Compleanno

It’s party time! Craft grid celebrates its first birthday this week. Sim Jubilee is the main venue for the event, which starts tomorrow, Tuesday, 25th January. Artists and builders have been working hard to show off how much the grid has accomplished in just twelve months.

There’s an exhibition of photos taken over the past year, a music venue, and displays of the wide variety of activities and interests of the grid residents, from physics to pirates.

How did the grid get going? The owners explain, standing next to by their sim-sized cruise ship.
Licu Rau: Well, what happened is this. Carlos Roundel, the owner of Cyberlandia, decided to try a different grid organization, with a central grid (Cyberlandia) and other sims not linked in grid, but autonomous. We thought we could solve the problem to send IM and teleport between different grids and hypergrids but were not able to do that. So I organised my sims like a grid making a ‘home’ for Tao and myself, and Tosha and Lumiere.

Tao Quan: Craft is a baby which we have nursed.
Licu Rau: There are some interesting projects we are achieving.
Tao Quan: There is a game sim, like a paper chase, on White Heat. There is the beautiful landscape of delta, and the underwater seaworld of aquarium there is the restaurant of Lyth, our poet, and come RP sims. There’s the beach and yacht at Playa.

The greatest challenge has been keeping pace with the growth of Craft, from just two people to around 500 in less than 12 months. The joy has been seeing their expectations come true. They have not actively sought new residents, but the numbers have grown partly because when Cyberlandia closed, the old website directed previous users to Craft, and partly thanks to the arrival of the Museo del Metaverso, (seen here from above) which has actively recruited artists, and made them welcome on their numerous sims.
(..and Yes, I am aware that my skybox is very pink.)
Licu Rau: it has been difficult at the beginning to gain the trust of people.Many people were going to osgrid and advised us to go there too. For us, it’s a question of freedom.
Tao Quan: …and companionship, too. I wandered alone in SL for months, and here I found friendship, friends who are there is you do not feel well or are alone. There is always someone here to talk to to comfort you if you are feeling down.
Another great difference, is, of course, the lack of money. In Craft almost everyone is a builder, and sharing, rather than selling, is the norm. As the grid grows the sharing becomes more organized, with a texture library and soon a sculpty library too. On the Craft Store sim, close to Hydra the Welcome sim, you’ll find freebie shops for clothes and a Garden Centre full of free plants and trees. A literature library, to be opened in the grid meeting place, is also in the works.

Change can be a two edge sword. Do they worry that Craft might change in a way that they did not plan?
Tao Quan: It is up to us to ensure that we do not fall into those traps.
Licu Rau: What I am noticing is that there is a sort of selection of people whoo come here. Only people who like the way we doe things seem to stay; it’s a sort of natural selection. This is the beauty of opensim. You have several choices, so if you don’t like here, you go somewhere else!
Tao Quan: It is hard for people coming from SL at first, but we do try to integrate people, make them feel welcome, and some people begin to enjoy the new way.

Lumiere Noir, the creator of SL’s building mecca The Ivory Tower of Primitives has a been a Craft resident pretty much from from the start, and is making an equivalent construction for Craft,  on sim Sophia, where builders young and old can come and learn techniques and problem solving tricks. The new building has an organic feel to it, part of Lumiere’s move towards buildings that grow with the landscape, rather than imposing themselves on it. Sim Sophia is also the home of Paidos Woodall’s Sloodle-based learning centre.

But it’s sim Jubilee where most of the action is taking place. For the celebration, Jo Ellesmere and the  Odyssey group have an install, as do Lollito Larkham and Artistide Despres‘ Saltimbanques, and the Cassiopea group and you can also see the gorgeous art of Frau Ra, peeped at in the above photo, our good friends from CARP Diabolus, and other builders and artists too numerous to mention. But my favourite place is sitting on the little island off Locus, watching Oberon Onmura‘s twin sims Elena and Titania with their tower and mountains, as the lights and shapes play hide and seek with the shadows.

The first anniversary fun starts tomorrow Tuesday 25th January. See you there!

Bird uncaged: Ruben Haan

Dieu aima les oiseaux et inventa les arbres.
L’homme aima les oiseaux et inventa les cages.

