Originally a religious festival, Mardi Gras (“fat Tuesday”), refers to events of the Carnival celebrations, beginning on or after the Christian feasts of the Epiphany (Three King’s Day) and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday.
This year Mardi Gras falls on February 9th, and Windlight Magazine has partnered with Riel Estates to help Second Life residents get into the party / festival mood with a photography challenge offering a total prize pool of L$ 5,000.
All you have to do is pay a visit to Riel Estate’s St. John’s Parish, where you can find old New Orleans circa 1916, and take your photos! Up to three pictures per person can be submitted to the official Flickr Group to be entered into the challenge.
On offer are three prizes to the lucky winners, who will be selected by an independent panel, who will select the winning entries based on originality, creativity, technique, incorporation of your selected location and adherence to the challenge guidelines. The prizes are:
1st Place: L$2,500 plus a double page ad in Windlight Magazine
When posting your photos please use the following naming convention: Mardi Gras Photo Challenge – Photo #1-Your SL Name (Do not use display names). Add a #2 or a #3 for the additional photos you wish to submit
Be new and original. You can add the photo to other groups (please do respect the covenant of any club or venue, and make sure you obtain the permission of the venue owner to use their location in your submissions)
Nudity or adult behaviour is not allowed
Editing via Photoshop, Gimp, or any other graphics tools is permitted.
All entries must be submitted by midnight, Friday, February 5th, 2016, and the Flickr date and time stamps will be used to assess whether or not entries meet this criteria, so check your time zones. Winners will be announced on Tuesday, February 9th, 2016.
This summary is published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
HTTP updates and Vivox RC viewer updated to version 4.0.2.310097 on January 19 – combines the Project Azumarill RC and Vivox Voice RC updates into a single viewer (download and release notes)
Quick Graphics RC viewer updated to version 4.0.2.310127 on January 20 – provides the new Avatar Complexity options and the new graphics preset capabilities for setting, saving and restoring graphic settings for use in difference environments / circumstances (download and release notes)
Project viewers:
Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions) version 5.0.0.310099 released on January 20 – adds 90+ bones to the existing avatar skeleton (download and release notes).
Lab Chat #2, January 21st, 2016 – Jo Yardley, Ebbe Altberg and Saffia Widdershins
Update Wednesday, January 27th: The official Lab Chat #2 video is now on-line, and is embedded at the end of this article.
Thursday, January 21st saw the second in a series of discussions called Lab Chat, billed as “an opportunity for you to ask Lindens your questions during a live taping that will be recorded and archived for everyone to view.”
As with the first show, the session featured the Lab’s CEO, Ebbe Altberg in his alter ego of Ebbe Linden. In preparation for the recording, Second Life users were invited to ask questions about the Lab, Second Life, “Project Sansar”, etc on a forum thread.
Over 80 questions were asked, all of which were reviewed by the Lab Chat production team, and from which the list of question to put to Ebbe was drawn. The questions select were those the production team thought would be of most interest to the attending audience, or represented those questions which were asked multiple times by different people.
The following pages offer a transcript of the show’s recording session, which has been split into three parts:
Those questions and answers those related to Second Life
Those focused more on Project Sansar
Additional questions & audience Q&A.
The first two sections are presented in chronological order – as the questions were asked during the recording of the show. The additional questions have been grouped together (where possible) by subject matter, for ease of reference.
The Quick Links below will take you directly to each of these three sections, or to any of the individual discussion points within them. Each question / answer includes an audio extract of that question and response for those who wish to listen rather than read.
Note: this is not a transcript of the entire recording session. The focus is on the questions asked and responses given. Also, the audio extracts are from a recording which was cleaned-up following the show to remove repetitions, pauses, trailing comments which otherwise break the flow / context of replies. However, no attempt has been made to editorialise or in any way alter the context of any response given to questions.
Don Quixote – part of the upcoming Seanchai Library Crazy Eights series. See below for a preview
It’s time to kick-off a week year of story-telling in voice, brought to our virtual lives by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s Second Life home at Bradley University, unless otherwise indicated.
Sunday, January 24th, 15:00: Selections from Flight to Brassbright
Caledonia Skytower read from Lori Alden Holuta’s 2015 novel at a special session at SL Goth Magazine’s steampunk themed TIMEKILLER II Festival.
In 1895, Constance is orphaned at the age of 12, she finds the local authorities ready to impose their own kind of upbringing on her previously somewhat wild life – a part of which involved nightly break-ins at the local library so she could lose herself in the books and stories there. Determined not to let things be so, she runs away to – where else? The place everyone in fiction runs to: the circus.
