Resilience is that ineffable quality that allow some people to be knocked down by life and to come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes.
Resilience. The capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress.
With these two dictionary definitions, one is welcome to ReZilience, the latest quarterly exhibition at Kate Bergdorf’s cosy Berg gallery, located overhead of her home region, Nordan om Jorden.
Both of these definitions can be applied to those of us who use Second Life; the first being applicable when Things Go Wrong for often inexplicable reasons, while the second is more directly applicable to our avatars. While the days of teleporting from A to B and finding shoes, hair, and other attachment trailing from our posteriors as a bizarre tail have long passed, for those who wear mesh, life can be full of random bodily and clothing malfunctions which we stalwartly accept because “it’s Second Life”. And thus the theme of the exhibition is set.
ReZilience is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek look at what can unexpectedly happen when we log-in to SL, only to find our mesh body rotated 90 degrees and lying horizontally through our (alpha wearing) form, or when we teleport somewhere, only to appear to others as if our heads and bodies are going through a trial separation from one another, and so on.
Tutsy Navarathna, perhaps best know for his marvellous award-winning machinima, is the artist behind the pieces on display, and he presents a series of pieces combining images captured in-world with paintings and drawing to offers a series of delightful shots celebrating bodily mishaps in Second Life, each with its own delightful caption edged with a wicked sense of humour and, in places, underlined with what might a a subtle social comment on matters of identity – such as appears to be the case with Elle n’a jamais cache utiliser la chirurgie esthetique pour conserver une plastique de reve
With just twelve pieces on display, this is not an extensive exhibit, but it doesn’t have to be; the wry humour is more than adequately presented, and the intimate space provided by Kate’s little gallery space is the ideal environment in which to present the pieces. Rezilience will remain open to visitors through until March 31st, 2015.
Elvira Kytori’s Timeless Memories is without doubt one of the most beautifully ethereal and captivating regions I’ve visited of late.
With parts wrapped in softly-falling snow, the composition of this Homestead regions has to be witnessed in order to be truly appreciated. From the arrival point, inside one of two quaint houses in the region, board walks wind forth across a watery, semi-frozen landscape, while a late afternoon sun tints trees and grass in muted tones of gold, lavender, green and blue, all softened by a slowly-rising grey-white mist.
To call this region photogenic would be an understatement; there is not a single element that does not lend itself to being photographed. Indeed, Elvira encourages people to take pictures and asks that if they do, they share them through her Flickr group.
Throughout the landscape lie little scenes and vignettes, each of them offering a narrative of its own while collectively they add to the rich tapestry of the entire region. Penguins skate across a stretch of frozen water; a polar bear and her cubs roam a snowy embankment. cuddly toys play backgammon and wave to passing visitors. Scattered throughout the region, as well, are places to sit and enjoy, or watch, or converse with friends.
Despite the winter’s feel, timeless is the most apt description here; there is a real sense of time having been suspended, and a small part of the world set aside where one can simply be.
A note in the About Land description suggests that, as hard as it might be to let go, Timeless Memories could itself vanish into memory. It would be a shame for this to happen, given the love and care that has been poured into creation such a beautiful place to be enjoyed by everyone. So when you pay a visit, please show your appreciation by offering a donation to help ensure people might continue to enjoy timeless memories of their own when they visit; just touch the bunny at the landing point.
It’s time to kick-off another week of fabulous story-telling in voice, brought to Second Life and Kitely by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library.
As always, all times SLT / PDT, and unless otherwise stated, events will be held on the Seanchai Library’s home on Imagination Island, or at their Kitely Homeworld.
Now Open: Explore the Great Gatsby Online at Kitely
“But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg” (The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2)- The “Valley of Ashes”, an iconic part of the novel and home to the tragic Wilsons (that’s their garage you can see being built in the background), forms one of Explore The Great Gatsby locations
Coinciding with Tacoma Little Theatre’s production of The Great Gatsby, adapted for the stage by Simon Levy and directed by Dale Westgaard, Seanchai library Kitely is offering theatre goers attending the play, lover of the works of f. Scott Fitzgerald and users of virtual worlds an unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the World of Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy and Tom Buchanan. Visit the Buchanan’s mansion and explore a reproduction of the Tacoma Little Theatre, walk the Valley of Ashes under the all-seeing eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, spend time in Nick Carraway’s rented summer cottage and peruse the Fitzgerald Gallery.
With readings from the novel before and during the play’s run, and further attractions to be added, Explore the Great Gatsby is the perfect means to discover one of America’s greatest novelists and explore Seanchai library’s extensive offerings on Kitely. Simply log-in to the Seanchai Library’s homeworld on Kitely, and follow the portals!
Corwyn Allen continues a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnificent 1925 novel at Explore The Great Gatsby in Kitely.
