Friday HIE !

 HIE 2023 took off today with a fantastic party event on region HIE 4 of Craft Grid. The venue? A piece of art by Nyx Breen the renowned RL photographer and builder on such art-rich grids as Pangea and Alternate Metaverse Grid. 

Hanging in the sky above the Expo park, Nyx's build is a three dimensional treat based on the concept of crosswords, where the letters escape into the night sky. Inside the floor features a trompe l'oeil effect that will make dancers dizzy!

Three full hours of International music began at 11am SLT, shich stands for  'Second Life Time', or 'grid time' since most people in virtual worlds keep the clock on their viewer set to Pacific Standard Time, because Second Life  operates out of San Francisco, and that is the time they use.  Tradition.

First up was the wonderful Zoree Jupiter.  US-based Zoree was born in the Azores, and so she brought a wonderfully Portuguese-with-a-twist atmosphere to the event from the very first song. Some Fado, some modern classics like the Lambada and Despacito... what more could you ask for. Pure class. Zoree is also a really good builder and has a beautiful region on OSgrid called Victorian Christmas, which will be gearing up for the festive season soon, and a venue region on AMV called The Lotus - so make sure you bookmark both! 

Following Zoree, our second hour at 12 noon SLT (9pm in most of Europe) was DJArianna Nightfire, an exceptional dee-jane with a genius for finding the right tunes to match the mood of an event. She never fails to delight and set the tone, and she got the whole place rocking the tunes of familiar singers and groups like Rammstein, as well as a bunch of powerful songs many of us had never heard of... exactly the right theme for an event that aims to broaden our horizons! Arianna is based on Craft Grid but she performs all over opensim and beyond, so we were very honored to have her come do her magic for our event.

Poster for DJ Arianna under Nyx's Crossword cube, during her performance

The whole HIE team would like to thank everyone who came to the party - about 40 of you - for being there and also for taking a moment to check out the Expo build below. Spread out over 3 regions, the Expo has about 70 booths on it, celebrating everything from math to gorean roleplay, from sci fi to real-world history. The booths will be up throughout the next weeks, so if you missed them, there's still time to drop in, get the notecards and LMs and freebies everyone put on offer.

For our final hour, the intimate and bluesy voice of Forest Azure, soothing the nerves, warming the heart, and generally delighting us with some really amazing Dutch songs... the Dutch language, its poetry and rhythms, are sorely under-publicized, mostly because Dutch people are really good at English, and a bit unwilling to share their linguistic culture. 

Luckily Forest broke down that perceived barrier, and she brought the evening to an end in the most delightful way.  Forest is also the official Greeter at this weekend's HIE event, so definitely someone we must all listen to!

Tomorrow, the Hypergrid International Expo begins, and we hope to see everyone there.

HG Address   craft-world.org:8002:HIE WELCOME  then use the portals to visit any or all of the Auditorium sims.