Jaques Deval,  Afin de vivre bel et bien

First there is orange. This orange is not the fruit, nor is it not the only fruit. It is alive,  slightly fevered;  a cartoon dune, treeless, bright. A baked beach. This is the art of Ruben Haan on his sim Kliederaar in OpenSim. You get there via Hypergrid, here are some hints on how all that works.
Ruben Haan: Running an opensim attached to 2 grids, OSgrid and hypergrid server is pretty easy. I chose not to add any artwork to the Linden Lab servers anymore because they restrict freedom. Hopla hehe, let’s go…
We came in to Kleideraar from Craft grid, where we had been looking at the MdM. It was night in Craft, and night in OS too. A hen lay sprawled across our path. Haan’s hen. A hen with a key, like canned ham, or an open hand; primary, piecemeal, on a bed of parched clay that not even the metaversal sea seems capable of quenching.
Ruben was smoke, when we got there. Not that unusual in OSgrid, to find yourself or your bits suddenly disappearing. I thought of the peacocks of Second Life, with their precise primskirts and impeccable attachments. This place is not like that. But you only miss it sometimes.
Ruben’s sculptures are littered around the shallow lagoon. Oil and acrylic paint make the prims look weighty, flexible, rubbery. No wonder they call Ruben a clayworker. Their names are mostly in Dutch, except for Bleu Bird, ranging above us like a sumo wrestler. There are a lot of birds here.

Ruben Haan: Yep they are easy to paint, just start with an eye, then some weird things around that, and it’s a bird.
Birds teetering on the edge between horror and humour. Bold colours mirror your mood, find you anxious or ready to laugh, and throw the feeling back at you. Both paintings and sculptures frequently include a speech bubble spouting symbols, an urgent message: is it hostile or having fun?
He led me over to a round island ringed with canvasses.
Ruben Haan: These are some of my ‘rl’ paintings and collages and more. I use my paintings in opensim but I also use work from opensim in my paintings. I don’t really distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’. Take the Bleu Bird. I don’t call this virtual. It is not more or less virtual then my paintings and sculptures. Ruben’s 2010 project ‘Ava’ illustrates this well. The acrylic painting spans both realities, both bodies.

Ruben Haan: I started an irc channel on freenode so you can have contact even when you are not on the same grid or when the sim is crashed or if you feel like trying some ascii art in an irc place.
He’s not a fan of Skype and its ilk – but itsn’t Skype just a way to say things like “I’ll see you in Jokaydia“?

Ruben Haan: And a painting is just a thing to look at. If you are creative things are never “just things”, they are always modifiable. My objection is both technical and philosophical. You can’t be creative and are technically limited. The sourcecode of IRC you can download from the net –  you can’t do that with Skype. If you use something that you don’t know what it’s doing and you are not allowed to learn what it’s doing and you are not allowed to be creative with it.

On the other hand, which of us really knows what 99% of the things that surround us are made of. That fork you put in your mouth has a design and chemical composition that you neither know about nor agonize over.
Ruben Haan: If I buy a fork I want to know what its made of,  and if I want to study it I am free to do so. There is a fundamental difference between hardware and software. If I buy a fork they don’t make me sign a contract that I will only use it to eat, and that I will not share the fork with my friends, or make my own fork after I have looked how its made.
Well, OK, but if you copy the fork and sell it a little thing called patent law is going to catch up with you, isn’t it?

Ruben Haan: There are thousands of people dying because of patent laws. Protection is something you should do for humans, not for things.
Well, what about the whole Egg of Columbus argument?
Ruben Haan: if the first developers of opensim would have patented a lot of stuff there would not have been Craft. If van Gogh would have patented expressive painting I would not have called him a good artist. If the inventer of the wheel would have had used a stupid patent law, he would not have been able to get help from friends. I dont give away things I make, I sell them, but the people that buy my work are free to do what they want, they also have to live. Do you know that internet which is the biggest invention of this age and the place where most money gets made is for 90% run on FREE software? We are artists, we need to know how things work and we need to be free to change it.

All this implies give and take in a world rather more fond of taking than giving, caging rather than letting ideas fly free.  If you work, then give away the things you make, how do you live? Trust that other people will give you things so you can eat? Ruben says Yes.
I hope he’s right.

The great gate

Xon Emoto was there before me, testing the jump from Jokaydia to ReactionGrid; I landed on his head but I don’t think he minded. After all, we’re out on the frontier here. There’s something about the Hypergrid portal – they call it a Blamgate – that is quite thrilling, and if you have a region on an open world, you can come into Jokaydia and get one for free, to set up on your own land.

