Author: Inara Pey

Eclectic virtual world blogger with a focus on Second Life, VR, virtual environments and technology.

Charlie’s reflections at Eulennest in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Eulennest Art Gallery: Charlie Namiboo

I first became acquainted with Charlie Namiboo as a result of her involvement in the (long since retired) Frisland region, which I had the pleasure of documenting in these pages on a number of occasions in 2015 / 2016.

Back then we did joke that we had something in common: she referred to herself a the Typo Queen, and I had a habit of wearing a tag that read Kween of Tpyoland. However, and to my shame, it was only later that I became familiar with her work as an extremely talented photographer. So, it’s with a great deal of pleasure that I’m able to write about her latest exhibition of work, which opened at the start of April at Kitten Mills’ Eulennest Art Gallery.

Well, so you asked me about my reasons why I started taking pictures. I guess, it was the same reason as many people have for their Flickr accounts. They simply take snaps of their second life to capture moments and make memories. When I explored places with my partner or had a special moment with him, I took snapshots.

– Charlie Namiboo on her work

Eulennest Art Gallery: Charlie Namiboo

The exhibition is offered without title, but I’ve taken the liberty of referring to it as “reflections” here, because it is the most marvellous selection of images that bring together elements of introspection and commentary on life.

Predominantly presented in black-and-white, these are pieces that are genuinely rich in narrative; more that a picture or image, they are the encapsulation of a thought, a feeling, or an emotion. Each one is perfectly framed and set to words.

I went through different phases; after pure (and very simple) fashion pictures, I fell for taking landscape themed pictures as regions and places became more and more attractive due to better landscape items. I worked with different windlight settings and also created my own when I found out that I was able to change the entire mood of a picture just by changing the windlight. And inspired by some of the greatest story tellers on Flickr, I started trying to tell my own short stories in a single picture.

– Charlie Namiboo

Viewing the pieces offered, it is clear that Charlies does more than just “try” to tell stories in her photographs – she does so quite magnificently. Each of the pieces included in this exhibition beats with a heart as it reveals a depth of soul. These are stories we can all relate to, touching on our own feelings and thought because they embody the things we have so often experienced. Also within them there is at least one challenge (so line on up, and take your place and show your face …), which has a particular depth of meaning in this day and age.

They are also, perhaps, personal reflections – if not on the things Charlie herself has experienced, then certainly on the depth of connection she has with her photography; a connection not only revealed by the images on display, but by the little vignettes of props she has included in the exhibition.

Eulennest Art Gallery: Charlie Namiboo

All told, a superb selection of pictures which I recommend to all patrons of Second Life arts.

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April 2021 SL Web User Group summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, April 7th, 2021. These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar.

When reading these notes, please keep in mind:

  • This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
  • Similarly, and if included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, any audio comments related to that topic that might be included in these reports will be concatenated into a single audio extract).

Web Properties Updates

  • General post-Uplift internal work is continuing, particularly the fine-tuning of various web services.
  • The secondlife.com home pages have received a “spring refresh” with new images. etc..
  • A general clean-up of web pages is in progress. This includes things like:
    • Enabling unicode support in the DMCA complaint form (important for those with accented letters in their names).
    • Web profile fixes: removing a bug that prevented interests from being deleted on web profiles;  correcting an issue that caused an error to appear at the top of the About section of a web profile; (finally) removing the link to “Open Groups in the sidebar” that hasn’t existed in the viewer for almost a decade…
  • A  number of the Lab’s own tools for managing / maintaining the Marketplace were also worked on, but no details supplied.
  • Resident search has been updated to ensure all those who should be showing in searches are showing in searches.
  • Additional work on Search in general is still on-going.
  • The problem people are having in being suddenly logged-out of Marketplace for no accountable reason (such as going from browsing to the check-out page or when editing a listing) is still being looked into.

Marketplace – The “Catwa Incident”

At the end of March, Catwa ran a Marketplace-only promotion for a fully feature Bento Head priced at L$1. The resultant demand overloaded the Marketplace system. The outage lasted several hours, causing considerable upset, some of which was exacerbated by the poor quality error message that was given to those trying to reach the MP, and which included commentary on the state of the infrastructure in being unable to scale with the load placed on it.

