Push to go

Garry Beaumont has 'no imagination' - or so he says. But pay no attention to that, because this army type who 'likes to press all the buttons' has got some serious curiosity going on, not to mention an eye for detail and the patience to make some fantastic vehicles and gadgets.  In his testosterone-packed store in Wright Plaza, the much labelled motorcycle maniac explained his presence on osgrid.

Garry Beaumont:  I like osgrid, because you have to work at it if you are not techno, and I love the fact that it's all free. The only thing that's frustrating is the viewer; I liked hippo, but now am back using Imprudence - but osgrid will get that sorted soon, it's always changing and improving!  I dont think I've made anything to be proud of yet, I'm not that good! the submarine was the first thing i made on here, but when I look at it now, it looks poor.
Looks pretty good to me...

Garry Beaumont:  If I had to choose the piece I'm most fond of, it would probably be the tank I made with only one finger on my right hand. That is all i could move when I came here, so it was hard to do!  I type with one finger, like most people, but try building with only one! CTRL ALT DEL is a pain! I hit a truck on a motorcycle head on. I should not be here at all, really. I was sat for a long time looking at the computer, then I thought of the days when I was in SL, and started to look at what was out there. In Google, I read about this new grid that was doing things differently, and decided to try it.

Garry left SL, tired of the drama. Then, he had a big accident - truck vs motorcycle, head on. As a result, he could only move one finger. Interestingly, many of the good friends he had left behind in SL were wounded soldiers, whose courage in the face of terrible injuries and long, difficult recoveries gave him the strength to face his own journey back to mobility with a good attitude, and a sense of humour. Garry couldn't get over osgrid Thirza's sexeh a/o which had decided to keep me alternately  trotting on the spot, or gliding like a mummy. 
Garry Beaumont: I like your walk, it makes me laugh. Never seen a walk like it  you should box it up and sell it.
Maybe I should, it would be a good counterbalance to Garry's boy's toys. Is that a tank, or...?

During his years in SL, Garry never made anything - he remembers once putting together a simple Tp device, that's all. It's amusing to look back and think of the little noob house he had, just the right size to fit on a 512 region. Now he spreads himself out over one of Nebadon Izumi's megaregions, and wonders how he ever consented to be so cramped. His interest in art is always understated, always referential, often flavoured with a late-night effect, never more so than in this osgrid version of Hopper's Nighthawks, with good friends Avia Bonne and Richardus Raymaker.

Considering his interest in vehicles,  does opensim's notorious lack of physics, and scripting issues, hold him back?

Garry Beaumont: Not really, because I make my bikes and so on wearable.  Personally, I do not like to script, it is too much like work for me, and it makes my head hurt! But when I need it, there's plenty of help available. 

He produced a fine cine camera.
Garry Beaumont: This is available in my store on Wright. I set the buttons to run 4 films. Inworld video went a bit awry with Youtube a while back, so Neb made a new script that links to http://www.archive.org/internet archives. I got that from him. Nebadon Izumi is everyone's friend on here, from the noob to the old timer and the dim, like me! I try not to bug him if I get stuck I ask the helpers on the IRC chat channel.
We went inside the submarine and I listened for pings on the sonar. Next project for Garry will be making a new version of a friend's build, called Gone City. How does he see the future of the grid in general?

Garry Beaumont: Osgrid is getting better all the time, but you can never tell in this life where you will be tomorrow. It would be good to see more people - the the right people, yes. And when it comes to technology, give me it now, give me more! I press all the buttons!

A Mist Land

Going to CondensationLand is like visiting Tibet, like in Lost Horizons, maybe, but without the plane crash. Or wait, no, there is quite a bit of crashing; and a fair old bit of what feels like walking into the wind, in terms of lag. 

Condensation Land is a small grid consisting of just eleven islands, occasionally reachable from Osgrid, sometimes accessible directly via the grid manager, once you get permission to create an account from Zonya Capalini  who, along with Ludmilla Writer and Favio Piek, founded the Land long before the dawn of mesh. The weight of prims often prompts OutOfMemory errors, making the grid crash, and RL interests have drawn Zonya away from the project. But should you get a chance to sneak in here, you'll find it's like entering a secret garden, a special place of strange imagination and exuberant prims.