When you go gridjumping, your name in Chat gets very long, along the lines of Thirza.Ember @jokaydia.metaverseworlds.com:8002: So if you’re thinking of setting up a place from which to jump, call your grid Dave or something. You’ll thank me later.

I had been nosing around John ‘Pathfinder’ Lester’s Clubhouse, looking for treasures. Nothing doing. What proportion of the Omniverse, do you think, is given over to empty clubhouses, meeting halls, corporate offices, stadiums and theatres? There must be about 50 empty seats for every avatar ever created. Yet, there are sort of pirate hamsters and an octopus and other stuff on the sim, so it all balances out. Anyway there was no porridge and no comfy bed in the clubhouse so I wandered through the gate after Xon.

Permutation! There was no way to get back! A loud sign announced “ReactionGrid is a PG Grid, so please, no nudity, no swearing, there are young kids on the grid every day – keep it safe for us all!” So I kept my kex on, muffled my b@#$% and begged help from Xon. A SLURL pasted into the Search part of your Map, and then hit Teleport, – that’s what most hypergrid jumping involves, but the gates make it look fancier.

The Hypergrid Adventurer’s Club is Pathfinder’s way of getting people to network and share stuff from different grids. I zoned out when they got to comparing acquaintances, and talking about technical innovation, but you can read the minutes on Pathfinder’s  blog.

Here are Vanish Seriath and El Silven – they’re having a Start Party at The Gray Inn Between on the 16th of January. More about that closer to the day. We heard about the map of Open Worlds made by Pam Broviak from govgrid. Her group, which began in SL, and does what it sounds like it would do, is interested in the Creative Commons approach to virtual communities: sharing content rather than selling it. Like the rest of us, they’ve had to face the whole export-from-SL challenge: if you made a large building in SL the chances are that, even though they’re your prims and your textures, those pesky megaprims aren’t ‘yours’ and you’re not going to be able to export it.
CC, TOS and license chat ensued. But another interesting thing popped up -a place called  Unity 3D where they’re making Participatory Chinatown. I could participate in some Moo Shoo pork right now.

And then off through the Blamgate! We went to  New World Grid, woot, La France! we dropped in on this beautiful villa by Kire and Marline. Italian francophile Giovanni Molko gave us a rather bemused but very courteous welcome. Then off to Aime Socrates’ region, Physics (There’s a Cern connection – Pathfinder can tell you more, if you’re into all that stuff.)
This is Aime’s first sim and she’s been working on it for a year, it’s a wonderful achievement, but it seemed clear that not nearly enough people come visit and her informative  real-time Planetarium, complete with Trou de ver

or her amazing giant size lab, which is reminiscent of the Greenies that Rezzable had in SL, back in the day, here complete with a little rat-run around the furniture – tres amusant! So many great places out there, and kind, welcoming people, beyond the edges of Second Life. Join the Adventurers’ Club and see them all!

party crashing

To everyone like soror who’s bundling up in front of virtual beaches, or roasting their nuts in front of particle fires, and feeling glad they’re not stranded in an airport on the way to Marrakesh, I have five words for you Road trip to Palm Beach; woot, but let’s be honest,  I’m not going to find anything as gorgeous as this in Florida, am I? No no, not Oberon Onmura although of course he is geek-chic in his glasses and Jo Ellesmere skin; however, I meant his new creation. I’ve been having cloud/clothing issues in Craft all week, so his greeting didn’t come as a big surprise. Except that is was in Italian.

Oberon Onmura: vicino allarme donna nuda!
He was wearing one of those translator things, which work fine about 60% of the time and, like many an Italian Studies undergrad, can’t cope with the gap between received and idiomatic English, creating some hilarious lapses. In preparation for what may be a long stay in this decidedly Italian land, Oberon has been working on his Definite Articles as well as a new installation…
Oberon Onmura: if I was Italian, I’d call it Waves of Desire
Oberon Onmura: se fossi stato italiano, lo chiamerei Waves of Desire
Don’t ask me why it didn’t translate the name into onde del desiderio. On the other hand I could tell you why it used the past subjunctive, but then I’d have to kill you, because term time is over, thank God.

