Month: April 2019

The Spirit Blooms Timidly in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Ribong Gallery: The Spirit Blooms Timidly

Currently open at Ribong Gallery, curated by San (Santoshima), is a new exhibition entitled The Spirit Blooms Timidly by Artistik Oluja.

An interestingly curious exhibit, combining 2D and 3D art, The Spirit Blooms Timidly requires time to absorb, and also includes media elements as well; so make sure you have media enabled within the viewer, and be sure to toggle the media panels (and some of the artwork itself) whilst visiting.

Ribong Gallery: The Spirit Blooms Timidly

This exhibition merges several personally inspiring concepts, beginning with a passage by George Santayana: “The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

– Artistik Oluja, describing The Spirit Blooms Timidly

In short, life is transient, changing, imperfect; nothing lasts forever nor does it ever really remain the same; through imperfections, through growth, ageing, decay, everything is in a state of flux.  Thus the art within the exhibition is intended to reflect this.

Ribong Gallery: The Spirit Blooms Timidly

From the landing point, visitors are asked to jump down into the gallery space, wherein they will find the exhibition proper, a place of “light-hearted optical illusions, hypnotic mandalas, and vibrant dandelions”. Among the pieces on offer are Cylent pieces, which are described as:

A technique that Art developed in-world. It is a hand-made process that merges virtual photography with Lenticular Motion printing [hence the merging of Cy(ber) and lent(icular) to form “Cylent”], and she describes them as being “like those fun little animated cards I got in cereal boxes as a kid 🙂 .

Ribong Gallery: The Spirit Blooms Timidly

When all is said and done, this is a difficult exhibition to quantify, simply because it is layered in several ways, all of which can have a different appeal, from the visual through to the underpinning ideas of change and impermanence. As such, a viewing is suggested.

SLurl Details

Fantasy Faire 2019: Ursula Le Guin and voting for rulers!

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Fantasy Faire

As a part of the Fantasy Faire LitFest, one day at Fantasy Faire is set aside to mark the life and works of popular writers of fantasy and science fiction. The roll call for this event so far reads:

  •  2015: Terry Pratchett.
  • 2016: William Shakespeare (marking the 400th anniversary since his death).
  • 2017: J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • 2018: G.R.R. Martin.

On Wednesday, April 24th 2019, the Fantasy Faire LitFest is celebrating the life and work of American speculative fiction icon, Ursula K. Le Guin, who sadly passed away in January 2018.

Ursula K. Le Guin by Eileen Gunn

Regarded as one of America’s foremost writers of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish Universe, and her Earthsea fantasy series, Le Guin’s career spanned 60 years. During that time, she produced more than twenty novels, over a hundred short stories and many volumes of poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children’s books.

Her first published novel came in 1966, with Rocannon’s World, after she had faced around a decade of having her work rejected by publishers. This novel formed the founding volume of her Hainish Cycle, the fourth volume of which, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), propelled her in the mainstream of science fiction, garnering her a Hugo and a Nebula award in the process – the first of many awards she was to receive throughout her writing career.

The Left Hand of Darkness laid down many of the defining traits found within Le Guin’s works, which often include themes of cultural anthropology, Jungian archetypes, philosophical Taoism, gender and sexuality, moral development, political development and systems, and general sociology, psychology, or philosophy.

Today, Le Guin is rightly regarded as a writer who did much to bring fantasy and science fiction forward as accepted literary genres, and her work, ides and style influencing many authors in both fields who followed her.

Ursula K. Le Guin day will be marked by a series of special events, comprising:

  • 09:00-10:00 SLT: Exploring Le Guin: A Brief Tour and Discussion: a “tour” of Le Guin’s lands, via favourite passages from her books – suggestions invited. Moderated by Aoife Lorefield.
  • 10:00-11:00 SLT: Aoife Lorefield Shares Readings from Ursula K. Le Guin.
  • 15:00-17:00 SLT: A Wizard in Earthsea Party: The LitFest Ball.
  • 19:00-21:00 SLT: Seanchai Library present Celebrating Ursula K.Le Guin.

Don’t Forget To Vote!