It is a girl's first job in any world to import hair, skin, shape, and at least one dress, and that takes about an hour when you're new at it, between the crashing and the importing objects. It feels good to do so, it feels like an investment in the place. OK no shoes. I can live without them. This is a place for flying and staring out over the battlements of improbable castles, or becoming one with the land's very own Klein Bottle.

The bottle turned out to be empty; in this antique world that came as no surprise. There is a strangely airlocked feel to Condensation Land. Knowing you are utterly alone on a grid is not a new experience to me.  In both Craft and my own minigrid, many's the evening I've spent without a soul around. But Condensation Land is like a Lost World, a place of silent awe, of certainty that any speck of pixeldust I might stir with my bare toes will stay moved for the longest time.

It is the evidence of activity, frenzied, purposeful, flamboyant building, that makes the sensation of stillness so poignant. Omurtag Milev's three sims Temple, Conceptior, and Angelico Miguelis burst with energy. Zonja's videos bring it to life.

  Walking quietly in this strange land, it rains down on the visitor just what it means to attempt escape velocity from the orbit of  Second Life. This place is a condensation of all the existential questions, a meditation on the missed opportunities, and the grasped possibilities, the virtues and the drawbacks that come with not being in the 'first world' of VR which we all either love or hate, or both.

Quiet loveliness is here. Like a mystical mosaic hidden in a misty mountaintop monastery, the art in Condensation Land has a special value, one that no Linden Endowment can touch... the effort required to see it. I wonder how many pushing, ambitious artists know what value that would add to their work - a little subtlety, a little more reserve.

To visit glorious, mysterious Condensation Land for yourself, contact Zonja Capalini via email for more information.

Rhomb here to Eternity

The sacred geometry of chance

The hidden law of a probable outcome

The numbers lead a dance

Sting, Shape of my heart

Wizard Gynoid is all about the Golden Rhombus these days, and it's led to an exciting new discovery about complex geometric shapes, which she describes on her blog. We have the opportunity to experience the quiet mystery of it, in InWorldz at Wizard/120/140/23 (when is IWz going to get functioning WZURLs? I ask nobody in particular.) Her creation looks a bit like a piece of brain, as it turns, orbiting rather than rotating, it calls to mind something Escher would make; the rhombuses or rhombi are all the same shape, size and colour, but don't seem so.

Wizard Gynoid: I like it 'cause it is deceptive. It looks like it's made of squares and cubes and boxes, but it's not. It's made from the Golden Rhombus.
We were quiet for a bit, just watching the oddity. The Golden Rhombus, I thought, would make a good name for a restaurant.
Wizard Gynoid: Or a liquor drink.
Thirza Ember: 'Ambassador, with this delicious Golden Rhombus, you're spoiling us.' or no - 'Hey, it's after 6, I'll have a Golden Rhombus on the rocks'.
Wizard Gynoid: 'I'll take a Golden Rhombus right between the eyes, thank you.'
One thing has led to another, with this rhombus story. She was inspired to build a crystal flower from the same root matter; it too is a zonohedra, and is squeezed in among the other Sacred Toys in the Temple.

Wizard Gynoid: The crystal flower is made of five petals, growing out from a center point, and has  icosahedral  symmetry. I'm into crystals at the moment, and over here are some real crystal structures I made for the Elf Clan Fantasy Art Festival, which is on right now. Soror Nishi, Ub Yifu, Scarp Godenot and a bunch of other peeps were involved also. As you probably know, the Elves recently escaped SL, and came to Inworldz. This thing glitters like it is crystalline; it's significant because this is the real atomic crystal structure that the world is based on, which is why I suggest it with the orbiting electrons.

Wizard Gynoid: InWorldz is great because it lets me make stuff big. and link them together. This object is almost a thousand prims. not possible in SL.
You need to tp to sim Wizard in InWorldz to truly get the effect. Don't forget to friend us when you get there.

Thirza Ember: It's always fascinating to me how, no matter what, we come back to nature. Inside our computers, it's a virtual world far from rain or mud or snow; it might be as alien to Earth as the Moon, or space itself - far from the natural substances of the world. But no. Whether it's traditional plants or the more surreal kind, like the ones soror makes, or this kind of meditation on form - it's still all nature.
Wizard Gynoid: I think duplicating nature in here is ok, but there is so much more potential to do things. To explore the inside of your mind. Which is nature, I guess, too...
Thirza Ember: I guess that's our axis, we can only spin on it.