The problem with the Translator is that, no matter which two languages you’re mixing it up in, the ‘translation’ give the illusion that you’re learning the other language when in fact you’re picking up botspeak. But don’t let that stop you visiting the MdM on Craft. It is more beautiful and interesting every time. The Italians are doing some cool RL/SL  crossover work this December, in collaboration with the prestigious Brera gallery in Milan. Thanks to Imparafacile Runo and his team, the Brera Academy Virtual Lab has a presence on the grid, and Second Life has taken up ‘residence’ on screens in one of Milan’s biggest railway stations, San Giovanni. Merlino Mayo wrote a little about it, if you’d like to know more, he can point you in the right direction.

Back on Oberon’s region in Craft: he’s currently working on getting the colors of Waves of Desire to change gradually. Right now they ‘just go’, changing hue rather more suddenly than he’d like, but gradual color changes wreak havok on the server, which he monitors closely -in fact, it’s getting to be a bit of an obsession, watching all the values, and that raises another question: does all the reporting out to the console eats up a lot of processor time? Yeah, like I would know.

Later, Lollito Larkham showed me his brains (yuck). Nobody could see me, but at least I wasn’t all nekked on their screens, probably due to my on-the-road crappy connection. This also explains the low quality of these pictures. There was much talk of the mysterious instant rezzing script/object they give you in InWorldz. Or is that just voodoo.

Minutes I became another willing victim of the Bodimosa skin by Artistide Despres. II’ll kee those snaps for private viewing. It’s the semi-official club skin, so feel free to come here, join up and ask for your own copy… if you’ve got the nerve.

They were pushing the limits in Veesome this week, also, with a  ‘Crash my Cloud’ party on Wednesday afternoon. If, like me, you don’t really know what a cloud is, try clicking here and see if that helps.

Tessa Harrington, Victor Hua, Sunny Salamander and the rest of the team set up a version of Thoth Jantzen‘s Area 54 Club, and bots, guest testers and regulars alike tried to crash the cloud. Sunny was Cloudmaster, and had a big graph and everything!

No, you’re right, I have no clue. Bots are particularly good in this setting because they do a lot of physical stuff like running into one another and leaping strangely in the air, which is RAM hungry, I’m told.

Definitely not bots, the rocking musical entertainment was provided by Anek Fuchs and Jimmy49 Dukes. Anek has played Veesome before, and he’s blazing a trail for other musicians out to explore grids beyond SL.

Among the guest testers, Mal Burns (sitting on the toadstool) and Chantal Harvey, unrecognizable in a basic avie. She enthused over Thoth’s build (seen here in only its partial glory) and vowed to come back and make a machinima of it. Can’t wait to see it!

jokaydia

Nobody reads this blog, but I should point out that Craft has a proper Welcome Centre, on sim Hydra. There is a bug in the system that makes some people land up in the dungeon, but they’re working on it – hey, it’s The Friendly Grid.  And I’m to say that ‘Craft offers more than just the Museo del Metaverso’.  Just to be clear. Yay! Like this classy freebie shop!

They have Italian shoes here, and lots of other goodies, including Josina Burgess‘ dresses. Art you can wear, she calls it. Lovely.

Maya Paris suggested I go to the Hypergrid Adventurer’s Club, over on Jokaydia, I said no, sigh, yet another Thirza avie, but then I threw together a sort of travel pack – importable hair, dress textures, a prim skirt, a transparent texture, because I can never make the default one work, and shape parameters. While it’s as easy as (INV-> CREATE NEW-> SHAPE) to make your own shape,  it’s unclear how to export it, unless you’ve got either Second Inventory or a copybot. A familiar-looking avie makes it easier to navigate a new place, it’s one less distraction. There are about 70 shape variables, and the window only lets you alter 3 at a time, that’s irritating but it’s quicker than the alternatives – experimenting with shape options (ages in Appearance and less time for exploring the new world), or freebie shopping/trying on, or settling for the default shape (yuck).

Skin and shoes are the hardest accessories to make, I have a kind of pigtaily thing going on made in Veesome, it’s a breeze to import it complete with textures, but DIY is such a time sink, and as much as I fuss over it, it’ll never be anywhere near as lovely as SL Thirza’s Damselfly hair. I miss it. Sometimes freebie is the best option, just to move on from the introspection of newbiedom.

