Gino's Butterfly

Dale innis asked why we meet, and where we meet, before heading to destination 1 on Safari.

The 'why' is simple. If we all meet together before jumping to the first destination, then I can let the hosts know how many people to expect, so it's easier for them to know when to begin their presentation. Meeting at the Clubhouse means anyone new can make some friends beforehand, so they can ask for help if they get lost. Also, there are often last minute changes to the Safari, so if you come to the Clubhouse, you'll have the latest news about what's going on. Lastly - have you ever invited a group of friends over for a meal, and one person shows up waaaay too early, and you don't know what to do with them? We want to avoid that situation, which is embarrassing and stressful for our hosts.

Dale Innis and Karima Hoisean, on Gino's Butterfly

The 'where' is simple too. We meet at the Clubhouse on HG Safari grid and there's usually someone on the sim to welcome you half an hour before the event begins.

Thirza Ember: welcome Kjs, bonsoir Prodyck, grande soiree pour les frenchies ce soir!

Prodyck.Theas: hellooo... On va voir ça :)

kjs Yip: Hi, I know I'm early, but I don't want to be late...

Thirza Ember: omg Kjs sitting on that Hand chair I made... I feel very proud and happy now

kjs Yip: It looks very comfortable...

Tosha Tyran: incl. one finger for back scratching

kjs Yip: It's the thumb...

Kjs Yip on hand at HG Safari clubhouse

Thirza Ember: i hope it doesn't leave fingerprints on the clothes! I am really happy that Prodyck says he will be one of the French speakers at HIE in 2025. it's going to be a great event

Tosha Tyran: I am sure it will be! Hi Prodyck

kjs Yip: Hi all... I'm a newbee at the safari, please be kind ...I try my best to run behind you...

Tosha Tyran: if you want, kjs, I take you by the hand,  or better yet: Forest will, heheh

Forest Azure: you can always tp to Thirza's head, kjs, she likes pple landing on it

Thirza.Ember: I have big hair so it doesn't hurt me if you tp to my skull

Tosha Tyran: Holzkopf

Trouble for Safari

This week's opening gambit was a bit of a gamble, but what fun! We went over to Kitely to visit the Catronian Archipelago, a 4x4 roleplaying and sailing sim on Kitely where pirates combat navy, cannons roar, and you'll either end up in the drink, or with a drink... probably rum.
Trouble... but in the best possible way!

Cata Raven and Trouble Ahead 

There's nothing rum about this band of friends who came out in force to meet us on the sky island that serves as a TP hub for the various points of interest on the region. If you've never visited this bit of Kitely, it's a total delight. It can be shy-making to drop in on a RP group, because you never know if you're breaking in on their story, but these guys have always been super friendly - here are some of the 'usual suspects' who had just finished a battle royale when I dropped in last week to make sure of my LM. 

Captain Bally, Melanie Auxifur,  Till.Uhlenspiegel, Trouble Ahead

For our visit, there was a fantastic welcoming committee, and I guess about 18 Safari tourists, so quite a crowd was forming when we all tp'd over to Kitely...

Melanie Auxifur: greetings All

One Andonly: Ahoy everyone

Jupiter.Rowland: Hello to our hosts!

Cata Raven: Welcome:)

Captain Bally: Greetings everyone

Lawrence of Serenity

 Tosha Tyran: Hiya Lawrence, thanks for the invite

Thirza Ember: the bravery of this man is incredible

Lawrence Pierce

Lawrence Pierce: My pleasure

Forest Azure: are we dangerous?

Luna Lunaria: we iz

Tosha Tyran: lol, yes, we nibble

Lawrence Pierce: Well, just a brief introduction...I started using and building in Second Life while working on a master's in education, and then discovered Open Simulator and Kitely.

James Atlloud: Hey Lawrence, I did pretty much the same thing.

Lawrence Pierce: Yes, SL and education are regular portals to virtual living! Serenity Island was born August 29, 2011. I came here every day to create as a calming activity while going through a loss. It represents a variety of my interests through time.  After all this time, visiting Serenity Island now is like visiting a lifelong friend.

