the whole is a very useful and versatile tool. It is however quite hard for a non native speaker to follow all the chat that is possible when you're able to just talk, and not tied down to your fingers, so after a while, we got him to just type. But it proved what a great and speedy and efficient tool that is.

The way to travel around the sim is by teleporter, train, and good old fashioned running. he teleporter board is split into regions called stages, and there is also an educational region where they'll be holding teaching-oriented events. Why so?

Lone Wolf:Because we have two universities running within our grid. And also VWC virtual. The the people that deal with people like me who've got autism and will be doing an educational session as well. I'll be doing two tech sessions, one about how the grid is developed and some of the tech that we use. And then the day after, we'll be doing a text session on 'object storage', which you can use for all kinds of applications. We use it for our assets. We have about seven and a half million assets

sitting on our object storage right now, and that's growing by the hour.  So there's lots to come and see and hear. And you'll see on Opensim World, we'll have all the events listed. We've also got this big board over here.

Inside the Big Top

Lone.Wolf: if you zoom out you can see our big top so our next place to visit is built by luna lunaria  and we'll visit that next - that's her pyramid from luxor  which was bought here by slaves  piece by piece

Forest Azure: slaves? /me is suddenly all ear

Taarna Welles: Nice to see the pyramid of Stargate.

Lone.Wolf: So this is the luxor club where we will have events

Taarna Welles: Stargate symbols :)

Francisco Koolhoven: I remember being here :)

James atLLOUD: these textures at Luna's - so rich.

DJ Illusions: i actually created one of the musical pieces for luxor

Lone Wolf: yes this is pure gold and latinum and has cost a fortune... this is the same as the one on Luxor.

Roffellos Kisses: this is Luna's yes ..she has a really gorgeous place

Lone Wolf: add me as a friend if you wish to, just in case you have questions

DJ Illusions: yes and me if you like

Lone Wolf: we'll wait a second for mal

James atLLOUD: .. and I jump on Forest's head.  It's a thing.

Forest Azure: /me takes revenge

James atLLOUD: oh my head!  lol

Thirza Ember: has this been a long time in the planning, Lone? What made you think of doing an event like this?

Lone Wolf: yes we've been planning this for about a year, and its our 3rd birthday, my rez day is tomorrow, I was the first avatar on this grid

DJ Illusions: took me and my staff hours to schedule djs

Lone Wolf: so thats why its weekend

Ange Menges: Will you put online some videos of your tech talks ?

Lone Wolf: yes you can see my tech talks so far, on my youtube channel. The link is on our grid website home page https://www.wolf-grid.com

Taarna Welles: What is your connection with Egypt and Stargate?

Lone Wolf: i have have autism and i love stargates and start trek and star wars etc.

Taarna Welles: Me too":)

Lone Wolf: but this creation is luna lunaria's... okay next place, lets go this way

Thirza Ember: follow lone wherever he goes, tp to him

For anyone thinking of having the Safari come to visit, maybe it would be good to mention how teleport boarts aren't always our friend. Unless everyone is really focused on reading Local Chat, which is often laggy, it is really hard to guess what destination we're supposed to tp to, for one thing. So most of us just click on the 'People' button in the toolbar, and look at the list of 'nearby' and then double click on the name of someone to teleport to them. That means landing on their head, but we're all pretty used to it by now. Here's Star and James doing just that and landing on the head of our guide, Lone Wolf.

Star Ravenhurst: sorry

James atLLOUD: like I said - it's a thing

We moved on a  little further to Jimmy Olsen's exhibit, a taster of Europa, which was the destination for the  first Safari of this season.

Lone Wolf: so i wanted you to see the view here, this city is part of europa. Europa is 9 4x4s in fact, let's go see... as you can see we do have a problem with noisy aliens

James atLLOUD: whoa

Forest Azure: wow, whoa = whoa!

Star Ravenhurst: Those fireworks are fabulous!

Lone Wolf: all our exhibits give out landmarks and also we have our train ride so it hink we could probably get everyone on

James atLLOUD: And we often have stragglers, rogue participants.  It's all good.

Roffellos Kisses: wow Deelite aliens ...I need to drink more

James atLLOUD: deelovely

Lone Wolf: so this is a basic introduction to the grid, the arches are from Morocco, we had them hand carved... you can see them at welcome mountain as well and on the right is the wolf software systems offices...

Lone Wolf: this is wolf software systems ltd which is my rl company and we do all kinds of systems and web ddesign and software, this is a demo of an RL company in world in fact... plug plug

Thirza Ember: nothing wrong with a plug. Imagine your bathtime without one.

Lone Wolf: here we can have in world meetings, stream our screen in world, to do training and software using the grid tools, and we will be having  movie night after wolffest.

Next up, we jumped to another sim, devoted to educational purposes.The idea of WolfTec is to promote real world learning in the virtual, as previously mentioned, this grid is home to a couple of universities.

 This is becoming ever more common all across opensim, and it seems that every day I hear of various grids hosting a sim or two (or sometimes many many more than a couple of regions!) for private academic institutions, state school districts, universities, and colleges.

Lone Wolf: we have our own educational team, working with the university of dallas and the university of texas and two educational charities - you can find details on our website

Thirza Ember: is that who Xenon Darrow is affiliated with? she was on Inworld Review a while back talking about what she does with opensim in education.

Our visit concluded back on the Wolf Fest sim, with a few words about the upcoming event. The festival kicks off at 8am SLT on Saturday June 15 and there will be plenty of different activities, from DJs and dancing, to serious talks and the chance to explore the exhibits. It's going to be a great weekend!

 HG Address:  hop://grid.wolfterritories.org:8002/Wolf%20Fest/128/128/22