Butch Safari

This week, the Safari was in the business of raising Male Avatar Awareness. 

Even with the latest shopping survey on Hypergrid Business, finding what you need to create a look in OpenSim is always a challenge, and menswear is the toughest category of all to locate. 

Skins, shapes and clothes are all tricky. Shapes often give that gorilla look, shoes have traditionally been way too big and clunky, and hair varies wildly from super effeminate to frankly monstrous. If you don't believe me girls, then just go out there and try putting together a look you can live with. No wonder many men give up and go girly, or furry, or simply wear the same tee shirt and jeans for about ten years... I found this Shrek skin and shape at Lani Mall in Jorink Devin's shop... definitely a boy thing.
This week, the Safari goers were challenged to wear a male avatar and walk a mile in those moccasins (or steel toed boots, whatever) and we went out across the HG to sample the state of Male shoppingness for ourselves.

Schreck Thirza

Our first stop was on Bubblesz Grid, which is the small hg enabled grid of mesh enthusiast Taarna Welles. 

       

If you arrive at the Welcome sim on bubblesz.nl.8002 you'll see the portal that will take you direct to the shops. Taarna's personal brand is called ReMake Fashion.

Safari Sees the Blues

We went for a blues concert, and a visit to Wolem Wobbit''s home on Metropolis. 
 Wolem is best known for his music - you can follow him on Youtube to hear some epic covers, and also a lot of really lovely original songs. He's a romantic! The Safari first came across Wolem playing on German Grid right at the start of our adventures in 2014, and he has been a firm favorite with us all ever since then. You might recall his epic set at Justin CC's farewell party last year.So yes, as well as playing music, Wolem has branched out into building. And we were invited to come take a look! Visiting Metropolis Grid is always a pleasure, although more recently, lag has been a bit of an issue. 

Le Safari

             This week's Safari was a trip to the little known French province of Lagetaine. The emphasis on Lag...

Eyewatering buckets of slowness, crashing and general frustration seemed to dog our every step, from the starting point at HGSafari sim on Francogrid, through to Virtual Dreams, on to the Louvre sim on OSGrid. Only the very last stop worked perfectly, by which time a mere handful of bold and tenacious Safaristas were still on board.

           

Getting Seen in Open Sim

 You like to build things, but Second Life has become too expensive or dramatic or stale or commercial for your taste, so you decide to move to open sim.
 You've overcome the hurdle of being a noob again, you've found a region on a sympathetic and cheap grid, or set up your own minigrid and hooked it up to hypergridding. You've gone through an intense period of creating, facing the challenges of sourcing material away from the SL Marketplace, dealing with the maddening glitches that open sim likes to throw at builders, and kaboom - now you have a bunch of beautiful stuff on your sim. 
You look up from your work and suddenly realize that Hey, this is not like SL where you can send out a notice in some spammy art or building group, pay a musician 6 or 7k Lindens, and throw a vernissage or housewarming party with 40 hot bodies to pat you on the back.

Is this scenario familiar to you?

SL Artist Livio Korobase has made a brilliant transition into the open sim art world

          So how can you get the positive feedback that forms an essential part of the creative process? How does it work in Open Sim? What can you do?

Game On

Games. Who doesn't love them?
But what kind of games work best in open sim? 
We sat around the fire in the Safari Clubhouse and talked about it this week. Some don't like games in opensim at all, they think it is really better used for building and experimenting. The instability of the code, others mentioned, is a challenge when it comes to group activities and complicated scripts. Selby Evans mentioned an interesting solution to lag or reliability woes; in Second Life some of his friends organize a weekly version of Hollywood Squares on Thursdays, in which case the only scripts you have to worry about are the contestant's. 

Inside the FrancoGrid clubhouse

When it comes to playing games in the hyperverse, builders are faced with the unenviable task of dealing with the competition of other dedicated and commercially perfect video games. How can you get people to play at racing or shoot 'em up  in opensim when they could be having a go at Need for Speed or Call of Duty. Well, perhaps for the company?  Something the wide open spaces of the hypergrid is always a bit short of. 