But six years on, and a young woman, Constance finds the circus life draining, and longs to be free from it. An escape plan is hatched, and as a free woman, she wanders the landscape of Industralia, home to creative eccentrics, brilliantly cracked inventors, dazed automatons and more. Here are kindred spirits aplenty. As she wanders from town to town, Constance finds herself making friends and caught in an unfolding story as she seeks a place she can final call home.
Monday January 25th, 19:00: Snow Crash
We all know Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as one of the inspirations behind Second Life. Now Gyro Muggins concludes his reading of this modern classic.
In the 21st Century, Los Angeles is no longer a part of the United States, but is instead run by a variety of corporate and other factions, which much of the city divided into sovereign enclaves. Mercenary forces via with private security firms; drugs and the private vehicle reign supreme and where hyper-inflation is rampant.
Within this strange and complex world exists the Metaverse, an omnipresent 3D “Internet of everything” in which people can roam as avatars. It is in this world that the aptly named Hiro Protagonist (and former pizza delivery driver) operates as a sword-welding heroic warrior and bounces between the virtual and physical worlds as the self-styled “last of the freelance hackers.”
However, when his friend and fellow-hacker Da5id, falls victim to the mysterious new drug Snow Crash, which exists in the virtual world as a computer virus capable of infecting machines connected to the Metaverse and in the physical world as a viral infection which attacks the central nervous system, Hiro sets out to learn the truth of what is going on. Working with his virtual business partner, the 15-year-old Y.T., Hiro digs into the truth behind Snow Crash, leading him (and Y.T.) to the doors of fibre-optics monopolist L. Bob Rife and his acolytes and minions, including the highly dangerous Raven.
Tuesday January 26th 19:00: Pearl
Faerie Maven-Pralou continue her reading of the first book in Lisa Pinkham’s the Doll Collection series.
Everything changes for Addy on her 12th birthday, when she receives a mysterious gift of a collection of dolls and an opal necklace imbued with magical powers.
Soon, Addy finds herself transported to a beach where she meets a mermaid, Pearl, and where she can swim with and talk to underwater fairies and enjoy the company of min-reading dolphins.
But all is not as safe as it seems; when Pearl vanishes and Addy’s magic necklace is stolen, Addy is left with no way home and without a friend – and she must confront the thief on her own, trusting that the magic which resides in her is enough to put things to rights.
Wednesday, January 27th, 19:00: Silence of the Loons
While writers from the southern American states turn to tales of crime, inevitably the broiling heat of humid summer days is an ever-present backdrop. But when the stories of criminals and their ways are moved northwards to Minnesota, it is the brutal cold of hard winters which offers a frame for many of the tales.
In this collection, 13 of the state’s top crime writers present a series of tales of mystery, all of which are linked by the same 8 clues, which lead the reader through their dark twists.
Join Kayden Oconnell as he reads from this fascinating anthology.
Thursday, January 28th: 19:00 Time Travel Stories
With Shandon Loring – Also to be presented at Seanchai Kitely and Seanchai InWorldz. Check session post during the week for specific grid locations).
This week A Gun for a Dinosaur from Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp.
Reginald Rivers runs a safari business. Not just any safari business, mark you. His is of the time-travelling variety, and his clients are after a particular game: dinosaurs. It’s obviously a dangerous business, and not suitable for any client who comes along, whether or not they can afford the price.
Nor are they helped when one client’s arrogance leads to the death of another, causing the surviving client to determine he must kill Rivers – and must do so in the past. In doing so, the client breaks one of the rules under which the machine used to carry Rivers and his safaris into the past must operate, with devastating results.
Seanchai Library at LEA Starting Sunday, January 31st
Sunday, January 31st will see Seanchai Library open the Crazy Eights, a region offering six different storytelling venues, all connected by the Story Forest. Here, over the coming months, Seanchai library will be presenting and hosting a range of special story telling events and readings from classic literature and series.
I’ll be previewing Crazy Eights in full in due course; but here is a foretaste of what is to come:
Sunday, January 31st, 13:30: Don Quixote – Words and Images: Derry McMahon and Bear Silvershade present selections from Miguel de Cervantes’s classic and much-loved tale at the Crazy Eights Eastern Meadow. Accompanying the reading will be Derry’s own images from her 2014 Fine Arts Tour exhibition, Don Quixote, which I reviewed at the time. Guests are invited to sit beneath the windmill and listen to the tales of The Gentleman of La Mancha, and wander among Derry’s images, several of which were not included as a part of the 2014 exhibition.
