Jupiter Rowland @JupiterRowland

Protips, especially for more immersive players:

1) I won't tell you too much about the underwater tour. You have to see it yourself. It's absolutely worth it.

Just so much: Just like the name indicates, it's under water. Not in a Jules Verne-style tunnel system made from Arcadia Asylum parts, but actually under water. As in you will get wet, and you'd better wear a wetsuit or swimwear plus diving gear.

In fact, it's best to take the Underwater Tour during an extra visit to Novale. And then I recommend you to change into your wetsuit or swimwear at home so you don't have to do that on the sim. Don't worry, you don't have to walk much to get to the start of the Underwater Tour.

2) When you take the kayak after the underwater tour, don't paddle back to the start of the underwater tour and get out of the kayak. Once you're out of the kayak, it's gone immediately, and there's no teleporter in sight. The only ways of getting away from there are by flying, teleporting via map (and you can't see much on the map), teleporting out of the sim altogether, taking the tour once more or swimming, and be it to wherever you can get another boat.

So when you're in the kayak, you'd better paddle somewhere that you know you can walk away from.

Auch noch einmal eine Direktantwort: Was willst du jetzt eigentlich? Nur noch eine deutschsprachige Party pro Wochentag? Damit die Party, auf die DU gehst, maximal groß ist und ALLE da sind?

Vergiß es. Passiert nicht. An Freitagen schon mal erst recht nicht.

Das hat nichts mit Partykriegen zu tun. Parallelveranstaltungen sind keine Kriege.

Partykrieg ist, wenn einer vorsätzlich ein Event aufzieht, nur um anderen Events das Publikum zu klauen, oder zu seinem eigenen gleichzeitig stattfindende Events schlechtmacht. Partykrieg ist, wenn Events gezielt bestimmte andere Events kaputtmachen sollen.

Statt dessen haben wir einfach gleichzeitige Veranstaltungen mit unterschiedlichen Konzepten. Die wissen voneinander. Und die zoffen sich trotzdem nicht. Die HABEN sich also abgesprochen.

Der eine mag eben dies, der andere mag das, aber das mag der erste wieder nicht. Nicht jeder hat Bock aufs Rockhouse. Nicht jeder hat Bock auf Gothic. Nicht jeder hat Bock auf was auch immer freitags in TPW läuft.

Rubeus Helgerud ist dienstagabends im deutschsprachigen Hypergrid meines Wissens konkurrenzlos. Er hat aber trotzdem keine 100 Besucher. Bis letztes Jahr hat Cayoun Daydreamer noch donnerstags Blues gespielt, das hat er sogar auf OSW angekündigt, und da gab's auch meistens nichts parallel. Da waren trotzdem keine 100 Leute. Warum war das wohl so? Denk mal drüber nach.

Tell #2 to notorious trolls like Copper and Woody who take every chance they can to verbally attack certain people even if that means going off-topic right away.

Well, to be fair, it wasn't four parties on one grid, it was at least three regular parties on three different grids plus one out-of-the-ordinary party on a fourth grid.

There's quite a number of events going on on the German-speaking side of the Hypergrid on certain weekdays, but there's also enough audience for several parallel events. Besides, not all our events are competing for top rankings.

Isn't the point of sock puppets NOT to rub under everyone's noses whose sock puppet it is?

A few points:

First, maybe a powerful grid server could take 100 avatars on one sim. But most viewers will have massive problems with 50 avatars already, also because most users neither know nor care about the complexity of their avatars.

Second, you'll never get the entire German community to cooperate.

Third, you'll especially never get them to only have one event per weekday. Especially not on Fridays. That'd mean either the whole German community piling into the rather small Rockhouse each Friday (https://opensimworld.com/hop/78058) or the end of a traditional weekly event that has been ongoing for some 8 years (= over 400 Fridays) almost without interruptions just because the only German Friday party will be elsewhere.

Fourth, if you go around and have events cancelled on German-speaking grids so that there will never be two or more events at the same time, do you really seriously believe that all the people who used to go to the cancelled events will now go to that one event that remains? Spoiler: No, they won't.

For example, if you want the Friday event to be at TPW because it's so big, and you force Anachron Young to cease his weekly Rockhouse (again, he has played that five-hour event over 400 times already) because there is already an event on Friday, do you seriously believe that he and Dorena Verne and Klarabella Karamell and Rubeus Helgerud and the other Rockhouse regulars will go to TPW instead after you've had THEIR traditional party killed? Well, they'd rather stay at home and boycott the event in whose favour one of the longest-running events in the German community has been axed.

