Close Encounters

Encounters - of any kind - it's not a word we always associate with Opensim. It's a whole lotta space! 

If you think that opensim's kind of empty today, then you should have seen it ten, fifteen years ago. The small population of pioneers was pretty sparse, and you'd be forgiven for describing it as a place of rare encounters, maybe even zero! 

Close Encounters - the space ship

Yet, for seven years from 2008, there was one fixed appointment on OSGrid where you'd find a regular band of happy dancers, some good tunes, the latest gossip - of a friendly kind, nothing hostile - and the chance to finally see someone after a week of building and experimenting in this brave new world.

The place was Close Encounters, a spaceship dance club on a region that was home to Dorothea Lundquist and Jay Maze. 

Twirling time!

Missing the Sky

 Are you the kind of person who can't wait for the next update in the Firestorm viewer, and eagerly test its many windows and menus? Or do you wait until you think it's been tweaked into reliable behavior - maybe even wait till you absolutely are obliged to update?  As grateful as we all should be by the people who do the testing and reporting of problems, it's probably fair to say that the majority of us just want the thing to work, and are not entertained by bug hunting. 

Firestorm 6.6.8 (68380) was released this January. When I finally bit the bullet and changed over to it,  it seemed a pretty painless transition. 

With one exception - all the Windlight settings were gone. Urk. 

For a few weeks I just let it slide, but eventually I had enough time to check around to see what was up with that and found this thread on the SL community page. The new way - well, not all that new, but never mind about  that - to make skies is called EEP (meaning Environment Enhancement Project) and you may have seen some stunning EEPs around opensim like this beauty...

Dew Drop Islands, by Azi Az and Danger Lytton

and this one:

I Dew

We all do so love builds by Azi Az and Danger Lytton. In the second part of this week's adventure, we visited the Dew Drop Islands, and what a contrast from the first part of our tour! 

Azi Az and Danger Lytton

This blog covered the Dew Drop  a few months back when it first opened. At that time, the sim was attached to OSGrid. Since then it's been moved over to Danger and Azi's personal grid, called Shipyards, where it is one among a whole clutch of jewel-like regions. HG Address, as always, at the end of the post.

We did manage to crash Sauce, our first destination, but with no casualties, as we were all kind of expecting the crash so we just relogged and rolled up a little early at the Dew Drop Islands, in ones and twos.

Azi Az: Hi Thirza :))) Welcome

Thirza Ember: woohoo we survived!

Kelso Uxlay: Drinking stuff was risky

Az... good as it gets

          Snakedance Moonwind's lovely avie said it best...2015 was on it way out. Some of the  Safari regulars met to talk about what they thought the year had brought. 

          It was a two stop Safari, the second half on the heart-breakingly lovely region created by Azi Az. Azi and her partner Danger Lytton, who hosts the region on a fabulous server connected to OSgrid which took in its stride the arrival of a dozen happy avies, despite the colossal amount of detail on the land.
       Arriving in the main square we immediately tp'd over to the ballroom where Danger was spinning some fantastic tunes. That made it easy to cam out ant about on the var region. It's pretty awesome, is open sim. A fair sized group of people, with my viewer set to Ultra and the maximum draw distance possible, and not a whiff of lag. Bliss.

A Crash Dancing, Scope Riding, Anvil Dumping Safari

Jessica.Pixel: I decided to be human today so lets hope all of my hair makes it
Thirza Ember: I feel like hair like that deserves its own greeting
Wizard Gynoid: at least it's not up her bum

Ms Pixel and her remarkable hair

          There was loose talk at the 54th HGSafari about gorean virgins and Mal Burns, most of which I can't divulge.
Fuschia Nightfire: when I was a noob, me and a friend once did a parachute jump from a sky platform and landed in a Gorean village, where she was taken as a slave, and this is the absolute truth, I never saw her again

More Emphasis

The Emphatic Eccentricia show is still on, at the sim of the same name on OSGrid. It marks the 4th anniversary of the group which started in SL but which has high hopes and big plans for an open sim future. 