  • In terms of the error message, this has apparently been updated to give more meaningful information should a repeat situation occur in the future.
  • As a result of that situation, the Lab has now implemented changes that should allow the MP to better leverage the AWS environment and correctly scale to meet similar massive increases in demand, should they occur in the future.
  • The was the first time the MP had faced such a massive demand, one which far exceeded anything previously seen the the MP’s history.

Mobile Client

  • iOS Version:
    • The app didn’t make it back to Apple for further evaluation before the end of March, but is now “very close” to being ready to go.
    • The Lab will be running an internal test with the updated app during the upcoming week or so.
    • Assuming no issues are found as a result of this testing, the app will be passed to Apple once more for their evaluation.
  • Android: nothing to report.

In Brief

  • Linden Homes: the Chalet theme (see: Lab announces Linden Homes Chalet Theme released) is now regarded as “mostly released”. The total volume of available Linden Homes means that the Lab is no longing “selling out” of new homes immediately on a release or batch release.
  • Last Names: at the start of April, the Lab introduced a couple of “limited time” last names to the Premium Name Changes capability. The two names, UwU and OwO, were introduced specifically for the furry community, among whom they have apparently proven popular.
    • According to a tweet from Soft Linden on April 8th, the two names will be removed from the active list “shortly”. So, if you want either one – now’s the time to grab it.
Twitter comment from Soft Linden on the two “limited time” last names for Premium members.
    • At the WUG meeting, Keira Linden indicated that the Lab is considering doing more such “limited edition” last name options from time-to-time and that may be geared towards particular events or holidays, or towards a particular community. The next example of these “limited offers” is liable to come around the time of the Second Life Birthday celebration in June 2021.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, May 5th, 14:00 SLT.

The remarkable art of Tucker Stilley in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Cape Able Art Gallery: Tucker Stilley – Palimpsessed

Commencing on Wednesday, April 7th, and running through until the end of May at the Cape Able Art Gallery is a most extraordinary exhibition of art from the physical world. Entitled Palimpsessed, it features the work of Tucker Stilley.

The exhibition is being hosted by Virtual Ability, who have worked in partnership with Tucker and his sister, filmmaker, editor, and producer Kate Stilley Steiner to bring the exhibition to Second Life, and I was invited by Gentle Heron of Virtual Ability to a preview of the exhibition ahead of the first of a series of special events that will accompany it.

Born in Santa Ana,  California in 1961, Tucker Stilley is a veteran intermedia artist and distinguished alumni of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he was a member of the Studio for Interrelated Media. A leading member of the Boston arts community throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he has worked the MIT Media Lab, and with his partner Lindsay Mofford, in a range of environments – academia, technology , corporate, public – producing a broad range of art exhibited at the likes of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, the Boston Film Foundation and Harvard University, as well as continuing to work with the “arts underground”.

Cape Able Art Gallery: Tucker Stilley – Palimpsessed

Now residing in Los Angeles, California, Tucker Stilley is now completely paralysed, the result of ALS/MND (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), with which he was first diagnosed in 2005. Nevertheless, he continues to create the most incredible art that is rich is substance.

He does so using his one means of communications, a hybrid computer he controls with his eyes and which allows him to essentially “live” within the world wide wide, remaining in contact with friends, colleagues and artistic collaborators, seeking inspiration and engaging in research.

Through this computer, and most recently using ophisticated generative software, Stilley literally pains with his eyes. The pieces he creates bring together a host of genres and styles – abstraction, post-modernism, conceptualism, touches of surrealism, collage, etching, and perhaps in places a hint of fauvism – in the most remarkable and fascinating of ways, all of which is demonstrated in the exhibition at Cape Able.  Within these pieces can be found simplicity and complexity of expression, hints of irony or whimsy.

Cape Able Art Gallery: Tucker Stilley – Palimpsessed

Palimpsessed can be further enjoyed every Wednesday through April and May 2021, when Cape Able Gallery will be hosting guided tours between 17:00and 19:00 SLT.

