A Crash Dancing, Scope Riding, Anvil Dumping Safari

Jessica.Pixel: I decided to be human today so lets hope all of my hair makes it
Thirza Ember: I feel like hair like that deserves its own greeting
Wizard Gynoid: at least it's not up her bum

Ms Pixel and her remarkable hair

          There was loose talk at the 54th HGSafari about gorean virgins and Mal Burns, most of which I can't divulge.
Fuschia Nightfire: when I was a noob, me and a friend once did a parachute jump from a sky platform and landed in a Gorean village, where she was taken as a slave, and this is the absolute truth, I never saw her again

Thirza Ember: o m g
Wizard Gynoid: we should go rescue her
Fuschia Nightfire: shame I didn't know you back then Wizzy, we could have
Selby.Evans: Got all the LMs -- in order  good planning
Thirza Ember: don't get used to it

Azi Az

          Two things we can guarantee you, on Safari - well, OK, three. We will probably lose you, at least one sim will crash some or all of us, and there will be dancing.

No-one was disappointed by this week's adventure, in those three departments. But for those who were able to stick with it, there was much to learn and much to laugh at. URIs as always at the end.
          The very beautiful Azi Az organized a great dance and chance to discover her sim Water Dreams on refugegrid. 

          Water Dreams is an ocean-side region that reflects the lifelong love of the sea and a charming, sensual, harmonious old-world atmosphere that reflect Azi's Portuguese heritage and impressive skillset when it comes to textures, building, and putting things together. 

DJ Pooh

          The party got started with DJPooh, spicing up the event with some powerful tunes, rocking us as we rezzed, which took a little while - this is a detail heavy sim, and worth the wait. Refugegrid likes you to tp first to their Welcome sim, and then to your destination in a ploy to amortize the stress of new arrivals, but I'm pretty sure not everyone did that. Even though it was mentioned on the notecard ... honest. It was easy enough to pass the rezz time just dancin' and talking to the locals, including Seth Nygard, who told us a little bit about the genesis of refugegrid. 
Seth Nygard:   Refuge grid was started largely because there was a number of us with too many projects in hold while OSGrid was down. We needed a stable place to work from. So I took what I knew about systems admin and OpenSim and started up the grid.
Azi Az: on which Seth does an amazing work......Refuge Grid works really good and very smoothly :))))))

       Is it a big grid? Is their aim to go large? Nope. 
Aine Caoimhe: just thirty-something members
Seth Nygard: There are 38 registered users, and about 50% of those have been online in the last month. We see about a dozen or so on frequently
Aine Caoimhe: the idea is to stay small and avoid all the major issues of scaling that larger grids have to fight with.

Azi Az: and the good part of being a small grid ......we all are like a family here...what is really good :)))))

Seth puts the moves on his NPC partner,
while Safari veteran and remarkable punk rocker Ange Menges looks on.

                Water Dreams has a number of environments, including a twin photography gallery with some of Azi's pics and a space where grid members can contribute evocative shots. It's a lovely way to tie together the various creators who are all working on their own ideas, and is an unmissable stop as you explore the grid.

        Azi's partner in cr...eativity is Danger Lytton, and they have a number of lovely regions, some collaborations, some made independently. Originally we hoped to get over to Danger island as well, but between chatting, and one crash and another, we ended up staying put. 

Danger Island

        That means we will just have to keep coming back to refuge till we've seen it all, poor us! 
        Next, the Safari headed to a couple of destinations on the the OpenSim Scripting Showcase Trail. If you haven's tried this yet, you should! It's a chance to visit 7 scripting destinations on 7 grids, each one is unique and offers chances to learn, play and explore the many aspects of scripts. We couldn't go to all of them in one safari, but just visited a couple, starting with Jeff Kelley's place.

Snowbody and Lucy quiz Jeff about the Language -and future - of OpenSim scripting.

          Showcase, the purpose-built sim on Jeff's grid, offers Trailgoers a huge number of things to play with, useful tools to take, and informative notecards to read. The emphasis of Jeff's collection is the way that opensim can be used to educate students in the real world. It includes a great video featuring two of Safari's favorite frenchies , known in vws as Acryline Erin and Aime Socrates. 
          Between the clones, and the color changers, the Inventory Organizer and the Maze runner, we managed to turn the serious telescope into a toy... and even managed to get Jeff to take a ride on it!
          Although, he's just a beginner. You need Wizzy and Fuschia if you really want to see telescope riding.

          There were attempts by some of the ladies to attract the attention of the sim athlete, and a great many balls were released into the wild.

          The trail is a lot of fun.

          We moved on to Littlefield Grid and  Dirk Mathers' Mad Scripter display, which narrates some of the ups and downs of porting scripts into OpenSim. Dirk is a great writer, and he makes the fun and the frustration come alive.

          The ecclesiastical construction by Camryn Darkstone, with trees by Ada Wong and a fabulous spooky gate custom made by blender guru Aaack Ardvark are just some of the attractions of the build. 

           Then there are the anvils.

          It was late by the time we attempted one last jump, using Dirk's excellent tp device, over to Kayaker Magic's fabulous watersports region Panthalassa on Kitely. The region is so full of things to do, that it was a sin to spend only a few minutes there, and we'll be bound to return very soon.

Serene and me read the fine print, on Kitely

           The Trail is open for another month, and of course the region will continue to be thriving indefinitely. So - much fun to be had for a long time to come!