Newly opened as of Saturday, June 4th, is Gates of Melancholy, the latest regions design by photographer shelly70, and a further piece in her Gates series (see my article on Gates of Memories for a sample of her work cloaked in winter). And like her previous designs, Gates of Melancholy is a visual feast.
“This sim which is based on and inspired from the life and work of the famous American painter Andrew Wyeth,” Shelly says of the design, “is created to emulate and elicit the feel in [his] watercolour paintings.”
A realist painter, Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) predominantly focused on his local landscape and the people within it, presenting America and the world with a grim, flinty, and often starchily sentimental view of New England. His was a world of empty beaches, windswept, desiccated fields, wooden buildings grey with age, their frames like brittle parchment, and locals with faces as craggy as many a coastal cliff, couple with evocative studies of families and friends. There is, as Shelly states in her introductory notes, a stark nostalgia and melancholy evident in his work, and she has striven to recreate that feeling with the look and feel of the region.
This is a rugged, coastal landscape from which wood-framed outbuildings and chapels rise, wood parched and faded under the unrelenting influence of coastal weather, and where the farmhouses carry a careworn look. The lands around them is a mix of open fields, craggy scarps and rises, where the trees are often bent and crooked as with great age, shapes borne of long years resisting the prevailing winds. The grass is mostly short and tufted, often with the bald, rocky land beneath it showing through here and there before the land abrupt falls way by scarp or cliff. Over all of this, an ochre sun hands in an ochre sky, casting the landscape into a sombre twilight.
It is, quite simply, breath-taking – although I admittedly opted for an alternative Windlight when capturing the images shown here; there is so much that is evocative of Wyeth’s work. Two examples of this came to me in the form of a view up a grassy slope towards distance farm buildings which immediately suggested Christina’s World, albeit without the central character, whilst a rowing boat draw up onto the grass immediately put me in mind of Teel’s Island, Maine.
Nor is this any empty landscape – there are signs of life everywhere, within the barns, in the houses, and outside under the awnings of little market-like stalls, all offering views and scenes ready to capture the eye and camera. Many of the the building offer the opportunity to sit and snuggle or chat, adding to the desire to visit and tarry.
Complemented by an audio stream Shelly has taken pains to put together, as well as ambient local sounds, Gates of Melancholy, like Wyeth’s paintings, is not something simply to be seen; it is a place to be experienced and savoured for all of its stark beauty and realism. It is a place, I’ve little doubt, that were his spirit ever to visit, it would recognise and approve.
It’s time to kick-off a week 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, June 5th
13:30: Tea Time with The Jungle Book
Bryn Taleweaver presents selections from Rudyard Kipling’s great adventure.
Trolly Trollop, Kayden Oconnell, and Caledonia Skytower read 100-word drabbles and poems inspired by the current exhibition of art on display at Holly Kai Park, including composition by Rosedrop Rust.
Please join the Seanchai Library team and members of Holly Kai Park, and take the opportunity to hear stories and poems, and see the art that inspired them. Featuring the work of Ceakay Ballyhoo, Eleseren Brianna, JudiLynn India, Lantana Silverweb, Slatan Dryke and SisterButta.
Monday June 6th, 19:00: The Alchemyst (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #1)
Faerie Maven-Pralou reads Michael Scott’s mystical novel.
According to the records, Nicholas Flamel was born in Paris on 28 September 1330 and died in 1418. Only his tomb has forever lain empty, because Nicholas Flamel is the greatest Alchemyst of all time. Entrusted with the care of the Codex – also known as the Book of Abraham the Mage – Flamel found within it the secret of eternal life.
But there is much else in the Codex which, if used by the wrong minds, could very well bring about the end of the world. So, for 700 years, Nicholas Flamel has guarded the Book, keeping it from all those who might otherwise seek to abuse its secrets.
Until John Dee steals it. And John Dee has the desire to unlock the Codex and bring about the very cataclysm Flamel has always feared. Without the book, he and his wife, Perenelle, will age and die, whilst with the book, Dee can thwart all attempts to recover it.
Enter 15-year-old twins, Josh and Sophie Newman. Prophecy has foretold of a time when the world would be threatened – and of the two youngsters gifted with extraordinary powers who will save it. Flamel recognises the Newman twins as those youngsters, and sets out to awaken their magical talents. So it is that Josh and Sophie find themselves cast into the middle of the greatest tale – the greatest confrontation – of all time.
