A Petrovsky Flux, the stunning, ever-changing cluster of devices that would assemble themselves and grow almost organically, only to blow apart and rebuild themselves over and over again, taking on a new form each time – has gone from Second Life.
Designed by Cutea Benelli and blotto Epsilon, the installation had, since 2010, been curated by the University of Kansas at their Spencer Art Museum region in SL, where it had over the years been a popular draw. However, at a time when eyes were all on the opening of the Horizons regions (see here) and return of Mont Saint Michel to Second Life in November 2016 (see here), the Spencer Museum of Art region quietly slipped away from Second Life, pretty much unnoticed.
It wasn’t until Chantal Harvey contacted me about the possible status of the Spencer Art Museum region that I found out something may had changed. “I’ve been trying to get there for weeks now,” she informed me via IM, “I was filming there. but it seems it is gone, do you know?”
A quick check on the map confirmed the region had indeed gone from the grid, and a check through Tyche Shepherd’s excellent Grid Survey summaries showed it had been removed from the grid during the week ending Sunday, November 13th, 2016.
It’s not clear if the removal is permanent or not – as I reported in 2014, the region came close to vanishing from Second Life, due to something of a miscommunication involving the Spencer Art Museum, the University of Kansas and the artists. As a result of that situation, I’ve written to Stephen Goddard, the Spencer’s Associate Director/Senior Curator of Prints & Drawings. He was responsible for the Museum’s presence in Second Life, so hopefully, he can shed some light on what has happened. Should he reply, I’ll offer and update.
In the meantime, here’s Toxic Menges’ 2010 machinima of A Petrovsky Flux to remind us of this fabulous build.
Since December of 1843, Charles Dickens’ “Ghostly little book”, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, has never fallen out of favour, or been out of print. Endlessly adapted, its journey of redemption has broad appeal for its secular focus, rather than sacred invocation.
– Caledonia Skytower
These are the words Cale uses to introduce The Dickens Project SL for 2016, and they are a fitting way of opening this preview for what has – very rightly, in my opinion – become a firm Staple of the Second Life Christmas experience – and if you haven’t shared in it yourself, I strongly urge you to do so this year.
Truth be told, a Christmas Carol has always been a part of Seanchai Library’s calendar from the year it was founded. However in 2012, and coinciding with the Dickens Bicentenary Year, Seanchai took the step from reading the story to presenting it in a 360-degree immersive environment designed to visually capture the essence of the novel, within individual staves (chapters) read by Seanchai volunteers over the course of several days, with visitor free to listen to the presentations, and then explore more about the life and times of Charles Dickens.
Since then, The Dickens Project SL has reappeared in Second Life each Christmas, with new opportunities to enjoy the story, new events to share and more opportunities to discover the rich treasure of Dickens’ work, explore the lasting appeal of A Christmas Carol and learn about Victorian England from a literary standpoint.
I’ve followed the project throughout, including the special 2013 virtual / live cross-over performance, featuring artists in Second Life and the physical world. For 2016, it is being hosted by Kultivate Magazine at their headquarters region on Water Haven, where an expanded set has been constructed, offering a broader, more immersive setting for the story, with supporting activities and events. While The festival officially opens to the public on Saturday, December 10th, I was delighted to be able to have a preview tour of the project with Cale, taking the opportunity to talk with her about this year’s presentation.
“The first thing I’d like to emphasize is that the goal of The Dickens Project SL is literary, not documentary,” Cale said as we entered the wintry realm of London in the mid-1800s. “What we’ve built here isn’t intended to be 100% historically accurate; other ventures in the virtual media excel in that. Our aim is to reflect the emotional essence of A Christmas Carol by providing a visual framework for those listening to the story, and which encourages them to explore more of Dickens’ life and times.”
Caledonia Skytower, Shandon Loring (centre) and Kayden Oconnell in an evocative shot of a 2013 special virtual / live performance of The Dickens Project. Credit: Bear Silvershade
To this end, and making full use of the half region put at their disposal by Kultivate Magazine, Seanchai have built a number of interlinked story and activity areas – Christmas Present, Christmas Past and Christmas Yet To Come / The End of It – where individual staves of the book will be read, Dickens’ writings explored, and entertainments presented. Each has its own look and feel, helping to immerse visitors more deeply in the tale.
“We’ve been able to expand the programme this year,” Cale said. “The opening weekend on December 10th and 11th will feature music events and readings from Dickens’ popular novels short stories and related pieces. Then on Monday, December 12th, we commence reading A Christmas Carol, with two sessions of each stave or staves per day, through until Friday, December 16th.”
The event will be rounded out over the weekend of the 17th and 18th December with more music, the traditional Fezziwig’s Ball and The Big Read – all of the novel over three-and-a-half hours. A marathon it might seem – but one very mush worth hearing!
