Birthdays, Borders and Bunnies

        HG Safari is a hypergrid tour group. 

Every Wednesday we meet on the HGSafari region on FrancoGrid. About 15-20 people join each week, trips are organized in advance so we can meet grid and region owners. We go to two or three different grids each week, spending about an hour on each. The entire event lasts about three hours, some people stay for the whole thing, some people come and go, depending on other commitments. 

To make it easier for people to join us partway through the Safari, event details are posted on opensimworld.com, G+ and Facebook.
To keep it interesting for all, there's a mix of destinations, from social to sporty, from arty to educational, from technical to theatrical. No one grid is promoted above all others, though we tend to spend a lot more time with people who are not in virtual worlds for the money. Cuz if we were into that, we would just have stayed in Second Life.
You will find the HG Addresses for this week's three destinations at the end of the post, should you wish to visit them yourself. You put the address in your Viewer's Map, hit Search, and then teleport. It's a simple low tech way of discovering opensim for yourself.

Building competition entry by XsiberiaX Ilfreddopurifica

         Craft Grid turns 7 on Friday, and there will be a big party from around 1pm Pacific time, which is ten o'clock in the evening in Europe. They will be awarding the prizes for the annual Build

Safari crosses over

            Institutions. We all love them, and most of us belong in one. This week three SL/opensim crossovers were our destinations, each one an epic in its own way. First up,  Seanchai Library which this month celebrates seven years since it was founded in Second Life. That's a big deal when you think of all the performances that this group has put on, and all the money they have collected for charity too. We met on sim Inis Arcain in Kitely to hear the short story 'The Bard' performed by Caledonia Skytower. This is a tale of druids and warriors and ancient angst, and one of the most memorable menacing laughs in the metaverse.

          Caledonia set things up so we could hear her via streaming anywhere on the sim, making it possible to go wandering around the build without missing any of the story, also making it easier on those of us who find that Voice does not work well when

Goodbye to Gatsby

"In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." 

She looked at us all radiantly.

"Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? 

I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker.

                                                                                 The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's easy to miss things in OpenSim; we are all so busy making, inventing and scratching our heads as the platform throws up some new curve ball that takes away an hour or two we might otherwise have spent  relaxing. 

But some things should not be missed, and this is one of them: The Great Gatsby build, part of EXPLORESeanchai on Kitely. After a month or more of performances and guided tours, the build will be closing, with a party on the last day of this month, Sunday 28 February, some time after 2 pm Pacific. Here's the address:
Hypergrid URI    grid.kitely.com:8002:EXPLORESeanchai  

East Egg and West Egg have been coming alive in this very special way throughout the past few weeks as the Seanchai has presented readings of the novel in weekly episodes with performances by both Caledonia and the great Corwyn Allen. The readings

Classic Safari

Once upon a time, there was a grid called Virtyou, and it had gallic village on a sim called Niflar. This was all pre mesh, you understand. Well, Virtyou seems to have sort of morphed and amalgamated with another grid, Nick Zwart's 3DLES grid, a language acquisition environment in association with Digischool. The idea is to make immersive environments for the students to play and learn in - there are Quiz chairs, videos, Sloodle boards, and games like Snakes and Ladders, which is Snakes and Chutes to you, probably. This is Chatterdale, with its pub, Belisha beacons, Job Center, fish and chip shop, and so on. You'll find a potted version of France and Germany on sims Parolay and Plauderstein respectively.

 Nick frequently has 20 students on the grid at any one time without his system even blinking. OK, now you're thinking: "hahaha, famous last words" and of course, you're right. Hypergrid visitors are not like regular local visitors. We really should get that printed on a tee shirt or something.

Safari Out Loud

A cloudy start in Metropolis this week, things did not look too promising, to be honest with you, and not just Apmel's funky Metrosexual hairdo. We are still meeting on Outlands sim in Metopolis, and no, nobody has fixed that elephant yet, but this time tomorrow, you will find a few freebies and a list of clothing, shoes and hair landmarks, not as fancy as the one Wizardoz Chrome has made in OSGrid, but a start, anyway. 

Outlands : I don't advise sitting on the barrels

It is a strange sensation to hear voices in Open Sim. One gets so used to having a smart mouth without actually opening it, that this week, when Safari went to the Seanchai Library in Kitely, it was a delightful shakeup of our usual routine.

Apmel and I ponder what could possibly have happened to Mal Burn's signature top hat.

  The Seanchai Library in SL has been delighting audiences (and helping real life good causes) for many years, and now they have branched out to Kitely, it means they have a vast number of prims for a fraction of the price. 