And while discussing matters literary, don’t forget to cast your vote for this year’s King, Queen and Chancellor for Fantasy Faire 2019!

This fun (and fund-raising) activity lets Fantasy Faire visitors vote for the fictional characters (human in the case of King and Queen, strictly non-human in the case of Chancellor) they’d liked to see “crowned” at this year’s Faire. Voting is via donations to L$ Fantasy Faire, and this year’s nominees (selected by popular demand) are:

Kinq Queen Chancellor
Doctor Stephen Strange (MCU) Arya Stark (Game of Thrones /  A Song of Ice and Fire)
 Drogon  (Game of Thrones /  A Song of Ice and Fire)
Inigo Montoya (Princess Bride) Brienne of Tarth (Game of Thrones /  A Song of Ice and Fire) Falkor the Luckdragon (The Neverending Story)
Jareth, The Goblin King (Labyrinth and winner, 2016) Daenerys Targaryen (Game of Thrones /  A Song of Ice and Fire) Kalessin (Earthsea series)
Newt Scamander (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) Lyanna Mormont (Game of Thrones /  A Song of Ice and Fire) Paarthurnax (Skyrim)
Tyrion Lannister (Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire)  Moana (from the film of the same name) Smaug (The Hobbit)
Toothless (How to Train your Dragon)

To vote for your favourite in each category, visit the voting board on The Celestial Plain.  Here you can cast your vote via a donation to RFL of SL. Just right-click on the donation boards beneath the nominee(s) for whom you’d like to vote, and enter an amount of your choice to donate.

Voting for your choice of king, chancellor and queen – uright-click on the RFL donation kiosks, not the nominee images!

You can pay as much or as little as you want but the more you pay, the more chance your candidate has of becoming King, Queen or Chancellor, as the winners will be based on the highest amounts raised for the nominees in each group. You can also vote as often as you like, as this is a fun activity to help raise funds for Fantasy Faire and the KNH Hope Hostel.

Voting will close at 16:00 SLT on Sunday April 29th, and the results will be announced at the end of the Live Auction.

Additional Links

Bellisseria gains a coastal airstrip in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Flying over the new island airstrip at Coral Waters off the west coast of Bellisseria

Update: Abnor Mole offers a list of rez points for vehicles and boats (again, as per the note below, keep an eye out for the lighthouses for the majority of the latter).

The Moles have been busy again! Following requests for airstrips within Bellisseria, the new Linden Homes continent (something I’ve actually requested in these pages as well), one has appeared off the west coast, complete with a boat rezzing area alongside.

We spotted it by chance whilst taking one of the boats out to try local region crossings; in fact, the airstrip was so new, it hadn’t actually appeared on the world Map – although we weren’t by far the first to spot it. By the time we happened to motor past it, the island was already the subject of considerable attention – some of it probably not suited to the environment (such as attempts to rez an ocean-going freighter followed by a United States Navy warship).

At the time of our initial visit (by boat – we’re loitering at the left-hand ed of the island in the photo) the Coral Waters airstrip was so new, it hadn’t even propagated to the world Map – but people were finding it!

Situated on a low-lying sandy island in Coral Waters, the airstrip has a tarmac runway suitable for light aircraft, complete with a rezzing zone off of its north end (although the mesh here can give some aircraft a little trouble when trying to clear the runway onto it).

The boat rezzing area – one of a number scattered around the region (generally on the offshore islands such as Springhurst Gulf or those with lighthouses on them) – sits on the east side of the island with a couple of piers. Rezzing time for both airstrip and piers is set to 2 minutes, which should be enough to get a ‘plane or boat pulled for inventory and sat upon.

The position of the island, with the north-south orientation of the runway means there is plenty of room for aircraft manoeuvring when taking off or positioning for a landing – just be sure to be careful if turning west on climbing out, as the island isn’t too far from the grid boundary.

Readying the TBM Kronos for take-off at the new Coral Waters airstrip – the aircraft rezzing area can prove a little rough for some ‘planes

Following our boat trip, I dropped over to the airstrip to give it a go using my TBM Kronos (see Flying the TBM Kronos in Second Life for a review). There’s not really a lot to report in this respect, other than the fact the airstrip does exactly what it does on the tin – provides space for flying out of / into for light aircraft (it’s really not suitable for jets or larger ‘planes), and has room enough from helos – again providing they are not oversized.

