Safari Magic

And we're off with another season of Safari! Some glitchiness on HG Safari region, but we all seemed to overcome it one way or another, and landed on Wizardry, the freebie shopping region of CyberGlo's grid, Cyberdatastorm. As usual all HG Addresses are at the end of the post.

It was so great to have the usual gang back together, plus some new friends joining us for the first time.

Star Ravenhurst: Hi Lifted! I missed you all! GTS everyone!

Taarna Welles: Hear hear

lifted pixel: Hello! :3

Kelso Uxlay: It looks like people have trouble to TP from HGSafari Clubhouse... I moved back home and jumped from there

lifted pixel: yeah i went back to sandbox plaza and here, no problem

Thirza Ember: we can beat any tp problems LOL

lifted pixel: Safari is Authorized!

Forest Azure: ah, the hop worked

We landed in a beautiful meadow full of flowers.

CyberGlo CyberStar: welcome

Nara Nook: Hi Cyberglo

Safari on Europa

 Second destination for the premiere of the Spring Season of Safari  - Europa! 

This region on Wolf Territories Grid opened a while back, (HG address is, of course, at the end of the post as usual) with a big party celebrating its Mall, stocked with avies, outfits andmesh objects with a sci-fi fantasy twist. 

About 15 of us made it over, and while the lag definitely played some tricks with outfits, Text chat, and people frozen here and there, on the whole it held up pretty well, and experienced safaristas will often just cam to where the people are even if they can't move. So it all worked out pretty well.

The arrival area was full of light, strange signs, and these dancing androids...

Safari Heads Out Again!

 Yay and we're off once again on Safari this Wednesday at 12.00SLT as usual for a two hour trip! 

The familiar courtyard... the LMs and the drama llama await you

Yes, yet another ten week season of tours to places of interest on a variety of grids, some big some small. We will see all sorts once again this season, from the machines of Leonardo DaVinci, to fantastic sci fi spaces, and then also, there will be opportunities to improve your Mariner skills, your zombie-avoidance techniques, and to learn more about scripted objects, art, and the community of opensim... 

We will be celebrating a few milestones too, for example, in May the Safari celebrates ten years from that first trip that led to all these others. Wow where does the time go.

See you on Wednesday at the clubhouse, if you can make it...
HG Address:  HG.ossgrid.org:80:HG Safari

HIE 2024 Starts !

Yesterday at 11am Pacific, the Hypergrid International Expo kicked off with three hours of music. The HIE expo regions are on Craft grid, you can get to them by coming to craft-world.org:8002:HIE Welcome and use the portals to get to HIE 2, HIE 3 and HIE 4, where all the fun takes place.

And what music! The divine Zoree Jupiter kicked things off with a truly beautiful set of Fado, the traditional portuguese songs of love, passion and of course, 'fado' or fate, destiny...

Wyldwood Bayou Beckons!

Starfleet or shaman, medieval merchant or merman, it's that time again, and you're welcome to the Open Market Roleplay event on Wyldwood Bayou grid. There are two roleplay groups here, Ravenquest and Brigantia. Come along and learn about other RP groups in opensim, and help keep the roleplay community vibrant!

Organized by Contessa Lacombe and Fitheach Eun, this is a chance to share what you know and maybe dip your toe in roleplay. Not a recruitment drive so much as a way to better know what's available out there across the archipelago of grids and groups that actively tell stories in a dramatic immersive way. I asked Tessa how she got started.

Rock On

It's not the news that anyone wanted to hear, that 3rd Rock Grid will be closing its doors in May.  The longevity of the grid, and the circumstances that have led to its likely demise, make the news even more upsetting. But, I say, let's be positive. 

Write Plaza, da Vinci

Why be positive? First of all, because of all the wonderful places, events, and people of the grid who have given residents and visitors alike a dozen or more years of great memories. 

Wolf Leaps Forward

 When a grid migrates its servers to a new rl location, it's often quite a tricky process. Just the words 'grid migration' have your average opensim resident shaking in their thigh length boots, admit it.
But that's not always the case... sometimes it can go as smooth as a silk, or the silky fur of a Wolf...

That was the case today, when Wolf Territories Grid announced they have moved their

Littlefield Eleven

Littlefield Grid turns 11 years old as an independent grid and they're celebrating!

From Nasa to Firestorm, Littlefield Grid is celebrating the past and the future

There's a special Anniversary region on the grid where many of the grid's residents have set up displays that illustrate the range of builds that you can visit here. There's also a gallery that explains the history of Stonehaven, from the days of SL onwards.

Egg Static

Hunting easter eggs - it's your classic springtime activity, and once again Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges have been working on a delightful storybook build that, as usual, will be open right around the holiday weekend, and then gone for good. 

The build is, of course, not yet open - hey Easter isn't until the end of the month! 

