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.