Time to put InWorldz Thirza in some sort of order while the mood strikes. What a delight to wake up in the shadow of soror Nishi‘s enormous tree-based confection. No lag on Soror Nishi Island. At the InWorldz welcome centre-cum-coffee shop, however, it was quite another story. Pure treacle.  The conversation turned to snow, and someone asked for a snowangel anim, and I imported one of mine, (I love the way Inworldz has free uploads!) but it kept going weird – arms and head twisting as if I’d been cursed by someone…

hmm I wonder who…

Back in Veesome, I ran into Tessa Harrington. She’s looking forward to the Virtual Worlds Conference in Washington DC in February, and very pleased with how her grids are growing – yes, grids, SpotOn is a sort of family of grids, and with one click you can tp from one to another – and the newest is Musicajam, and she’s got the people who make Hermes interested in working with the grid, here’s an interview with Philippe and Jim on Grid Wrap which is a TV show hosted on Metaverse TV. If you’re a musician, and want to sell your music securely, you probably already know all about the Hermes workbench – if not, you really should check it out.
Rumour has it, in a few weeks, we’ll be able to use the Phoenix viewer in Veesome – finally! Just in time for the arrival of Purdue University on the grid. I suppose I’d better start making academic earrings, then.

Jokaydia is an art/ed grid, up and running since March, hosted by ReactionGrid. They describe themselves as a Community of Practice, but it seemed pretty perfect to me. I crashed about five times at the very beginning while importing stuff on the Welcome sim, but after that, it was solid as a rock.

Search doesn’t work on Jokaydia, so finding friends is not easy, but a nice man called Johnny Cider provided a tp to Pathfinder’s sim. There were about 10 people present including grid creator Jokay Wollongong. Pathlandia is very pretty.

Pathfinder Lester is the one squatting on the log, if you’ll excuse the expression. The club is a fun group, Their conversation was over my head, but you can read everything that was said on Path’s blog, obviously. It’s been said that Hypergrid jumping could be dangerous for the security of your own computer. For example, naughty photos could be either accessed, or, if you don’t have any, added to your computer by passing visitors! There are malicious minds out there, we all know. What did the group think?

Vanish.Seriath @tgib.sytes.net:9000: Thirza, in theory it will allow others to run software on your computer, so there’s never to say what might happen, but if you’re not running a standalone on your computer that’s open for the public, the implications are very minimal.

Pathfinder Lester: The only potential security issue I’ve read about is the very remote possibility that a grid owner could possibly tweak things to be able to get into the inventory of someone visiting via hypergrid but nobody’s seen this happen. Ever. It’s just theory and the latest version of Hypergrid closes that potential hole completely, from what I’ve heard.

They discussed video games, something called hyperica, and the hypergrid stargate on Mal Burn’s Estate (doesn’t that sound very Beverly Hills??) And then it was time to step through the Gate –

woohoo! We first landed on this Hypergate platform on RG, and from here, gridhopping means you cut and paste an address into the Search part of your viewer Map. Took a few tries, but eventually…

there we all were on this fantastic French grid, ooh la la that’s some tower… no time to stop…

it’s upwards and onwards to Vanish Seriath and El Silven’s The Grey Inn Between.

This is an amazingly beautiful place, and the creations there – trees, houses, and furniture – are all free to copy and use in opensim.

Not all textures or attachments travel safely from one grid to another, but it doesn’t matter; the company was amusing and lively, and the locations take your breath away. I’m useless, I know, I have no clue how to get back to the Eiffel Tower or to the Grey Inn, but club members keep notecards of their favourites, and of course Pathfinder’s blog supplies the rest. The Hypergrid Adventurers Club is a must-do adventure experience. They meet on Sundays at 11.00pm GMT 5pm and 10pm GMT every Sunday, and 2pm GMT every Wednesday on sim Pathlandia in the Jokaydia grid. See you there.

feedback

Easily sidetracked, I started exploring the idea of selling my earrings and such in Veesome and got lots of encouragement from Grid Gear creator Lindy Low. Unlike SL, all shopping has to be done through the website,  which is more secure and all. Lindy’s making money as the new grid begins to get populated with corporate and academic users, so if clothes and such is your field, you should try to get in at the ground floor, they’re crying out for content.
If, however, you just want simple larks, nothing’s more fun than pulling Crap’s chain. Too easy. Just insert a random name into a random sentence, tag him, and watch him whir off into the distance like a semi soggy firework. A good time for this activity would be during a poker game. Just a suggestion. And he really does have a voice best suited to listening.
Speaking of people working themselves up into a state in a mildly amusing way, it’s polemica time at the MdM over on Craft: it’s in the ‘which grid is better’ family of fights. Nothing new there, right? As gky gianky put it,  ‘Nella rete gli animi si accendono molto più del grisù nelle miniere.’