This sneak peek gives you an idea of the charming style of the region, called Dhoglin, and located on OSGrid. 

The regular Safari tours are on a break, but there will be a special event for hunt lovers, at the usual time, 12 noon SLT or 9pm in Europe, on Wednesday 3 April, if you want to come and join in the fun!

IDD - Great Idea

 This photograph was blatantly stolen in the night from Zoree Jupiter, there, I said it. 

And what a night it was! 

A night of 30 minute music sets on a special region AMV International,  showcasing singers from around the world, and celebrating the vibrant and fascinating multicultural community we're all part of. 
 The celebration of all things international is of course in the air with the HIE event coming up in April 19-21. HIE is a sort of opensim convention, with a big but simple Expo 

Safari meets its Speculoos

So this was it, the final mass gridjump of crazy Safarians from SharingIsCaring to Speculoos. This Belgian-but-a-bit-caribbean-with-a-side of welsh grid has some idiosyncrasies, in particular when it comes to Inv and Lms, making it a little bit of a challenge to reach, but perhaps we needed to stretch our ingenuity muscles. And it was certainly worth it to see one of the most unusual builds in opensim, Brussels' famous Grand Place flooded and turned into a tropical beach. Global warming, anyone?

arriving in Grand Place

Tosha Tyran: Hi everybody.... wipes her forehead.... it really was a fight to get here :D

Thirza Ember: teleport totem! I think everyone made it however!

Lavia Lavine: Hail hail the gang's all here.

Andron Rae: woo beach party , lol :)

Thirza Ember: we are all here Gudule!

The Journey of Pat Babii

The final meetup of this first season of 2024 took us to a brand new grid tor the HG Safari and the tourists were out in force to visit SharingIsCaring grid, and discover some lovely and thought provoking art. The full HG Address is, you guessed it, at the end of the post.

Pat Babii: Welcome to the Gavezdois Virtual Museum. 

lifted pixel: Thank you for having us Pat! :D

Pat Babii: My oldest avatar on Opensim is already 11 years and many months old, and in SL, where the surname Babii came from, the avatar has existed for 17 years. The person who gives life to these avatars is Brazilian by birth and Portuguese by adoption, and I spent most of my life in Sintra, Portugal. I don't say much more than this about my RL. This museum, which was once a museum exclusively with exhibitions of classical art, is now set up more like an art gallery than a museum.

Pat Babii outside her SharingisCaring gallery

Pat Babii: What is on display now is a current type of art, composed exclusively of images made by Artificial Intelligence software called Midjourney. To obtain images in this software, the user needs to describe in text what they want to be in the image, which may vary in styles, reference artists, materials, eras, colors, etc. The options are endless

Cornflakes in Bloom

The second half of an uproarious, imaginative, and musical Cornflakes Week party was on Winxtropia! A big shout out to everyone who makes the effort (and it's not always easy, as we're all busy people) to honor the event with their great costumes, and by showing up and being part of the fun! But most of all, of course, to our hosts who do so much work behind the scenes, it's crazy. Here we are arriving on Crescent Melody, Winxtropia, among the incredible instruments that play such a vital part to the event.

Jupiter Rowland: Finally I get to see this sim on a decently powered machine.

Bloom Peters:  hehe i love all the cool new avatars to see

Lavia Lavine: ...she said I reminded her of a bag of Wonder Bread

Bloom Peters: Angelic with a cool avatar too, very unique

Lavia Lavine: So I guess I'll just loaf around.

Farstar Enoch: hehe

Star Ravenhurst: Angel always looks amazing

Cornflakes on Neverworld

Cornflakes Week comes round once a year, and it's a great opportunity to show off your imaginative side in a uniquely Opensim way. This year, as usual, the Safari celebrated the week long event with our Wednesday tour split into two halves, with our first party destination on Neverworld Grid. 

Never Plaza... the calm before the storm.

Be ready to be amazed by what the Neverworldians pulled out of their corny inventories...

But first, a shout out to everyone who dressed up! Lots of cornflake hats, plus Angelic Kisses rocking an Alpha Tribe outfit by Felix Ringtail, Lavia Lavine and four-legged friend sporting spots, Roff clowning it,  James in a vintage carpetman avie with lit-up face, Forest ant-itified, while a colorfully ringed lifted pixel took to the corny dancefloor, as she prepared to livestream the event. 

Atlas TV

We arrived, all of  group, on a wintry welcome region of the Francophone grid, Atlas. It was our second destination for this week, and the tech talk portion of our adventure. Home to Harthelie, Chip and Jeff, it's a grid where ancient architecture hints at supernatural powers...

