Advent Neighborhood

 Osgrid is back up, or kind of back up, not entirely convinced by it, from a performance point of view, but it's a good omen, and another promise of good times ahead is the start of the Advent build by Ange Menges and Nani ferguson. Ange and Nani have been consistently building festive, ephemeral regions for over 12 years in Opensim (and worked together before that back in SL) so they're used to the vagaries of the virtual. They have set up their latest creation Advent Calendar on two grids, Zetaworlds and OSGrid. 

When you arrive there's the usual poster board but this time, no HUD, it's just up to you to go out wandering around the snowy, bosky neighborhood and seek out structures with numbers on them. 

A Study in Scarlett

 "Tomorrow is another day" remains one of the most famous last lines in the history of cinema. Gone With The Wind debuted in 1939. The film tells the story of Scarlett O'Hara and her family home Tara during the turbulent years of the American Civil War, and Rhett Butler, the love of her life. 

It's a film about the effects of radical change coming to what had seemed to be a settled way of life, and of the dramatic results that those changes bring to individuals and families.

Tara

The movie, and the story behind it, have been cleverly brought to life in OSGrid (the HG Address is, of course, at the end of the post) by the French builder and historian Wildrose Guardian, who has a particular interest in those life-changing years from 1860 then the United States found itself torn apart by conflicting ideologies that turned to physical violence. 

Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa, the blank slate, is a concept as ancient as Aristotle, and as modern as an empty sim. Often associated with the human mind in that magical moment before impressions, feelings, opinions and experiences have made their mark, the very words 'tabula rasa' can fill a creative person with the thrill of possibilities.

It's also the name of Ieko Catnap's art sim on OSGrid, and it's home to pleasant pathways leading between attractive buildings with a provencale feel.  In one corner, a little grey graveyard is enriched by this lovely fountain, with prim fish that say they were made by Virtual Christine, giving the place the feel of an authentic history.

Charming too are the little shops, a flower market, bakery, newspaper printers and more, the cutest has to be 'Chik' Ânes' with a bit of a Latin American vibe going on. 

Prince's Passions

 suprema citius solvet amor die

He's Prince Amor, or 'the PrinceofAmor' - his precise name fluctuates, but for simplicity's sake let's just call him Prince - is pretty new to Opensim. He's only been here two or three years, but of course he's got a whole lot of SL experience under his belt from before. Safari goers will be well familiar with his Solar System build on OSgrid which we toured back in September. There's much more Amor on OSgrid, and hopefully over time we will get to explore the trippy Maze of the Mind, or his Star Trek build, and perhaps his automotive sim with over 300 cars, just to mention a handful of his personal sims. Along with these, he is known as the landlord of about 100 sims; his renters are either on OSgrid, or have Dreamgrid sims. It's always informative to get someone's take on the two platforms, especially if they're a fairly recent arrival, and it will be interesting to see if your observations are in tune with his. 

Prince Amor

I asked first of all for him to give us an overview of his experience in Opensim and the Other Place.

Prince Amor: Both experiences for me were about the same. When Second Life first started people there were helpful and kind. I was quite worried over privacy in Second Life at the time and they helped me a good while there. Gifts etc....things were free or close to it. Of course when Second Life first started Osgrid and it were one and the same. So it was the same kind of people. I do believe Second Life is not the same place now as it was, I believe it is because the good kind people came to Osgrid. I wish I had known of Osgrid then, but such was not talked about in the circles I was in.

LibDescent

Yes, OSGrid still has logins restricted, but it'll be open again soon, and when it does, here's a place you might like to (re)visit. It's a piece of virtual history and also - what could be better - a bit of a freebie shop, by Plastichansa Bade.

If you're a bit of an oldbie you'll remember the golden days of Metropolis Grid, and among the vast number of great artists from Germany and around the world who made that grid their home, you may recall the art of the Plastichansa Bade - and it's hard to think of Plastic without Zonja Capalini. They met inworld in 2016 and were a great artistic team for years. 

Two artists from Spain, they've graced the pages of this blog more than once. Even before our Safari trips began, Zonja's little grid Condensationland featured on this blog - later the oar was attached to Metro, making it easier for people to see. They participated in AvatarFest, that much loved pan-grid annual event, back in 2017, and of course, a lot of you will remember the tango place in SL called Arrabal - the Safari went there too, back in the day. 

