The Persistance of Magic

It's all code. If magic happens it's just a bit of code somewhere doing something logical that you hadn't accounted for when reasoning through the process. Maybe.

Despite the fact that it all makes sense--it doesn't. Despite the fact that it it's all completely, practically, logical--magic persists.

When you're done meditating with your NPC buddy and he levitates just like the yogi's of old, then launches out the window to go floating around the sim... Well, what do you call it?

I get mail.  "You probably know about this," the users say, "but I just thought I'd let you know--there is a tree sitting in the middle of a house in Greyville, someone's hair is floating above the counter in the cafe, an entire winter wonderland scene is floating in the air above Holodreams, there's a flying tiger in your swamp and he's frozen mid-leap."

I did know--well, not about the hair. I accidentally conjured most of it--well, not the tree. I feel like that witch on TV, the one who always got her spells jumbled up.

Laughing, wait until yogi Rob goes whipping past someone. Or imagine the mail I'll get when someone drops into Shadowling where my ghost kitten follows visitors, meowing and purring until the opportunity arises to push them off a porch. Which she does. Unfortunately she follows them over the ledge. I'm always finding her in the moat. How do I find her? It's one of those magical things, I'm the only one who can see her.

I might be the only one who sees the bald NPC who occasionally appears in the Crate and Barrel. He's dressed in camo boxers and is standing with his with his nose in the corner.

Magic persists in more practical but equally mystifying ways. Poor Siobhan works hard all afternoon to learn how to make prims she can manage from the game controller. That evening I get an IM from her. Frustration shimmers in the text. "The game prims have vanished from my account! They're all gone! Gone!"

I check her account. The prims are gone!  Panic! Please don't let mine be gone too.

I check my account. What to my wondering eyes should appear? Yep, all Siobhan's prims snuggled up to mine. Way more preferable to having all the prims just vanish into the mist. But why?

As the other strumpets learn to make game prims their  prims sneak out the window every night. By the next morning my prim count has grown. It's like I am the cool prim mom and all the game prims want to live with me. So I moved the other mothers into my house. I think today we will see an exodus of all prims back to where they belong.

I won't torment your logic-loving minds with the tale of the floating text generated by script with no floating text component to it. Your brains are already frantically listing all the reasons why and how such and such probably happened. Mine does that too.


Some of this can be explained by operator errors. Some by code being pushed to do new things. Some by collision of one scripter's code with another scripter's code. Some by...?????

Maybe one day we can explain all magic away. But for now, frustrations aside, it's nice to find a corner of the universe where magic persists.

~~Nara Malone

You can learn more about Nara and her books at naramalone.com

Hypregrid Stories Project: Building Community Across Virtual Worlds

Our Magic Books donated by Whitestar Magic

Hypergrid Stories is a project we've been cooking up at Greyville Writer's colony for a couple of months now.

The overall goal is to build community across the borders of our hypergrid worlds while we are building stories to entertain the citizens of the metaverse.

Yes, we are even sneaking across the garden wall into SL and back with a scene from one of the stories. More on that on release day.

We've been quietly working with some grid and region owners already. We're amazed by the welcome and support our project has gotten. Whitestar Magic donated magical prim books. Fred Beckhusen contributed the brilliant game controller scripts. Mike Hart of Next Reality Grid has gone out of his way to help us.

Beautiful dressing room set Mike built for Tina

Peek in window at room he and Siobhan are working on.

Siobhan and Grizz slaving away over story plot in Redlight Spa

Dancer Martin in leopard thong provides...um...creative inspiration.

Future home of bookstore for hypergrid authors at Redlight Hotel

Crystal Brewton, indie author extraordinaire and owner of Independently Spoken, was gracious about all our newb mistakes like forgetting to wear or group tags  and wondering why our prims disappeared.

 She's generously allowed us to take over cabins at her colony and build sets inside. She even parked her boat out on Nara's Nook grid in the Quarterz City region. I may have to put a poem in her boat.

Crystal Brewton's boat at Quarterz City.

Poem you ask?

Yes in addition to stories, Jeff Cuneo and I are putting together poems and song lyrics to set out along  a poetry trail. If any of you poets out there have a poem or two you'd like to add, let me know. We're also still looking for places to plant our poetry prims. If you have areas in your region you want to highlight we just need a spot to plant  the book we place the poem in and another prim to hold the script that goes to our game controller to deliver clues to the next scene.

Merrie Schonback, owner of the lovely new Pilliars of Mist world, agreed to host some of our poetry prims at some of her intriguing builds.

Amid the pillars in ruins on Pillars of Mist

Mine Entrance on Pillars of Mist

When the work is all done you will be able to step into one of the story books we will set out in Greyville Park and be teleported into a scene on another grid or region. Then the adventure begins with clues to find the hidden bits of story in each scene. When you finish a scene you will be transported to the next scene.

Yes, we do have plenty of interesting settings around Greyville and the Nook that we'll include too. But the point here is to to show off some other beautiful builds out on the hypergrid.

Good Karma Shop in Greyville

Tarot fortune-telling deck inside Good Karma

Author Shara Lanel's house in Greyville.

We're still looking for settings to put poetry. If you have areas on specific regions you want to draw traffic to we'll happily drop some poetry prims there. We also need a good spot for a Wicca based scene and a harbor of  blue water where you won't mind having a greenhouse floating for a few weeks. Project will be on display Feb 14 thru March 17.