So, the best time to whir around Craft this weekend is after the Italians have gone to bed, unless you’re good at tiptoeing.  The current setup in the Cassiopeia Art community is more granny’s attic than artist’s garret, a tumbling bundle of famous names from SL. It’s a sort of multi-storey art … well, park, for want of a better word. I’m not sure any of them take the new grid seriously, or if they just want to hedge their bets. Wizard Gynoid’s whattheheckadron is a bit squished but if you turn your DD way down low you can see some of the pieces in isolation.

On the other hand, the picture below is Artistide Despres’ install. Through the walls you can see the surrounding art (the steel mushroom cloud thingy is the new tower shellina Winkler is working on) and it turns the whole concept of ‘piece of art’ on its head. Each item is an individual, but when they are seen together, they speak together, not always a harmonious chorus, some name-calling involved, but it’s definitely a dialogue, and it’s good to talk. Well, with some obvious exceptions.

Jumping to Autumnus

“… it may be full of beautiful pictures and churches, but we cannot judge a country by anything but its men,” she remarked.

“That is quite true,” said Philip sadly.

Henry James, Where Angels Fear to Tread

I stumbled briefly into SL last night, to see what Ina Centaur’s Twelfth Night might be like. To see, really, if anything had changed since the last time I watched a production there. Crap Mariner was one of the first players to speak, so the show was at a disadvantage from the start – he has an unattractive voice at the best of times, but it’s especially unsuited to Shakespeare.  Skylar Smythe sparkled, but she sparkles in everything she puts her mind to; apart from that, and of course the lovely if predictable avies by Ina, things lagged in every sense – unremitting and appalling lag in all four sims. And before you say ‘oh it’s just your rubbish graphics card’, I asked three people near me if they were also suffering and they all eventually replied yes. If you can believe anything people tell you.

Interestingly, Ina chose to play Malvolio herself, she made a good job of it, using the voice morphing, I think it was the first time I heard someone morphed (unless Crap has been Beta testing all along, which would explain a lot) and if I never hear it again, it will be an easy fate to live with.

But I met a new friend, who explained to me that the company is made up of old-age pensioners (I’m sure Ina and Skylar would be interested to hear their Social Security has already kicked in) so it wasn’t an entirely wasted evening.

Ina’s theatre is lovely and she puts so much into her work, she really deserves less lag.

On the other hand, Craft is effortlessly beautiful. OK I lie, you do quite often have to relog when stuff happens. But who cares. It’s full of wonderful places already, like this fabulous Renaissance villa, on sim Hiems, complete with pineta and parterre and a lovely loggia. There are fountains, statues and – well, everything you’d expect to find in a Second Life sim, and why not, creator Nicola Reinerman got his start over there, and is now beautifying  a new world, one region at a time.

I ran into him, because Oberon Onmura was trying new terrains on his adjacent sim, Titania. I was standing on it – well, flying just above – when he first attempted the terrain file swap. I got chucked in the air to a height of 90,000 metres. Woohoo. It was a bumpy ride, and a lot of fun, but then I thought I’d better land somewhere and chose the sim next door, Autumnus, where you’ll find this pretty (if empty) house.

From here I could watch Oberon’s progress  in comfort. His sim looked like a big grey cake, just waiting to be sliced and iced.

Being able to see other sims from your own seems a great way to foster a spirit of community and cross pollination; privacy is great, but company is the lifeblood of virtual art.  Especially when you think that this is all part of a hypergrid. That really rocks.

Autumnus is another build by Nicola Reinerman (that’s a BOY’S name in Italian, thankyouverymuch). He was a regular both on OSGrid and in Cyberlandia, the Italian world created by Carlos Roundel, which faced significant structural changes last May as you probably remember. At the same time he was closely involved with the Museo del Metaverso in Second Life.