Tuesday June 7th, 19:00: When Sisterhood was in Flower
The writings of Florence King return to Seanchai Library as Trolley Trollop continues reading When Sisterhood was in Flower (1982),
Isabel, a conservative southern writer living in Boston, finds her life taking a number of strange turns. After an explosion brings down the wall of her apartment she is forced to share her living space with her neighbour, an ardent, humourless feminist called Polly Bradshaw. Then, between them, they take in nutty Gloria, who is fixated with all things medieval, including the lute, which she constantly plays, and the death of Edward II.
Things start unravelling further when Polly inherits a house in California, and unilaterally decides they’ll form a self-sufficient feminist commune there. Along the way, they collect Agnes, who is trying to escape her survivalist husband, and Martha, a widow whose estranged husband died after an unfortunate incident with an inflatable rubber doll.
Then Isabel has the opportunity to earn a living as a writer … of pornography …
Wednesday June 8th 19:00: Raymie Nightingale
Caledonia Skytower reads Kate DiCamillo ‘s 2016 children’s story.
What do you do when your father takes off with a dental hygienist? Be upset? Miss him? Rail against him? Or hatch a plan to get him to come home?
Raymie Clarke decides on the latter course of action. Dad needs to come home, and it’s down to her to see that he does – and that means winning the Little Miss Central Florida Tyre contest. Doing so will get her name and picture in the papers, which are sure to be read by her father, prompting his return.
Except… In order to win the contest, Raymie must do good deeds and learn the graceful art of baton twirling. Worse, she has to go up against the nauseating, show-business steeped Louisiana Elefante, who has fainting for effect down to an art form. Then there is Beverly Tapinski, who has entered the contest not to win it, but to wreck it for everyone else. So Raymie faces a mountain of challenges she must overcome.
Then fate plays a hand, circumstance and events bringing the three girls together in an unlikely friendship in which each has a role to place in supporting and aiding the others.
Thursday, June 9th 19:00 Special VIP event at the University of Washington The Lounge at 221B Baker Street: A Scandal in Bohemia
Join Corwyn Allen, Kayden Oconnell, and Caledonia Skytower in celebrating the re-opening of Baker Street and the lounge at 221B Baker Street, last seen at Seanchai Library’s Crazy Eights LEA installation, and now relocated for the Summer at the University of Washington;’s
iLearn Lab.
“This photograph” by Sidney Paget, July 1891 (wikimedia)
To mark the event, Corwyn, Cale and Kayden present one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most well-liked mysteries to have engaged his Great Detective. It first appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1891, before going on to be the first story in the 1982 collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was also the first of Doyle’s detective series to be illustrated by Sidney Paget. I’m of course talking about A Scandal in Bohemia.
In March 1888, Dr. John Watson, married and with his own medical practice is returning home when, on a whim, he drops in at 221B Baker Street to see Holmes. No sooner has Watson arrived, than Holmes demonstrates some of his incredible deductive powers – which are shortly given greater exercise when, after receiving his expected guest, who arrives during the reunion, Holmes pronounces him to be not “Count Von Kramm” as he purports, but rather Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and the hereditary King of Bohemia.
Admitting Holmes has correctly identified him, the king reveals he is seeking Holmes’ assistance in a matter of some delicacy. It revolves around a liaison he had five years’ previously with an American opera singer, Irene Adler, and which could now threaten his upcoming marriage to a Scandinavian princess. Thus Sherlock Holmes comes to pit his wits against an adversary he will forever only refer to as “the Woman” …
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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 May / June is Habitat for Humanity, with a vision of a world where everyone has a decent place to live – a safe and clean place to call home.
Windlight Magazine, the award-winning arts magazine and brand, is celebrating its first anniversary in June.
To mark the passing of a year of outstanding coverage and support of the the arts in Second Life, Windlight has commissioned the award-winning SCALA™ fashion agency to bring you fashion art on a chromatic runway canvas. The event will mark the start of a series of summer celebratory events by Windlight.
AChromatic: Behind the Collection sees 14 of Second Life’s most innovative fashion designers showcase their visions of bold shapes and colour within a monochrome setting. Immediately after the show, the AChromatic Vaults will be open within the boutique area at Windlight’s home region, presenting exclusive items from the show to shoppers through until Saturday, June 18th, complete with a LookBook commemorating the event.
Also following the main show, there will be a live performance by Christopher Quan, also at Windlight Magazine’s home region.
