Vela Turns Eight

 Vela dreams grid just turned eight years old last weekend, in opensim grid terms, that's a pretty venerable age. 

This small grid, run from home (the ddns in the name gives that away) is the creation of Cleopata and Myrena Rajal, and they celebrated with friends with a mixed event, starting with a fashion show, in collaboration with Loru Destiny.

Candoranien Romance

Roleplaying is romantic. Whether you're a player or not, it's impossible not to see the romance in the way stories are woven by minds working in sync to explore themes their shared experience brings together, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

There's something deeply romantic too in the commitment of friends, often over many years, not just to bop together to a few tunes, but to bring imaginations together, working to maintain a unique shared fiction. 

Candoranien is one of those places. It's doubly romantic because the theme is Medieval, with a nice wide margin each side, veering into the late Dark Ages on one hand, and the Early Renaissance on the other. pirates, Vikings, Merchant Adventurers, Damsels and Knights - it's all happening here - what's not to love.

This week a new exhibition was inaugurated on sim Path of Glory (HG Addresses, as always at the end of the post) and here you'll find a lovely tribute to the RP group, as the sign says " From Hohenburg to Candorania, a journey through the career of our role-playing world...

The Warmth of Yana

It's no secret that Yana Dakota likes to be warm! Whether it's her signature Tahiti build, visited by the HG Safari group back in  or her take on what makes the ideal opensim gird, warmth is key. She discovered opensim by herself, and the experience wasn't all that positive at first.

Yana Dakota: I joined a grid that was not open for HG which had some serious problems and after 3 months I had had enough. Then I joined OSGrid and I didn't feel comfortable there either, that didn't last long. And then I come to AMV and it was a feeling of coming home. I was immediately addicted again, lol. What I look for in the owners of a grid, is warmth, safety, feeling safe under their wings, and that's what I found here.One big family, warmth, coziness, and especially love, because that is actually what life is all about, not only in RL but also here.

Yana on Tahiti

Yana's experience as a landscape builder began early in her virtual life - back in 2007 she got a job dressing sims for XiaoWang Yue of Tao estates - five regions, each with 16 parcels if you remember those. Plenty of work, then, in organizing them for rental use.

Yana Dakota:   I  think I worked for him for 3 years. Landscaping is a thing of mine.  All in all I got the hang of creating 3D. I put everything on the marketplace with a 3D picture and in no time everything was rented out with the result that he had to order more sims. Eventually I became general manager there.Then the recession in RL meant that he started selling his sims until there was nothing left. After that I had 2 more jobs and then took a big break from SL.

Advent Neighborhood

 Osgrid is back up, or kind of back up, not entirely convinced by it, from a performance point of view, but it's a good omen, and another promise of good times ahead is the start of the Advent build by Ange Menges and Nani ferguson. Ange and Nani have been consistently building festive, ephemeral regions for over 12 years in Opensim (and worked together before that back in SL) so they're used to the vagaries of the virtual. They have set up their latest creation Advent Calendar on two grids, Zetaworlds and OSGrid. 

When you arrive there's the usual poster board but this time, no HUD, it's just up to you to go out wandering around the snowy, bosky neighborhood and seek out structures with numbers on them. 

Something for the Weekend

 Next weekend is going to be a busy one for opensim - isn't it almost always? For starters, it's the Opensimulator Community Conference held on a dedicated grid - this is the 13th year for the event that brings together educators and developers, with speakers like Valibrarian Gregg, Lone Wolf, and Sally Cherry.

Rhiannon Chatnoir and the team at Avacon organize the OSCC every year

On Saturday at 12.00noon SLT there's a panel presentation all about the Hypergrid International Expo! Mal Burns, James Atlloud and I will be discussing how the HIE event came into being, some details about the history, technical aspects, and aims of the event. SO if you're available to come over and hear it, check the HG Addresses at the bottom of this post. OSCC events are filmed and streamed in Youtube also. Subscribe if you haven't yet done so, and visit the OSCC Expo Zone 2 to see more information about HIE. 

There's more going on this weekend though. 

It's the final party on Discovery grid, next Saturday. They have 4 DJs lined up. from 12 noon SLT, to serenade the grid offline, or should I say transitioning  to O3DE. 

We Thinx Winx

Winxtropia is one of the most fun and cutting grids out there, with a strong bias toward original opensim content, cartoon looks, lots of low poly and low lag and high performance happening here. A short while back, the new sim 'Frutti Music Bar' was featured on this blog - it's all your food groups wrapped into one!

But... even super tech savvy grids can have their  hiccups - one happened just over a week ago. A new update caused havoc to Crescent Melody, the music region you probably remember for its dancing cats.

This situation brought Bloom Peters, owner of Winxtropia, to a decision - she decided to start again. Well, not entirely of course...

Bloom Peters: I kept many backups and lost nothing. All sims are restored and inventory so Winx should work the same as it did.

Thirza Ember: OK, so what's new? Re-friending everyone, I know, possibly LMs will be broken... what else?

The Stars of Exupery

 There is a kind of law of the shortest distance to the image, 

a psychological law by which the event  to which one is subjected 

is visualized in a  symbol that represents its swiftest summing up.

                                        Wind Sand and Stars, A. de Saint-Exupéry

He fell out of the sky in 1935. 

Antoine de Saint Exupéry was born into a noble but impoverished family of Lyon, France in 1900. He became a pilot in the years between the world wars, transporting people, mail, and goods around North Africa and the Med, frequently flying over the Sahara. That desert, and its peoples, were so far from the modern hazards of life in Europe in the 1930's, that they captured his imagination and, along with his other adventures in far flung places, gave life to a series of books, rich with limpid prose, exquisite descriptions, and timeless reflections on life and love. 

It was in the Egyptian part of the Sahara that De Exupéry crashed, during a race from Paris to Saigon, in 1935. Of his many plane crashes, this one - and the 4 days that it took him and his copilot to be found - were the most influential on the rest of his life. Hope and fear, mechanics, mirages, and hallucinations, coffee and oranges, and a passing Bedouin got him out of the situation, and no doubt led to Saint Exupèry's career as a writer. 

The best loved and most widely distributed of his works is The Little Prince. It's one of those books that everyone should have read, and once read, you will probably decide to read it again. It's a short read, most people can get through the whole book in about an hour.

The planets