The Art of Aaack

For many years, Aaack Aardvark and his original mesh creations, available free and full perms in his store Arcadia on OSgrid, have been a familiar and much loved part of the opensim galaxy. Recently, Aaack decided to step away from the platform, but he very kindly took a few minutes to tell his story.  Like so many of us, he came here from SL.

Aaack Aardvark and his signature store

Aaack Aardvark:  When I was in Second Life I spent all my time in a sandbox called Little Blue; I made friends with the owners and eventually helped moderating it, all my available time there was distributed into play with friends and build, especially build. One of my friends there started to experiment with Open Sim and used to comment his discoveries about the platform. That was my first contact with OS, at the time I learned two very important things:

1. You can be in SL and OS at the same time, it’s not like you go to hell if that happens and,

2. OS exists.

Pumpkins and Prizes on Yaksha

 It's that time of year again and we were guests of Nani ferguson and ANge Menges on their Halloween Hunt this week. The sim will be open until November 6, so you can come back and complete the Hunt, if you wish. It's called Yaksha, over the years I've often asked Nani if there's some sort of storyline or cultural reference behind the odd and distinctive names they pick for their sims, and she's always said something like 'it's funny' so I'm guessing this year is much the same. You can invent your own etymology - bonus game! The full HG Address is, as always, at the end of the post.

Ange Menges: Welcome to all the safarista, you don't have a lot of time, so I will help a little those who want to play the game. You can visit the sim as you like, and for those who want to play the game, start by reading the panel carefully. In the region you can find 10 laughing pumpkins that will give you a gift.  Follow me inside the castle so I can show you one.

Escape 2 Halloween

 Back in 2010, Mystic found her way to Opensim, and settled on OSGrid. Relatively recently, she  made a move to a new grid, which she shares with friends, Escape2Reality, and here she has an annual Halloween region worth a look! The HG Address is, of course at the end. It was too much of a good opportunity to miss when we met up to ask her a few questions about her life on the platform and to know a little bit more about her home.

Mystic Moonshine: Ozzmosis  started this grid  a year and  2 months  ago. We  are finally getting things done here, it's been a slow process - rl  things of course take first place - but  Ozzy, Purr, myself and  Hippie are admins here and trying to make a  wonderful and inviting grid for all to  come use and explore. Many nice places being set up here... I love that the grid is  filled with friends and  family  that  want to get together and share and build a happy environment for anyone wishing to do the same.

Mystic Moonshine: It's  always  nice making friends. However we have had people come  join  the  grid then not  come on  to hangout or join into the grid activities. We want  people that are  wanting to  stay and interact and  enjoy and make the grid better, if that makes sense.

Mike's Towns End

Our second stop this week was with the magnificent Mike Townsend, friend of the Safari and frequent tripper with us back in ye olden days when it was a three hour, uncertain slog through any number of  destinations. These days, Mike is busy with his Tropicana sims, where you can rent a bit of pixels for yourself in some very atmospheric places! HG Addresses at the end of the post - but you knew that already.

Coming from another grid, we all met with a fair dose of lag but the welcome was warm from both mike himself and a bunch of Tropicana friends.

Mike Townsend, flanked by Blancanieves and Tina Bey

Mike Townsend: Welcome everyone to Tropicana Village, If everyone is ready we can start the tour

Leoa Urmah: (pt:en)  I'm very ready

Mike Townsend: We will explore the area around the abandoned village and then take the path to the Trailer park. In a state of part ruin and abandonment there is still evidence of people living here. Lets walk to the trailer park.

This part of the build is a great mix of grunge and rundown architecture, with everything from nodding donkeys to a nice red phone box. Walking among all these detailed elements proved to be tricky, to say the least, but while we lost Mike for a moment, most of us were able to power through it. OSgrid's ongoing inv issues and unexpected kicks, when paired with a mass avatar event, kind of reminds us what a privilege it is in reality to be able to be part of a global community, despite the ructions of RL with its solar flares and political shenanigans.

Boldly Going with Prince of Amor

 This week's trip took us to visit the Prince of Amor on his megaregion on OSGrid, Maze Space. 

