The End of Discovery

 Discovery Grid is closing, and will be gone by December 15. The news was announced at a grid meeting last Saturday. If, like me, you're busy on Saturdays and missed the meeting, you can get a recap of the main points of Balpien's announcement here. 

It seems the main reason why Balpien decided to shut down Discovery is that the internal economy of the grid has ground to a halt, with few merchants and money making sims, and a general decline in residents and regions.

It's always a shame to see a grid go offline, and one that's been around for over eight years is a loss to the general hypergrid community. But you still have a few weeks to go around and take one last look!

If you can't quite place Discovery among the many grids we have visited, here are a few reminders. The Safari has been lucky enough to tour here once or twice, beginning with a visit to Spirit Rock Ranch when the grid was just one year old. 

At that time our guide, Angel Discovery, explained how the grid was born out of friendships forged in Inworldz, so it's no surprise that, in his statement about the closing of Discovery, Balpien makes reference to that shambles of a shutdown that happened to Inworldz back in the summer of 2018, and vows to do better.  

Titanic going down

More recently we made a return to Discovery to see Kayaker Magic. He has a fabulous interactive Titanic build which is the scene of an annual party, to memorialize the sinking of that great ship - he very kindly let us see the dramatic sinking play out - so many details, with icebergs and lifeboats and flotsam and even rats deserting the ship!  The sporty Panthalassa region, with its opportunities for surfing, riding, hiking, and shooting dinosaurs, will surely survive on some other grid, it is a jewel of a sim.

Safari goes to Inworldz

As many of you already know, earlier this week OSGrid has gone offline due to a failure of the RAID drives in the asset system. This is a big deal, because although everyone's assets on OSGrid are backed up, they will now have to be restored - billions of bits and bobs, and it's going to take a while. Fun fact, while you weep for your missing shoes and sculpties, I'm told that RAID stands for Redundant Arrays of Independent Drives. Did that help? I was afraid not.

Fortunately, Opensim isn't just one grid, we are many! so while we're all sorry to lose our homes/stuff in OSGrid, and hope very much to get it back, if possible, many of us have options, even duplicates, on other worlds, and can carry on without missing a beat. Always wise to diversify! So this week's Safari trip is on track.

 The Safari trips are aimed, as you know, at getting more acquainted with the grid-jumping process, and in learning more about the great galaxy of hypergrid connected worlds. This week, while Thirza is away, something slightly different happened.

Fuschia in black and white (Photo by Praline B)

This week's trip HG Safari Week 14 was organized by Fuschia Nightfire, who wanted to show the group her gallery on Inworldz, with a follow-up trip to Sendalonde, a region for literature and art, by Alexina Procter and Prax Maryjasz.

Artz and Mindz : Visions of InWorldz

O Canada

        If you like visions of flight, then you should get over to  InWorldz  soon to see the latest edition of the Dreamz & Visionz Art Festival. This time the theme is 'Wings' and there are some diverse, beautiful and thoughtful installations. This delicious mind game is called 'Cloud's Gate' by Ub Yifu. 

The 'Wings' in this case bring to mind a Du Maurian anxiety; should the avatar take the plunge, and where, beyond the swirling dark security of the little house, will that cloudy leap take him? Is there anywhere to go? Like so much of Ub's art, which continues to bring enduring pleasure in Second Life too, of course, you're going to want to experience it for yourself to get the full inner effect. Videos and photos are great, but nothing beats being there. 

         And 'there' in this case are the four exhibition sims where Jeri Rahja, with help from curator quadrapop tree has been holding Dreamz & Visionz shows since late 2011. At first it seems the idea was to hold a once-a-year event, but it was so popular now they do them three or four times a year, this being the third Fantasy Festival. 

quadrapop tree: The D&V Art Exhibitions started out as judged shows with 3 residents being asked to review all the work and so we had winning entries as well as participation awards. There were also people's choice awards for one year. We are now doing only participation awards which are a share of the total tips received. All moneys for the awards comes from tips made by visitors and some sponsors (most of whom wish to remain anonymous but who want to truly support the arts in IW)
        So everyone's a winner, which is nice. Quadrapop, seen here in Male mode, is of course an artist too, and has a big gallery complex called Dolphin Bay, which is full of treasures, both home-made and belonging to other artists, including an Arcadia Asylum collection and a space for Tuna. Quad also does lectures from time to time on textures and windlight and that kind of thing. A vibrant mass of color greets the visitor, and with 14 tps to choose from at the landing spot alone, there is no reason to get bored on Dolphin Bay! 

        Coming back to the Festival, though, it was interesting to hear how quadrapop came to choose InWorldz after leaving Second Life.
quadrapop tree: In 2010 Linden labs sacked the 1/3 of their workforce who actually cared about the residents, many Lindens who I knew or who had championed things I cared about were gone and so was their voice within the company. This along with continued lack of effective communication between Linden Lab and SL residents prompted me to look for alternatives. I decided that LL would not get any more of my IP. IW came up as the best option for me of the OS Grids available at the time.

