Safari SGT: Sauce by Maya Paris

 Personal:   are you flipped, gobby, arch, or tricky?
Would you like to be beckoned with an indistinct finger of mildness? 
  Where do you stand on soup?

A darkened room, 1800m up in the air. Red phone boxes. And immediately you're being asked to choose. Who are you? What do you like? What's your number? Should you jump? 
And you wonder - what is all this sauce?

Think about it. That camp yet classy British look. Having all your own teeth, or not.  Brewing. Fish eating chips. Being tempted to cross the line marked 'Do Not Cross'. Surprising sounds with poses and particles. 

What else could it be but a Maya Paris build?

This is where the inner joy of OpenSim becomes replete. 

Chester and the portals

 Chester and me have been pretty busy jumping around the hypergloop looking for destinations for the latest HG Safari project, the Self Guided tours, and we are pretty close to being done. We have nc blindness now, hopefully some wine will fix that. 

Lessons from a Hypergrid Honeypot

The following is a Guest Article by Nara Malone of Nara's Nook. 

You can visit her grid at world.narasnook.com:8900 

Follow Nara's writing blog at naramalone.com 

The Nara's Nook Grid blog is at narasnook.com

The backstory: Nara and two writer friends, Siobhan Muir and  Tina Glasneck, founded their own grid 'Nara's Nook' in OpenSim about ten years ago. After several years of experiments in digital storytelling on the hypergrid, the resident authors branched off into other projects, leaving the grid online, but unattended. That was not good - their distraction was exploited by bad actors, who damaged the Nook. Here's Nara's take on this experience.

Nara’s Nook grid was an intentional hypergrid honeypot, not originally with intent to lure troublemakers so we could learn to secure things better. We left the grid portal unguarded to empower potential users to slip in, watch shyly from the shadows if they needed to, and eventually to experiment with the various elements of 3D storytelling on their own or by joining our projects. There was always a pot of stone soup simmering on the back burner, a fresh baked something or other to go with it, and plenty of wild honey or wild spirits to spike brewing creativity. Our doors and windows were left wide open. We left the porch light on, and NPC powers enabled for curious wandering souls.

Outdoors Indoors and more...

 Season One of the rebooted Safari has come to an end, and perhaps you're wondering - is that it?

Well, no. A brief burst of taking it easy, then it all begins again.

Season 2 will begin on Wednesday May 4. The theme of the first trip will be "The Great Outdoors - Indoors".  First stop: the French Canadian grid Creanovale, in its Spring/Summer mode. The Safari has been to this grid, owned by Dabici Straulino and Kelso Uxlay a few times over the years, but we have never seen their Canadian Summer look, so that will be a first. 

Our second stop will be on the German grid of Achim and Dina Twisterling, Next-Life Grid. Next-Life is gorgeous mix of regions, and a party destination throughout the year, and we will be hosted on their impressive sailing regions. 

That's just the first of 10 weeks of Safari that will include events celebrating 'The Little Prince', The Beatles, Dinkies, Gor, Space exploration, Opensim's top dev Ubit Umarov, the city of Belfast, OpenSimFest, and the music of Moses Rae - to name just some of our planned stops.

In the meantime, do drop in on HG Safari region on OSGrid over coming weeks, there will be some new items there.

Closing at Crista's

             For the second part of our final Safari of the season, we decided to "fechar com a flor" and so the Safari group came to UCI Mondego to meet up with a true Diva, Opensim's own Diva Canto, aka Crista Lopes. These occasions always produce a lot of questions and interesting answers, and on this occasion, Crista was quick to get in the first question, where were we all from?

Safari goes Silent

 The final Safari of this first season of 2022, and we ended on a high note indeed! Two completely different, yet equally interesting destinations this week, as we visited the vast space installation by Ferd Frederix and Joe Builder, and then called in to see HG goddess Diva Canto, aka Crista Lopes. This is Part One, and deals with our visit to Outworldz. For information about our trip to Crista's grid, see the post 'Closing at Crista's'

Our host Ferd joined us at the Clubhouse in robot form yesterday, and brought a nice gift - it's a little

Francogrid : The Musical

 FrancoGrid, one of the oldest grids in Opensim, is down. That is sad news, indeed, for anyone who over the past 15+ years has enjoyed this grid as a visitor or resident.

FrancoGrid has always been known for the beauty of the builds - whether hyper realistic or abstract, it has celebrated literature, music, art and culture for the best part of twenty years, through events famous across the Metaverse, like Fest'Avi, to less flamboyant but equally intricate celebrations of art on dozens of lovely sims. So what is next? Is this the end? Or the end of the beginning...