Nicola Reinerman: I’ve been making buildings, flowers and trees for years. More than once, I have come across items that I immediately recognized as my own, only to discover they had a different creator – they had been copybotted. It’s annoying, but I guess it’s a sort of a compliment in a way – someone thought they were good enough to steal.

Perhaps in part for that reason, he has been building and experimenting on his own server for some time now; and has found it a great place to test out architectural and textural ideas – in fact he first built the current MdM structure here, before importing it into Second Life. Wow virtual Euros. Insert your own exchange rate quip here.

Nicola Reinerman: There’s a certain amount of prejudice against Open sim worlds. But I think nowadays it’s misplaced, we’ve come ahead leaps and bounds over th epast two years.  Licu Rau has had both the courage and the knowhow to put together a new Grid – this one, Craft. Since September there’s been a huge migration of builders and artists. Our idea is to make it a creative grid, and the presence of the Museo del Metaverso is a really important element of that. It’s not the only project in hand on Craft.  Lyth Karu and his collaborators are putting together a virtual library of copyright-free books, and we hope to welcome many non-profit organizations, including educational organizations, who, as we all know have been having a tough time of it tier-wise – but we’re still in the early phase so we will see where that goes.

Dozens of metaverse-class artists like soror Nishi, shellina Winkler,La Baroque, and Artistide Despres are taking up residence on the grid. It’s pioneering stuff to be sure, but being a newbie here is not the same as when we were all noobs in Second Life – gosh even I can throw down a sculpty and make a new shirt on my first day. (OK still haven’t done the hair thing, I grant you, but bear in mind I’m not really here.) And a man on his knees on our first encounter, hey, that’s none too shabby.

treetime

woot I threw my first prim in Craft ! ok a bizarre flouncy heart, not a dodecawhoodron, like Wizzy would make, but something, at least – and I have my own teeshirt, even if the rest of me is all noob. It’s the shirt from Oberon Onmura‘s world Portable1, it has ‘Visit Thirza’s Rock’ written on the back. Thirza’s Rock (version 2)  is on sim Titania on Craft, it’s surrounded by much larger, more important mountains, but naturally, I like mine best.

This is the sandbox at Craft, but there are loads of more interesting things to look at, like the castle you get trapped in visit when you first arrive. The residents are all artists of note, so there are lots of interesting sims to discover, just not enough time for it all…

The thing with all these worlds is that, going from grid to grid and viewer to viewer, you’ve got to keep track of all the bizarre places in which your pictures get saved in the PC, making it hard to find clothing textures and souvenirs. Who the heck would have time for alternate name tags? I can’t keep up with all the various Thirzas. Also, I still haven’t figured out how to import prims into Craft, but that’s a mere Q/A session with one of the tame brainboxes in the new world. Italian powerhouse Roxelo Babenco has loads of events going on, even a gallery show by the absolutely wonderful La Baroque. Join the MdM group in FB to know more.

Back in Veesome, it’s tree time. Fel‘s trees are all completely modifiable, and it’s fun to twist the palms a little. Then I made my own invention, an abstract tree, pink of course. It will have starfruit on it.  What can I say, it’s an obssession.

To balance it out, the ruined castle tends towards lapis lazuli. I have no idea where I am going with any of this.

In an unrelated Veesome ping, German poet Morgue Mcmillan is here! What a thrill to speak to her. She was drawn into Veesome by Mike Burleigh‘s ROF organization, – that stands for Remember Our Friends – but she’s also organizing some nice literary events in the new grid, pictures and news to follow. If I can ever get my land to stop bubbling.

swiss on wry

I hate these foggy days, I hate the thought of fog in the mountains, well fog plus big rigs; it makes me break out in a cold sweat and count the number of times I’ll have to brave the weather before the winter break begins. It also makes me want to snuggle up to some prims. I always get ideas about builds, or (impractical) strategies to resolve building problems, when I am driving. Along with my addiction to taking photos of amusing number plates, this no doubt puts me in a category by myself when it comes to Dangerous Drivers.

Last night I was invited over to a new friend’s place. His name is Caliburn and he has a super castle on his sim, he’s a bit shy of publicity and his build isn’t finished so I’ll just put a photo that gives the general idea of his style.