Tosha Tyran: how sweet

Kitely's Fifteenth

From brainchild to booming platform, 15 years is a big deal for any grid in opensim. Our second destination for this week's Safari was Kitely Welcome, to meet with Ilan Tochner and learn more about the motivations, interests, innovations, and passion that has kept the man and the grid so central to the opensim community for so long.

Ilan Tochner: We started working on Kitely in Sep 2008. We opened our doors to the public on Mar 27, 2011.

Lifted Pixel: 15 years of Kitely? is that right? I remember when it was new and the whole 'spawn an instance when needed' was the new hotness. I assume the grid still uses that?

Ilan Tochner: Yes it does, Lifted. Though we do offer one always-on option (the Dedicated Server option).

Thirza Ember: what do you think is the secret of your success?  

Ilan Tochner: I think our attention to technical details and ability to modify OpenSim code when needed had a hand in it. Also, I've been told that my personal involvement in the day-to-day needs of the people who use our services helped :-)

Coopersville Parade

Yesterday was the Coopersville Flotilla on Kitely, and after many weeks of planning, devising, testing and of course building, nine waterborne vehicles and about 20 people gathered to enjoy the show!

The event was coordinated by Koshari Mahana on her VAR region, Coopersville.

Coopersville is a historical region, with an emphasis on the early 20th Century American style - lots of clapboard, gambrel roofs, and opulent villas, and although this is not a RP region, it offers the opportunity to dress up in your jazz-age finery, or your best Edwardian top hat and tails, and soak in the atmosphere.

Coopersville offers opportunities for people to take up residence, or open a shop on the region, provided it's in keeping with the look of the place, so if you're thinking about sampling life on Kitely, it could be an option worth considering! Contact Koshari Mahana in person for more details.

Koshari Mahana - Beatles Yellow Submarine - Four Winds

And it was the lady herself who wins the 'Yellowest float' award for her Beatles inspired barge, helmed by the Fab Four and carrying a raft below it with a fabulous array of Pepperland-style plants and animals.

Safari Goes Gunga

Thia week's first destination is a work in progress with a wow factor that will amaze! We visited the Naboo region on Kitely, the brainchild of Mike Lorrey. With a name like that it could hardly be anything but Star Wars themed, and the giant sim while not yet complete already features some fabulous environments, like this Gunga City Deesko in a lake to the South. It was the venue for a 'May the Fourth' party last week, and the vibe was still pitched perfectly when we arrived. The HG address etc, you will find as always at the end of the post.

Thirza Ember: Favorite Star Wars person? I am going with Baby Yoda

James Atlloud: Grogu is adorbz

Star Ravenhurst: Star Wars?

Wizardoz Chrome: Darth Vader

Forest Azure: Spock :)

Forest Azure: /me covers her ears... finally picked one, Jabba the Hutt

Mal Burns: chewbakka - he never messes uip his lines

What Dreams May Come

 Eclectic & Ever-Changing are the first words you see when arriving on AI Dreams in Art, the new sim by Karima Hoisan featuring art by Dale Innis. A bold promise, you might say, but Karima isn't the kind of person who over-promises, and this build lives perfectly up to expectations.

At this point, pretty much everybody on Discord has tried their hand at MidJourney, with varied results.  Admired and despised in about equal measure of passion, millions of words have already been spent on its place in the art world, so there's no point in rehashing all that. 

What counts here is the inspiration, and by that, not just the word choice by Dale Innis that elicited the images, but also the fabulous way the images have been set, like jewels in a splendid jewel-box, in discrete galleries in collaboration with the wonderful Karima Hoisan.

