SL Places: Ambat Infohub

My mate Osprey Therian is a very talented lady. Anyone who knows her knows this is true, but for someone like me who hasn’t really known her for very long, the sheer scale of what she has done in SL is amazing. Hell, half of what she has done has gone and I’ll never get to see them (/me thinks of the bizarre roadside attractions inspired by the curios often found along the forgotten highways of America – think “The World’s Biggest Potato” or “America’s Largest Furball”).

Hers is one of the few blogs I not only read every day but have traveled back in time and read too – her stories from There always tempt me to open an account and I’ve put my name down for beta in Twinity because of what she has said about it. Over the course of the last few months, her blog has been a revelation to me as to the extent of her creations and some weeks ago a nice missive she received from someone in-world thanking her for her work on an infohub led me to promise myself I’d go along and take a peek at this creation.

I feel a word or two on infohubs might be apposite, especially if you, like me, came post-late 05/early 06 and missed all the infohub kafuffle. Back in the day* when direct teleporting to anywhere wasn’t possible**, the Lindens introduced telehubs. For one reason and another, the ability to teleport anywhere being key of course, these were removed and replaced with infohubs that were built by residents who bid for the work (I’m not sure if this was paid or not – it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this post, please concentrate and stop interrupting). Osprey must have won a bid*** because she ended up designing the infohub in Ambat, a sim I’ve never been to… well, until now that is 🙂

I dropped into Ambat (which I found wasn’t too far from my usual haunts in Sansara, the first continent – it’s times like that I realise just how impossible a job it is to explore all of SL because it is so huge) and had to zoom my camera around to find the infohub. I wasn’t expecting to see it up on a small hill and the views it had of the surrounding sims were amazing.

I’d recognise Ospery’s tents anywhere and the infohub boasted two of the beauties along with covered infobooths and rugs for folks to relax on.

Throughout the small area are traces of her humour, often rooted in the very early days of SL such as the Hippo Helper and the free Hippo book which contains the (so far) only quote from the legendary Spike Milligan I’ve ever seen in-world.

If, like me, you have never given a moments notice to that often crowded and confusing place you call home (and by ‘home’ we more-often-than-not mean nothing more than the place we first entered the world or are teleported back to in times of grid crash) then maybe it’s about time you just spent a few minutes inspecting**** who made it and finding out a little more about how it all came to be. If you find a good one, drop a SLURL in the comments and let’s all go exploring and appreciating some oft-overlooked resident built goodness 🙂

Oooo, me old horns are tingling… I feel a new travelogue coming on here… Backpacking Burro’s Guide to Infohubs!

HBA

****

* What about the night? No one ever refers to back in the night – why?

** Well it was but at a cost and not anywhere like we have now. It’s complicated and I think it was part of an economic brake on resource usage.

*** I’ll have to ask her about that.

**** PC users – Right click on something and cycle through the pie-wheel-thing until you see INSPECT. Mac users – Fek knows, I’ve never used one and can’t afford one. Actually, here is a great video tutorial about it from Torley,