Keep your hat on

John 'Pathfinder' Lester (né Linden) is much too famous to require introduction here: that hat, 'taken from a pirate' (draw your own conclusions, people) is the trademark of a VW guru whose resume includes Harvard, SL, and Reaction Grid, with Jibe Worlds thrown in.

For a more complete story, listen to the recent Metareality podcast where Gianna Borgnine interviewed him (brace yourself  for *sewper excited* voice).

He gets no puppy-dog adulation at the Hypergrid Adventurers' Club, which is the best club in the Metaverse. Here we are, outside the loos in osgrid (hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go) which are part of the Virtual Harlem/Africa build by SL legend and OSgrid goddess, Arcadia Asylum.
What 'is' the HGAC? It's a gentle forum for finding out what's going on in different parts of OpenSim.

In and out of the box

Going to another grid is hard work. No wonder people stay put! It's all sitting in front of the screen, but man, this is exhausting, I'm getting square eyes!  Reaction Grid Thirza  came into existence  in '10, back when Caerleon had some art here. She's languished somewhat since then. It's Jokaydia Thirza who goes Hypergridding, occasionally passing through RG on the way to more exciting places. Seems unfair - maybe there are exciting places in RG, right? 

Erm... RG Thirza had a default noob skin best described as 'Woman vs. Eyeshadow' and the usual Walmart combo of jeans and tee favoured by the makers of basic outfits, and some random black hair. For sanity's sake, basics are a must. Only as I brought them into RG did it occur to me how much work all this is! But the alternative is trawling through endless boxes of drek from the Freebie shop, which is an unsatisfying and long job. The following are essentials:

Shape. Got a shop-bought shape in SL? you're going to want to get a piece of paper and note down all the names and numbers on all the sliders. Then, in your inventory, go to 'Create' and make a new shape, painstakingly copying the numbers. It's a lot of work, but then the shape belongs to you and you can export it onto your computer and import it to any grid you want.  OK I've lost some of you already...

Skin and eyes. Eyes are not too hard, either draw or paint; otherwise, google 'eye iris' and see if you can find something you like, to put on a white background. For personal use only, obviously. Another source (and not just of eyes) is Opensim Creations. For the skin, that's a little harder - but much less than it was a year ago. Several people have made their skins available to download, share, and modify for free. Eloh Eliot's skins from 2007 are still the best place to start, even if you're not a photoshop wizard, but simply want to play about with lip color. Ina Centaur's skins are detail rich, but have two disadvantages, they're saved in a weird type of file (not simple non-paranoiac psd or png), and the women are all homely. Some manly men there, though, so give it a glance, if that's how you roll.

Hair. Thirza's took 15 versions and about 3 months of on-again off-again frustration. Simple sculpty shoes plus foot alphas are also frustrating - but nobody in opensim seems to mind seeing bare feet. Clothes are way easier, but still time-consuming. Craft Grid's elegant shop is full of Josina Burgess and Nicola Reinerman creations, while osgrid has the Fabulous Ada Wong. Most grids are pretty dire, though. Come prepared. Linda Kellie's enormous collection of free and modifiable clothes will give you a jump start at making your own fashion, with wrinkle layers, cuffs, lacy bits and clothing textures. It's impossible to overstate what a star Linda is, in making all her clothing available and modifiable this way. Use Robin Wood or Chip Midnight's clothing templates in Photoshop or Gimp and get creative! It's way more relaxing than trying to follow the plot of NCIS.

Frillies A loop rezzer lets you build prim skirts. To export them from the grid where you make them, you'll need to be the creator of all the prims.  Imprudence Viewer has Export in the pie menu: rezz your object, then click through till you see it. 
If Export isn't lit up, it means you don't own all the prims. Importing is done via File at the top of your screen-  if you created all the textures that were on the original object, they too will be saved with the prims in your computer. 
Here's me importing a skirt into Reaction Grid, together with hair and texture. Of course, all uploads are FREEE !!!
Whoa that feels better ! it's time to take a turn about Reaction Grid!  It's still home to the excellent World's Fair, featured in an earlier post. What else is here?

Some great RL paintings in the gallery on sim Arte, the Catholic University of Peru stronghold. 

 The Grid HQ is a fancy piece of modern architecture, too, and there's this Drive In, high in the sky.

It's early morning in the US, so it's no surprise that there are few people around. OK - make that nobody. For anyone used to SL on a weekly basis, all of opensim has that make-do-and-mend feel, but ReactionGrid feels more than most like a backwater where the shark has most definitely jumped. A cardboard world. These posters aren't helping...

At last I found some life. Six avatars hard at work on the Bedfordia sim. What I took to be a noob was getting to grips with a door script, hiding behind a hill. 

On the other side of the hills, the other five avatars beavered away at what seemed to be a Science Fair, but since none of them would give me the time of day, I can't be sure. No amount of standing around provoked them into comment.  

Torley's textures were all over the place like a rash. The workers walked, rather than working from cam, from one boxy build to the next. Be fair, it's a work in progress, but this is a long way from Second Life. Iron sharpens iron, and while it's true many parts of SL are prosaic and even badly built, the good bits, the innovative exuberance, the preconcept-defying adventurous bits, inspire creative flight. Which you need, if you're going to do science right, don't you agree?

