The Art of Aaack

For many years, Aaack Aardvark and his original mesh creations, available free and full perms in his store Arcadia on OSgrid, have been a familiar and much loved part of the opensim galaxy. Recently, Aaack decided to step away from the platform, but he very kindly took a few minutes to tell his story.  Like so many of us, he came here from SL.

Aaack Aardvark and his signature store

Aaack Aardvark:  When I was in Second Life I spent all my time in a sandbox called Little Blue; I made friends with the owners and eventually helped moderating it, all my available time there was distributed into play with friends and build, especially build. One of my friends there started to experiment with Open Sim and used to comment his discoveries about the platform. That was my first contact with OS, at the time I learned two very important things:

1. You can be in SL and OS at the same time, it’s not like you go to hell if that happens and,

2. OS exists.

Aaack Aardvark: Opensim was catastrophically bad for me at first, I tried to run a sim hosted in my computer and it crashed every 40 seconds, literally. But I also start to roam around OSGrid. At that time in my very un-informed head, I thought Osgrid was Opensim! 

Lifted Pixel and Miso Susanowa gettin' ready to shop

That's quite a common misconception even today, you've probably heard it before. And do you remember being confused by the fact that Metropolis grid's address used to be 'hypergrid'? It's easy to forget that when you are new to it, Opensim is a steep learning curve, and a decade or more ago, even steeper than today. 

Wright Plaza

Soon Second Life became a thing of the past for Aaack. He found other ways that he could stay in touch with inworld pals worth holding on to over there, and closed his SL account. 

For well over a decade, we have come to think of Aaack as a purely OSgrid guy, but in fact he also had a spell over on LFgrid, where the Safari visited him, in 2014, and he told us about the Opensim Builder's Alliance. It was a good move for him, because it meant he avoided the inconvenience of the OSGrid crash that lasted from August 2014 to February 2015. 

Aaack Aardvark: I have very good memories of Littlefield, I was in OSG and Walt (the owner of Littlefield) contacted me and basically sold me Littlefield to me, let me tell you: he’s good! I moved there for some years, mostly attracted to a small and very integrated community and the BDSM focus which was almost non existent in OSG at the time. 

On Littlefield at the Opensim Builders Alliance area

Aaack Aardvark: The fact that the uploads were free was a huge factor to move to OS for me, I had a moderately successful store in SL but it was a source of stress for me, I needed it in order to keep uploading stuff and build which was what I wanted to do but money and costs were extremely intrusive thoughts at the moment of being creative, suddenly there was OS, a platform almost identical to SL but I could build all what I want without the stress of the money system.

Aaack Aardvark: I never considered SL technologically superior, OS just lacked content, things that you can play with. When I first arrived in Opensim, it looked very different than it looks now, it was like SL in 2005/7, nostalgic and very empty. I realised very soon that if I wanted content there I would have to do it myself. This was at the time mesh appeared in Second Life.

Some of Aaack's clock creations

Aaack Aardvark: Mesh was something new in SL and OS but I saw the new mesh content was sub par, it was normal at that time to browse the web for free models and import them directly in world. Those models were horrendous for real time rendering, they were designed for static scenes. I disliked that, I didn’t appreciate people complaining about lag while having extremely complex mesh objects around badly mapped and unscripted.

Aaack soon realized there weren't many tutorials for total beginners who wanted to make stuff for the specific needs of the Opensim platform, so he got busy and produced a series of videos, covering the basics of Blender for virtual worlds such as ours. The videos are no longer online but they were a great source of information, and Aaack's laid back, serene style of explaining made them a joy to watch.

Aaack Aardvark: It was my way to give back, I have a background in education, I had been a professor in universities and a teacher in a high school so make videos was easy for me. Sadly not many people felt attracted to the most complex topics so eventually I lost the momentum and that marked the end of the YouTube channel, but it was fun while it lasted. The motivation was simple: If you think there’s need for fresh content, do it yourself, copybot is normalised and that kills original creators will to do original stuff. Don’t know how? Ok here’s a video, now you don’t have an excuse! lol.

Like me, over the years you've probably collected all kinds of odds and ends by Aaack. His creativity extends to all sorts from wings to watches to fridges and beach huts, from seasonal items like this animesh zombie, and this Frankenstein style outfit. He has been making a continuous stream of useful and beautiful items that you can mod to please yourself, all completely free of charge.

You can still find some of Aaack's content available in his Freebie store on Wright Plaza - it's between the shops of Azi Az and Caro Fayray, so in illustrious company! - but his famous region Arcadia is, sadly, now a thing of the past. That's a very recognizable name - and there's a story behind it.

Safari visiting the OSGrid shop en masse

Aaack Aardvark: The shop was named Arcadia due to the suggestion of my girlfriend of that time, sadly I didn’t know anything about “Arcadia Asylum” which caused a lot of confusion at first, had I known about it, I would’ve named the shop differently, but by the time I found out it was too late! 

Coffee maker

Aaack Aardvark: I already made the corporate identity book for my store, so Arcadia Shop was it. I’m not entirely sure how many people visited, I had an annual average of 10 visitors per day, so 3650 per year? That would be 36500 in a decade, but it’s probably a lot less. Visitors are very different types. Some of the people are happy to interact with me but the vast majority just came to get something and leave without any chat or interaction at all. Over the years I met a lot of people for sure, I would call most of them acquaintances rather than friends but that’s mostly because I’m not super social either, being extroverted is a skill I sorely lack. But, it was very positive, now I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember any negative interaction in world, ever.

Aaack came to opensim just about the time that hypergridding was really beginning to be a thing. So, from  creator's  perspective, what has the HG meant for Opensim, and what are the pros and cons of it?

Aaack Aardvark: I was always appreciative to HG, it’s the best and worst thing of the OpenSim project, in my opinion. The good: It allows freedom! You can reside in a grid and visit other grids making the exploration interesting and a finer granularity to cater each person’s preferences. The bad: The implementation of it, how much it breaks everything that you wear on HG jumps. HG broadens greatly the horizons of what a grid is capable of, but for now it’s very incompatible with wore scripts, it definitely changed the Open Sim project for the better but forces us to script in a very precise way to force every script to “survive” a jump, that’s not always possible and thus it may become a frustration generator.

Finally, the question that probably everyone wants to know the answer to. What motivated you to step back from opensim? And is that the end of Aaack as an opensim creator?

Knowing when you've had enough is an art in itself. We have to listen to our bodies, our spirit, and act in a way that keeps us healthy - it's not always easy to know ourselves, but Aaack's taken a decision that's right for him.

Aaack Aardvark: In the first place I isolated myself way too much, create content offline prevented me to “play” in world, and being introverted as I am that wasn’t good: gradually for years I avoided people more and more until the whole experience turned into logging and parking my avatar to dedicate my whole attention to blender. That led me to a very sterile experience. 

Aaack Aardvark: The other motive is more important: my health. Due personal circumstances my health deteriorated in these last years so I had to take care myself more, that means less time in front of the computer and more in the real world where I need to move my muscles, I hate that we can’t upload ourselves in world but that’s how reality works. 

Aaack's store on Wright Plaza - the address is at the end of the post.

Aaack Aardvark:These two motives made me decide to step away from metaverses in general, I joined SL in 2004 and OSG in 2013 or 14 if I remember correctly, it’s time for me to ease it a bit. I still plan to release stuff but a much more moderate pace than before, after all you can’t ever have enough of a good thing, right?

 HG Address: hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Wright%20Plaza/53/119/21