Ad Astra

 Dorrena's World is one of the oldest grids in Opensim and the oldest continually active German Grid with a stable and welcoming community and a wealth of lovely sims full of detail freebies, art, and historical information - not to mention clubs and dance halls. The grid takes its name from Dorena Verne, pictured here.

It happens, sometimes, that a sim decided that, no matter what you want to do, the Landing Point is   underwater. Probably everyone has had this experience, and no matter how many times you restart or re-jig the sim, that wretched Landing Point won't budge.

Series Stuff

 Just two stops this week on Safari, as it's high summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and lots of people are away from their desks and desktops.

Joe Builder welcomed the Safari back for some racing on his Mad Max sim.  Joe's grid Lost World is huge, and he has made dozens of different regions, in a variety of styles, many inspired by movies like Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Star Trek and more. Other builds include a biker's hangout, a fantasy world of elves and fairies, underwater adventure places and more. Not all sims are online at the same time, but if you visit his Welcome sim you will find all the portals and can either sample what is up, or Im Joe and ask him to open a region for you to visit.

Safari Back on Path

After a little bit of a break, Safari returned with a roar this week. 

We went first to a destinations right here on OSGrid. If you're ever visited the iconic Maritime Club venue, which has regular Sunday night music events, you'll know our first host. 

Stiofain MacTomais invited us to discover more about Irish culture, and the changing face of Belfast from the photos of Frankie Quinn The build records some of the city's lost landmarks and reminds us of its rich heritage. 

Steamy Safari

 The summer of Safari this year has continued to bring fun and interesting destinations, and this week we had our passports ready !

First up,Vbinnia Radek invited us back to her region Steam to see if we could break it. We had tried to visit in the past but the lag monsters had rendered the grid almost totally invisible to most of us, and then eventually it crashed. 

This happens quite often when a huge number of us descend on a very complex grid. It's just too much for the server. 

This time Vbinnia wanted to load test it again to see if improvements had made a difference, and they had! We were all forewarned that this was a load test, and were ready to crash, maybe that's why opensim decided to cooperate for a change. It's ornery that way.

There are some lovely quiet corners, like this one, with a skilfully made statue

and of course all the exuberant airships and mills, make it feel like a trip through time (though hard to tell whether you're going backward or forward!

Vbinnia Radek is an opensim oldbie with a penchant for complicated constructions, industrial heritage, proudly grungy buildings and lots of vehicles and gadgets that she makes available not only on this sim but also on Lani Mall. Each invention has a gloriously Victorian feel to it, and they're usually complex and mesmerizing.

Any kind of shop, with dozens of textures and scripts all in a small space, can be laggy in a way one might not expect (big objects often 'weigh' far less than small, in our experience) but to visit here as a group, is so fun that it is definitely worth it.

Praia Brasil our next stop, it's a new grid located in Brazil, just in case the name hadn't given it away, with its golden beaches made for nudists (glad I managed to snap a shot when nobody was around)...

There are plenty of people on Virtual Brazil and they welcomed us with a great musical set. This is a community that knows how to party. They did their best to communicate, although Portuguese is naturally the dominant language and they're not used to having a lot of strangers drop by.  That made our visit even more interesting really, like RL travel, you go with the flow and try to sample the local culture... often good to bring a friend or relative with you, just in case you need backup...

Just kidding, they're friendly and harmless and very musical. Afterwards, time to explore the glorious waterways and architecture. The perfect place for a summer R&R

Finally a party on Phaandoria grid, on the epic Der Krater nightclub.

This grid is home to Arielle and Phaandor,  and features many other regions beyond this epic volcano build. Good music, good building skills, and good company.

The best way to bat the summer heat - keep moving!

HG Addresses

Vbinnia Radek's steampunk region                 hg.osgrid.org:80:Steam

A New Brasilian grid                                       mundo.virtualbrasil3d.com.br:8002

Phaandoria dancing region                             phaandoria.de:8002:der krater

White Paper, Wizard's, and OSGrid Art

 This week, three stops on Safari, with plenty of art to show for it!

CapCat Ragu met us on Craft Grid, where she has a region dedicated to art experiments and education, called IPVerso.

The sim exists because CapCat (In RL Catarina Carniero de Sousa) uses it to work with her students on digital art at a college in Viseu, Portugal, where she lives. 

IPVerso is a long term project, giving artists a chance to try out their wings (sometimes more literally than others) in virtual worlds, and exploring the possibilities that offers now - it's an ever expanding possibility for creators, and so it's exciting to know that mainstream schools recognize the usefulness of opensim as a means of promulgating this branch of the arts.

Capcat works in collaboration with a number of other artists, and their collective, Delicatessen, has been known in Second Life for years as a place of excellence.

Safari turns Blue

BlueWall Slade: Friending is a mystery

               Hypergridding has changed the face of OpenSim. It has opened doors and forged friendships across grids. As much as it's still a work in progress, the possibility to visit 'foreign countries' is one of the most intriguing, challenging, and fascinating aspects of OpenSim. Once considered the denizen of curmudgeonly geeks, OpenSim has blossomed into a cross pollination of creativity, and created in many a sense of belonging to the whole hyperverse, rather than just one niche.

               All this liberality fosters a sense of love and tolerance, the precious values at the heart of the first destination visited this week, Pepperland in Littlefield Grid built by Mudpuddle Cleanslate and Chelsea Louloudi. (Addresses for the destinations are, as always, at the end of the post.)

Fest'Avi II

Last year, Francogrid's Fest'Avi was a blast, a fun family gathering.
The idea of the event is to get people - including those who don't think of themselves as 'artists' - to express themselves by creating an avatar. It was a way to get the Francogrid community together, and it worked. A bunch of local people participated, helping set up the sim as well as contributing to the fashion show. They included Cherry Manga, Erasme Beck, and Archael Magic, and several designers from beyond the FGrid frontier, like Alpha Auer, CapCat Ragu and Meilo Mintaur. 

Fest'Avi 2014

By the end of the event, OpenSim had more than a dozen original avies that newbies and oldbies alike could grab. They ranged from  Cyberwolf to Hibou, from Akiko to the Arbre, figures that have become synonymous with OpenSim. Fantastic avatars a world away from the humdrum human skins and shapes.

Akiko avie on the road (worn by Wizardoz Chrome)

This year, Fest'Avi exploded with an amazing light show and a new batch of avatars, eighteen in all, by Fuschia Nightfire, Cherry Manga, Imperator Janus, Dora Twinklens, Archael Magic, Zany Foxtrot, Cendres Magic, Capcat Ragu and Meilo Minotaur.