Safari goes to the Docks

This week, two Beatles related builds! One recreating Liverpool Docks, and the other recreating all the joy of the Yellow Submarine. Both exploring a time long, long before you or I were born, naturally. Liverpool is a city with a rich, sometimes troubled history. A port city from the beginning of the 1700s, the ships that plied the Transatlantic routes carried all sorts, manufactured European goods, American cotton, tobacco, sugar, and people - immigrants, but also slaves. The famous Penny Lane immortalized by the Beatles is named after James Penny, described by some as a slave merchant, although the jury is still out on that. One thing that is without a doubt is that the Beatles are Liverpool's number one export, the pride and joy of the city. A huge Beatles museum is located a converted warehouse building on Albert Dock.

We start with a truly amazing trip to Kitely, and the Old Liverpool Dock. This region is normally closed to the public, so our visit was a little bit of HG heaven, and our host Graham Mills has done a

Still Standing

The dance floor at HG safari clubhouse

Kelso Uxlay: Good idea to warm up safari goers before going.

          Dancing really does do it. This week, two animated destinations, a big crowd of avatars, and a roaring success for our hosts, Dorena Verne and Anachron Young on Dorena's World, and Karima Hoisan and the scriptastic Dale Innes on Kitely. 

Addresses of the destinations, as always, at the end of the post. 

It really helps if you come to the clubhouse on HG Safari, OSGrid and get the LMs before we depart at the top of the hour, and thanks to everyone who showed up, including Lux, Dabici and Kelso who entertained us by dancing so well. A good omen...

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

Graham Mills' Age of Steam

   Our final destination this week was on Kitely,  with Graham Mills, a talented builder, educator, and story-teller. Named, Age of Steam, the build celebrates the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company  

Graham Mills: this is a recreation of the world's first railway station 
Don Smith: Nicely done Graham, i was here recently, loved it

Graham.Mills: opened in 1830 and closed in 1836 because it was too small, all before photography, so just paintings and sketches to go from. The opening day was 15th Sept, there were 750 guests, amazingly complex to organise; the army must have helped, Wellington was guest of honour, he was Prime Minister at the time and rather unpopular he got a particularly rough time at the other end of the line, Manchester, 30 miles away, a lot of folk didn't want the railways either as they thought it would ruin the nvironment and put poeople out of a job, which was true in part.
Serene Jewell: Darn railway/automobile/internet/cellphones.... 
 Praline B: wow this build is awesome and all in prims
Graham Mills: normally 4 horse-drawn omnibusses would bring 1st class passengers here, you had to book the day before, on the opening ceremony they came in their own carriages -- there was a one-way system outside. The railway carriages were incredibly tightly packed, 26 was a typical number
Serene.Jewell: Pretty crowded

Graham Mills: most were 4-5 coaches on opening day, yellow were first class, blue second class
Serene Jewell: Let the random sitting on things begin!
Graham.Mills: all sorts of ways to make second class passengers miserable, not least Embers from the firebox, lol many complaints of damage to clothing at the front is a pilot wagon, this was used for brakes
Thirza Ember: some scary umbrella accidents too i bet
Serene Jewell: Lots of stepping on dresses I'm sure.
Graham Mills: the dresses were huge in those days major issues getting into carriages, but folk were used to stagecoaches,  so nobody thought proper platforms necessary. This is the first ever railway shed and incidentally platform, although it was poorly designed as the pillars sometimes meant you couldn't open the doors
Serene Jewell: I need a ticket!
Kurtis Anatine: That will be 1 shilling please
Graham Mills: this was the train used by the Duke, the VIPs and the Directors of the company, it started in the tunnel and they pushed it out -- nice theatrical effect, gasps from the audience, three bands are playing, the Duke arrives. Thousands of people around cheering. He waves to everyone. He's dressed in black but has a sensible thick cloak on (the King had just died)... Notice anything?
Graham Mills: No engines!! They made the tunnel too small!

snowbody Cortes: wow!
Thirza Ember: that is hilarious
Praline B: yes lol
Graham Mills: but there was a slope anyway so they couldn't use engines (which liked it flat) so they ran the carriages down by gravity and up by rope or donkeys, so to get started the staff would push the train - technical, eh?

