AviWorlds: Josh & Co

Sometimes, seeing is believing. AviWorlds owner Josh Boam discovered Second Life thanks to a friend who told him that 'there was a place you could live a virtual life and do anything create anything and meet people from around the world'.  

Josh Boam: I did not believe him it was all so much to take in so that night I went home and joined.

Josh Boam

In Second Life, Josh split his time between running RP regions and building stuff - JP Collections opened in 2008 and is still on SL Marketplace offering furniture, aircraft, buildings, and Josh's main love, yachts - he went on to build 100 different watercraft.

But, as we all know, SL is pricey!

Josh Boam: At one point our Friday Harbor RP had over 15 regions and the cost to run was just way too high, so in 2014 I was turn onto the open simulator platform by some friends.  It was at this point I could see the profit that could be made by running your own grid, and thus SkyLifeGrid was born.  I ran Skylife for many years and learned over the years more and more about the backend of opensim.  Having no previous knowledge of opensim or databases or anything I studied the code for opensim line by line during my working days and was able to develop a system that worked for me.

The 5k of AviWorlds

A nice big crowd is assembling over the next few hours -Rogue Galaxy is the headline performer - for the big party happening over on AviWorlds today, at login.aviworlds.com:8002:AviWorlds Club

The reason? It's all about celebrating 5000 members of the grid! 

The party is on a cute wooded island, with a super yacht moored close by, if you're in the mood for some five star floating.... 

but most of us were drawn to the tunes expertly spun by the lovely Candida Campese, who got the party started.

5000 is a huge number, and considering the grid is only a little more than 4 years old, and it was nice to see such a crowd of locals and outworlders come together to mark the event with grid owner Josh Boam. Here's what a few of them had to say.