        Next to Ub Yifu's install, there's another engaging sculpture, this time by Maximillian Svarovski. Tiles narrate an ascent, a sort of hard-scrabble progression through stages of flight, undercut by the enveloping cage. One wonders if the figure knows it's closed in, or if it minds. 
        With four sims and a whole sky full of stuff, you will enjoy a visit to the exhibition, but I'm going to say it: a couple of the builds were too scary for me to take pictures of. Go over there and see if you can see which ones...
        Any builder or artist moving out of one world and into another has to face the challenges of rebuilding Inventory, sourcing extras like mesh, animation and sound components, and the dreaded Script Gap, in which scripts that worked just fine in Second Life give all kinds of horrible errors in other worlds. How had that been for quadrapop? (this is q in lady mode.) Not too bad, on the whole.
quadrapop tree: The odd script might not work (mostly because the SL script engine forces scripters to use workarounds that are not necessary here) and occasionally you might meet a scripting function that is not fully implemented - however unlike SL if that happens here you can file a support ticket or speak up about your problem in the IW Scripting Forum and have the grid devs either implement the function or explain how or why they can't, usually a case of yet rather than never). However all the scripts I am likely to use work fine - in fact since Phlox (the IW script engine Tranq rewrote from scratch) was introduced scripts run so much faster that this removed yet another lag issue which has plagued SL for as long as it existed. When I moved to IW I decided to start from scratch - the only thing i brought with me was textures. I've not attempted to import anything from SL and my work does not rely heavily on scripting. So for me the move to IW has been painless. I know there have been hiccoughs for some over the years but in all cases the issues were resolved as quickly as the small team can manage - often within days. Some things like vehicle physics got held up by higher priority issues and it is the concentration on the basics and string foundations by Tranq and the team of devs that inspired me to choose this grid over any other.

         Across the water from Ub and Maximillian's builds is Mira Karu's off-the-page feathery fantasy. Pegasus presides over the leaves of books, as light and illuminating as the ideas they spawn in the mind of the great wire man. Also there is a very nice umbrella, but you're going to have to figure that part out for yourself. 

        Coming back into InWorldz after many months elsewhere did feel a bit odd. This Thirza is fourth or fifth eldest out of 14 different Thirzas created over the past six years to visit various worlds that all required, back then, a grid-specific avatar, so you can imagine how small and old her inventory is, yet the feeling of difference wasn't just the crazy looking hair. (As a side note, worrying about your avatar appearance has its place, but it's a limited one, and when people start going on about 'honing' or 'inhabiting' their avatar, it's very hard not to be creeped out, often to Lovecraftian proportions, regarding what that suggests about their real life appearance.)  Coming out of open sim, it is also kind of depressing to be on a closed grid again, where you can't just tp from home to home to home on half a dozen wild and woolly grids; it's sad to be in a place where the norm is paying for stuff (gosh, paying tier! remember that?) and where it's considered a semi-big deal to let others use your land rent-free. 
        I know many InWorldz residents consider themselves in 'open sim', which technically maybe it is, though it's a closed world. But it's a bit like when someone says they've 'been abroad a lot' and then you find out they mean they've been to Canada, not Fiji or Istanbul. Not that there is anything wrong with Canada. Nor is there anything wrong with InWorldz being the cheaper, broader, saner northern neighbor of Second Life. Better, quite likely, but not really 'abroad', and hey, that might be exactly what you're looking for.
        A nice thing happened. By sheer lucky chance, Kapi Kinder was in world. This is his build. He said he'd seen me at Pirats years ago, which seemed apposite as this is a very Pirats-reminiscent build. 

        He said the installation was about planet earth, about what we humans are doing to it. The figures flying around prompted to me to ask if they were 'earth angels' . It was a  silly superficial remark, but look at his reply - a poetic explanation not only of his own build, but a picture of what is at the heart of all artistic communities, wherever they may be. 
   kapi kinder: i can tell you what happened to me ...so you will understand....at list the angel parts
   kapi kinder: almost a year ago i broke 1 rip 1 leg 1 hand and was half way to heaven
   kapi kinder: some how  i got ability to make a call so they found me and i survive
   kapi kinder: very simple
   kapi kinder: i am still recovering... but  it give new prospective how fragile we are.
Wings, a Dreamz & Visionz Art Festival, starts February 7 in InWorldz.

Rhomb here to Eternity

The sacred geometry of chance

The hidden law of a probable outcome

The numbers lead a dance

Sting, Shape of my heart

Wizard Gynoid is all about the Golden Rhombus these days, and it's led to an exciting new discovery about complex geometric shapes, which she describes on her blog. We have the opportunity to experience the quiet mystery of it, in InWorldz at Wizard/120/140/23 (when is IWz going to get functioning WZURLs? I ask nobody in particular.) Her creation looks a bit like a piece of brain, as it turns, orbiting rather than rotating, it calls to mind something Escher would make; the rhombuses or rhombi are all the same shape, size and colour, but don't seem so.