The other way around, if the decision was to leave Fridays to Anachron and the Rockhouse, do you seriously believe that everyone from all the other grids would go there? Would you? How many times have YOU been to events in Dorenas World so far? Would you try if I told you that Anachron seldomly plays metal or gothic rock or EDM, maybe two or three songs in five hours, often not at all? Or if I told you that Rubeus Helgerud who plays Tuesdays and Bogus Curry who plays every first Monday in a month don't play ANY of these genres AT ALL?

Fifth, why not give people a choice? Why should there only be one German-speaking event at a time? Imagine you don't understand English, and there's only one event in the German community on any given day. One particular day, that one single German community event is something that you don't like. What'd you do? Go to the German event where the music/the concept/the community sucks, but you understand people because they all speak German? Or go somewhere else where the music/the concept is better, but you don't understand anyone because they all speak English?

And don't believe that each event would cater to your tastes if there was only one on each weekday.

Sixth, not everyone loves gigantic parties with as many avatars as possible. One of the reasons why Dorenas World doesn't announce recurring weekly or monthly events on OSW. The smaller a party is, the better the communication works. Or do you seriously believe you can talk with other guests on the local chat while 70 out of 100 avatars constantly spam the chat with gestures? And yes, people want to talk during parties. And yes, over at Dorenas World, we actually do that. Believe it or not.

I strongly advise visitors to dress appropriately. Seasons change, summer is warm, the other seasons aren't, and winter is pretty cold here. This is Québec after all.

Also, if you want to hike on the trail, you'd better wear sturdy and comfortable shoes or boots. This isn't exactly an asphalt road. So, ladies, leave your high heels at home.

Generally, bring a bag for what the mill and the farm have to offer. In summer, pack some swimwear there's a little beach along the trail, and I recommend you to hike clockwise so that you pass the harder parts of the trail before you can cool down and relax at the beach.

Oh, and Captain Kelso's tour is actually under water, so you will need swimwear or a wetsuit and some diving/SCUBA gear. You can get that at the entrance of the tour, but you may want to bring your own.

Okay, I've managed to track down the other avatars made by Cherry Manga. You can find them at Oceanid (2.nymphgrid.com:8002:Oceanid) at the disguises shop right next to the landing.

That's probably because someone copied the beacon, not knowing what it's for, and dropped it onto their own sim. Again.

Cherry if you read this, first of all, you need to generate a new OSW beacon key and put it into your beacon. Besides, set your beacon up so that it can't be copied.

Well, if the Territories had grown like they do now, it wouldn't have been long before it would have looked like Vincent has rented sims from you instead of the other way around.

There's one more reason for a German to be on a German grid, and that's better performance. If you're on a grid overseas, the ping times can get nasty even if the grid itself is as fast as lightning. The worse if you aren't just steering an avatar through the Hypergrid but building and managing popular sims.

tl;dr: Zetamex doesn't want grids with unknown admins, grids with changing IP addresses (fucking up Hypergrid friendships) and grids run by clueless derps to connect to ZetaWorlds. Maybe, maybe not, they also want to keep the copybotting mafia out.

I don't think the policy will change anytime soon. As it stands now, for Zetamex, the company that hosts ZetaWorlds (Vincent Sylvester, the Zetamex CEO, is also the ZetaWorlds main admin), the advantages of sticking to the policy are bigger than the disadvantages because Zetamex doesn't experience any disadvantages.

The most important things for Zetamex are stability and security. Due to this, grids need to fulfill certain requirements to be allowed to connect to ZetaWorlds via the Hypergrid.

For example, they require a website with information about who runs this grid and how to contact them other than in-world. If someone runs a malicious or otherwise dangerous grid, it must be possible to get into contact with them WITHOUT going to their malicious/dangerous grid. The Mare-Grid is banned because it doesn't even have a website.

DreamGrid-based grids (including the entire outworldz.com domain, yes, including Ferd Frederix' very own grid) are banned because they have standard "websites" with no information about the grid owner. Also, most DreamGrids are run by amateurs who absolutely need Windows point-and-click applications even to run a grid. Sure, this helped OpenSim grow, but it also led to the launch of countless grids run by people who neither possess the skills to run a grid nor the will to learn these skills. Yes, there are DreamGrids like Free Life (which AFAIK is indeed home-hosted) or con.tin.u.um (which runs in a data centre). But there are also countless individuals derping around on a "Klickibunti" interface without really knowing what they're doing, and I dare say not all these grids are private. Such people can't be expected to keep their grids as clean and safe and healthy and reliable as, for example, the Kitely admins. And if someone from a DreamGrid with a completely fucked-up asset server (the grid owner neither knows nor cares what an asset server is) comes into your grid, chances are they will fuck up YOUR asset server.