Starting Thursday, February 4th, 19;00 – Featured Stories: Shandon Loring, Seanchai Library’s Chief Storyteller, opens this series reading from Tracey Garvis Graves’ New York Times bestseller On The Island, within a 360-degree environment Shandon has created, inspired by Graves’ work, filled with links and scripted surprises.
Starting Sunday, February 7th, 13:30 – Tea Time at Baker Street: Seanchai Library’s ever-popular visits to the rooms of 221B Baker Street commence a special run at Crazy Eights with stories from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, starting with the first story in that collection, The Empty House. The Baker Street area of Crazy Eights includes the Holmes & Watson Gallery, a book shop with links to Conan Doyle’s canon, and references to other Holmesian locations around the grid.
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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 Heifer International, working with communities to end world hunger and poverty and to care for the Earth.
I adore Elicio Ember’s work. As a craftsman of works of fantasy, he is one of Second life’s finest, as anyone who has had the delight and pleasure of seeing his work at Fantasy Faire over the years will know.
His in-world store of Cerridwen’s Cauldron is a stunning delight as well, and it is easy to spend a fair amount of time there, simply wandering, climbing the Dream Tower, riding a dragon around the towers, spires and outcrops of rocks and over the gardens, or walking its halls and chambers.
It’s been a while since I’ve actually written about Elicio’s home region, so when he recently informed me he was starting work and redeveloping the ground level (on which I blogged about far, far back in the mists of 2012), I was keen to see what he had done, although time played a little against me. So when he IM’d me to say he was making some additional changes and sent me an invite and Landmark to see things for myself, I knew I’d had to make up for lost time and hop over with Caitlyn to see.
The Landmark Elicio sent me when extending his invitation for us to visit, delivered us directly to the Emerald Lounge. This lies within a huge cavern, seemingly hewn from the living rock, and through which water gently glides while crystal lamps hang from high ceilings.
Here, in a place I personally feel is best seen under night-time lighting, is a bar serving wines and ale and slices of delicious fruit, a space paved by great hexagonal blocks open to dancers before it. Nearby, on the dusty sand close to the entrance to the cavern, or just across the shallow waters, can be found places to sit, softly lit by the glow of crystals and some of Elicio’s beautiful plants.
Steps lead the way upwards from the waters inside the cavern, allowing the visitor to go by glass-topped walkways and platforms up to the plateau overhead, revealing the incredible beauty of this island. The plateau sits like a table on stout rocky legs carved by the sea and sheltering the cavern within their midst, while beaches, exotic plants and an ornate water temple gathered around their feet, while water tumbles from above.
Atop the plateau lies a beautiful realm of water, light, plants and open-sided structures with a distinctly elven feel to them. Walk through the fluorescent plants at your feet, and slivers of phosphor drift into the air around you; walk under the great natural arch of a gigantic tree of life and witness the huge decorated skull of a long-dead dragon; climb the stairs to a broad hexagonal platform and find seating and refreshments awaiting you. Everywhere you turn, there is something waiting to be discovered.
This is a place to be explored with local sounds enabled and your speakers / headset active. Like many regions throughout Second Life, Cerridwen’s Cauldron has an ambient sound scape, one beautifully crafted to add considerable depth to any exploration over the plateau and through the spaces beneath. It is one which really should be experienced in it fullest when walking through the fluorescent grasses or wading the shallow waters or standing beneath the slowly turning fae orb.
For those who prefer, a teleport system is available to scoot you around various locations – and up to and around Elicio’s store; but to use it exclusively in favour of exploring on foot would, both Caitlyn and I agreed, be a mistake.
Cerridwen’s Cauldron has always been a magical, mystical place of harmony and beauty, and this latest design at ground level further reflects this fact. Indeed, looking at it from a distance sitting above the sea, it offers a harmonious echo of the store itself as the latter floats in the sky atop its own islands, and extends beneath them with its stairways and stone halls, just as the garden sit atop their rock plateau and the cavern of the Emerald lounge sits beneath them.
On Tuesday, January 19th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server update package previously deployed to the three RC channel. This comprises:
Feature Request: llGetObjectDetails() constant OBJECT_TOTAL_INVENTORY_COUNT – when targeting an object, OBJECT_TOTAL_INVENTORY_COUNT will return the total of all inventory types in each link of the linkset. See BUG-10575 for further details
Feature Request: llGetObjectDetails() constant OBJECT_PRIM_COUNT – provides a means to get a worn attachment’s prim count (rather than just returning 0). See BUG-10646 for further details.