It was quite a daring exercise, because this was our first Safari visit to Prince's regions (he has a lot!) on OSGrid, and this particular region is a challenge for any visitor, due to the dimensions and the darkness of space. On top of all that, Hurricane Helene was knocking on Florida's doors, and so Prince warned us before we got going that anything might happen RL-wise, and if he disappeared that'd be why. Luckily our timing went well, nothing got unnecessarily damp, and we had an out-of-this-world tour of the sim.

The start point for Maze Space (full HG Address at the end of the post, as always) is at over 8000m just about the position of Pluto . It's really essential that you come up here to begin, because at ground level you'll be in the sun, not a lot to see and a little to close to the heat for comfort. 

Prince Amor, today dressed as a Borg, welcomes the tourists

Instead, at the Space Station, you will find a collection of freebies, some info about the ideal Graphics settings for this build (spoiler alert, set everything to the max possible for your computer) and the main means of transport, the flying saucer. 

Call it Communauté

Community! However you spell it, it's important in virtual worlds.

Nadajdae region on OSgrid is home to Hella Yver and her partner Badr Norseman, and recently they've decided to open up the sim to social events for the Francophone community.

A little opensim history, which you probably know already. 

FrancoGrid was the best-known French grid, and arguably the oldest, it started in February 2007, and closed in March 2022 when the servers suffered an irreversible breakdown and the FG committee came to the sad decision that the grid was no longer viable. Just over a year later Metropolis Grid, the giant in the family of German-speaking grids, finally went offline (you may remember the wonderful party we had to mark the end of that era!). 

Metro and Franco - these two gaps in the Opensim scenery, not to mention Osgrid's 8 month 'hiccup' in 2014, brought home to most people that probably, the way forward was  to have lots of smaller grids, where people can do their own thing, and comfortably avoid people who have different ideas and uses for virtual worlds.

But little grids, though they lead to less drama, also fracture the community, making it less likely and less easy to stay in touch.

If you read this blog often, you already know of quite a few Frenchies in OSGrid - from the lovely Paela Argus, who for many years served the OSGrid community as an active admin member; Ange Menges and nani Ferguson are here, with their signature Hunt builds three times a year; and there's Cheops Forlife of course, with the Theatre d'Adret; not to mention the delicious Cherry Manga who has sims here and on many other grids. That's just to mention a few of the better known folks on OSGrid - there are many more, plus a whole archipelago of Francophone grids out there, many of which we have visited, from Ignis, to Creanovale, to Logicamp, to Vibel, to Atlas and more. Wondering where the other French grids and French creators are located? Well, Prodyck Theas has compiled a useful list on Artefactix, his interesting blog, you can see the grid list here.

M is for Music

Morlita Quan's Second Life adventure started 16 years ago, and it was pure boredom.

Morlita Quan:   I even remember myself thinking : " Ok, I won't stay here more then two days". But as you well said, SL is a nest of creativity and very soon, I had the luck to meet persons there who used SL as a professional tool for art and music, and not like a simple social game. 

Morlita at her new, as yet unfinished, gallery on sim MorlitaM on OSGrid.

Sixteen years later, Morlita is still working on projects that overlap between the real and virtual worlds. Recently she has revived her interest in Opensim, and has an exciting new sim on OSGrid - address at the end of the post, as usual!  What, though, makes virtual worlds a special place to be creative?

Austin's Eye

Opensim can be  a tough place to get your arms around. It's like Second Life, but it also has distinctive features in terms of the technology and the culture. It's a dislocated, often quite mysterious place, in the sense that people often give a lot of weight to their subjective experience when talking about 'how opensim works'. 

That's a fun way to live the adventure, but solid information about resources, innovations, and changes to Opensim, (and where the two are related, in SL) is a must for anyone who's serious about understanding the platform. An outstanding source of knowledge is Austin Tate's blog. 

Ai Austin on RuthandRoth region OSGrid

Austin Tate, known inworld as Ai Austin (pronounced 'eye' not A.I.)  is an Emeritus Professor of knowledge-based Systems at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. 

His career in Information Technology started in the 70's, but his interest in computers goes back even further. We chatted during a tour of three sims on OSGrid, and you will find the HG Addresses at the end of the post, as usual.

It takes an eye for detail, and a talent for sharing complex knowledge in a way that works for both experts and casual readers, and Ai has achieved this with his blog, making it the go-to read for anyone trying to parse what's currently happening in Opensim.