The Bedfordia is a brave attempt at building by newcomers. But I hope these Bedfordians also take time to go and see what's out there. If they like straight lines and, lord know, i'm a fan, then they could start with Oberon Onmura's new build at the LEA, where 15,000 pointy prims are set on a month-long collision course.

He's definitely outside the box.

Jokay Unconferential

Yeah. It's a stretch. Today's HGAC meeting on Pathlandia was less about exploring and more about setting up for Jokaydia's Unconference, on from May 29 to June 26.

So what's this festival of unconferenciness all about?
Jokay Wollongong: The events can all be seen on our conference calendar.  We hope by letting the community generate the topics and activities, it will be more interesting than a scheduled conference, even if it makes for some chaos sometimes. It also always leads to interesting discussions. One of the challenges for this group is to get the different groups together a little more.We seem to have two almost separate communities sometimes; the daytime Aus people kinda miss you guys...

Pathfinder Lester: I love it when other folks put things on Google Calendars, because I can then easily add them to my own calendar. It makes it easy for me to figure out timezone stuff, since GCal just converts everything to my own local time zone.

All's Fair

Seventy-two years ago last Saturday, the World’s Fair opened at New York, and we went to see it! No, not thanks to time travel, it was another gridhopping trip with the Hypergrid Adventurers Club. The Club meets on Sundays at Pathlandia on Jokaydia grid. Before you start saying shaking your head and saying you could never go to another grid, oh purleeeeze, it will take you all of 10 minutes to get a Jokaydia account, make an avatar, and kit it out at the freebie shop. Once you’re done, you’re golden for many fun trips around the metaverse.  And if you have a ReactionGrid avie, you can get to Jokyadia quite easily. Here’s more about how to do that.

 The real World’s Fair was spread out over more than a thousand acres of what had been an ash pile (yay coal fires!). Reaction Grid’s version is build over three sims and includes all the best-loved sights from the original fair including the Star Pylon, the New York building, and of course the Perisphere...

...which is where the HGAC regrouped once we’d al made the jump from Jokaydia. This is Democracity in the Perisphere. What fun to be able to fly down among the tiny buildings and do the 30-foot woman thing on Yesterday’s idea of the Future Today. It made Pathfinder go quite pale.

There’s a wonderful positive vibe in the images that is reflected in the mood of the Club; we reflected on the fact that all this was being imagined at a time when both economic depression and war were at the forefront of most people’s minds.

At the New York building, I took the weight off and struck up a conversation with Trivia Tiratzo. His dad visited the real thing back in 1939, and took over 200 wonderful photos of the buildings, the artwork and the exhibits. Back in 2008, Trivia was approached by ReactionGrid’s  Kyle Gomboy about doing some consulting for a World’s Fair project.

Trivia Tiratzo: I had no idea how to do anything in the virtual world, so it’s been a real learning experience before, I didn’t even know what a prim was but I gave it a shot. The more I build, the better I get (I think) … the hardest part is getting interior information for the pavilions, especially the murals.

The photos help so much in getting the details right, and Trivia has put on a big display of them so we can compare the builder’s work with the real thing.

Trivia has also published his father’s pictures in a book, ”1939 New York World’s Fair Photo Collection”   and has a blog that provides updates and insights into the project.

Ruud Lathrop, Joey Chernov, Amber Beaver  and other talented  builders have contributed models, exhibition rooms, and a Music Hall, to help us explore in 3D this wonderful retro-futuristic phenomenon. It’s a multi-faceted build, with vintage recordings, poses, notecards, and of course tons and tons of original pictures. To bring the whole thing even more to life, this past week, a range of events have marked the opening of the build, with talks on the construction and planning of the fairground, a piece about the Royal Visit, by RG’s official Fair Historian David Cope, and a fascinating insight into the Westinghouse Electric Company, by Shirley Manning. 

The World’s Fair build is slated to be a permanent exhibit in RG (as far as anything virtual can be permanent) so if you’ve not had a chance to go over there yet, there’s still lots of time. Trivia is optimistic about the build, and its potential.

Trivia Tiratzo: Between the web site and the grid, I have met some wonderful ppl from all over the world. Take David, our Fair historian, for example.  He does not come in-world but is a close friend of mine, even tho we have never met. I’d really like to have more people involved to make this a learning experience for everyone.

Home of the Brave

Everybody has their own Freebie horror story, from the 'cute little dress' with the fatal flaw that you only notice when it's way too late, all the way up to finding one of your generously donated creations being sold on some scuzzy sim. 

Destination shopping is not going to disappear any time soon, though. It's an adventure, and a fun way to meet new people, and discover new grids. It's also going to take time to aggregate all the free things available. Put the words Freebie and Open Sim together and, for most people (especially anyone with a L$ axe to grind) they conjure up an image of utter tackiness, plus a boring re-hash of the whole creative rights issue. The free culture of Open Sim has so little to do with the make-a-buck mentality of SL that it may be hard for closed-worlders to grasp what's really going on in places like the boutiques of Wright Plaza on OSgrid, or Greg Prince's Freeland megastore on Craft Grid.