Simulator crash fixes.
On Thursday, January 21st, three RC channels received a new server maintenance package comprising a simulator crash fix and a further feature request: llGetObjectDetails() functionality to get the parent_id of any task in the region (OBJECT_REZZER_KEY). This returns the parent_id of any task in the region. If the object came from an object rezzer it returns the ID of the parent object, while If it was rezzed by an avatar, it returns the agent ID of the avatar. The function only works for those objects rezzed in-world after the code deployment (objects in-world prior to deployment will return NULL_KEY).
SL Viewer
The HTTP updates Vivox RC viewer updated to version 4.0.2.310097 on January 19th, while January 20th saw the Quick Graphics RC viewer updated to version 4.0.2.310127, and the Project Bento (avatar skeleton extensions) viewer updated to version 5.0.0.310099.
Project Bento
I missed the greater part of the Project Bento meeting on Thursday, January 21st, so my apologies for not having a full report.
Cathy Foil demonstrates what can happen when an avatar using a mesh incorporating the new Bento bones deforms …
Deformed Avatars: The lab is still asking for examples of avatars deforming as a result of using a mesh uploaded with different joint positions. If people have examples, Vir Linden requests that both the .DAE file and a copy of the mesh model are forwarded to him so that the Lab can test items for themselves.
Elizabeth Jarvinen (polysail), also points to some discussion on the Bento forum threat on how to possibly correct the problem when it occurs. see: here, here and here).
.BVH and .ANIM uploaders: It was noted at the meeting that the .BVH and .ANIM uploader have different capabilities. The .BVH uplaoder is viewed as being not as robust as the .ANIM uploader, although it does include optimisations for animations which are not present in the .ANIM uploader. Oz Linden suggested that it would be nice if both uploaders shared the same level of robustness / capabilities.
Vir pointed out that the .BVH uploader has various optimisations which are not present for .ANIM uploads. So how parity between the two is achieved is unclear. fore example:
Is the optimisation code removed from the .BVM uploader or added to the .ANIM uploader?
Are the updates server-side, or should they be viewer-side, with the ability to preview animations prior to final upload to ensure they are playing correctly?
It is also open to question whether any such work, were it to be undertaken, would form a part of this initial Bento project.
Bento Bone Survey
I was absent (as noted) when this particular item was discussed, so I may have the details wrong. However, it appears that, as previously reported, the Lab are going to put out a survey asking for creators and animators to indicated their preferred additional bones out of those which have been suggested. The survey is liable to be published via the Bento forum and / or the Bento user group wiki page.
World Makers Filming
There will be a final Bento filming session for the upcoming Drax Files World Makers special on Monday, February 1st. Creators and animators who have examples of content using the Bento skeleton extensions and are willing to take part in the filing should contact Draxtor Despres in-world for further details.
Aditi Inventory Syncing
The code for merging main (Agni) inventories into beta (Aditi) grid inventories is still subject to final testing before being deployed to Aditi. As previously noted in these updates, when this does happen, it will mean that logging-in to Aditi will trigger an automatic merge of your Agni inventory with your Aditi inventory as a part of an overnight (PDT) process. This means that items unique to people’s inventories on Aditi will no longer be lost as a result of their Aditi inventory being overwritten by their Agni inventory (as is currently the case). Once deployed, this update also means that a password change will no longer trigger an inventory sync between the two grids.
Suggestions have been put forward that rather than merging Agni inventory directly into the Aditi inventory structure, the incoming Agni items are delivered to a new top-level folder (perhaps called “Agni” or “Main Grid”) during the merge process, so that people can easily distinguish between unique versions of items they’ve been editing on both Aditi and Agni.
Adobe Flash on CEF Viewers
As has been covered in this blog and others, the Second Life viewer, version 4.0.0+, and all v3 TPVs using that code now makes use of the Chromium Embedded Framework for supporting rich media, including Adobe Flash.
However, for the latter to work with the viewer, it requires a specific version of Flash to be installed on your system. For those interested, Jeremy Linden has provided a knowledge base article on what needs to be installed for the official viewer, and how. With thanks to Willow Wilder for the pointer.
Originally a religious festival, Mardi Gras (“fat Tuesday”), refers to events of the Carnival celebrations, beginning on or after the Christian feasts of the Epiphany (Three King’s Day) and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 