One of the community projects he has consistently championed is the idea of an original open source mesh body for Opensim, called 'Ruth' and 'Roth'. That's the theme of the sim where we met up.

RuthandRoth sim has resources, information and teleports 

Ai Austin: This is the Ruth2 and Roth2 home region as you might know. Its where the open source Ruth2/Roth2 mesh assets and avatars are made available. The NPCs here are examples.

Thirza Ember:  Can you tell me a bit about how you got into computers to begin with?

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!

How Not to be Lonely in Opensim

Ever heard someone say 'there's no-one in Opensim'? Or maybe that was you, talking to yourself - hey nothing wrong with that!

Opensim can often feel like a wide open, empty place. Quite intimidating after, say, the bustling sims of SL. That's not surprising when you compare its size to that of Second Life. 

SL in 2024 by primerib1 aka Claire Morgenthau

SL is not small. This picture shows the main continents at the center of a galaxy of private regions, but if you think that's huge, Opensim is waaaay bigger - if fact, if you're wondering why there's no map of opensim here, that's because it's impossible to say how big the connected hypergrid universe is. 

A few people try to give statistics about it, but they do not, and indeed cannot, know the full extent of opensim, since it is a completely decentralized and unregulated meta-place where anyone at any time and for any duration can have a grid without reporting to any higher authority. 

That means there's no central control, nobody keeping complete records of all the comings and goings of our hyperverse - it just can't be done in a meaningful way. 

Happy 17th Birthday OSGrid

 Yes, it's that time of the year again, as OSgrid is celebrating its 17th anniversary from July 22 to 28.   As always, there are a whole lot of parties planned, and as well as the usual dancing, there's a special emphasis on music, because the theme of the Birthday Expo builds this year is exactly that. 

As always the builders of OSGrid have come through with some special builds celebrating the field. There are four regions, and it's recommended to use region environment settings in order to see the installations at their best. Wow are we all getting old or what? The first time I covered this event was a ten years ago... These were the exhibits, on that occasion.

Victoria Logan's delicious little dancing park has a very apt message board 'Music connects generations, crossing barriers of time and space" and this installation is just on of the gems on show this year. Here's a few hints - you should definitely go yourself to see these builds properly when everything's in place and up and running.

Snack-fari?

The HG Safari clubhouse on OSGrid is closing down, because now the travel group's main HQ is on a dedicated grid, hopefully you already know that if your planning on joining us in the next season of trips. 

The HG Address of the new sim is at the end of  the post, where it belongs.

New HG Safari sim

So - exciting times, but it is a bit of a sad goodbye to the sim that Ange Menges gifted in the fall of 2021 when it became very clear that our old home on FrancoGrid wasn't going to be viable any more as our main base for the revamped HG Safari group.

The FrancoGrid clubhouse, 2015-2022

Over past months, regular visitors to the HG Safari sim on OSGrid may have noticed gentle reminders that it's closing, as the land got smaller and features like the Archive House, the Self Guided Tours, the Marketplace, the dancing places, and the mesh clothing store, Meshanthropy, all gradually disappeared.

 Leaving just the mountain in the osgrid ocean. 

Dan Banner's Rec-Creation

 If you're allergic to flashing lights, this post is not for you - but if  you're partial to a little bit of kaleidoscope every now and again, then Dan Banner's multi media experience over on OSGrid's Recreation Plaza could be right up your street. 

If you haven't heard of this sim, then add it to your list of must-see places, for it's a bit of a landmark in opensim culture.

Symphony's Mech Lab

Arriving on mech Lab in OSGrid is like stepping into a movie, or a high-end game. We were guests, for the second destination of this week's trip, of Symphony Vive, and she met the 20 or so Safari visitors at the Landing Point which sported a nice Welcome poster... always good sign!

The big white spheres are the cars that take you to the HUB

Symphony Vive: Welcome HG Safari Explorers! 欢迎 HG Safari 探险家！It will take some time  for the Region to load  for you to see... we will  soon move to a landing  HUB when we've all  loaded. This  will begin our  tour.

More Arts, More Friends!

Victoria Logan's OSGrid "Arts And Friends" adventure has a new chapter, this time it's all about 'We are OSGrid'.  

The inaugural party will be late May, so keep your eyes open for the event details which will be listed on opensimworld.com ad elsewhere on social media.

Lots to see here and also plenty of places for partying of course!