          We walked through the dark tunnel to the next station Edge Hill, which is where they coupled trains, the dark interior made us al think about how much soot people must have breathed in back then.
Kurtis Anatine: this is where coal lung came from right?
Serene Jewell: What are the barrels for?
Kurtis Anatine: i think its for water isnt it?
Graham Mills: This is where they coupled up the locomotives, the barrels are for water -- to make the steam - easy to forget they needed water, but they were on the outside of town - no mains water, so they pumped their own. The arch above me has stationary engines, one in each tower; they powered the rope for hauling the trains, and pumped the water, the arch was a signature build, but cleverly hid all the techie stuff :)
Serene Jewell: People are ingenious.
Praline B: coming from indian architecture?
Graham Mills: yes -- asian, unusual as most was neo-classical, ie Greek
Praline B: ok ;)

Thirza Ember: people must have thought they were living at the end of one age and the beginning of another.. like the Moon landing... life would never be the same
Graham Mills:it was a momentous step -- travel had never been so fast they moved vast quantities of coal, and fresh food; cities and factories became possible, one end of the country was soon connected to the other - railwaymania began
Serene Jewell: So many people that had only known there one small area would be changed by traveling on railways.
Praline B: yes, a real step , revolution, how exciting it was at this time!
Thirza Ember: what got you interested in this station and event?
Graham.Mills: um, I work on Crown Street. Never knew it had such a pivotal role. Decided it was a good subject for a build,  it's a public park now, so i can do mixed reality.
Praline B: Really interesting build Graham, I very glad to revisit this part of the steam history! This build is really realistic,
Serene.Jewell: So, someday people can take their iphone and see what the park used to look like by viewing your recreation, Graham.
Graham.Mills: yes, Serene, it's easy enough to capture panoramas already, RL to Opensim to AR To RL, that's the idea, connect ppl to their heritage, release an OAR, let them work with it.
Praline B: that works fine Graham ;))
snowbody Cortes: super
Graham Mills: trying to get cultural and historical organisations interested at city level, some progress - I would, of course, like to get the trains running, maybe next 15th Sept
Thirza Ember: that would be wonderful also, but they tell a story here in the statio that is very interesting
 snowbody Cortes: it seems all alive

Graham Mills: well, as you may know, the opening ceremony was a disaster after the triumphal departure - the local Member of Parliament was killed, run over by a loco, so a very gloomy return!
Serene Jewell: Saving the gruesome bit for last, Graham? :-)
Graham Mills: very hostile crowd at Manchester- Hasty return - engine failures, engines in the wrong place, 3 engines ended up pulling 24 carriages -- very slowly, but the next day they ran an excursion and the day after that opened for business and never looked back!

HG Address: grid.kitely.com:8002:age of steam

SafariMania

          So, this season of the Safari, we are going to be promoting builds with some kind of - let's not call it educational benefit, that sounds too dry, but the idea is that we all come away from our tour feeling like we now know something we didn't know before. First up, Anachronia sim on the German language grid, Dorena's World.
          HG Addresses at the end of the post, as usual.

          Dorena and Anachron, the grid-mama and grid-papa were there, along with other residents like Uwe Furst, Lureen Persephone, and the lovely builder and creator Klarabella Karamell, an authentic opensim heroine. We first sat down which really helped with the lag that comes when a region is bombarded with a dozen or more avatars arriving from multiple grids.

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.

Safari gets a Fair Shake

       Two destinations this week, and both of them are about connecting and sharing across grids. Two hosts, Satyr Gator and Ozwell Wayfarer, both of them keen builders who have done that extraordinary thing, they have looked up from their own work and beyond their own creativity, and decided to do something for the greater good.

Ozwell Wayfarer and Satyr Gator

          Our first stop was on OSGrid, Satyr Gator's sim opensimworld full HG Addresses at the end, as usual. 
        This is a lovely imaginative build where you can find the famous beacons available - the beacon you'll need to add your grid to the opensimworld.com website which allows people to find your region, club, shop or institution in the massive universe of ... well, open sim worlds, there's really no other way to put it. 

        Get your beacon, but explore the rest of the region too, there are NPCs and spaceships and a lovely psychedelic dance floor. But for our group, there was - let's say, a certain amount of lag.