Wizard Gynoid: The crystals of gold and silver and lead and copper look like this which is very alchemical -they are the classic metals. I found afterwards that they matched, so that was sorta synchronous.
Huh - so maybe she'll figure out finally how to make gold from baser metals?
Wizard Gynoid: I'm not out to make a fortune. I'm not materialistic. I just want to make beauty and help others to see it.

Rising Tide: Alizarin Goldflake

Digital artist Martha Jane Bradford thinks big. As Alizarin Goldflake in Second Life, she's collaborated with big noises like the Caerleon Art group, and big events like Burning Life. In the LL booth at the Shanghai World Expo last year, seventy squillion people from forty-two different planets got a chance to admire her work via the machinima Acquarella: the fable, by Chantal Harvey and friends.
Acquarella is an original story by Alizarin. Inspired by her love of all things aquatic, it's a tale of apocalyptic upheaval and change inspired by (among other things) the Fukushima disaster. Acquarella got its first outing in Second Life, which is still the default grid when it comes to virtual art meeting the virtual art-loving public. But, while Alizarin keeps a consitent foothold there, she's expanded the concept on Nexus Central, part of Jeri Rahja's  arty archipelago on the InWorldz grid.

Alizarin Goldflake: The sim tells a fable in 4 quadrants. All of it happened because White Lebed couldn't understand why

Linda Kellie's FreeLife

This is Linda Kellie, previously known as Ayla Holt in SL and Inworldz, where she spent over 5 years making stuff - clothes, furniture, skins, buildings, sculpties, and more. She's gradually putting all her goodies on her website, to be exported, modified, re-used any way you want, as she explains in her personal note. 
It's an extraordinary move, and so far there's over 250MB of material available, all set out in nicely categorized sections. 
Yes, that's right - FREE, FULL PERM/MOD/TRANS.
 On your computer. Good for any grid.
Linda Kellie: Not all of my stuff is on my webpage yet, a lot's here on OSGrid, and I am still adding to it, I haven't been here long! Making things has made virtual worlds more fun for me. I loved both SL and InWorldz, I just worked really hard in SL, and then played hard in IW. I quit for awhile, and decided I needed to do something with all my inventory, backed up on my hard drive. A friend told me about the OpenSimCreations.com site - it was amazing to me that someone would give away files for export to any grid. I didn't know I could even back up to xml. I think you just have to get to a point where you don't care about people stealing your ideas and stuff. I love having my stuff with no rules and giving people the freedom they need. I hope Vanish doesn't think I stole his idea. I kinda did, I guess! But it just made sense to put it on a website that I wasn't using anyway, and he has made a few positive comments.

What could be better? If you like to make stuff, but

Tech Savvy

Welcome to Biolandia, a scientific sim for schoolkids, where in a few days it's going to be Party Time! *digs out crazy co-ed costume* ...but more on that later.

Biolandia is on Craft Grid, and it was built by middle-school teacher, Michelle Tech, who uses her skills to inspire young students to learn the basics of science - chemistry, math, and biology. Michelle won a

Brave New Grid

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

The Tempest Shakespeare

If you're tired of SL prices and poseurs, and looking for somewhere new to hang your hat, here's a thought, what about New World Grid? Never heard of it?
Well, they are trying to put that right by having a fab  Open Day on Saturday 1 October.
Of course, the grid's already open, so be smart, go get an avie now, this is the URI: opensim://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002/   

Vadrouille Zepp

I gots my avie, and on rezzing at sim Welcome - look who was there already!  Vadrouille Zepp, famous creator of the multi-grid communicator, the Radionne. He has a new version, the 0.5.5.9G - upgrade, people!

But back to the point of this post. New World Grid, better known by the acronym NWG, is non profit and offers cheapish, reliable land, good services, lots of nice educational builds; plus it's on European time, all factors that appealed to Graham Mills, aka Peter Miller, a professor at the University of Liverpool.

Gianto office on NWG

 Graham and I were both there when the HGAC visited Aime Socrates' fun sim Physics one wet weekend, just as the Education discount in SL was coming to an end. The giant lab is a fun place to play, and makes you think about the Greenies, sigh, and all those other Rezzable goodies.