This is a genuinely extraordinary exhibition that is compact enough so as not to overwhelm, but rich enough to provide a look into the life and creativity of a most amazing artist and visionary.

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A return to the Butterfly Conservatory in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021

In  2017 I visited the Butterfly Conservatory, the work of Ry Heslop. I found it to be an engaging visit – one you can read about in Of lepidopterans, owls, bugs and honey in Second Life. I actually lost track of the conservatory a little while after that visit, so was pleased to learn via the Destination Guide that it has made a return to Second life and has a new home and it went on the list for places to (re)check out.

Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021

Once again occupying a sky garden, the conservatory shares the space with the Merge Club, also operated by Ry. A mover is in operation at the landing point, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself being shuffled away on teleporting – this is presumably to keep those arriving for events at the club from stacking up on one another’s heads.

A  crossway on the footpath points the way to the three primary locations on the platform: a dining area under a pergola, the club, and the Conservatory – the latter unmissable in its impressive new building.

Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021

Within the building is a lush semi-tropical environment, home to a wide variety of flora and  – more importantly in this context – butterflies. These can be found circling the plants, while nearby signs offer information on the species you are seeing.

Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021

Following my initial visit to the Conservatory, I noted that it might be easier for those who have a hard time reading in-world text if the signs also acted as note card givers. As a result of that comment, Ry contacted me to say that’s exactly what would be done in the next update to the gardens – and it is an approach that has been continued through to this iteration; so do be sure to touch them as you follow the paths around to learn more about the butterflies that are to be found here.

Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021

The indoor gardens are beautifully laid out, with split level path leading visitors around them, a café, sculptures, water features and more. In addition, a branch of the path directs visitors to a wing of the building containing the Birds of Paradise aviary – a part of the Conservatory that I think is new to it; at least, I don’t recall it from my 2017 visit.

Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021

Outside of the main building are two further areas to be explored, one providing information on a number of species of beetles and bugs, the other on bees, and their importance to the world as a whole. With the latter – and again tooting my horn a moment – Ry has also followed through on my 2017 suggestion and provided more information on exactly why bees are such a vital part of the ecosystem.

Butterfly Conservatory, April 2021

What I found particularly pleasing about my original visit to the Butterfly Conservatory was its simple elegance in being both an informative and charming visit one can appreciate for both its content and the thought and care that has been put into its design and layout. This remains very much the case with this iteration as well; so if you’ve not been to the Butterfly Conservatory before – make sure to add it to your list of places to visit and enjoy; you won’t be disappointed.

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Bare Skin in Second Life (NSFW)

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Bare Skin – Traci Ultsch and Dido Haas

This is the first of planned two visits to Dido Haas’ Nitroglobus Roof Gallery for April – the second will come in about a week and feature the gallery’s April 2021 main exhibition. However, I wanted to jump over to see a new exhibition by Dido herself, together with Tracy Ultsch.

The images in Bare Skin – as noted in the title of this article – may not all be suitable for work viewing, dealing as they do with the subject of female nudity. However, this are not “simple” or “gratuitous” nudity; rather the pieces presented are a genuine celebration of the art and beauty to be found within the female form by two of Second Life’s most accomplished photo portrait artists.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Bare Skin – Dido Haas

Located in the smaller gallery space at Nitroglobus, Bare Skin presents a total of eight monochrome images by Dido and Traci, who display four pieces each.  The two sets of pictures are most clearly differentiated by the fact that Traci’s work utilised a white background, and Dido’s a black backdrop. Both artists approach their work in a similar manner – none of the images feature any background elements distraction to clutter up each image, although props are used in some (notably a cat with some of Traci’s images) that add a sense of focus / narrative.