Safari Watches Witches and Work in Progress

          There were two official destinations this week, but the hard-core Safaristas ended up on a third, and there was a lot more tail by the end of the adventure than we started out with. Addresses at the end of the post.
          First, off to Kitely, to get an idea about their regular WIP (pronounced whip) event, where builders and inventors can show off their latest Work In Progress.

 Serene.Jewell: So welcome to the Hypergrid Safari! So it's simple - you stand, you rez something and you talk about it.  It is one hour long only! Everyone will get 5 minutes today, I call the time when your time is up. We don't have many presenters so you will be able to jump in at the end. Nara Nook [aka Malone] is First!
Nara.Nook: I'm using Aine Caoimhe's PMAC system to make the cafe in the Greyville Writer's colony more interactive.

          Nara explained how the cat keeps writers company, and can be easily modded with poses and animations. It looks complete, but is a work in progress because she is still looking for animal animations, rather than the human ones she is currently using (although they looked great to us). The audience loved it.

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

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

Safari Collection

Stephen.Xootfly: yeah, sounds like a good strategy.
Stephen.Xootfly: which I think is also what Custer said as well.

The instinct to collect and share, that's what this week's Safari was all about. Accumulation, classification, and determination. But we're always all about being determined. We are also about not minding if our faces suddenly disappear.

If you classify writers, you end up with a sort of fractal mental image. Not in the Dewey Decimal sense; something more philosophical. Good writers and bad, there's your first division, followed by famous/unknown, ancient and modern, fact and fiction, drunk/sober, read and unread, short-works/long-works, prolific and writers-blocked, reclusive and sociable. It forms a sort of lopsided flowing tree of all the people who, whether they ought to or not, put pen to paper, fingertip to key.

Safari High

          You know you've been on safari when the trip starts out with an elephant farting, and ends with a dinosaur eating a giraffe.

          The new HG Safari meet up point is still in OSGrid, but we moved to a different sim, Teravus Plaza, a homestead township where the weather is less picturesquely stormy. Probably just as well, since a whopping 24 people showed up for our trip this week. I'm not sure Ilha Magica could have taken the strain.

          There is an indoors to the clubhouse, with freebies, and chairs, a TV showing some of our exploits, 'helpful' posters, and a patio with a meeroo cooking on the barbecue, but everyone ended up in the front yard, somehow. Please drop by any time. TP to Teravus Plaza and look for the waterfall. We are next door. Feel free to grab freebies, get the notecard with LMs to freebie stores, and do not forget to click on the elephant's tail.
          It was so cool to have valued regulars with us, and also lots of new friends along, including SL pals like Apmel and Desdemona Enfield. Finding a look that works for you on a grid without all your favorite shops, let alone marketplace, is a challenge and they both made it work in different ways.

Apmel Opensson and Desdemona Enfield. Apmel is the one with pants on.

           Just friending everyone took about 5 minutes. Why friend everyone? Well, obviously they're all exquisite human beings, but on the practical side it makes it easier to keep track of who has crashed or lost the group, and you can tp and chat to someone when you're on another grid. Sometimes. 
            Fuschia Nightfire had organized our first jump to a truly lovely ensemble installation called Dreamtforest, on a tiny grid which frankly I doubted could take the strain of two dozen avies. Art Blue aka Ervare Farroretre was there to meet us. He explained how this build is part of the RL contemporary art expo, the Santorini Biennale, and that it's an interactive install. You get a tree from the dispenser near the big blue stargate, and then plant it and water it. I'm not sure how you water it, but I have my suspicions. Anyway, then it grows leaves and such, and you can go back and visit it, and see it develop. 

          We are those tiny dots and clouds on the tray being held by the gardener high above the lush vegetation of the adjoining sim. It is a place to return to, not only to visit your tree, but to explore. Here's a link to get more information about what it's all about.