“In all there will be 20 hours of events during the festival, ” Cale continued. “And the Community Virtual Library has created a Resource Centre to support us, where people can learn more about specific elements of the story: what was Tiny Tim suffering from, for example. We also have teleport portals connecting us to other themed locations in Second Life, such as Get Scrooged, at HKU’s Education Island.” A further addition to the 2016 programme is the Eight Days of Dickens mini-hunt.
The Dickens Project SL is free to attend and explore. The twice daily readings are designed to help reach as wide an SL audience as possible, and will be presented by different volunteers, each giving his or her interpretation of the story and the characters, and visitors are welcome to attend as many readings as they wish. Donations will be accepted on behalf of Team Diabetes of SL throughout the week, to coincide with their Winter Showcase events.
A Christmas Carol is, as Cale noted in the quote opening this article, an enduring, endearing piece; a work of fiction with which we are all familiar; I asked Cale for her thoughts on why this should be. “The core of what makes it so are the words – very precisely chosen, very powerfully arranged words,” she replied. “A lot of what we think of today as ‘traditional’ to this time of the year can be traced back to this work, and Dickens’ own re-imagining of what the holiday could be and mean.”
The annual RFL Christmas Expo opened its gates on December 1st, and will run through until December 12th. I’m not sure if it is me, but RFL events PR seems to have been a little low-key in 2016, to the point that this event almost entirely slipped my mind!
However, if it had by chance escaped your attention as well, there’s still the weekend to make the most of it, and to hop over, explore the four regions, buy goodies, join in the fun and donate to RFL of SL.
A highlight of the Expo is the Holidays of Hope Ball, now in its 7th year, which will take place on Sunday, December 11th, from 15:00 through 18:00 SLT. There will be special raffle baskets for which tickets can be purchased, together with random door prizes, which in 2015 totalled almost L$50,000 in value, while the 2015 raffle baskets were each worth more than L$35,000 each and included items such as homes, designer outfits and L$5000 gift certificates among their goodies.
Holiday formal attire is requested for the Ball, which will take place at the Polar Express Grand Station, high over the Expo regions.
On Tuesday, December 6th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the same server maintenance package deployed to the three RC channels, comprising internal simulator changes.
On Wednesday, December 7th, the three RC channels will received the same new server maintenance package, which includes the following feature requests:
BUG-6377 – llGetObjectDetails(id,[OBJECT_ATTACHED_SLOTS_AVAILABLE]) – Returns a value that is number of attachment slots allowed by the server minus the number of attachments worn by avatar. Returns 0 if avatar is not in the same region or if UUID is not an agent.
BUG-40871 – llGetEnv() constant “region_object_bonus” – returns the object bonus set for a region.
Bento Update
The major news is that Bento was officially pronounced “live” on Monday, December 5th with the promotion of the Bento viewer code to de facto release status – see the official blog post or my covering article. Currently – and as far as I’m aware – Black Dragon has a release out supporting Bento, Cool VL viewer has had Bento updates in the experimental branch for some time, and both Firestorm and Catznip will be issuing updates with Bento support very soon.
The announcement was followed with some further releases of Bento capable content on the Marketplace, and more will doubtless follow as Bento reaches more viewers and Avastar is fully updated (see below).
Troy Linden, the product lead for the project, passed on congrats and thanks to all who have been involved in the project, and Vir Linden’s role in getting things rolling and taking responsibility for getting things to work in the viewer.
One issue that wasn’t fixed prior to release was that of facial deformations occurring at altitude, which was noticed very early in the project.
Cathy Foil demonstrates the mesh deformation which becomes more pronounced with altitude (starting at around 1,000m and getting progressively worse through 4,000m)
As this particular problem appears to be part of a broader issue of floating point calculation errors and it can be overcome by using hardware skinning, it wasn’t seen as a significant enough issue to warrant holding back Bento. Should you encounter it, try using hardware, rather than software skinning on your system.
Future Follow-Ons for Bento
As Bento was being developed, a number of ideas for follow-on projects were put forward. Two of these include:
“unwearing” the default avatar while allowing baked textures & reducing the complexity of avatar bodies(see BUG-10980). Vir has previously indicated an interest in pursuing this idea (and the feature request has been accepted by the Lab).
Splitting the avatar shape into different elements (e,g, head and body), seen as making it easier for users who are uncertain about customising their form using the sliders, or who have a No Mod shape associated with their head or body to be able to mix and match more easily.