Then there's the dynamic DNS issue. ZetaWorlds also bans all grids running via dynamic DNS. The reason for that is that the Hypergrid has big problems with changing IP addresses, they tend to mess up friendships and such. This is why only grids with fixed IP addresses and domains of their own are allowed to connect to ZetaWorlds.

As for CopyKat, I don't know why that grid was banned. I'd suspect the reason to be a) where it came from and, in conjunction, b) the implications coming from the name. For those who haven't been around for long enough such as Cheryl: Oni Kiri's sims were originally on the Foundation Grid. The Foundation Grid was seen as the second-biggest entry gateway for mass-copybotted content from OpenSim, right after Sacrarium when Sacrarium still supported mass-copybotting. The Conglomerate was for the Foundation Grid what The Harbor was for Sacrarium, namely the place where freshly copybotted content was piled up right after being imported, ready to be picked up by freebie store owners and spread across the Hypergrid. Just like Sacrarium, the Foundation Grid was basically only (in)famous for copybotting and for nothing else. And now there's a new grid that was founded by a) a former Foundation Grid resident who b) runs a plethora of well-stocked freebie sims and c) called the grid COPYkat? Emphasis on COPY? Oh, the implications...

Another part of this little history lesson: ZetaWorlds used to have a problem with copybotters itself. And that problem was called Port ShenZhen, a sim of the same kind as The Harbor (Sacrarium) and The Conglomerate (Foundation Grid), but it was on ZetaWorlds. It lived for about two years, and I guess it was shut down when ZetaWorlds was on the brink of having the same reputation as Sacrarium and Foundation. That would have been considerably worse than being "that grid with that naughty nudist sim". So large-scale content theft and mass-distribution of stolen content is a touchy issue for ZetaWorlds.

On the other hand, if implications in this direction were the reason why CopyKat was banned, then, following the same logic, certain other places on the Hypergrid that are still alive should have been banned much longer ago. But they aren't.

Cheryl, I know you're fairly knew to OpenSim. I guess you haven't seen that many places yet, especially not more obscure, not so well-known places. I guess you've gotten all your freebies from a few rather new and popular sims which you've discovered here on OSW. It's true that the majority of freebie sims (almost) only offer stolen content. But believe me when I say there is indeed legal content made in OpenSim for OpenSim.

Some believe that if it isn't plastered all over the big and popular freebie sims that opened over the last two years, it doesn't exist. Others believe that if it isn't on the same level as the stuff stolen from Second Life where it costs hundreds or thousands of Linden Dollars, it doesn't exist.

But that doesn't mean that literally nothing is being or has ever been created in OpenSim, and absolutely everything has been stolen from Second Life. There have been and still are plenty of creators in OpenSim. Not just Linda Kellie, in case someone wants to reduce OpenSim's own creativity to her.

The former is partly because many OpenSim creators offer their creations no-transfer so that it's easier for them to upgrade them with no old versions remaining available. Another contributing factor is that the owners of many popular freebie sims are too "mafiya"/"gangster" to knowingly have any legal content on their sims (that'd taint their self-imposed image of being a badass criminal outlaw), so that the next generation of freebie sim owners who get all their stuff from such sims doesn't have a chance to pick up legal content.

Mostly, however, it is because OpenSim creators don't offer their creations on those big freebie sims with thousands of boxes of copybotted stuff, because the sims where their creations are available aren't too well-known.

The latter is pure non-sense. Look at what Aaack Aardvark offers on his sim, ArcadiaShop (https://opensimworld.com/hop/86546). This is on par with absolute luxury content in SL. You think he has stolen it all? Nope. He has made everything from scratch. In fact, people come from SL, steal his stuff, scripts and everything, and put it on the Marketplace for premium prices as their own original creations. Aaack has DMCA'd Linden Lab several times already, always successfully.

And he isn't the only creator in OpenSim. Heard of Bibiana Bombinante and Encantada (https://opensimworld.com/hop/86458) yet? She's a friend of Aaack's who often helps her with scripts. If you're looking for plants, that's one place for you to go.

Okay, maybe sim decorations don't count, only avatar decorations do? For one, Aaack made these as well. Also, Taarna Welles. Check out Savvy (https://opensimworld.com/hop/75031) and, when you're on the grid already, her older sim La Baronnie.

If you pick up some of Taarna's clothes, don't complain because they don't fit on your Athena body. Taarna doesn't rig for Athena. Her more recent female mesh clothes are rigged for Ruth2, a free, legal, open-source (https://github.com/RuthAndRoth/Ruth2) mesh body 100% scratch-made in OpenSim for OpenSim by OpenSim users (Shin Ingen, Ada Radius, Ai Austin, Serie Sumei etc.) with EXACTLY ZERO stolen content from SL. Ruth2 v4 has actually even got advantages over Athena 6. And there's a male counterpart, Roth2.

