“This is nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that a biscuit on the floor over there?”
“Stop looking at it. You’re not going anywhere. I need your body heat right here, right now.”
“I swear it’s a biscuit.”
“It’s an inedible chewed rubber bone that you nevertheless tried to eat yesterday. Focus on being in the blanket.”
“I don’t remember…”
“Focus. On. The. Blanket.”
“Ok, ok…”
I’m often impressed by the things we discover in our club’s travels across the Hypergrid.
Opensim is a pioneering platform where everyone is building anew, and that pioneering spirit brings out an amazing level of creativity.
But on this particular tour, we discovered something that completely blew me away. We found a cityscape spanning 16 regions. A Tolkien-themed area called “Romenna,” created by a single artist named Nick Lassard.
“It’s fascinating, really.”
“I’m half asleep. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The fact that we are the same species. I mean, look at our size difference!”
“What?”
“You’re 10 times my size! You’re gargantuan! Yet we are both Canis lupus familiaris. How is such disparity within the same species possible?”
“You think too much. Let’s snuggle some more. My butt is still cold.”
“I wonder if there’s a Wikipedia article about this…”
I’ve been getting into creative writing lately.
When I was in high school, I used to write a lot. Mostly short stories. I really enjoyed it, and apparently I was pretty good at it too. As a junior in high school I won a Brown University Book Award for my “academic excellence combined with clarity in written and spoken expression.”
I’ve always remembered that nice formal affirmation. Despite the fact that I never ended up going to Brown. And that I spent most of my academic focus in high school playing D&D.
But such an affirmation doesn’t mean anything if you don’t actually continue to write. Continue reading
For this Sunday meeting, we made a couple very special excursions on the Hypergrid.
Instead of discovering strange new worlds and interesting new creations, we found an empty and vacant place.
So we left a message in a bottle.
At this meeting visited the region Wizzy on ReactionGrid. At this location, Wizard Gynoid has created a giant model of the E8 Polytope, one of the most complex and elegantly beautiful geometric objects known to mathematicians.
Read on for a full transcript and photos of our adventure.
I’ll be offline for a week starting Jan 12. So I won’t be around to host the next four meetings of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club.
But the show must go on!
Vanish Seriath frequently attends our club meetings, and he has graciously offered to lead the next three meetings.
Dusan Writer thinks a lot about the business of virtual worlds and, specifically, Second Life.
He recently wrote a very thoughtful and interesting blog post titled “SECOND LIFE NEXT: 2011.”
In my comment on his post, I said the following:
You also talked about how “user generated content is not a business model.” I’m not sure I fully agree with you on that. The bottom line is, if you’re using a service and not paying for it, you’re not a customer. You’re part of the product. At least that’s how all successful businesses see it.
I’d like to expand a bit on what I said in bold. Because, if done right, I think it’s a very good thing both for businesses and customers.
Our Hypergrid Adventurers Club continues to grow. At our last meeting we set a new record by having people from 5 completely different grids attending our club via Hypergrid connections. We typically have about 20 people attending our big Sunday meetings. And we’re even expanding our collaborative efforts to other grids.
In addition to our weekly inworld meetings, we stay in touch with each other via this blog, our #HGAC hashtag on Twitter, and our IRC channel.
It’s always good to have different options for communicating. And it’s especially important to use the right tool for the right job.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to create a Google Groups mailing list for the Club. This will allow us to have more detailed ongoing discussions. I also hope this new list will allow us to talk about broader topics such as education and the exploration of all kinds of different virtual worlds.
I’ve had very good success with mailing lists in the past. They’re a great way to help a growing community evolve.
And boy, we are growing!
Take care,
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
This past Sunday we made two excursions to the region Physics on NewWorldGrid, where we discovered and explored a giant-sized physics lab as well as a planetarium.
In our second meeting of the day we met with the creator Aime Socrates, who also built the amazing CERN nuclear physics area we explored in a previous visit.
Read on for a full transcript and many photos from our two meetings on Sunday.
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 