The brands participating in the event are: Alpha Tribe, Ghee, Jumo, Letituier, Lyrical Bizarre, Prey, Prism, Rapture, Rayne Couture, Ricielli, Vero Modero, Virtual Diva, Wicca’s Wardrobe and Zibska.
The first round of the SL13B Music Fest Auditions, held in Bay City
Friday, June 3rd saw the first round of auditions take place for the SL13B Music Fest. The event saw Linden staffers Xiola, Torley, Rider and Simon join music fans and local community members in gathering at an outdoor stage in Bay City to hear some of those who applied for the auditions (see my blog post on the auditions announcement).
Held between 12:00 noon and 2:00pm, as originally scheduled, the event venue hadn’t been advertised at the time of the original announcement, although SL residents were invited to attend as members of the audience. There didn’t appear to by any follow-up announcement on the selected venue (at least, none that I saw), and I only found out about it by dint of perusing the Destination Guide out of curiosity given there had been no update to the original official blog post, some 20 minutes after the event had started!
Xiola (to the front left) dances while Simon Linden (seated, front centre in his trademark top hat) listens, at the first round of the Music Fest auditions
Nevertheless, those who did get the news and had hopped along to the event were all enjoying themselves (Xiola was bopping along nicely!), with folks taking the opportunity to join the judging panel seated in deck chairs, or simply standing in the open field and showing their appreciation for the acts.
If you’re interested in attending the second round of auditions as a member of the audience, you can do so from 18:00 through 20:00 SLT on Saturday, June 4th, and the same venue. The music fest itself will form a part of the upcoming SL13B celebrations later this month.
The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer (TPVD) meeting held on Friday, June 3rd, 2016. A video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this report, my thanks as always to North for supplying it. Time stamps in the text relate to this recording.
Server Deployments
As always, for the latest information, please refer to the server deployment thread.
On Tuesday, May 31st, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the same server maintenance package previously deployed to all three RC channels, which included a server crash fix.
On Wednesday, June 1st, all the RC channels were updated with a new server maintenance package, comprising the addition of mnemonic names to be used in LSL scripts when attaching to the new attachment points on the Bento skeleton extensions and minor internal changes.
The next RC deployment, scheduled for Wednesday, June 8th will including further anti-griefing measures, one of which will be if you try to rez a group of coalesced objects which between them have more the 10,000 items within their contents, the rezzing will fail on regions on the RC channels once this update has been deployed.
SL Viewer
Release Candidates
[00:45] there are currently two RC viewers in the release channel:
Maintenance RC viewer, version 4.0.6.315551, dated May 23rd
Inventory Message RC viewer, version 4.0.6.315555, dated May 23rd – removal of deprecated and unused UDP inventory messaging mechanisms from the viewer
[01:05] The Lab is hoping that TPVs will be picking-up the changes on the Inventory Message RC viewer ASAP, as they are hoping to be able to deprecate and removed the back-end support for the old messaging mechanisms completely as well, so that all inventory operations will go via AIS (Advanced Inventory System).
This will provide the Lab with a single point of enforcement for things like which folders in inventory are mandatory and cannot be deleted; which folders cannot be moved inside other folders, etc), in order to help eliminate points of potential inventory issues users may experience.
There are concerns over remaining bugs within the AIS system.
[12:14-17:20] BUG-9506, for example, remains open, although a fix which may help in part with in, relating to how AIS operations are threaded in the viewer, in the current Maintenance RC release, together with fixes for both BUG-10391 and BUG-11929. However, it may be that to deal specifically with the likes of BUG-9506, further tests are to be carried out to see if it still occurs on in the Inventory Message RC viewer, and if so, it may be that it might be merged with the Maintenance RC to see if issues can be resolved that way. The Lab will also re-examine what fixes have been recently made and where they reside within the viewer development pipeline.
Oculus Rift Project Viewer
[05:54] The Lab is still working on the Oculus Rift project viewer, but there are still assorted bugs to be dealt with. The time frame for this project viewer, which will support the latest SDKs and the consumer version of the headset, appearing remains as “pretty soon”.
64-bit Viewer Versions
[24:00] Work on the 64-bit versions of the official viewer is still “on hold”.