          Safari lasts more than 3 hours usually, and nobody expects anyone to stay for the whole thing because you people have lives to live and Wednesday is often a busy time. Not only that, jumping is frustrating and laggy and annoying at the beginning, so it's only natural that people get fed up and go off to do something more comfortable and/or productive. So it was quite a shock to find  that almost everyone was able to stay with us to make the next jump, to Calchester on Kitely grid.

Calchester panorama

Some were able to use the Landmark, some used the map address, others needed a tp, some hopped back to OSGrid and then on to Kitely, some had to change sims in order to get the Landmark to work for them. We haz strategies. There's been quite a bit of talk about making a HUD for Safari, and while I appreciate the thought, honestly, hypergridding is way too unstable right now for that to be a viable option. But it will be, in the near future. For sure. 

Arriving in Calchester, Kitely grid

          Alexina Proctor and Prax Maryjasz welcomed us to Calchester, a 4 sim region, or 'world' as they call it in Kitely, with a truly enchanting atmosphere. There are castles, cottages, and creatures everywhere. If you're looking for a calming place to visit, this is perfect. Many simply cammed the regions, hence the standing-around pose here in the gazebo, but take time to ride one of the animals (find nessie if you can!) and just soak in the loveliness. 

          I went to take photos for a poster before the event, but snuck back several times, just to enjoy the scenery, which is probably very naughty because as I understand it, Kitely charges sim owners for every time somebody goes to visit. I hope not in this case! 

Foreground: our hosts Paislee, Prax and Alexina

          More gorgeousness on the Tolkein themed build of Paislee Myrtle, also in Kitely. I wondered what her response was to people who say that open sim is a 'desert'.
Paislee Myrtle: I say any virtual world is what you choose to make of it. Opensim forced me to learn how to make most of my own things.
Serene.Jewell: How many worlds have you built here, Paislee?
 Paislee Myrtle: hmmm... at the moment... 6 worlds. But there have been several more...in storage. I hope to start a straight up fantasy build soon. Have the flat land. If one gets in the flow...it goes pretty quickly.

Serene.Jewell: You do a lot with windlight settings.

Paislee Myrtle: yes. I love the option windlight offers. I tinker with them and make my own versions.

Serene.Jewell: That must take hours of tinkering. so many options.

Nara Mistwood: It's lovely.

Paislee Myrtle: not as much time as you would expect.

Alizarin Goldflake: soft and misty

Paislee Myrtle: after a while of doing it...you catch on to what to change and what to keep hands off of!

          The interesting thing about Kitely is that it gives you the genuine feel of being in another country with other customs. Like, you know, the way blowing your nose in public is considered very rude in Japan, or like the whole multiple kiss greeting you get in France. It's an underlying cultural difference that lets you know you're truly abroad. In OSGrid, the idea that you'd want money for the things you make is not considered 'quite nice'. It's like a social contract: If you take freebies, you ought to, in turn, make freebies, and pay it forward. But Kitely seems to be not like that. It's different. Different is good, seeing it helps us grow.

Paislee Myrtle's Ismadril region on Kitely

          By the time we'd explored both these regions, and taken LMs so we can return because boy there is way too much to see in one short visit, we were down to about seven or eight avatars. Nine weeks ago, when this adventure started, it was just me and wizzy. More than twenty is a bit mad, to be honest. Not what we expected at all. But we'll work on a plan to keep things managable and pleasant for all. 

          Six of us were still up for some grid hopping, so we did a bit of a tutorial: try to get to Triton Grid. 

The Fellowship of the Blam

Step 1. We went to Kitely Welcome Center, using the viewer Map. (Whenever trying to jump to a small exotic place, go to the 'main' sim of the grid you're on, it's more likely to work from there.)  

Step 2. We tried to jump to Triton via LM (didn't work) and copy/pasting the address (ditto)

Step 3. We went to Sanctuary Grid using the Map; that's sanctuary.homelinux.org:8012 For quick copy/pasting, I keep a grid-address Notepad doc on my desktop. Tip - need to quickly find out the address of a grid? Google the *name* + grid + 'URI'.