JOG Grid

Pleasure Craft

          Congratulations to Craft, and all who sail in her, the grid turns 6 years old on Wednesday January 27 and celebrates with a party in the evening, European time, and the announcement of the results of the Annual Building Contest.
          Craft styles itself 'The Friendly Grid' and that title is well deserved. Few opensim grids can boast such a long and successful life, and the secret is assuredly the community spirit. 
          But how do you create this kind of enduring family? It starts at the top. 

Tao and Licu, taken at the 2014 anniversary party

          In 2009 Licu Rau founded Craft, along with his partner Tao Quan. Tosha Tyran and her partner, the celebrated and much missed Lumiere Noir, made up the original four members. They were soon joined by friends who had been in Second Life, or in Cyberlandia, an early Italian language opensim grid. Managing a grid, with all the hundreds of little things that can go wrong technically, socially, financially, is not work for the fainthearted, and Tao and Licu have been tireless in their pursuit of other people's happiness. 

Safari Goes Boldly

          The word maze means to be confused or bewildered, and may be related to Scandinavian words like mas - 'exhausting labor' and masa, a Swedish word meaning 'to be slow or sluggish'. Clearly a natural fit for any Safari.

         

Zan and the art of Hypergridding

       So now we know. 
       The secret to an absolutely perfect Safari where nobody loses their hair, gets lost or freezes or has chat lag is...   to predict that everything is going to go horribly wrong and we all need to be ready for multiple crashes.
          Or was it the fact we were all invited to keep our attachments to a minimum? 
          Hmm... it might be that, but we all looked stunning either way, so I'm not sure who paid attention to the 'low lag' dictum. 
          Making rules about what people can do or bring on Safari would defeat our main purpose, which is that the grids and regions should be the ones that toughen up for the onslaught of visitors, not the visitors pussyfoot around the sims. That may sound selfish, but it is done with love - love of making places visitor friendly, because visitors and appreciation and networking are the lifeblood of any community. 

Teravus Plaza keeps losing its prims. The clubhouse is next to the hill on the right. 

           Plus nobody actually reads the notecard, so it would not work anyway.

What Is OpenSim For?

          What is OpenSim for?
          Many things. It's like a large garden, with different flowerbeds, trees, rockeries and ponds, maybe a vegetable patch, and a compost heap too. Each zone  has its own needs, but they are all connected.
          By what? Paths, weather conditions, hedges... but above all, the will of the gardener.
          So, which are you? Are you planted in the garden, or are you a gardener? Or do you belong to a middle category? And why does it matter?
          Over the past few weeks you may have seen a poll on G+ and in Facebook.
          This is the G+ Poll, as of today.

          G+ is not a very poll-friendly forum, but the immediacy of the stark question 'What is open sim for' was designed to get your gut reaction. Some kind folks apparently thought I was looking for a wiki definition, rather than a 'choose one' opinion from each participant, but hey, that's G+ for you.

Radiola

There is something of the divine at Radiola.

          It is a land that provokes lightheartedness and a light step.
          Tread carefully, for you tread on dreams.

 And what dreams may come, after a visit to Livio Korobase's  small OpenSim grid, Radiola, remain to be discovered with the closing of your eyes. But first, eyes open, senses on alert. This is a whimsical, sometimes mystical, place of impossible beasts juxtaposed with strange and familiar shapes.


          Turn on the radio.
          Real music flows and sews the installation together.  Flying up into the uncluttered sky, you will find a building, an industrial basilica, perhaps dedicated to the Patron Saint of AC, St. Tesla, with its sparking mast, a sort of child's windmill, electrified.
          Radiant.  

Who Dereos Wins

            It's fun to visit new places, and in open sim, 'new' often means places that have only recently come into existence. This week the Safari took a trip over to visit the predominantly German language grid Dereos, founded by Akira Sonoda and a small group of friends, with the technical wizardry of Freaky Tech. We were there to wish them well for their upcoming first anniversary celebration, at the end of this month.

Malon's fabulous loft on Dereos

Fancy.Day: Can you see me ok?