Another maker of mesh clothes, not quite on Taarna's detail level, but far more prolific, is a good acquaintance of mine, Klarabella Karamell. She mostly makes clothes for herself because she dislikes all that stuff that has been coming in from SL since at least 2015. She has probably made more original mesh skirts over micro-length since the start of the year than have ever been stolen from SL. And she and Taarna are the only makers of medium-height pumps that can be worn by mesh avatars (and Taarna's are sandals available only in black); mind you, all these medium-height shoes can only be worn on Ruth2 feet because they're too tight for Athena. Her creations can be found in the Kaufrausch Mega-Store in Santiago (https://opensimworld.com/hop/78061; you land right inside the building), her shoe store in the Westend (https://opensimworld.com/hop/80119) and on her own sim, Bella Klara (https://opensimworld.com/hop/81258).

Yet another maker of original mesh clothes is Loru Destiny, another acquaintance of both Klara's and mine. She has a sim with clothes on her grid which you can reach from here: https://opensimworld.com/hop/87665.

Luna Lunaria only offers her creations for money, but they are definitely not stolen either (https://opensimworld.com/hop/86652); the same goes for Emmalena Damour (https://opensimworld.com/hop/80563).

And then there are the many creations from Satyr Aeon, the creator and admin of OpenSimWorld himself, most of which you can find on his own sim (https://opensimworld.com/hop/74730). They include the OpenSimWorld beacon, of course, as well as the SatyrFarm.

Last but not least, look around Wright Plaza (hg.osgrid.org:80:Wright Plaza). This place is chock-full of original creations.

I could name even more places, even more creators, but that's a lot already.

A different case are creations that were originally made for Second Life but allowed in OpenSim or even brought to OpenSim by their creators where they were modified, especially when they were made open-source. For one, this applies to Damien Fate's mesh clothes templates (https://outworldz.com/Secondlife/posts/mesh-templates/) which have often been used in the mid-2010s before copybotted mesh clothes started flooding onto the Hypergrid. Klara has used them a lot in the past, as has Cary Bean (Deva Moda), as has Thirza Ember (HG Safari), as have others, and Klara's new skirts are designed to match Damien's clothes in shape.

And then there is Arcadia Asylum a.k.a. Aley Arai a.k.a. Aley Resident. She started in Second Life where she offered her creations as freebies right away, even open-source and under a free license. When OpenSim had come along, someone asked her if they could take her creations to OpenSim. Not only did she allow that, she joined OpenSim herself, uploaded her existing creations and started creating for both Second Life and OpenSim from then on. You can sill find her very recognisable works in many places such as in the Arcadia-Aley Library (https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/NewMediaArts-CTO/Arca...) or elsewhere, partly amongst other things (https://opensimworld.com/hop/84940, https://opensimworld.com/hop/79330, https://opensimworld.com/hop/78749).

If you should meet my in-world sister Juno Rowland, she's likely to be decked out only in legal content (although we aren't sure about the hair, and a good AO with clearly legal origins is hard to find).

I hate to break this to you, but: Not all OpenSim grids are run by private people in their spare time.

OSgrid is run by a company (and OSgrid is non-commercial with no payment system), Kitely is run by a company etc., and ZetaWorlds is run by a company, too. But just because a grid is run by a company, that doesn't mean it's run by greedy, power-mongering Linden-like dictators who want you to pay for just about everything you do.

Also, ZetaWorlds has a long, long, long ban list. They only allow trustworthy grids to connect via the Hypergrid. This excludes all grids running under the *.outworldz.com domain (including Ferd Frederix' very own Outworldz grid) as well as any and all grids they can find that use dynamic DNS instead of having their own domain.

And this also excludes every grid they discover that doesn't have an "Impressum". And the Mare-Grid doesn't even have a working website, much less any information on how to contact the grid owner other than by visiting the grid.

The reason why they do this is security, stability and reliability. They want to keep away from badly maintained grids run by clueless amateurs with fucked-up assets and all. And they want to keep away from grids run with malicious intent.

So the problem with Mare-Grid is: It doesn't have a website. It doesn't have an "Impressum" either. ZetaWorlds doesn't know who the fuck runs the grid. But they have to know who runs this grid. They have to know how to get into contact with whoever runs this grid. They have to be sure that the grid is okay, that the grid doesn't do anything illegal with whoever from ZetaWorlds comes over to Mare-Grid, and that whoever comes from Mare-Grid won't fuck up ZetaWorlds or anyone on ZetaWorlds.

