Free Radek-als

 Vbinnia Radek is an Opensim legend. Her region Steam on OSGrid is one of those places that in the early days was a haven of fantastic assets when assets were like rare earths.

Arriving on the region can present a few small hiccups, you may end up at 128,128 which is the default landing on a regular sized sim, right in the middle. Steam was regular size but it's been improved into a VAR however opensim doesn't always remember that and will deposit you at the traditional landing spot which happens to be underwater. DOn't panic take a deep breath and cam up and out and you'll soon see the vast port and the industrial steampunk landscape behind it.

We met at an incongruously countrified spot on such a townie region, a little camp fire in a wood.

Vbinnia Radek: Hello every one :)

Forest Azure: hello vbinnia

Dorena Bree: Hi

Thirza Ember:  you have inspired so many of us, Vbinnia. This region - from forever - has been one of the best places in Opensim... i'm a fangirl LOL

Vbinnia Radek: chuckles! glad someone is... right now I need to inspire myself

Hel of a Trip

 This week we kicked off with a visit to a set of sims steeped in nordic tradition. Due to some very last minute changes in the itinerary we went to a whole different set of interesting spots, some of which rezzed for us, and some not so much. For many, just getting to the sim was a struggle but we battled through valiantly, using the Welcome region on Ignis as a stepping stone, plus improvised LMs, IMs, teleports, swearing, and sheer determination.

The gorgeous Dragon Towers, maybe we will get to visit another time.

There was a big and very last minute change to the itinerary; instead of visiting the land of the Dragon Towers as planned we went to see the Viking equivalent of hell... thankfully the people planning on joining the tour had gathered at the clubhouse so it was easy to contact everyone who got lost or stuck and get them back with our tour guides, Nadir rae and Max Well, who also built this wonderful place

Max Well: First PART — The Gates of Hel,  Gnipahellir and Garm: Journey Through the Nine Worlds of Yggdrasil. The light flickers gently. The ground beneath your feet seems alive, pulsing with slow rhythms, like an ancient heart. Around you rises a colossal trunk, so vast that its summit is lost in the heavens. You are at the foot of Yggdrasil, the World Tree.

Daydream Believers

Our second stop for week one of the new season of Safari was on Kitely.

'Synthetic Dreams' is the art event organized by Koshari Mahana, Kimm Starr and Cooper Swizzle. This is one of two Opensim 'pavilions' participating in The Wrong Biennale  the other was curated by Art Blue and featured heavily at the 2025 OSCC. For the HG Safari OSCC tour last December, we took a trip around Synthetic Dreams, which is on Kitely Expo Center, and there's a blog post about this place when it first opened, so for some of us this was a return visit, but because of the overwhelming nature of the sim - a whopping 15 artists with multiple, complex installations are here  - it was definitely the case to return and try to take in a bit more of what's going on.

Arriving at Synthetic Dreams

Kimm Starr: We want to thank Thirza for bringing the hypergrid Safari to Synthetic Dreams here in Kitely.  Synthetic Dreams is ½ of our Pavilion for the Wrong Biennale. The Wrong Biennale is a real world art show seen by millions of people world wide!  This years theme is AI in Art.  Please take a moment to landmark this Pavilion.   We will visit all of the represented exhibits to meet the artists and have a look at their work. Feel free to ask the Artists questions about their work.  Please come back and experience all of the exhibits at your leisure.  First up - Forest Azure, Enjoy the tour!

Forest Azure: this build symbolizes the struggle of man versus machine, which is my thing with AI and art. 

Light Entertainment

Getting back into the swing of things after the break for the holidays is always tough. I for example forgot to turn on 'Save Local Chat' at our first stop on this week, but the visit was unforgettable. 

A good sized crowd showed up to sample the joys of Luminaria a region on Littlefield grid that opens only for a few days a year. But before we got to the good bit... it was get the LMs time!

Safari Returns

 The HG Safari tours return this week on Wednesday 7 January at 12 noon Grid time (9pm in Central Europe) with the usual double bill of destinations. As always, a host or guide will be waiting for us at each stop because sure, you can visit these places by yourself at any time, but it's even more fascinating to be there with the person who built, or owns, or looks after the sim and who can give you some context to what you're looking at. And traveling with friends makes it a road trip.

Defying drowning on Friends Grid

It's a fine human paradox that on one hand we're all trying to get away and carve out our own little paradise of expression and freedom, but on the other hand we're gregarious animals and feel the need to explain, share, and party together. Sims come alive when they're full of real people not just animesh or NPCs. 

That's the fun of group trips and kind of cancels out the more frustrating bits of herd-hypergridding: lag, missing bits, having a time constraint, and did I mention lag.