Truelie Telling: yes, you got all your parts, hehe

Fancy.Day: Good. Never sure with this platform :)

Truelie Telling: but we haven't gone too many jumps yet

Unadecal Masala: there's still plenty of room for chaos and mayhem

Fancy.Day: I am using Radegast on a windows phone emulator

Unadecal Masala: that's really interesting, Fancy.  Are we all rezzed fine for you?

Fancy.Day: Yes all rezzed but the graphics are a little crude

George Equus: this new 0.9 code is sure making some stir in the pot

Lucy Afarensis: I have found that it causes asset problems if you let it run more than a few days

Truelie Telling: apparently, there are certain scripts that no longer work... including NPCs

Thirza Ember: una, didn't you say you couldn't find inventory you had bought on another grid?

Unadecal Masala: I did say that the inventory I bought at Clutterfly arrived corrupted at OSG... it arrived fine at my grid though.

Lucy Afarensis: never arrived at all for me

Unadecal Masala: Lucy it did arrive, but it generates XML errors and doesn't rez

Thirza Ember: sooo bizarre

       On that note, our first stop was Freakyo sim, home to Freaky Tech, who has developed the Arriba software, a fork of Open Sim, on which Dereos Grid is based. But first, some Teravus fun.

No nudes on Teravus

Lucy Afarensis: Am I naked ?

Thirza Ember: no Lucy

Aime Socrates: yes Lucy..like million years ago !

Lucy Afarensis: whew

James Atlloud: No naked avs that I can see.
Thirza Ember: I apologize for that James, maybe next time.

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.

Smokin' Safari

        It's that time of year when we are all subjected to a sort of mass hallucination that the whole world is knee deep in presents and snow, family and mistletoe. 
         That makes it refreshing, not to mention healthy, to take a minute to realize that not all cultures, lifestyles, or climates, are the same. 
         Safari began as usual on Teravus Plaza.

       

The Snowind Swansong

          It is their swansong, and so it is up to you and I to make the most of it.  After many years of providing fun and delight to their fellow residents, in the form of their seasonal treasure hunts, Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges have decided to take a break.  

   
          Ange and Nani's Hunts marked things like Easter and Christmas, which provided a convenient deadline to them, and a signal to us that there would be hours of fun to be had.

Var Out

Aime Socrates: i'm looking much more intelligent with those horns

Dabici Straulino: certainly more brilliant

The Xmas season is getting close and of course all the decorative instincts of opensim people are coming out in force.
Lucy Afarensis: Like your Xmas decoration Snowy
snowbody Cortes: oh ty Lucy .. a gift at Friday party , mattie mcbride
Lucy Afarensis: she makes nice things
James Atlloud: Do love the horns.
Lucy Afarensis: lost my glasses
Prodyck Theas: hello all
PatriciaAnne Daviau: ok going to try and get to first stop...without crashing

Safari goes Hunting

       In Open Sim, as in the real world, two things are guaranteed, nobody reads anything, and travel is dangerous. Well, of course, that's not true. It is just that sometimes, there is such an information overload, that reading doesn't cut it. 

Gif shamelessly stolen from Serene Jewell

       This week the Safari did some recycling, for we did nothing more than hop over to the OpenSim Community Conference grid, which is a small purpose built grid hosted on the servers of the University of California at Irvine. Our goal - to visit the four Expo sims on the Conference grid, and then to try the Hypergrid Treasure hunt which is described on the four red posters you can see in this gif.

 Addresses at the end of the post.As always.      

You know you want one.

       The conference was last Saturday. There were a lot of good presentations about subjects like 'Fun with 3D Headsets' and 'What you can do with NPCs' and 'Virtual Epidemiology' (honestly, that is an actual thing) and most importantly in terms of shaking your fist at the purveyors of all those recent hiccups in OSGrid that have made you waste time re-doing stuff like building, applying textures, setting permissions, writing notecards, taking Landmarks, or crashing ten or twenty times when trying to make a simple hg jump from one place to another... -  'Who has been poking about in OpenSim code recently'.
       If you missed the conference or would like to view it again, then click here to go to the Ustream page. 