QuickTime Replacement
[24:09] A version of the viewer without any QuickTime support may be appearing in the next couple of weeks. This is as a result of Apple deprecating QuickTime for Windows without offering patches for a couple of potentially serious vulnerabilities, leading to the recommendation that Windows users uninstall QuickTime. As a result of this, the Lab has decided to completely replace QuickTime across all flavours of viewer. When made available, it will likely be called the Project VLC viewer, as some of the media handling will be through libVLC
Project Bento
With the move of Bento to the main grid, Bento User Group meetings will now take place at the Hippotropolis Campfire Circle at 13:00 SLT on Thursdays. Unfortunately, I was unable to make the meeting on Thursday, June 2nd, so there is no dedicated report in this blog for this week.
The male and female avatar skeletons have also been updated to support the most recent changes to Bento, and can be downloaded from the Bento Testing wiki page.
Work is continuing on bugs and issues, such as BUG-11538 (“Front legs crossing on Bento Mesh quad(animal) avatars”), and while new appearance shape sliders have been considered out-of-scope for the current iteration of Bento, issues have been raised with scaling limb sizes when trying to produce avatar add-on, rather than full avatars, which may in fact be in part solved through the use of a set of generic sliders. Further discussion on these ideas will likely come through the Bento forum thread, and potentially at the in-world meetings.
[05:15] Regardless of thoughts on slider sets and overall project scope, Bento will be progressing at its own pace, rather than trying to meet any specific deadline. There are a number of known issues still to be addressed, and it is anticipated that further issues are likely to be reported now Bento is available for more widespread testing.
Other Items
TLS 1.2
18:25] As per a blog post from the Lab, which I also reported here, users are being advised to update (if necessary) their web browser and their SL viewer to a version that supports TLS 1.2 by June 15th, 2016. After that date, any web browser or viewer that does not should TLS 1.2 will no longer be able to access Second Life cashier services to send, receive, or exchange L$.
The change is apart of the Lab’s efforts to improve its compliance needs for handling money, but some confusion has remained over exactly what will be affected in terms of L$ transactions, which still persists around matters of in-world purchases. The confusion prompted Oz Linden to comment during this meeting:
I believe that it will affect being able to purchase items in-world and to send and receive Linden dollars to other avatars, because it’s all interactions with the cashier.
So again, if you are using an older version of the viewer, it is essential you check to ensure it is TLS 1.2 complaint before June 15th.
To do this, use the viewer’s built-in web browser to visit How’s My SSL? and check the Version information displayed in the top left of the page. You may also wish to check your web browser as well, if you are using an older version of a browser and wish to ensure you can continue to make SL Marketplace transactions, etc. However, do be aware that some ad blockers can prevent the TLS 1.2 checks performing correctly.
In order to further confirm what may “break” as a result of this change, it has been suggested the Lab enable some form of testing on Aditi. This will be looked into.
“Feature Surprise”
[6:35] A further hint of an upcoming “feature surprise” was given at the meeting. I’m assuming this is actually the Visual Outfits Browser, designed to provide a means by which users can store and browse images associated with their outfits in inventory, simplifying the act of identifying an outfit prior to wearing it.
Just over the water from her Snuggles brand stores in Second Life, Teagan Parnas has created a little park open to the public to enjoy. Snuggles Forest, occupying a Homestead region, offers the chance for visitors to roam an undulating landscape and dance, sit, share time on the beaches, explore and – as them name might suggest – snuggle.
“Forest” is perhaps too broad a term for the region – there are trees for sure, but these are more woodland in nature and placement, rather than “forest”. So there is no need to fear you’ll be fighting through undergrowth and struggling to see things; the paths are all well-marked, and the sunshine falls as much on open spaces as it does on leafy canopies.
For those wishing to get to places quickly, the landing point offers a TP board – but setting out on shank’s pony is by far the best option. From the landing point on the north side of the region, visitors can head east or west to the Sunrise or Sunset Beach, or head inland and up the central hills, where there are places to sit or enjoy yoga.
The paths themselves lead right around the island, so whether you head east or west, you’ll find your way to most points, and there are plenty of diversions along the way, including the odd curio or two – such as the rock house nestled between the hunched shoulders of the humpbacked hills. There’s even a Norman church sitting in one corner of the region which, in a bit of a Las Vegas twist, offers automated weddings, complete with personalised certificates, for those who want the efficiency of a DIY ceremony!
For those seeking a place to wander for a while, with lots of little open and secluded places to sit, snuggle and / or dance, Snuggles Forest offers a pleasing location for exploration and relaxation, and a fair few points for photography.
Gates of Melancholy – click any image for full size
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 