Calendar Views

To say that each year there is a HG Safari Calendar would be a big fat lie; some years there were two, and some years there was no calendar at all. 

They usually break down into two types, the landscape type and the landscape-with-Opensim-person. The latter always takes loads more time to prepare and is always rushed into the final weeks of the year, due to a lack of forethought which I promise every year to conquer. A minute of pre-festive stress  although it's a lot of fun. Come to think of it, it has created as a by-product some great photos of Safari friends  like Virtual Dreamz publisher Sunbeam Magic, musician Truelie Telling, hub-mistress Spike Sol, burlesque choreographer Jessie Campbell, painter Lucy Afarensis, and monarch of PBR, Luna Lunaria. Some choose to no longer come inworld for RL reasons, some are now occupying a place of glory in the AfterSim,

The much missed Safari regular and painter
Lucy Afarensis was our December pinup back in 2016

This year, since there has been so much else going on and time just ran out, the 2026 calendar is a straight up landscape offering, with lots of greyscale and hopefully one or two place you've either never visited, or have only explored a little bit, or forgotten - it's an invitation to get out and better know our hyperverse. 

Mal Burns was one of our Calendar models back in 2018. He passed away earlier this year.

The Calendar script was completely overhauled in 2024 by snowbody Cortes (no monthly fees or prompts required) with some elegant improvements in the blue menu including an Info button that gets you a Notecard. This contains a short description of the places in the pictures - most important this year, since the photos have no superscription - and it gives you a LM to boot.

The first HG Safari calendar came out in 2016 and the month part was a 'paper' version, part of the texture, so if there were any mistakes or additions as to events they couldn't be added except with a lot of fuss. But in a way they make better artefacts of a time now passed. You can see copies of all - or most - of the old calendars in the HG Safari archive building on the hill behind the clubhouse 'waiting room' on HG Safari region.

Today it's generally a dynamic calendar linked to HG Safari's public Google Calendar which (annoyingly for some) shows not the specific destinations for each week, but simply when there will be a Safari trip. The same applies, you will have noticed, for the publicity on Discord and FB.  

Why?

That's because there are often last minute changes and it makes more work for me to have to correct a lot of social media posts, far quicker for you just to come to the Clubhouse and be guaranteed to have the last minute correct info for each trip.

Since this is a purely inworld product, National and seasonal holidays don't appear. You'll find other things, like upcoming live shows of Inworld Review, the dates of the next HIE event, and the birth dates or anniversaries of many many opensim grids (although ore than a few will tell you their grids have had so many relaunches there is no 'true' birthday for their grid), so you can celebrate. It has the date of the first HG jump by Crista Lopes, it took a lot of persuading to get her to go back through her records and find out the exact day.

If you would like a copy of this year's calendar you can grab it at the HG Safari marketplace, just south of the landing point on the sim.

HG Address: grid.hgsafari.org:58002:HG Safari

Thanks Loru for pointing out there was an error in the grid address!!

Safari '25

 It's been quite a year here in Opensim hasn't it? Lots of changes big and small, some of them dramatic, like the Great Asset Wipe of OSGrid in the spring, some spectacular like the month long Opensim World's Fair over on Wolf Territories Grid, and the art presentations at HIE. 

MorlitaM and Cherry Manga's amazing art performance at HIE 2025

We've had tech fun, in the form of the gradual transitioning to PBR friendly viewers and talk of a bunch of alternative solutions to Vivox. 

Mal Burns memorial event on Craft in October 2025

There have been weddings and inaugurations and milestone grid birthdays, and of course drama of varying types - reflecting the mood of the real world, perhaps. Then we've also had the genuinely sad news of the passing of friends, among them a couple of names known all over opensim, Mal Burns and Luna Lunaria. 

Luna Lunaria memorial event on WTG in November 2025

HG Safari has grown as a grid this year. Thanks to Snowbody Cortes, we now have a  HG Safari website that tells you a little bit about the various regions and projects that are going on here, from Bianconiglio to HIE to Cornflakes Tribute. 

It explains a bit about the purpose of the grid, which is not to get more residents, but rather to showcase the possibilities of opensim and the fabulous destinations out there, as well as to bring people together, to understand and appreciate each other a little bit better.

Jimmy Olsen on Inworld Review

The grid has also become home to Inworld Review, on HIE region, with episodes twice a month featuring some of the many interesting residents of Opensim. In our first four episodes, we've featured event organizers, a renowned artist, a much loved content provider and a legendary scripter. Check out the new Inworld Review Youtube channel to see those interviews and why not subscribe while you're there.

The next season of Safari starts in just a few day's time, on January 7 at the usual time 12 noon SLT at the clubhouse, grid.hgsafari.org:58002:HG Safari so join us if you can, we have so much more to see in Opensim!