OhMy Shalala; Systemic Candida Build

          We were at the opening event on January 5th, which featured music by Danger Lytton who had a pirate-themed build in the event, in the shape of a ship and some pretty noisy cannons. Danger is a mesh guy; despite all the detail, his cannons only count 7 prims, which means you can get a lot of firepower on deck without risking lag. (Lag I hear you say? What's that?) With that Jack Sparrow look going on, you won't be surprised to hear that ships are kind of his specialty - and not just the water-bound variety. 
Danger Lytton: I am trying to create a battle sim patterned after Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, complete with cannons firing and ships on fire and sinking. With availability now of NPC Clones it is fun to populate a scene with 'real' avatars. Currently my Region names are "The City at Night", "OS Shipyards" (currently under renovation) and the "OS Proving Grounds - Dry Lake Flight Test Center"  which is being patterned after the dry lake bed aircraft testing areas in California. The Proving Grounds are currently being used to construct a club for the Sohlarious mega region which will include a space ship ride from the ground, into orbit, through a wormhole and finally arrive at the space station in orbit around a distant star.

The City at Night

 It was also nice to see some soror Nishi trees in OSGrid; they are at ground level, or should i say sea level? and are enlivened by OhMy Shalala's ghostly flame dragons. 
soror as you may know mostly builds in InWorldz these days, although real world art has in many ways gotten the jump on her virtual activity there's a lot about it in her excellent blog. how's that working out, and how do the two creative processes compare?
Soror Nishi:  I spend a lot less time on the computer than I did. When I was very busy in SL it was partly because my RL job was not full-time. I had time to spare and no workshop in RL so virtual worlds gave me some great opportunities. Over the last 12 months I have a garage/workshop and, after finishing my latest RL sculpture, have turned my hand to woodwork. If I lost the RL workshop I might go back to spending more time in VWs.  Real life art is easier in that you can use your hands. Your fingers and hands are amazingly clever... on the computer you can only use your finger tips. I do like Matter. I like materials, so I think both RL and VW are valid media.
If you've read her blog at all, you will have seen how her love affair with wood grain is blossoming into a real passion. the agony and the ecstasy! To see how she has beautifully combined the two apparently different art forms,
click here to see a recent painting by soror of a build in SL, and look at this adorable bonsai reminder of her great virtual forests.       
You can also see it on Flickr so don't forget to go there too, and show the love by favoriting the pic!
       Both Danger and soror started out in SL (duh) but have moved on; I wondered why they think more artists don't leave, considering the much-hated TOS which have driven even the likes of Bryn Oh out of the arms of the Lindens. 
soror Nishi: I think artists think that they have to have the maximum "traffic". They have to have lots of people seeing their work. Many think that there are more people in SL and therefore it's a better place for artists. I think this is rubbish, but it is what keeps people in SL in spite of the ToS, lack of prims, poor building tools and so on.  Making art is not about how many people see it, that is just egoism. Everyone wants to be famous...but I have no idea what could be done to help people move.
Danger Lytton spends a lot of time talking up OS Grid in Second life, using his profile pics to showcase places and scenes in OS.

The Lytton shuttle

Danger Lytton: I have invited many people to come here. Although most of them find OS Grid a challenge compared to Second Life, many of them have stayed. 
Almost since day one in OSG I have said coming here was like packing up the Conestoga Wagon and moving West. It feels more primitive yet more alive. We all share our challenges and our solutions. There are builders and scripters here that are far better than I am, but I still have some of the best there are ask me how to do some things.  The biggest difficulty in OS is stability. Unfortunately I have restarted regions many times because they refuse to work. Often this appears to be because the build I have created is too hard on the system. Other times I think as I am also fond of saying, "It's Sunday." The greatest thing about OSG is that there is no pressure. There is no cost to do most of our work here therefore no rush to finish. I do things over and over again until I am happy with the result.

OS Shipyards

      A lot of pixels have been spilt recently on the subject of the projected figures of SL and OSGrid. Predictions are bunkum, and the multiplication of sims is no guarantee of use or quality.  Call it loneliness, call it traffic, call it community, call it exploring the boundaries; the virtual experience is in the end what you make it. 

If you go online looking for company, and you're not too fussy, you can always find people in SL. Not true of OSGrid. Yes, moving is irksome, finding a place and a look and a group of like-minded individuals is not child's play in any grid, just as it isn't in the real world.

Danger Lytton: One of the things I would like very much to see happen is for the Burning Man Regional in Second Life to branch out into the OSG. Collaboration is the best way to get folks to come here. Listening to what they would like to accomplish here  and then helping them find ways to do it will go a long ways towards keeping them interested. I keep a welcome package of avatars and clothing for noobs to wear so they can feel presentable before they head out into the Grid. One of my desires would be to attract my RL artist daughter to discover the medium of a virtual world. 

   I for one can't wait to meet her!