It’ll be interesting to see how popular the new airstrip is once the novelty of its arrival has worn off – and whether another might pop-up somewhere else in or around Bellisseria. Kudos to the LPDW for being so responsive (again) to requests!

SLurl Details

2019 SL User Groups 17/1: SUG – teleport disconnects update

Posted on by Inara Pey

Puddlechurch; Inara Pey, March 2019, on FlickrUmi – blog post

Server Deployments

From the server deployment thread for the week:

We are working on the TP & sim crossing disconnect issue, and making several changes over this week.  These may be a little bit more disruptive than our usual grid roll process and we apologise in advance for the inconvenience of those.  We’ll do our best to keep this disruption to a minimum. We have a simulator update which we will roll to BlueSteel and LeTigre on Tuesday.  Depending on the results we will make additional plans for gridwide rolls as soon as practical. We thank you for your patience and fully realize both the urgency and the frustration this has been causing.

Thus far, there has been a deployment to BlueSteel and LeTigre – server update 19.04.22.526534. Check the deployment thread for further updates.

SL Viewer

There have been no viewer updates at the start of the week, leaving the viewer pipelines as follows:

  • Current Release version 6.2.0.526190, formerly the Estate Access Management RC viewer, dated April 12, promoted April 17 NEW. – see my EAM overview for more information
  • Release channel cohorts:
  • Project viewers:
  • Linux Spur viewer, version 5.0.9.329906, dated November 17, 2017 and promoted to release status 29 November – offered pending a Linux version of the Alex Ivy viewer code.
  • Obsolete platform viewer, version 3.7.28.300847, May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7. This viewer will remain available for as long as reasonable, but will not be updated with new features or bug fixes.

Teleport Disconnects

Let’s see … for server news, many of us are focused on the teleport issues … I hate to promise anything, but we all know a lot more about TP internal problems than we used to 🙂 . We do understand they’re annoying and a frustrating problem – we definitely want to fix it and make it better.

– Simon Linden, Simulator User Group, April 23rd

From the above statement, it should be clear that the Lab is devoting a lot of time to teleport disconnects. There have been mixed reports on the outcome of the deployment made on Thursday, April 18th, 2019, with some indicating matters have improved, others reporting no real change. In particular, people visiting Fantasy Faire and travelling around the new Linden Homes continent appear to be faring a lot better than had been the case. Which is not to say the issue has in anyway been resolved – hence the continuing work.

While it had been indicated that the recent operating system update may have played a role in the problems, Simon again referenced the timing issue with region crossings, whilst also mentioning the potential for the simulator side of EEP possibly also playing a role in things.

One of the puzzles we’re trying to sort out is if somehow the environmental work caused the TP problems – the timing of the release is suspicious but the functionality _should_ be different …. The disconnects are a problem where the viewer and 2nd region don’t start talking as they should [so something is out of sync] or there’s a failure to communicate. I know, for example, the 2nd region is waiting for the viewer to connect and get a message … that never happens …

He continued:

It doesn’t seem to be closely associated with AV complexity … that said, the more complex your AV is, the more work it needs to change regions. It’s always been better to have fewer scripts and data for teleports and region crossings.

The problem is still trying to pin down actual potential causes, with disconnects remaining inconsistent in terms of reproduction., again as Simon noted:

It’s frustratingly inconsistent. It’s a lot easier to fix something that breaks all the time … to fix it, and to know when you fixed it. For example, before this meeting we ran a test that had probably 400 or so successful teleports, no disconnects … that’s good, but not proof of a fix.

Mazidox Linden, from the Lab’s QA team further qualified the Lab’s problem:

We need in the neighbourhood of 10000 teleports to have any kind of real statistical confidence, just as a reference point 🙂 .