No final decision has been made on what might follow Bento or when, but given Vir’s feedback on splitting the avatar shape into separate elements would require a fairly extensive re-working of how avatar appearance is handled (up to and including changes to the baking service), it would seem unlikely this would be adopted,
Avastar and MayaStar
Avastar is still in the process of being updated to give expected support for Bento, and a new version is anticipated in the near future – users should keep an eye on the Avastar website for news. Cathy Foil believes that MayaStar is fully up-to-date, and while there have been reports of problems, these appear to be user error rather than bugs in the software, so she is considering further tutorial videos.
Future Meetings
Bento meetings will continue for a while (allowing for upcoming holidays). They may still be broadened into more of a content creation style meeting if there is sufficient interest. This is still TBD. The next meeting will take place on Thursday, December 15th at the Hippotropolis Camp Fire Circle, as usual, commencing at 13:00 SLT.
Web Properties Update
On Monday, December 5th, Grumpity Linden issued a further blog post on recent SL web property updates, which also included a minor update (contents unspecified to the lindenlab.com properties. In terms of Second Life, the updates can be summarised as:
Maps:
slurl.com was officially retired on November 22nd, everything is now maps.secondlife.com – slurl.com/secondlife/ are redirected.
Viewing a specific location on maps.secondlife.com no longer throws a 404 error in the console.
Maps no longer disappear at peak use times.
A large infrastructure update was made to secondlife.com along with security fixes and several minor bug fixes.
The Marketplace had an Events infrastructure stabilization to fix a few listing bugs.
In July 2016, Giovanna Cerise invited me to explore The Lost Harbour, her (then) new gallery space in Second Life, shortly before it opened to the public (see here). Occupying the north-east corner of a region, it’s a superb open-air exhibit space, and Giovanna recently extended it with the introduction of a new skyborne section, which can be reached via an Anywhere Door at The Last Harbour’s landing point (just follow the arrows on the floor to the door), or alternatively, you can teleport directly to it.
The extension continues the theme found at the gallery’s ground level, offering a series of platforms on which elements and reproductions of Giovanna’s 3D installations are displayed, with her 2D work occupying panelled wall sections mirroring some of the floor areas on the ground level.
Of particular note to me on my arrival were two scale reproductions of elements from Giovonna’s Monochrome (open until the end of December 2016 and which I reviewed here), and her Ice Castle, which recently formed a part of her display at Holly Kai Park (see here). All of the pieces are offered for sale to the collector, and included a scripted resizer.
As a long-time admirer of Giovanna’s work, I can only say that the sky platform is a superb extension to The Last Harbour, offering an excellent reason for a re-visit – or for those who have not taken the opportunity to drop in, to have twice the reason to jump over and enjoy Giovanna’s art.
I’ve been paying an annual visit to Lindini2 Lane’s home region and location for her store, L2 Studio, since 2012. She has always presented the region as a landscaped setting which changes with the seasons, open for people to explore and enjoy whether or not they are seeking one of her house designs.
Previously located on a homestead region, Lindini2 has now expanded to a Full region, L2 Studio & LHOOQ Gallery, and for those seeking a break from the snowy scenes of winter now appearing across the grid, it could be just the ticket. The move has given Lindini the chance to really flex her creative muscle, displaying her designs in a coastal setting, beautifully landscaped, with a demo rezzing area for her buildings high overhead.
Visitors using the main landmark arrive in the L2 Studio store in the south-east corner of the region. Just across the water from this, a set of steps lead up to a major new feature for Lindini’s land: the LHOO art gallery, currently displaying work by Jessica Belmer. To the north and west of this, the landscape becomes more rugged. Pine trees occupy rocky land cut by deep inlets, stone steps offering a way up onto their fingers, before the land falls away to a curving beach and narrow channel separating a sandy island from the rest of the landscape.
Within this setting can be found several of Lindini’s designs, set out in a manner suggestive of a small coastal community. Additional designs by Van Auster and others add to the natural feel to the setting, assisted by sheep grazing up on the craggy hills and horses wandering narrow trails, Cats can also be found here, keeping their eye on things, while a gentle, ambient soundscape completes the sense of immersion.
The landscape is designed to encourage exploration – getting from A to B sometimes isn’t as straightforward as might first appear; diversions around inlets and across beaches are required. This further adds to the feeling of this is a place, rather than a showroom, as does the way all of the houses have been carefully furnished.
Throughout the region there are places to sit – indoor and out , on the ground and in the trees – little places to discover and a lot to photograph and enjoy. If I have a quibble at all, it might be that there’s perhaps a little too much; at times my system struggled mightily with rendering.
Nevertheless, L2 Studio and LHOOQ Gallery offers a pleasing and eye-catching break from the wintry destinations we might otherwise drop into; the only wintertime concession can be found on the beach to the north-east – and even that is made of sand rather than snow 🙂 .
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 