Sanctuary is home to dozens of hypergate portals or Blamgates; you arrive high up in the sky, and must go down to ground level on sim Eld, the main arrival region, to find them. 

          The Triton grid gate was hard to spot in the forest of portals, so we let Alizarin pick a destination - she chose Selea Core. Using gates is fun, but since it's a scripted item, if you click on it too much too quickly you just confuse matters. Four of us blammed there, me and snowy just copied the address into Search on our Map, and tp'd there that way. But the blam of the blamgate never loses its charm.

           Selea Core contains other portals, with a more futuristic look...

          Someone said, let's go to PMGrid! Where HG Safari has its new sandbox, and where soror Nishi has a sim full of lovely trees. Trees first.

          And then the HG Safari sim, which is just getting started. It's odd how sometimes your hair makes the jump and sometimes it doesn't. All those proxies probably. If you just went back to your home grid each time you jumped, that might fix the situation, but where would be the fun in that? Before long, the high jinx had begun. The T Rex (I call him Harrison) was eating the giraffe, and there was some funny business going on in the Official Landrover. Shocking behavior that is typical of this group. 
Nobody tell Bob.

Kitely: somewhere and no wear

           You know that sweater in your wardrobe, no, not that expensive one you shrunk but don't have the heart to throw away, the other one, the one that's not a weird color, or too small, or anything like that, yet every time you're looking for a sweater to wear, you think no, not that one, not today.

          That's me and Kitely. But wait! Hosoi Ichiba is in Kitely, and has been for months!

          You know, there probably is a reason you don't wear that sweater, if you really think about it. Something subconscious maybe. 

With Kitely, I don't go there because of the minutes. In March 2012 I joined up and got my free sim Chocolate and it was great but only kind of great because sure, it was free and that's always nice, but you could only be present on your sim for something like 100 hours a month for free - any more than that, and you had to pay. You could go see other people's stuff - if those other people have the right kind of membership - but you couldn't hang out gratis in your own place for more than those hundred hours. Which, if you're already paying in SL, Craft and Veesome, is going to make a girl think twice.
          There was something about that concept of the tick tick tick of the meter that drained all the creativity away, too. Perhaps you're the kind of person who already has OARs prepared, or at least a plan on paper, but for those of us who like to contemplate the land and develop it slowly, 100 hours a month seemed way too few to form the basis of something like a relationship with the grid.

          Time went by and Kitely developed in my absence, and there were murmurings of neat builds like this one, and (by all accounts) great strides being made with their commercial website which hopefully is better than that dreadful one SpotOn3D had with its Double Dutch system. It speaks to the affection in which SpotOn is held that nobody could be bothered to point out to Tessa and co what 'double dutch' actually means. 
          The thing with websites and selling is, if you came to open sim to make your own stuff and occasionally share it with others, how much is a place where you buy stuff going to have you whooping for joy? If you're committed to capitalism, wouldn't you just stay in SL, or if you really have too many enemies there, go to InWorldz?

          But OK, Kitely promises they have a lot to offer, and hey, they're going to find a way to make being a commercial grid compatible with hg travel to no-money grids. Right? With lots of lovely content. And that would be good, because this is what Kitely Thirza looks like. Back in 2012 apparently Kitely noob outfits included undershirts made in Appearance. To fix that, instead of going to Kitely Market, I went for Import textures, because I have a whole store of freebie clothes on my own grid.

          Because why buy what you already have? 
          Although, I may be missing the point.
          Face and sweater, leggings and undies, easy peasy, texture uploads, all free. But when it came to shoes, there was a problem. I have neat .obj boots I made on my grid, but to import an object to a new world, you need to be somewhere you can Build, like a Sandbox. OK, there were a dozen listed on the Map. Oh dear. I tried them all, and wasn't allowed to visit any of them. OK then, perhaps my famous free-hundred-hours-a-month sim that I've barely used shall now come in handy. Taxi to sim Chocolate, right away!