Cherry Manga: wow both are working, inworld Voice and Mumble, my brain explodes :)

LadyKa 007: lol, Cherry, ou alors, tu entends des voix

Cherry Manga: that's magic! wizardry

Jeff Kelley: Welcome back to Atlas, the grid with technology. Harth, Chip and Jeff are your hosts. We have two topics tonight: A hot one : Mumble (15 minutes). A visit to our new TV studio (40 minutes).

Star Ravenhurst: *-* YeSS! *-*

James Atlloud: ! very nice

Jeff Kelley: There is an extensive coverage of Mumble by Snowbody Cortes here I, at some point, mentioned online that we had a fallback Mumble solution in case Vivox pulls the plug or suffers an outage, which happened weeks ago. Thirza popped and asked me to talk about it. It is a minimalistic Mumble integration. A two-step process : First, click the panel and proceed to the web page. Then click the offered link.  If the Mumble client is installed on your computer, you are now connected to the Mumble channel for this region with your avatar's name.

Jeff Kelley: I see many of you has joined This is not a replacement for a fully-integrated solution which, by the way, had existed in the past (2011) but broke thanks to the smart concept of hardware/OSes/APIs/libraries/everything-obsolete next year. See here Ange Menges' blog from 2011

Akata Ocean: Bonsoir tlm

Jeff Kelley: I shut up for now to give you a chance to try / ask questions.

thirza ember: was it simple to convince atlas people to join Mumble Jeff?

Jeff Kelley: they love it

LadyKa 007: Not only Atlas people ! lol, I have it too

Once in a Blue Moon

The Blue Wave Club is an old soul in opensim, and it carries its memories lightly, with long friendships.  The club is located under a pyramid that gives the sim its name, and under the sim water, that gives an unearthly light to the dancefloor. 

Unlike so many clubs which are as huge as aircraft hangars, making the dancing public seem like ants, this is an intimate, primmy, colorful space, with that warm, lived-in feel to it. Full HG Address at the end of the post, as always.

Cherry Manga: hello!

Elamanu Pastorelli: hi all

Samira Samtanko: hello all  welcome to the  Midweek Party

Cornflakes Week

'Tis the season... but wait, no real world seasonal atmospherics involved, this is all virtual. Cornflakes Week is coming!
Always held during the final 7 days of February, this year's Cornflakes Week is 22-29 February. It's a festival just for opensim, and for everyone... not linked to any religious or national festivals, making it an all-inclusive addition to the many fun real-world oriented events that happen inworld. 

The first Cornflakes Week event was celebrated in 2015, and HG Safari always celebrates it

Here Be Dragons

After our first, super romantic hour on Soul Grid, our second stop has its own romance, with a big dose or art and adventure thrown in. This was a return trip to Barefoot Dreamers grid, on the invitation of DJAlex, and the first impressions of the build were ..awesome in the true sense of the word.

Home Sweet Home - dragons arrival point

Tosha Tyran: oh, this looks dangerous

DJAlex Harper: welcome to all

Secret Fantasys: Thank You all for coming

Huga Bug: welcome everyone

Star Ravenhurst: Hey Lavia! You made it!

Forest Azure: hi alex :)

Nara Nook: Neo is the redshirt guy ...dragon bait

Lavia Lavine: Yes I finally made it.  I was at the first one as well... Hail hail the gang's all here!

Secret Fantasys: everyone looks so awesome

DJ Alex

DJAlex Harper: OK plz follow me we will start at starting point, you get the best view from up here to start

Tosha Tyran: wow, but it is also a little dangerous

DJAlex Harper: yes a bit, plz be careful

Hearts on Soul

Tosca sim has been described as the heart of Soul Grid, the German-speaking world belonging to Nasti Backerly who invited the Safari to come over and enjoy part of their Valentine's day celebration. This mediterranean-looking sim is full of flowers and romance, and is the perfect place to celebrate February 14 in a beautifully lit and very popular sky build.

Bu first, of course, the Safari crew (and that means you too, any time you are able to join us) convened on OSgrid at the Safari clubhouse.

lifted pixel: hello internet friends :3

snowbody Cortes: hello

Thirza Ember: internet friends are the best lol you can ghost them and they don't even mind

lifted pixel: honestly yeah, we understand RL happens and we'll catch up later :3

Priory Accommodation

The Science Circle grid was our first destination this week and it is something quite out of the way in terms of our usual visits - this one is a piece of opensim history and a piece of RL history, combined. It's the build by Christi Maeterlinck, Mount Grace.
This is a first class build! If you read this blog, you may recall an article about it some time ago - this week, finally, was our opportunity to do a group visit. Not the full tour which offers a deep dive into the documented past of both the construction and rl history of the place, but a quick look, in anticipation of other visits.

Once again, Jessica 'lifted' Pixel was on hand to film the whole shenanigans, giving a real time pixel-eye view of what it's like to come on these trips.