Pinoy Hideout is a full region designed by Neva Crystall for Kate Gavin and the Pinoy Hideout group. Open to the public (group membership by invitation), It offers visitors something of everything: discovery, dancing, shopping, relaxing, music, romance…
Given this is a Neva Crystall design, it goes without saying that the island is immediately eye-catching. Two rocky plateaus nestle a handful of boutique shops and the Pinoy Hideout café bar between them. The tops of these plateaus are occupied by a cosy house (open to the public) and a large wooden deck respectively, the latter offering a place to dance and enjoy any entertainments which might be laid-on – although dance systems can be found throughout the island.
Below the plateaus, beaches and low-lying grassland encircle the island, offering plenty of opportunity for walking, taking photos, and simply letting feet and mind wander free. A waterfront chapel looks ready to host a wedding, while further around the coast is one of the more intriguing hideouts: the hulk of an ageing ship-of the-line or old privateer, propped up on rocks.
Offshore sit two smaller islands, one a mix of sand and rock, the other rich with foliage and marked by the ruins of an ancient stone tower, another cosy spot held with the curve of the broken walls. Elsewhere, an oriental bath house sits above a bridge leading to a small tea house, the curve of a small inlet sitting between them.
I’ve no idea if the “pinoy” is the name is a deliberate Filipino reference, but Piony Hideout offers a pleasing melding of tropical, western and oriental influences stirred and teased into a gorgeous island design which is crying out to be photographed. In fact, there is a photographic contest under way as I write this – information can be found at the teleport landing point.
All told, a delightful addition to the Second Life landscape; I look forward to popping back again and again – as I’m sure you will as well. Just be sure to explore carefully, as there really is a lot to see – both above and under the waves!
The Lab has issues a reminder via the Grid Status Reports page that there will be no concierge telephone and chat support available from midnight SLT on Wednesday, November 26th through until 08:00 SLT on Friday, November 28th.
This is to allow support staff in the USA to enjoy Thanksgiving with their family and friends.
Concierge phone and chat support will be offline this coming Thursday, 27 November, so that team members can spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their friends and family. Both services will close at midnight Wednesday evening and will re-open at 8am Pacific on Friday morning.
To the support staff and all at Linden Lab, I’d like to pass on my best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving, and the same also goes out to all those I’ve come to know in SL who are celebrating Thanksgiving as well.
Second Life photographer, blogger and friend, Ziki Questi, has two new exhibitions of her work under way in Second Life right now.
The first, located at the Rose Theatre Art Gallery, Angel Manor, features landscape images with a decidedly watery theme. In fact, of all the original pieces selected for the display, only one didn’t have a watery theme, and so that was swapped out for another at did!
Featured here are some of Ziki’s more recent works from places such as Binemist, NorderNey, The Colder Water, Square Pegs in Round Holes, Sarawak, and more, all in Ziki’s familiar panoramic format, tastefully displayed in one of the gallery’s larger exhibition spaces, with plenty of light and which also offers comfortable sofas from which to admire Ziki’s work.
“When Holter first contacted me,” Ziki says of the second exhibition of her work, which is located at the Holtwaye Art Space, curated by Holter Rez, who co-runs the gallery with WayneNZ, “he clearly had some thoughts in mind about what sort of theme he wanted, and I was very surprised to see what he had assembled.”
She continues, “most people probably know me as a photographer of landscapes and artwork, and I often think of my own work that way. But Holter assembled a group of ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ images, as he put it, that are more abstract, or at least less immediately recognizable by subject matter.”
The result is Geometries of the Grid, a selection of images by Ziki spanning a number of years, and taken (predominantly) at art installations which have appeared in Second Life. Each piece – as the title of the exhibition suggests – has been selected for it geometric content and appeal. Spread across two floors of the gallery, the display offers a unique way in which to revisit and recall some unique installations that have appeared in SL.
Both exhibits offer a very individual view of Second Life as captured through the eyes of a very talented photographer, as such, both come highly recommended.
Brysk is a homestead region currently shared between Nailah Carrlucci and Armon Aeon. While the two halves of the region may be independent of one another in terms of ownership, Nailah and Armon have worked to present their lands as one, bringing us a public place caught in an Indian Summer as the trees turn to gold, inviting visitors to explore and relax which winter slowly takes a grip on regions elsewhere…
Nailah’s portion of the region, The Sanctuary by the Sea, features a large stone church with cobbled paths beyond its low surrounding walls. A small tavern – more a converted stone out-house – offers visitors a choice of local wine or ale, both served by the chubby monk in attendance. A towered stone house, one of Maxwell Graf’s beautiful mesh creations, is open to visitors, offering a place to relax and chat with friends. A short distance away and reached either via tree-lined track or across stone bridge, is the landing point, surrounded by trees touched by the changing seasons. This offers another invitation for visitors to sit for a while and pass the time: chairs and loungers from Cory Edo, warmed by a fire pit and with a large stone fountain splashing water nearby.
Beyond the low line of craggy hills which divide the land, lies Sanctuary Falls, Armon Aeon’s land. This is altogether more rural, a place where red and gold leaves float on an ocean of white-tufted grass and deer wander among grazing horses, while tall trees mix greens and yellows against the backdrop of snow-capped mountains that surround the region. Water is a feature here, with falls, streams and ponds. A touch of fantasy is also caught within the landscape, as tall carven figures stand on either side of one of the waterfalls, and further afield, under the shade of a gnarled tree, an elven couple lay in and eternal stone embrace.
Both The Sanctuary by the Sea and Sanctuary Falls offer visitors a restful visit, and lend themselves to a broad range of windlight settings for photographers. Given their complimentary nature, I couldn’t help but combine them into a single little machinima, which I hope you enjoy (if it doesn’t play at 720p automatically, click the gear wheel and select)!