          Newp.
          You may say - 'Things changed while you were away.' and 'Kitely is obviously looking for consumers, not freebie hunters and the self-sufficient.' or 'They're looking for commitment, not people passing through, you're just not their target audience,' or 'Get some KC, you cheapskate.' Maybe.
          I kept thinking of fried chicken.
          So, OK, give up on the hair and the shoes and the earrings and other goodies of my own invention that would typically be my first uploads to a new grid. Let's just be a barefoot traveler, and go in search of Edo villages.

            Years ago, my mother would make us all go and spend Easter with an old aunt who had a sprawling house and garden in the country. Dad would sort out the vegetable patch, Mom would get the spring cleaning done, and the children would help out with both. Auntie was glad enough for the help, and we were on our best behavior. She was a nice old bird but she had the irritating habit of switching off lights all the time. If you went from sitting room to library to get a book for five minutes, you'd find the light switched out in the sitting room when you returned. The same if you went to the loo at night, you'd come out of the bathroom to find the corridor bathed in darkness. It was a pessimistic, penny pinching, claustrophobic habit not caused by a shortage of money, but a reaction you often find in people who have lived through Tough Times. It paid off in a way, for when she died, the Donkey Sanctuary got enough money to keep the lights on in the stables for another ten years.
          The 'on demand' feature of Kitely gives that same rather depressing sense of everything being in darkness until it's absolutely essential to turn something on. True, the Hosoi Mura sims loaded very quickly, but there was something of my old auntie about the process.

          But the build is a joy. The Matsumoto castle, the gardens, the hiroba, the walls and the houses, the countryside with fields and hills, even the spare buildings, hovering just off the ground as though waiting for aliens to take them off to another planet, it's all so well made, and charming. True, a 9 or 16 sim build is not the big deal in open sim that it would be in SL, but Ami has made excellent use of the wide open spaces. It feels like a real place. Once that 'wait for me to turn the lights on' feeling has passed.

          Walking around was cool, but there weren't any poses or moving vehicles and with no interactivity, it wasn't long before I started wondering what else there might be to see.

          A number of SL friends have set up homes and builds in Kitely, and one name came to mind, as a possible source of good places to visit. Opening her profile, it was kind of disappointing to find the Picks closely resembled her Facebook posts - nothing more than a long tribute to Self. Unappealing. When someone lavishes that much public love and attention on their own creations, there really is no room left for the rest of us to admire it without feeling a bit sick.
          Back to the Map, then, as a source of inspiration.

          Back to Evergreen? That sighing, slightly long-suffering little grey window 'oh, ok, if you really must, just a second, and we'll turn it on' message again. I felt guilty at making them waste the electricity, and decide not to go after all.

            But then Woot ! The Map and I got lucky and found Time Vault, a region by Paislee Myrtle, one of the Devokan storytellers. It loaded pretty fast, and was way nicer than my dim recollections of Evergreen.

          Nobody around doing RP or anything, thank goodness, (good lord, memories of Grimmrfell! Urk!) Instead, a strange, thundery landscape and fabulous flights of alien fancy, with steampunkesque buildings and mechanisms littering the land.

           This might be turning a corner. The never-worn sweater might become a favorite after all! More hunting for regions on the Map, and pretty soon it yielded another big build, Brian Robert's Dragon's Bane. Tp!

          No, sadly no Bane for Thirza. The same thing happened about ten more times.
          Sigh. Well OK, you know what, all this faffing about sticking a pin in the map, it's not the way to do things. Every grid has its Welcome sim, where all is made clear, and newcomers or prodigal sons can return and be made, well, welcome. Let me and Kitely give each other a proper chance in the orthodox manner. Wow, and maybe I'll even find an A/O and a pair of shoes! Yay! I am still not giving up on Kitely!
          Oh noes...

          Except Welcome Area is only for Premium Accounts.
          OK, OK, hold on, there's a Welcome 2, maybe that's for folks like me...  shows they don't know me well, if they've got me down as Moderately Mature.  Although, I did find the Edo village moderately interesting, so perhaps they're partly right. Let me pop the whole thing back in the wardrobe.
          Aren't Paislee's mushrooms nice, though?