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.
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.
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.
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
The folks on FrancoGrid are hosting another live opera.
It’s happening Thursday, January 6 @ 8pm French Time (11am SLT/2pm Eastern). Our Hypergrid Adventurers Club attended the previous opera, which was simply brilliant.
I’ll be leaving from the region Pathlandia on jokaydiaGRID at 7:30pm French Time (I want to arrive early) if folks would like a hypergrid guide to the performance. We can make the jumps from jokaydiaGRID to FrancoGrid together.
@Hugobiwan has created a poll to see how many folks will be attending the opera in Second Life versus Opensim. If you plan on attending the opera, please fill out this poll. That will help them a lot in their organizing and server setup. Thanks!
À Bientôt!
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
UPDATE Jan 8, 2011: Some nice coverage of the opera in the French press. See these articles on France24 and leParisien, and video coverage by a French TV station.
At this meeting we learned about an Opensim whiteboard tool designed by Trevor Meister and visited a There.com outpost on NewWorldGrid created by Mike_37uk There.
We also briefly discussed dachshunds. A subject very dear to me.
Read on for a full transcript and many photos of our adventure.
For today’s meeting, we visited VWERGrid, the new home of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable community.
On November 11th, 2010, the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable announced the opening of their second virtual home on their own Opensim grid called VWERGrid. Today we traveled to VWERGrid and had a chance to speak with AJ Kelton, the founder of the VWER.
Read on for a full transcript and many photos of our adventure.
At the end of each calendar year, it’s common for people to offer up their predictions for the new year ahead.
Such predictions are fun to make and fun to read. Since I mostly swim in the waters of online communities and virtual worlds, most of the predictions I come across have to do with the future of technology.
I have a prediction for the coming year. And while my prediction involves the technology landscape of virtual worlds, what I predict will happen actually has nothing to do with technology.
This past Sunday we made two excursions to a very special Christmas Festival on FrancoGrid.
The creative force behind the festival was Nani Ferguson, who also created the amazing Pandora region we visited in a previous tour.
This festival features a beautiful Christmas Village, free winter clothes, skiiing, ice skating, and a challenging Christmas Hunt full of freebies.
The festival will be open until Jan 19th, so be sure to check it out before it closes!
There are 3 full regions to explore (Winter, Pole Nord, and Noel), including a hidden underground chocolate maze full of surprises.
Read on for many photos and a full transcript of our discussions.
The map on the left is my first attempt to summarize all the different grids and regions we’ve visited with the Hypergrid Adventurers Club. It also shows the hypergrid routes we’ve taken in the course of our exploration.
I deliberately did not include things like coordinates and hypergrid addresses, since I wanted this map to be an overview and more of a conceptual outline.
We’ve been pretty busy, yes?
And there’s still so much more for us to explore.
Read on for help making your own maps, and learn about an exciting new project called HyperBase42.
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 