Christmas is a time for giving, and on Saturday, December 6th, 2014, Bay City will be hosting their annual Christmas Tree Lighting and fundraiser.
Activities will commence at 13:00 SLT and run through until 16:00 SLT, taking place at the Bay City fairgrounds. On offer will be:
Live entertainment, music and dancing
A skating party
A silent auction
refreshments and fun.
Christov Kohnke – performing at the 2014 Bay City tree lighting fundraiser
This year will see Christov Kohnke take to the stage to provide the live music, and GoSpeed Racer will be spinning the tunes as the event’s DJ.
The silent auction will take place throughout the afternoon, and will conclude at 16:00 SLT, when activities officially draw to a close. All proceeds from the silent auction and from donation bins at the venue will go to Child’s Play Charity, a 501c3 non-profit organisation offering on-line communities such as the Bay City Alliance an opportunity to help seriously ill children around the globe during their hospital stays with the purchase of games and gaming equipment.
Request to Second Life Designers and Artists
To assist with the fund-raising auction, the organisers of the tree lighting are asking that SL designers and artists to consider donating fun, interesting, unique, or other transferrable items (or a no-copy object that an auction winner can use to redeem their prize in the case of no transfer items) which both reflect well on Second Life and which can be offered as auction items.
If you are willing to provide one or more items, please contact Marianne McCann in-world for details on how to participate.
About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance
Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab™ and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest Bay city group, and home to most Residents of Bay City. To find out more, contact Marianne McCann in-world.
On Tuesday, November 25th, the Main channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to the release candidate channels in week 46. The update comprises “minor improvements” to help configure the texture and mesh CDN, by allowing the Lab to reconfigure the CDN URL if they need to, with the intention of the of making it a more dynamic host name in the future.
There are no deployments to the release candidate channels this week, due to the Thanksgiving no change window opening, which runs from Wednesday, November 26th through until start of business on Monday December 1st.
Server Beta Meeting – Thursday, November 27th
Just a reminder, there is no Server Beta group meeting this week, due to Thanksgiving in the USA. Happy Thanksgiving, all of you in the States!
Viewer Updates
The Attachment RC viewer was updated on Tuesday, November 25th to version 3.7.21.296904. This release adds fixes for two additional problems compared to the November 12th release of the RC:
MAINT-4537 “Change in Maintenance Viewer breaks my joint rigged mesh avatar”
MAINT-4687 “Petite” avatars render deformed for the wearer but not for observer.
Saving and Loading Graphics Settings
The option to save certain graphics settings in the viewer (STORM-2082) is moving forward; there is currently an initial test viewer undergoing trials, but things are in a state of flux.
The idea behind this change is to provide a means by which users can quickly switch between two sets of graphics pre-sets they have created and saved locally, allowing them to quickly adjust the graphics setting to assist with performance as they move around the grid (so a user would have a set of “low” graphic settings they could switch-on in order to maintain performance in busy regions, and a set of “high” graphics settings, with as many bells and whistles turned on as they like, for use in quieter regions).
As noted in my week 46 report, the initial work saw a “Quick Preferences” floater added to the viewer, which allows users to set various settings and would likely include options to save said settings.
Initially, this was accessed via the Setup tab in the official viewer’s Preferences, but a suggestion has been made to keep everything accessible under the Graphics tab to prevent unnecessary fragmentation of options. A suggestion has also been made to change the name of the floater, as “Quick Preferences” is a term used by several TPVs, where it has a different context.
Experience Keys / Tools
Progress continues with the Experience Keys (Tools) project. The project viewer hasn’t been updated in a while, but work has apparently been going on elsewhere – including a decision on what the charge will be for an Experience Key, although this has yet to be made public.
As a quick recap on this, and from my original overview on Experience Keys / Tools:
Every experience using the Experience Tools capabilities must be governed by an Experience Key supplied by the Lab – think of it as a licence applied to the experience and to all control scripts used within that experience, and which directly links the experience / experience scripts directly back to the experience owner, providing an audit trail of accountability.
Thus, the Experience Key allows the Lab to instantly revoke all permissions used by a given experience, stopping al the scripts associated with it, in necessary. This is intended to reduce the risk of people using Experiences as a means of griefing. As a further deterrent, the Lab will be charging some form of fee for the “licensing” of an Experience Key.
The cornfield, revamped in July, still provides a taster for SL Experiences – access it via the Portal Park
Apparently, Experience Keys / Tools were supposed to be released this quarter. However, with the Christmas season fast approaching, it seems questionable as to whether this will be achieved. As Oz Linden said in the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday, November 25th, “wish me luck”!
As previously noted, the initial release of Experience Keys / Tools will not support grid-wide experiences – although this is still on the Lab’s list for future enhancements to the platform.
Other Items
Cocoa Bugs
Many Mac users are still experiencing Cocoa-related issues, finding them something of a bone of contention as the Lab doesn’t regard some of the issues being experienced (such as excessive typing lag) as specific to the viewer, but rather endemic to the OS X operating system. All told, here is quite a wide range of issues, and TPV developer Cinder Roxley is attempting to resolve a number of them.
Part of the problem lies in the way the cursor position on the screen is translated to the cursor position in-world, which is in turn very screen resolution specific. This makes bug testing / fixing particularly hard: as fixes need to be tested against multiple monitor types. Cinder has been in touch with Apple engineers and has found one of their suggested solutions – removal of deprecated calls – hasn’t helped in resolving problems, so fixes may yet be a while off.
Pinoy Hideout, Lions Hill (Flickr)
Pinoy Hideout, Lions Hill (Flickr)
Pinoy Hideout, Lions Hill (Flickr)
Pinoy Hideout, Lions Hill (Flickr)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 