EEP / Windlight Issues

Following the Thursday deployment, many region holders / designers noted significant differences in how their region windlights were being rendered. The didn’t get much in the way of discussion during the meeting, however, Rider Linden offered an apology for the situation, noting that the focus on the TP issue(s) resulted in some unexpected regressions. However, it’s not currently clear what might be done to deal with this issue.

Re-visiting Elvenshire in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

(Fae Forest), Elvenshire; Inara Pey, April 2019, on Flickr(Fae Forest), Elvenshire – click any image for full size

Update July 2019: Elvenshire has closed, and Zuma relocated to a new location (see A new (fae forest) in Second Life, also now closed) for details. Because of this, SLurls have been removed from this post.

It’s been two years since our last visit to Elvenshire, the Homestead region designed by Zuma Fae Dust (Zuma Jupiter); a fact I was recently reminded of by Shawn Shakespeare, who actually originally pointed the region out to us back in March 2017. So this being the case, we girded our lions for teleporting, and hopped over to renew our acquaintance with the region.

Back in 2017, the region was set as a place rife with magic and not a little romance, rich in little vignettes and suggestions of an elven (or at least fae) presence. A lot has changed since then; now simply called (Fae Forest) the region still encompasses a forested feel – but this time it is a rain forest, suggestive of somewhere in the sub-tropics, backed against at high arc of mountain-like terrain, the rest of the setting smothered by a heavy blanket of foliage hiding it from prying eyes overhead.

(Fae Forest), Elvenshire; Inara Pey, April 2019, on Flickr(Fae Forest), Elvenshire

Much of the land around the feet of the trees is flooded, with water tumbling from the inaccessible uplands (while a path does offer a way up the steep hills, it only goes so far – to a plateau where a Koi house sits alongside the tumbling waters of falls). This is one of several places available for visitors to find when exploring the region.

Several of these maintain the mystical feel present within the region at our last visit. There’s an ancient, broken rotunda, for example. Slowly being overtaken by forest growth, it marks the way to an ancient garden area that in turn leads to an aged bath house rich in décor, brought together in an eclectic mix that completely satisfies the eye. A door to one side of this structure offers a way back to the landing point – but taking it might risk missing other attractions.

(Fae Forest), Elvenshire; Inara Pey, April 2019, on Flickr(Fae Forest), Elvenshire

Elsewhere sit hints of fantasy and the fantastical: a great blue whale, swimming without moving on the water rather than below it, a garden on its back, the bulk of spaceship like submarine close by. Then there are the little vignettes still waiting to be found: the old round stone turret when rusting canon and makeshift sofa, the gamer’s hideaway, all sitting between and under the trees.

And then there is the landing point itself, a hall close to the edge of the region. It has a wonderfully homely feel to it setting that immediately puts one at ease, yet holds an exotic look offering the promise of discovery within the region beyond.

(Fae Forest), Elvenshire; Inara Pey, April 2019, on Flickr(Fae Forest), Elvenshire

Should the forest prove too oppressive, gated steps run down from the landing point to a short tongue of land that licks the edge of a little grassy island crowned by a single tree (although two more lie to one side) and a sunken ring of standing stones. Here the rain falls lightly, and may well ease the more enclosed, oppressed air some might feel under the heavy foliage of the rain forest.

For those who fancy more of a challenge, the route to the path up the hills mentioned above can take some finding, but it also does reveal another little cuddle spot for romantics. Also, take care when crossing the bridges that form part of the route to the hillside path; we both fell through parts of the bridges to take a further dip in the waters below.

(Fae Forest), Elvenshire; Inara Pey, April 2019, on Flickr(Fae Forest), Elvenshire

This is a very different setting from the one we witnessed two years ago – hardly surprising since it is two years since our last visit; but it is one that remains photogenic.

2019 viewer release summaries week #16

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates for the week ending Sunday, April 21st

This summary is generally 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.
  • Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.

Official LL Viewers

  • Current Release version 6.2.0.526190, formerly the Estate Access Management RC viewer, dated April 12, promoted April 17 NEW. – see my EAM overview for more information
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Teranino Maintenance RC viewer version 6.2.1.526357, April 18.
  • Project viewers:
    • No updates.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V5/V6-style

  • No updates.

V1-style

  • No updates.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links