Seanchai Portals at the welcome area

That translates into more creative environments, places of wonder and inspiration for you to explore with twelve storytelling venues and eight themed worlds, you could spend days here. And before you start biting your keyboard and shouting 'Yeah, but where is the hg address" they are all at the end of the post, with the assumption that you have some inkling of how to gridjump.

For Safari, Seanchai (Irish for 'storyteller') meant Caledonia Skytower and Shandon Loring taking time out of their daytime to read for us two great stories that left us quivering with fear and clinging to our neighbors (or in my case crashing at the very end... I blame Apmel). The story reading corner is appropriately sized for such a large gathering but you really have to go check out their Fallingwater build, why not pop over there this weekend for their regular scheduled readings at 9 am SLT Saturday and Sunday.

 There is so much to see I am not sure everyone got to visit Fallingwater this time but we'll be back - who can resist these talented actors who have participated in on a whole raft of quality productions that bridge the gap between virtual worlds, including such classics as The African Queen and The Dickens Project. You can catch up with them on their website, and find them on FB, Google+ etc.  where upcoming performances are announced.

The beautiful Caledonia Skytower, during her reading of Frank Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger?

They have so many great ideas for using virtual spaces to put on plays and readings, this is a huge resource for anyone who loves literature and hypergridding, so be sure to join their group at the main welcome area, so you will get all their updates, and don't forget if you're in SL, you can also join StoryFest and perhaps be an even more active part of the fun. Voice is not for everyone, but it adds a delicious level of intimacy and animation to the virtual experience and we plan to come back again soon to hear some more of their stories, so please join us if you can.

Love the red plane on TanGle Grid!

Few things are more excruciating in a virtual world than when your viewer freezes just as you hear someone ask you a question in front of a large group of people, but at least the inevitable crash is a merciful release... and with crashing on the menu, it seemed appropriate that our second destination was the Air and Space show at TanGle Grid. Their Welcome sim is one of my favorites, it is easy to use, bright and busy, but not so full of info you are overloaded and can't figure out where to go.  Just follow the arrows!

Peter Veliz and the team made us very welcome, although once again it seems a good number of safarians could not see the fantastic vehicles on the sim, while the neighboring fun fair rezzed perfectly for them. It is your classic HG Voodoo, a huge shame though because the vintage and futuristic vehicular variety on show was amazing. For a long time the only thing I could see was Miso Susanowa wearing her new Meeroo HG Hairguard (too late, Philip. I believe it is already Patent Pending)

But then Boom! All the ships came into view. 
I went up to see the Star Trek models, shame my dire computer situation *breaks down and weeps before the shattered hull of her alienware laptop* could not really do the place justice.

This may be illegal.

We bethought ourselves to go over and check out the Ghost Castle Installation that Fuschia has put up on PM Grid. There's a special post all about that, Usually by the time we get to our third destination we are quite thin on the ground, but this week more seemed to have survived the many missteps that makes up jumping. One such misstep, losing your clothes, seems to be easily fixable, according to the Nook's very own Nara Malone who advises - put all the things you are wearing into your inventory's Suitcase, so that grids with HG restrictions will not bork your lovely look (huh- must remember to do that, also not try to grid jump when my viewer is set to High Graphics.)

For quite a few of us, it took loads of jump attempts and the use of sneaky back ways to get over to PMGrid; Pathfinder managed to get there before any of us. We found him riding around on an animal that looked distinctly HG traumatized, and when the grid finally spat us all out, we headed back to Metropolis, landing up in Art Blue's zoo on sim Futurelab. It is nice to close each chaotic safari this way, the hard core safarians drifts back to our grid of origin and we all end up sitting around being silly. For the second time in a week I have been a party to lap-sitting mishaps, and since I have been plagiarized twice this week also, Karma says it's OK to steal this photo from Phacebook. 

It belongs to  Apmel who made it right to the end of the Safari this time, a personal best for him, I think his magic hair must be the secret behind his new-found stickability. Lucy came and went, but what kept Nara with us down to the wire? Writerly genius, of course! Fuschia has Pink Power, while Wiz and Miso swear by Meeroo meat, which has become the number one snack for all Safaris, for its high fiber and levels of vitamins H and G.  I am not sure what Patricia Anne's superpower is... yet. Art has some bizarrely oversized animals in his collection, I leave it to others to decide what that means. Maybe Siobhan and Nara can write a story about it. 

So once you log into your grid of choice, here are the hg addresses of the places we went to. Put the address in the Search box in your Map, hit Search, wait, and then jump.

Seanchai Library grid.kitely.com:8002/Seanchai Library
TanGle Grid tanglegrid.net:8032 and then follow the big arrow to Expo Isle (the Air and Space Expo is nearly over, so hurry!) 

Art Blue's zoo and more  hg.hypergrid.org:80:Futurelab