My shoes are all over the place, and I am still fighting with those damn pigtails. I think I am not a builder at heart. I don’t want the challenge of reinventing something already brilliantly made, my version of them is never going to be as nice as the real thing by Damselfly , and I’d gladly give up trying, if only I could get my act together for long enough to just contact… this is what I love about writing a blog, you actually do stuff, like me right now, sending a begging email, and mildly stalking their Flickr … gosh they really do have lovely hair, hmm, look at that comment, interesting…

I have a feeling my  “waste less time running off on tangents” resolution is already dead.

Cal’s castle is gorgeous. He’s a good builder, and has loads of inspiring plans and schemes for the future. He got tired of paying all that money for tier in SL, and, like me, had intended to spend less time doing 3D stuff, but it seems that he and his partner are keeping just as busy with the new builds. He doesn’t see Veesome, or SpotON, as ever becoming a social place; hard to see it getting past the chicken/egg problem of pioneers not being shoppers and shoppers going where the goods are readily available.  Hard to say whether the grid will take off, as we keep being told, and even if it does, whether that will simply become home to business people, or (argh) virtual classrooms, or whether it will blossom into a sort of wild new world. There are so many variables. It’s funny talking in IM in Veesome, here are only a handful of people online at any time, and it’s back to that slightly creepy sensation from early in SL, when you thought that your private chat are being read **although I’m sure they’re not**… apart from that sunfish incident, hmmm…

Not that I have any secrets; I’m happy to tell all about my troubles; it’s a new place and there are wrinkles to sort out, my own sim Chocolate does loads of weird things, like bubbling if you terraform for more than a few minutes; my hair coming and going has been a recent trend, but a perfectly new thing last night was the swiss cheese effect, seen here, which I thought was caused by standing too long next to the new groundcover, a partially invisible sculpty by Spoton’s horticultural genius Felonious Nitely…

… on the other hand, that might be my poor computer trying to cope with the fact I have the viewer, skype, chrome, Photoshop, and Netflix all running at the same time. Wow. Omega Man is a really awful film, especially if you’re just following the audio part. ‘Get your dirty hands off me’. Oh wait no that’s the other one. But more comprehensible than that Hungarian film about the subway, it’s hard to follow Hungarian when you can’t see the subtitles. I leave you to your hungry puns.

If you’ve been cheesed, tell me about it. Misery loves company.

craft

Craft! woot! Having missed my flight, by some epic confusionary events last night that I better not go into, turns out I have an extra day here, and what with the fog – look, no bridge! – it seemed pointless to attempt any touristy things until dinner time, when I am promised crabs.

Yum. Both Wizard Gynoid and Oberon have posted about Craft today, so I had to go take a look! Their website is seriously sketchy, but it boils down to a Bring Your Own Sim approach, and of the many hideous newbie avies/outfits, this is one, with her backless shirt is far from the worst incarnation of newbie Thirza. The room I rezzed in was not very friendly, the stairs didn’t seem to work for a start, but there’s something comforting about coming inworld in an enclosed, semi-private space, rather than emerging onto the grid in front of an audience, which is what happens in Spoton. Sure, it’s nice to be greeted, but let me at least change my top before I make new friends.

Craft, which has only really been up and running for about three weeks, has just shy of 300 users so far, but that number is going to balloon over the next few weeks. It bills itself as The Friendly World, and the very first person I saw wasthe lovely Shellina Winkler.

She was naturally sporting a Museo del Metaverso tag, they are the prime movers on the grid, and they are really at the heart of the migration of so many SL artists, especially italophones, who are bound to be drawn inworld by the reputation of Roxelo. And yes, they do need a translator, and no don’t look at me. Anyway, Shellina was on Titania, Oberon Onmura’s sim, which is primed to become a focal point of physical art in no time. It’s fantastic how quickly the idea of independent sims is becoming mainstream, even I am beginning to get a handle on how it all works. OK not really.

As you can see, Oberon is pretty much the same in all worlds; here he has a fancy skin by… I forget who he mentioned made it, but I do know he misses his eyes – he looks very Roswell here, I think. However, with no charge for  uploading or anything else, I’m sure it will be no time at all till he gets that all sorted.

Artistide Despres’ sim of the same name has been up and running for three days already, and so you can be sure there’s going to be a whole world of excellent innovative art to check out before you can say Xmas Vacation.

Hmmm, wherever you go, there you are. Even virtually.