In 1922, Nick Carraway arrives in New York to learn about the bond business. He rents a small cottage in West Egg, home of the newly-rich, only to discover the owner of the huge Gothic mansion next door, the deeply mysterious Jay Gatsby, is prone to throwing lavish parties every weekend, to which in seems everyone comes. Everyone it seems, except Nick’s cousin Daisy, who is married to Tom Buchanan. Together they live across the bay in the more fashion East Egg, where the “old money” resides.
Following a visit with them, Nick is slowly drawn into their world, both discovering Tom Buchanan has a mistress who lives in the Valley of Ashes, an industrial area lying between the Eggs and New York city, and finding himself increasingly attracted to the Buchanan’s friend, the beautiful, if cynically minded, Jordan Baker.
Then, one Saturday, Nick finds himself invited to one of Jay Gatsby’s great parties, and is thus drawn into an increasingly deep well of infatuation, lust, and tragedy, witnessing first hand a darker side of the so-called American Dream.
Follow the teleport portal to Explore The Great Gatsby for this unfolding tale.
Gyro Muggins continues reading Roger Zelazny’s 1971 novel which mixes science-fiction and fantasy, the title of which is an homage to Jack Vance.
The story takes place on a tidally locked planet – that is, one whose rotation about its axis precisely matches its orbit around its parent body, thus the same face is always presented to the the parent body (just like our own Moon always presents the same face towards Earth). Given that that parent object in this case is the planet’s Sun, it means that one side of the planet exists in perpetual daylight – and is the seat of science; while the other lingers in perpetual night – and has become the seat of magic.
It is from the latter that the protagonist of the story – Shadowjack – comes. Even among his own kind, he is unusual, for the manner in which he draws upon his power; something which can, in the right circumstances make him exceptionally potent. However, when placed in either complete light or complete darkness, he is almost powerless. Jack’s only friend, Morningstar is doomed to what is effectively eternal punishment unless Jack can cross between the two realms of light and dark, combining his abilities with the power of science. Thus Jack must risk being lost in total light or total darkness in order to to rescue Morningstar. And if he fails, who might rescue him?
Tuesday January 20th, 19:00: A Walk in the Woods
By his own admission, Bill Bryson isn’t the world’s greatest adventurer. This being the case, you’d think he’d have serious misgivings about undertaking this particular “walk in the woods”, as he disarmingly calls it: taking the 3,500 kilometre (2,200 mile) Appalachian Trail – a journey which would take five months to complete.
Travelling with his good friend “Stephen Katz”, the book is both a humorous guide to the trail and a set of serious and insightful comments / discussion on the trail’s history as it winds its way from Georgia (where Bryson was living at the time the book was written in 1998), to Maine. These discussions cover a broad range of subject including the sociology, ecology, trees, plants, animals and people of the states through which the trail passes (Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine).
Join Kayden Oconnell as he continues in Bryson’s footsteps through the pages of this classic.
Wednesday January 21st,19:00: Beggars Day Book Two: The Caged King
Caledonia Skytower continues reading of MJ McGalliard’s second novel, and the sequel to Beggar’s Day Book One: The Beggar Prince.
The Kingdom of Galaway has a law that every ruler must work a year and a day as a commoner; thus were readers introduced, through the first volume, to the kingdom and some of its notable inhabitants, including King Willy, Prince Larry, the scheming Percy, desperate to see himself on the throne, and the chicken-stealing crone Cruith.
Now, in the second volume, Vikings, hidden illnesses, ancient family squabbles and unplanned pregnancy are but a few of the changes in Galaway. Cruith is part of a conspiracy, Willy invents a new wagon, apples seem to be in the mix, while everything seems to revolve around a baby horse. And I haven’t even mentioned King Monaghan.
Intrigued? Then why not hop over to Seanchai library to hear this entertaining tale which, incidentally, is illustrated by one Judith Cullen – aka Caledonia Skytower!
Thursday January 22nd
19:00: Poe’s Children
The legacy of Edgar Allen Poe takes to the stage as Shandon Loring reads from this anthology of horror stories edited by Peter Straub, which brings together tales by some twenty-five of the world’s most talented writers in the genre today.
Poe’s Children showcases stories by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Carroll, Elizabeth Hand, Dan Chaon, Melanie and Steve Rasnic Tem, Stephen King and Straub himself, all of which has been selected by Straub to represent what he thinks is the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades, and which stands as a modern tribute to the Master in its style and narrative while avoiding the formulaic approach so often found within the populist end of the genre.
Join Shandon Loring in a special celebration featuring the works of the Master of the Macabre, Edgar Allan Poe to mark the 206th anniversary of his birth.
12:00: The Great Gatsby, Part 3
Shandon Loring takes up the tale as he continues reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic story.
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Please check with the Seanchai Library SL’s blog for updates and for additions or changes to the week’s schedule. The featured charity for January / February is Project Children, teaching and building peace in Northern Ireland, one child at a time.