If you'd like to be involved contact Nara: +Nara Malone on G+,  Nara Malone on Facebook , or email nara_malone [at] yahoo.com

An Author's Guide to the Metaverse & How to visit Greyville Colony

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
What is the Metaverse?
The metaverse, for our purposes, is a loosely connected set of simulated worlds created by Opensim users and connected by a hypergrid which will allow you to move between regions built by different creators. The images in my slideshow above are all from a series of simulations I built online. There are other virtual worlds outside the Opensim hypergrid, but I'm trying to keep this simple, so lets start small with something powerful enough to meet an author's needs and simple enough that they can get up to speed quickly.

Why do you need a metaverse?
Basically the metaverse is an alternate reality where things you do and create can have real world impact on yourself and others. And that real-world impact aspect of the metaverse is why it is so valuable to authors.

• Having trouble getting inside a characters head? When I was writing Blind Heat, I logged into a virtual world as a domestic house cat and tried getting around in a human world as a cat. Not only did I discover that jumping from floor to tabletop without overshooting and smacking into a wall takes practice, but I was able to experience how street-tough inhabitants in that simulation of a slum would treat a vulnerable kitten.
• Stuck in writer's block? I think writer's block stems from not being able to see what needs to happen next. If you can go to a setting like the one you need to write about, it's easier to imagine your characters interacting. But a love scene on a beach is hard to imagine in the middle of January when the snow is piling up. A back alley in a rough part of town is not a not a safe place to go daydream. In the metaverse you can find a diner, or tropical beach, or back alley, or biodome on mars to work through your blocks at any time. You can even launch a private world right on your computer for working out sex scenes.
• Research exotic locals. I've explored exact replicas of cities I had neither time nor finances to visit. I've even done some research on surfing in a virtual surfing simulation. I was really bad at it too. Fortunately you can't drown in the metaverse. I've even visited a midwifing simulation where real world midwifes teach via virtual world. Maybe you can't find every single thing you need to research in the metaverse, but I've found everything I went looking for.

How do you get there?
I created a Virtual Writer's and Reader's Colony. It is designed for writers and readers new to the metaverse. It's a safe place to learn how to get around. You can meet up with other authors, just find a quiet corner to write (lots of quiet corners), explore, have adventures, interact with characters, and discover learning resources to build your craft.

To get into the Writer's Colony at Nara's Nook. Click here to create a user account. Sorry, I hate creating accounts too, but you'll need this account to store freebies, outfits, and various things you create or discover in your journeys. The form is simple: pick a name, enter email address, and choose a password. Be sure to select either male or female avatar--I don't have any neutral avatars in the system yet. Sign up as one of your favorite characters or under your author name.

And since your web browser is only powerful enough to get you to the front door of the colony, you'll need to click here to download a web viewer that lets you enter virtual worlds, walk around, and take pictures of all the cool things that happen. This will be worth it, I promise. Where else can you go chat with a dragon?

Be sure to select the middle, opensim tab and download the version (Windows, Mac, or Linux) that matches your operating system.

 Once you have your viewer downloaded and installed, launch it and you should see something like so.

 It doesn't matter if the picture is a little different, we're interested in the tab labeled "viewer" in the top left corner. Click viewer, click preferences, and then down on the bottom left, select, opensim. You see it highlighted in orange below.

Copy and paste this code:  world.narasnook.com:8900 into the empty box at the very top where it says "add new grid" and click apply on the right. Then click that miscellaneous tab (above the add new grid area) and make sure "enable lightshare" is checked. Click apply again, then click okay. You only have to supply this information once. The viewer will save these preferences for your future adventures. Now you're ready to go exploring.

You should now see something like this. Enter your user name, just first and last name with a space between in the left box at bottom, the way you see mine entered. Then enter your password. Under "Start at" type: Greyville. Under "Log into Grid" click the down arrow and select NarasNook from the list. Then click the login button and wait for a whole new world to appear.

At first things will look white, including you.

But as the world paints itself on your screen, the colors fill in. It's okay to move around while you wait.

That's you there in the picture. The woman, not the lizard. It's possible to change your appearance to look more like your real world self, but we'll save that for another day. You worked hard to get here and now it's time to play. Use your computer's arrow keys to walk around--right, left, forward, back. Walk around the village and out into the park.

You can launch fly mode by holding the Pg Up key for a few seconds. Then arrow keys take you in different directions and the Pg Dn key takes you back toward the ground. Holding the Pg Dn until you smack into the ground stops the fly mode. Fly to those distant lands you see. It's all mine and you have my permission to go into any building and do what you like. You can't break anything. Have fun.Stay as long as you want.

Take lots of pictures. There's a little camera icon on the bottom bar of your browser, toward the right. Click it to snap a picture and save to your computer.

~ Nara Malone.
You can learn more about Nara at her author blog www.naramalone.com You can learn more about her virtual worlds at her new website www.narasnook.com (under construction so expect some linkless links)

Credits: The dragon picture is a shot I took on the Alba sim in OSGrid, when I met up with a dragon who invited me to chat. I intend to blog about that adventure soon. It's a very cool sim based on ancient Scotland.

The author colony region is based largely on one of Linda Kellie's first oars.