Wizard Gynoid: I like it 'cause it is deceptive. It looks like it's made of squares and cubes and boxes, but it's not. It's made from the Golden Rhombus.
We were quiet for a bit, just watching the oddity. The Golden Rhombus, I thought, would make a good name for a restaurant.
Wizard Gynoid: Or a liquor drink.
Thirza Ember: 'Ambassador, with this delicious Golden Rhombus, you're spoiling us.' or no - 'Hey, it's after 6, I'll have a Golden Rhombus on the rocks'.
Wizard Gynoid: 'I'll take a Golden Rhombus right between the eyes, thank you.'
One thing has led to another, with this rhombus story. She was inspired to build a crystal flower from the same root matter; it too is a zonohedra, and is squeezed in among the other Sacred Toys in the Temple.

Wizard Gynoid: The crystal flower is made of five petals, growing out from a center point, and has  icosahedral  symmetry. I'm into crystals at the moment, and over here are some real crystal structures I made for the Elf Clan Fantasy Art Festival, which is on right now. Soror Nishi, Ub Yifu, Scarp Godenot and a bunch of other peeps were involved also. As you probably know, the Elves recently escaped SL, and came to Inworldz. This thing glitters like it is crystalline; it's significant because this is the real atomic crystal structure that the world is based on, which is why I suggest it with the orbiting electrons.

Wizard Gynoid: InWorldz is great because it lets me make stuff big. and link them together. This object is almost a thousand prims. not possible in SL.
You need to tp to sim Wizard in InWorldz to truly get the effect. Don't forget to friend us when you get there.

Thirza Ember: It's always fascinating to me how, no matter what, we come back to nature. Inside our computers, it's a virtual world far from rain or mud or snow; it might be as alien to Earth as the Moon, or space itself - far from the natural substances of the world. But no. Whether it's traditional plants or the more surreal kind, like the ones soror makes, or this kind of meditation on form - it's still all nature.
Wizard Gynoid: I think duplicating nature in here is ok, but there is so much more potential to do things. To explore the inside of your mind. Which is nature, I guess, too...
Thirza Ember: I guess that's our axis, we can only spin on it.

Wizard Gynoid: The crystals of gold and silver and lead and copper look like this which is very alchemical -they are the classic metals. I found afterwards that they matched, so that was sorta synchronous.
Huh - so maybe she'll figure out finally how to make gold from baser metals?
Wizard Gynoid: I'm not out to make a fortune. I'm not materialistic. I just want to make beauty and help others to see it.

Rising Tide: Alizarin Goldflake

Digital artist Martha Jane Bradford thinks big. As Alizarin Goldflake in Second Life, she's collaborated with big noises like the Caerleon Art group, and big events like Burning Life. In the LL booth at the Shanghai World Expo last year, seventy squillion people from forty-two different planets got a chance to admire her work via the machinima Acquarella: the fable, by Chantal Harvey and friends.
Acquarella is an original story by Alizarin. Inspired by her love of all things aquatic, it's a tale of apocalyptic upheaval and change inspired by (among other things) the Fukushima disaster. Acquarella got its first outing in Second Life, which is still the default grid when it comes to virtual art meeting the virtual art-loving public. But, while Alizarin keeps a consitent foothold there, she's expanded the concept on Nexus Central, part of Jeri Rahja's  arty archipelago on the InWorldz grid.

Alizarin Goldflake: The sim tells a fable in 4 quadrants. All of it happened because White Lebed couldn't understand why

Building an after Life

building is building, no matter the grid... talent is what show.

Hairy Thor

When bloggers are out of interesting topics, they give you the 'SL is Doomed!' routine. Supposing you're drinking that particular Cool-Aid, you may have wondered, what would happen if I went to build in other worlds? 

weirdness in veesome

On the downside, You're going to look like a noob for a while, and WEIRD STUFF WILL HAPPEN. If you go to a commercial world like InWorldz, and are prepared to pony up, you'll soon have good hair and skins. Otherwise, it's DIY or freebies. DIY can be an education, freebies are getting better all the time, but whichever way you go, be prepared to lose time reinventing yourself on your new grid. 

soror Nishi: I looked like a bagwoman for the first year, before we got shops in InWorldz!
   Personal appearance is only part of the learning curve. Don't be fooled by the laid back attitude outside SL - grid owners aren't lying down on the job, when it comes to protecting residents and their rights.

Elenia Llewellyn: My advice for builders leaving SL - not all licenses are the same! Keep your work legal!
Leannan Shi: Remember to check and make sure that everything in your SL builds is fullperm and YOURS before you bring it over. Sculpted parts do not export well.
Raphaella Nightfire: Scripting and animations require patience. And be prepared to be noob for a few hours.
Alizarin Goldflake: Builders need to be aware that not all SL scripts work here. Some have errors that can cause horrendous lag. And you can't edit linked parts.
Leannan Shi: Boobs don't jiggle in InWorldz. But next week though, right? LOL