The following notes are taken from the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 15th, 2015, and the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, January 16th. A video of the latter is included at the end of the article (my thanks as always to North for recording it and providing it for embedding), and any time stamp contained within the following text refer to both it and the TPV Developer meeting.
Server Deployments – Week 3 Recap
There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday, January 13th.
On Wednesday, January 14th, all three RC channels received the same server maintenance package comprising: a fix for BUG-8002 “Experience Tools Allowed & Blocked experiences are lost with parcel subdivision”; crash mode fixes and avatar-related region crossing code clean-up related to “clean-up and polishing” rather than to performance improvements.
SL Viewer
The Experience Tools RC viewer was updated to version 3.8.0.298091 on January 15th, bringing it up to parity with the current release viewer (the HTTP pipelining release).
[00:15] There is a new maintenance release candidate viewer that is being queued-up for the viewer release channel.
[09:52] The Lab now has both Windows and Mac versions of the viewer building successfully using the new tool chain (which among other things, used Visual Studio 2013 for Windows and xcode 6 for Mac), and may be “pretty close” to achieving the same with Linux, although that is still to be determined.
It is anticipated that project viewers using the new build process will start to appear soon, and the process gradually be applied to RC releases and the viewer release itself, but only after full regression testing has been undertaken to try to ensure there are no hidden issues remaining.
This work does potentially make it easier for the Lab to start producing 64-bit versions of the viewer, but there are currently no detailed plans for them to start doing so at this point in time.
Experience Key Tools
[01:20] The initial release of the Experience Tools is still on the horizon, with the release candidate viewer currently the only RC in the pipeline, and which has no further viewer-side changes waiting to be implemented (which doesn’t automatically mean it will be promoted to release status next). However, the Lab is still working on some back-end issues which must be fixed before the key can be turned and the capabilities formally released.
Group Chat
[01:24] The lab is continuing to push out changes intended to make group chat more robust. While happy with the overall improvements that have been made to performance in terms of reducing the noticeable amounts of group chat lag, the problems to the chat servers locking-up every so often and requiring a restart are still being worked on. Additional testing is continuing, and Oz linden indicates that the Lab aren’t about to give up on getting to the bottom of things.
Z-offset Height Adjustment
Vir Linden: working on the z-offset height solution
[02:52] This is intended to provide a means of on-the-fly adjustments to be made to an avatars height above the ground / objects and which can be used whether the avatar is standing or sitting, without the need to use the current Appearance hover slider. It will work in a manner similar to the old z-offset height adjustment found in some TPVs, and will likely comprise a slider access through the avatar right-click context menu. As well as working for individual avatars, it is thought the capability will also work against thinks like couples poseballs for dancing, although this has yet to be tested.
Vir Linden, who has been working on the project reports that the capability is now to be persistent across logins on a per-account basis (so you will be able to set it for each of your accounts, and have the viewer remember the setting for those accounts, rather than having a global setting in the viewer applicable to all accounts using that viewer).
The viewer code is about to go through internal QA testing with the Lab, and the hope is that it will appear as a project viewer during week 4 (week commencing Monday 19th January). This will be available for testing the capability on Aditi (the beta grid), where a number of regions have been set-up on channel DRTSIM-274 (notably regions Hover1 and Hover2). The project viewer will be released with notes on how to use it, and people will be invited to tes it both on these regions with the necessary server-side support and on regions without the server support (and when moving between the two), with a request that any issues found are reported via the JIRA.
Assuming no major issues are found, the server-side changes are already in the queue for release onto Agni (the main grid), and the viewer code will hopefully rapidly progress to RC status as well.
[05:21] A further server-side update which is forthcoming and will assist with this testing is the avatar attribute testing fix, about which I reported in part 1 of this update.
An artist’s impression of Beagle 2 on Mars (credit: European Space Agency)
In June 2003 the European Space Agency launched a pair of vehicles to Mars. The larger of the two, an orbiter vehicle called Mars Express, is still in operation today, albeit often overlooked by the media in favour of its American cousins also in orbit around the Red Planet. The other vehicle, piggybacking on Mars Express, was a tiny lander (quite literally, being just 39 inches across) called Beagle 2.
Designed to search for signs of life, past or present on Mars, Beagle 2 was the Mission That Almost Never Was, because at the time it was proposed, no-one outside of those wanting to build it, wanted it. And yet, even today, the science package it did eventually take to Mars is one of the most remarkable feats of science engineering put together, with capabilities that will not be repeated until NASA flies their one tonne Mars 2020 mission at the start of the next decade.
Sadly, for all its innovation and despite overcoming the odds to actually fly to Mars, Beagle 2 never achieved its goals; all contact was lost on the very day it was due to land on the Red Planet, December 25th, 2003. What happened to it remained a mystery for twelve years, but on Friday, January 16th, members of the Beagle 2 team were able to reveal that the fate of the plucky little lander was now known.