Safari Goes Jogging

      GeR.Orsini @craft-world.org:8002: benvenuti in Craft grid e in Italia

If you have been thinking OSGrid is a bit off color these days, between Notecards and prims and Landmarks and Friends acting up, then you are not alone. 
Hypergridding has always been ...unstable is the polite word, but with the state of things generally with this latest horrible release, we were braced for a pretty bumpy ride this week. 
And we were not disappointed by the crashy stuff... but equally, not disappointed by the absolutely gorgeous regions we got to see. 
HG Addresses at the end of the post... but you knew I was going to say that.

Gondolas and gorgonzola??!  Italian heaven!

A Scifi, Scofi, TP try and try Safari

 Beacon opensimworld: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: 
Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.    

        So, back to Metropolis for the Summer of Arts which has morphed into an Autumn and almost a Winter of Arts, which is fine by us - the more the merrier! If you have not been to Wanda Shigella's regions, you have time until the end of the year to enjoy the 40+ artists on show. 
       The addresses, as ever, at the end of the post.

Safari starts at a fest and ends up in Jail

It was highly inappropriate, to be on a cathedral sized art installation doing a girl gangnam style dance but that's how we roll.
      Two trips, and a shorter safari than usual, yet it felt like we encompassed the universe in this our 79th outing. First up, a visit to AvatarFest. This four day festival, part show and tell, part concert, was a huge success both socially and technically.

Thirza and James sitting on the Safari elephant

But first some elephant action. And Teravus Plaza chit chat. Last week, James was accused of 'never sitting on the elephant' so this week, he made sure he got on board. Can't have Safari's premiere sitter accused of not starting the Safari as he means to go on!
Thirza Ember: I'm so glad we get to celebrate your Fest tonight
Han Held: I am too! I'm glad y'all are coming and that Truelie is performing for us. I'm really proud of everyone and the way we all came together.
Thirza Ember: this time, I plan to actually go look at the exhibits on avatarfest, not just dance
Han Held: I think a lot of people are, and I hope that they come by before the end of the month
Sunbeam Magic: it's such a nice small town feeling , easy to walk paths and not too many exhibits to overwhelm you. and Tom had his DJ debut there, he is great bluesy jazzy guy lol
Tom Frost: now that the Metro stammtisch [grid meeting] is only once every month I will have much more opportunity to be with the safari !

     

Safari Goes to the Shows

George.Equus: Now stuff makes sense  :)

      The one thing that is always the same about our safaris is that they are never the same. Most weeks, two or three new friends join us and even when we go to places we have visited before, it always seems to result in a different experience.
Take yesterday's trip to Metropolis and Francogrid, for example. 
Billy Bradshaw: I have some chores in RL, will join the safari a little later
Alya VonZ: so glad it is wednesday, I could use a break:)
Thirza Ember: they are restarting the sim for destination 1 in a few minutes, so all should be ....dare I say perfect?? is that tempting fate?

Arriving on Futurelab

Alya VonZ: hehehe
Lucy Afarensis: probably
Thirza Ember: hey Lyr!! welcome!
Selby Evans: hi everyone
Lyr Lobo: Hiya Thinkerer *grins*
Thirza Ember: Lyr almost all the sit poses in the jeep are non embarrassing... also the elephant - apart from the tail seat of course
Truelie Telling: yeah, I'm sitting with my feet in elephant brains
Thirza Ember: how come James never sits on the elephant?
James Atlloud: I don't know about never. Usually getting myself sorted at this time.
Alya VonZ: hehe, haven't sat on it either yet:)  - have to be earlier on I suppose to do that, hehe
James Atlloud: lol - right after the elephant ... spoke?  the music started. lol
Selby Evans: I can sit on the elephant

        The conversation turned to operating systems and new laptops, and then poof it was time to go to Futurelab on Metropolis. HG Addresses at the end of the post. There was some climbing of ladders, and some jumping jack poses, then some sitting and having our cam control taken from us. Futurelab currently hosts the gigantic model of a sterile lab, which is part of a project for a real world company not named here by request of Art.