Day: September 13, 2018

2018 SL UG updates #37/2: Concierge and Land user group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Concierge and Land User Group meeting area

The Concierge & Land user groups are held every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month from 12:00 noon SLT. The focus of the meetings is “for discussion & education of SL topics such as current known issues and bugs, project viewers and new features, and general Mainland issues. Theresa Linden will be your moderator. Please bring your questions & concerns.”

These meetings cannot be used to discuss:

  • Specific account questions or concerns.
  • Anything pertaining to billing, fees and / or tier.
  • Specific region / viewer performance issues.
  • Abuse related issues.

The initial meeting of the new group was held on Thursday, September 13th, and was somewhat brief in nature. The schedule of meetings for the rest of 2018 is as follows:

  • September 27th, 2018
  • October 11th, 2018
  • October 25th, 2018
  • November 8th, 2018
  • December 13th, 2018
  • December 27th, 2018

Details on the meeting and the agenda can be found on the Concierge & Land official SL user group wiki page.

EAM Viewer

The meeting included a reminder that the Estate Access Management (EAM) viewer is currently in project viewer status (version 5.2.0.518362 dated August 9th, at the time of writing). My own overview of this viewer can be found here.

  • A suggestion has been made to add a field to record the reason a person was banned from a region / estate.
  • It is not clear if the parcel level access controls will be updated to reflect the changed made to the region / estate controls.

Region Sit Exploit

There have been recent issued with “buggy” scripts using llunsit on group deeded private land that can result in avatars sitting on the affected objects to be unseated under very specific (and rare) situations. The Lab is aware of the issue, which has proven difficult to track down,  resulting in feature request BUG-225443 being put forward to allow people to better identify objects that may be causing the unsits when they occur.

Mainland Purchases

Since the Lab announced the Mainland price restructuring, demand for Mainland parcels have significantly increased. Thus far, requests have been handled via support ticket, rather than through the stated policy route of requesting the abandoned land be placed up for auction. The use of support tickets doesn’t actually represent a formal change to the policy – but it has been used as the most direct means to respond to requests for land, simply because of the volume received since the price change was announced. However, Keira Linden indicated that it might in future see the auction policy revised:

We’re still in the evaluation stage and aren’t quite ready to officially change that policy just yet … We’ve been urging people to send in the request in a ticket. We’re using that response to kind of judge whether it should be officially changed or not.

Should this be the case, the policy will be updated, and a Land blog post made to announce that has now officially changed.

In-world Group

To help promote the Concierge & Land User Group, it’s been suggested that an in-world group is established that land owners can join to be kept appraised of meetings and news. This is being looked into. If such a group is established, I’ll add the details to these meeting summaries.

Cica’s The Girl Who Cried Wolf

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Girl Who Cried Wolf

Opening on September 13th, 2018, is Cica Ghost’s latest art installation The Girl Who Cried Wolf, which as she notes is something of a play on the Aesop fable, the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Within the piece, the wolf has already arrived, and can be found chasing the sheep over hill and dale, hoping for a meal. And where is the shepherd boy, who should be watching over them?

The Girl Who Cried Wolf

Well, unlike the original fable, in which his calls for help are ignored after previously pranking the village into believing a wolf was after their sheep when no such thing was happening, he’s off playing his little flute. Instead, it’s left to a little girl from the village to raise the alarm – shouting for the shepherd boy, who refuses to budge from his perch on a rock.

Within the setting are a number of Cica’s familiar sitting points where visitors can involve themselves in the story (mouse over some of the animals and furnishings to be found in the setting and you’ll discover them), and which offer a little sense of fun to the tale.

The Girl Who Cried Wolf

Looking at the core of the scene, it is perhaps tempting to look for a deeper meaning within it, or to perhaps ascribe some kind of political undertones to it. But neither is Cica’s intent at all; in fact she makes it clear that when it comes to politics, she has no time for the subject, “and I don’t bring politics into Second Life.” she states firmly.

Instead, this is a setting born entirely of the creative process. “I made that scene with sheep and wolf first,” she told me, “And it reminded me of that fable.”And the switch to having a girl raising a warning of the wolf’s arrival? “I wanted the shepherd boy playing a flute,” Cica says, “so I made the girl.”

The Girl Who Cried Wolf

And thus a simple, charming update to a famous tale has been made. One in which, the shepherd boy is more interested in playing his flute than in watching over the sheep – leaving it to the little girl to raise the alarm. But ien’t wanting to be off pursuing his own interests rather than the work assigned to them by their elders typical of many little boys?! 😉 .

The Girl Who Cried Wolf will, as with most of Cica’s installations, remain open for around 4 weeks.

SLurl Details

September SL Town Hall with Ebbe Altberg – reminder

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Town Hall meeting venue

Just a quick reminder.

The next in the Lab’s in-world Town Hall series, again featuring CEO Ebbe Altberg, will take place on Thursday, September 13th, at 09:30 SLT (17:30 BST / 18:30 CET). The event will take place at the Town Hall meeting regions, with the landing point URLs as follows:

Selected questions from the Town Hall meeting forum thread (now closed) will be put to Ebbe during the session, and there may be an opportunity to ask questions from the audience, if time permits.

All things being equal, I hope to have a summary of the session up after the event, which will be similar in nature to my summary of the April 2018 Town Hall – see here for more on that.