By the way, the "Open" in "OpenSim" stands for Open Source (https://de.ryte.com/wiki/Open_Source) = the programming code from which OpenSim (the software that the grids run on) is made can be read and modified by anyone.

I would never have thought that this lost place would see an event again after all those years, much less that I'd experience one myself. Even shortly after I had joined Metro at the end of April 2020, I had the impression that nothing would ever happen there again.

And yet, here we were, a crowd of largely over 30 avatars rocking the guts of the welcome tower. And the sim and the entire grid remained standing even beyond the party... except for that one time at 1:38 AM when some of us crashed and believed that had been the end, but it hadn't...

Guess what, the party is still on-going. Small, but still.

As if they don't have the heart to shut the grid down during its own farewell party...

I guess what that childgate script needs is the threshold size between a child avatar and an adult avatar.

This is hard to specify. No matter what some say the minimum size of an adult avatar is (= everything smaller is a child), someone else will come and protest and say that they've got a realistically-sized adult avatar that's smaller than that.

OpenSim has a rating problem in general. In my opinion, the Second Life rating system doesn't work nearly as reliably in OpenSim as in Second Life.

For one, there's no consent on what which rating means. There are different definitions, but everybody believes that THEIR definition is either the only one at all or the only right one.

Some say that everybody knows that the ratings in OpenSim are exactly the same as in Second Life.

Others say that everybody knows that both General and Moderate mean G-rated, and Adult means G-rated, too, but no child avatars allowed.

As they all claim that their definition is universal, hardly anyone can be bothered to write them down for others to read and follow. The only OpenSim grid I know that has rating definitions written down is DigiWorldz, but even their definition can be stretched by sim owners as far as they want to.

And then there are people who don't come from English-speaking countries and who don't live and breathe especially U.S. culture. For an American, "adult" means "smut". But if you're a foreign speaker, you've either learned in school that "adult" means "grown-up", or you have to run English through an online translator which translates "adult" into whatever "grown-up" is in your language. OSW has a lot of users who don't understand English, who run the entire website through Google Translate, and who seem to have forgotten over time that there's a translator running. That's another reason for rampant rating misuse and different ratings on OSW and in-world (e.g. OSW: Adult, in-world: General).

Not only doesn't OpenSim have mandatory rating definitions that all grids have to follow, it also doesn't have anyone who could enforce content ratings all over the Hypergrid. The individual grids can't seem to agree upon rating definitions, few grids actually have definitions in any form, even fewer write them down (only one did), and not a single one has definitions that can't be stretched to basically whatever a sim owner wants.

This leads to two extremes. One extreme is the use of the Adult rating as a child avatar repellent on otherwise 100% G-rated or maybe PG-rated sims because the sim owners "don't want no kiddies raisin' hell" on their land. You can get away with that even on DigiWorldz because you're free to restrict the liberties under the Adult rating as you please.

The other extreme are very liberal sims on very liberal, if not to say careless grids. You can build outright BDSM studios in plain public sight on General-rated sims and get away with it because the grid owners don't care. That is, grid owners can build on their own grids whatever they please because there's nobody who can stop them. They are their own Lindens with nobody higher up. They make their own rules, and they can just as well break them or not make any in the first place.

So I read that the only female mesh avatar allowed on the Barbie World Grid is Decadence-HG?

You want FACTS?

Nico quoted enough FACTS and linked to them. Your precious sim is not your property. Got it?

Want more FACTS? (tl;dr: Alex' grids shut down with no warning 14 times in 11 years, residents always lost all their assets and all their money.)
https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2020/04/aviworlds-shuts-...
https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2020/10/pomposelli-shuts...
Now you have more FACTS. Stuff that happened more than 3 months ago. Your history lesson for today. Thank me later.

Then again, it doesn't even matter anymore if Alex shut down AviWorlds (13 times even) and Virtual-Ville without warning. If AviTron should go down, it wouldn't make a difference if he announced it or not. You won't be able to save anything either way.

If AviTron goes down, Wuudsville WILL be gone for good. Until then, it's Alex' property, not yours. And he can do with it whatever he wants to. The Terms and Conditions say so.

That's probably the way he wants to "win". Not by having the biggest grid in terms of land area, registered avatars and active users, not by the top 10 most popular and most active sims on OSW being on his grid, but by assuming ownership over every last asset on the Hypergrid (once every single one of them has been copybotted by his residents and thereby entered his asset database) and misusing this ownership to take control over all other grids until he is the Supreme God-Emperor of the Hypergrid.