The Beagle 2 story begins in April 1997, when the European Space Agency held a meeting to discuss the possibility of flying an orbiter mission to Mars in 2003, following the failure of an earlier mission. This new mission would be called “Mars Express”, both in recognition of the exceptionally short lead-time to develop and fly it, even using instruments and systems developed for the failed mission, and for the fact that in 2003, Earth and Mars would be the closest they’ve been for some 60,000 years, allowing anything launched around the middle of that year to reach Mars in a comparatively short time.
Colin Pillinger, the man very much at the centre of Beagle 2, and who brought the mission to the public eye
Professor Colin Pillinger, a planetary scientist and a founder of the Open University’s prestigious Planetary Science Research Institute (since merged with the OU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy), attended the meeting together with his wife Judith, also a planetary scientist. At the time, Professor Pillinger was one of a number of scientists involved in investigating whether or not biogenic features had been discovered in a meteorite found in Antarctica, but which had originated on Mars.
This particular debate was focused on a piece of rock called ALH84001, regarded as one of the oldest pieces of the Solar System, being just over 4 billion years old, and which formed at a time when Mars was likely a warm wet planet. It had been raging for a year with no sign of abating, and Professor Pillinger had already come to the conclusion that one way to settled it would be to put a life sciences package actually on Mars. He realised the proposed Mars Express mission presented the perfect opportunity for doing so, as did his wife. So much so, that by the time they got back to the UK, she had the perfect name for a mission designed to seek out evidence of life on Mars: Beagle 2, named for the vessel commanded by Captain Robert FitzRoy that carried Charles Darwin on his seminal voyage of discovery.
One of the microscopic structures revealed by a scanning electron microscope deep within a fragment of ALH84001 that suggested biogenic origins
Given all of the controversy surrounding ALH84001 and the question of possible microbial life on Mars that dated back to the Viking Lander experiments of the 1990s, you’d think the ESA would jump at the opportunity to put a life sciences mission on Mars. Not so; for one thing, others also saw Mars Express as an opportunity to fly their projects to Mars and were busy lobbying. More to the point, it was held that the 6-year time frame for developing a lander mission from scratch was too short.
However, Colin Pillinger was not one to be deterred. In the UK he brought together a team from academia and industry, including Doctor Mark Sims, who was to prove pivotal in the engineering design of the lander. With many of those involved in the nascent project initially working on it entirely in their own time, Beagle 2 rapidly developed from a series of rough designs “on the backs of beer mats”, to a proposal which, when presented to ESA managers, so impressed them, they provisionally agreed to the idea of flying a lander to Mars – but only if the UK was able to fund it. No money would be forthcoming from ESA.
Dr. Mark Sims of the University of Leicester, who lead the engineering team responsible for Beagle 2, seen with another model of the lander (image: University of Leicester)
Thus began one of the most remarkable public relations exercises in annals of space history, with Beagle 2 becoming a household name in the UK, as Colin Pillinger sought to promote in on television, the radio, through newspaper and magazines, and giving public presentations. Space advocacy groups were rallied to the cause, celebrities were brought in to add their weight to things, Parliament and industry were lobbied and won over. In the end, the entire £44 million (US $70 million) was raised, with 50% coming from the UK government and the rest from the private sector.
Important note: The SL Go service is to be shut down on April 30th, 2015. For more information, please read this report.
OnLive, the providers of the Second Life streaming service, SL Go, which allows users to run Second Life from a low-end PC or Mac or and Android tablet or iPad (using a TPV based on the official SL viewer) or on a low-end PC or Mac using a version of the Firestorm Viewer, have launched an in-world support group for their users.
The idea for such a group was first discussed at the special Firestorm Q&A meeting held in December 2014 following the release of Firestorm on SL Go (see my review of Firestorm on SL Go here). At the time, Dennis Harper, OnLive’s Product Manager for SL Go. indicated the idea was a good one, which he would follow-up back at the office.
On Friday, January 16th, Dennis contacted me in-world during the Third-Party Developer Meeting to let me know the group is now up and running, and open to anyone to join.
The SL Go Support Group is intended to provide in-world support for users of the service
If you are an SL Go user, and which to join the group, you will find it listed as SL Go by OnLive using the viewer’s search, or you can view the web profile for the group. A number of Firestorm support staff are helping with providing cover within the group, so enquiries on either the SL Go SL Viewer (SLV) and Firestorm for SL Go viewers can be asked through it.
In passing the details to me, Dennis said, “It’s been quite a ride for us since the Firestorm release, and we’re very pleased to be able to offer in-world support to our users as a part of our growing commitment to Second Life.”
Important note: The SL Go service is to be shut down on April 30th, 2015. For more information, please read 
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 