Whilst breasts and/or nether regions can be seen in some of the images, these are not – again as noted above – pictures intended to titillate in any way. Rather, through framing, pose and focus they encourage the observer to initially consider the inherent grace and lines of the female body,  be it is the rise and sweep of a breast, the arch of a foot, and gentle valley of waist between upper torso and hips – or even as a canvas on which to reflect creativity and expression through the wearing of jewellery or the inking of tattoos. But after this first inspection, there is more to be found.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Bare Skin – Traci Ultsch

These are images that are both intrinsically feminine and beautiful layers in interpretation. Take Traci’s pieces for example. The use of the cat subliminally reminds of of female grace a poise – and also of a woman’s power. Just look at Cat Cat Cat; the kitty may well be stretching and yawning, but the entire image carries a marvellous subtext of I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar. Similarly, the use of tattoos speak both to the ideas of creativity and expressionism / individuality mentioned above, and also to ideas of tribalism –  and with it humanity’s long history; a history in which all successive generations have all be born of Woman.

Similarly, Dido’s images speak to grace and beauty – and also to confidence and power.  Within them lies a statement that women need not fear that their only value lies in their looks and figure, nor do they need to compete through trappings of power dressing in order to demonstrate male-like assertiveness. A woman’s power comes from within; it matters not whether she is dressed or naked – it is simply there, as natural and admirable as any line of mouth or curve of breast.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Bare Skin – Traci Ultsch and Dido Haas

An engaging and visual mini-exhibition well worth taking the time to see.

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2021 SUG meeting week #14 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Wythburn Village and Arts Community – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting.

Server Deployments

Please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest news and updates.

  • There are no planned SLS Main channel deployments.
  • Wednesday, April 7th: the SLS RC channels should all be updated with simulator release 557694, defined as containing “internal fixes an tweaks”.
Last week we ran into an unanticipated glitch and had to push the RC roll back to this week. So, this week we’ll be pushing out the next Maintenance simulator to all the RC channels.

– Rider Linden on the upcoming deployment

SL Viewer

There have been no official viewer updates to mark the start of the week, leaving the pipelines as:

  • Release viewer: Custom Key Mappings RC viewer, version 6.4.17.557391, dated March 24, promoted March 27 – NEW.
  • Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself):
    • Maintenance RC viewer – Eau de Vie, version 6.4.17.557412, dated March 25.
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 project viewer, version 6.4.14.556118, dated 23, 2021.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16, 2019.

Group Chat

On Monday, April 5th, Maestro Linden posted on changes made to Group Chat to try to improve overall message handling. The change appears to have met with with mixed results, with some seeing no real change in how their group chat sessions are affected. There may also been some related unintended consequences, some some reporting the following:

  • Some people are finding they have to make multiple posts for group chat to finally open and their chat to be seen by everyone, otherwise their group chat remains silent. It is not clear if this happens across all their groups, or just some.
  • Messages for some still appear to be failing with a degree of measurable regularity.

Commenting on the situation, and in lieu of Jira reports, Rider Linden commented:

As far as group chat. We know that it is a problem and we’re going to continue to work on it from our end.

New LSL Capabilities?

This from Rider Linden:

I’m proposing the following three LSL functions llOrd, llChar and llHash. llOrd() will return the ordinal of the first character in a string, llChar() given an integer will return a single character string, and llHash() is a non-cryptographic 32 bit hash. I was looking for a way to just have an integer that had a reasonable change of being unique for an arbitrary string.
Use case I can see: Given an owner of two objects I want to select a chat channel with a low probability of colliding with other agents in the area.
This approach wouldn’t be cryptographically secure, but would be convenient.

This many be the start of ongoing work to provide new  / improved LSL capabilities, with it being indicated that feature requests BUG-227663 “[Feature Request] llGetInventoryAcquireTime()” and BUG-227641 “Play/Loop/Stop sounds in linked primitives other than the primitive where the script exists” may also be considered  for implementation.

In Brief

  • Some people are reporting Voice issues – Voice failing to start, or Voice simply not working in a region unless others are already there and using it. It’s not clear have widespread these issues are, or whether bug reports have been raised.
  • BUG-229871 “Unable to re-enter or teleport to a region that I’ve been to during same session” – Linden Lab is still trying to consistently reproduce this issue. In discussing the problem, Maestro Linden noted:
One interesting case was somebody reporting that they were able to reproduce the issue 100% of the time until they replaced a faulty coaxial cable  – which makes me think that packet loss could somehow be to blame (disconnecting from the simulator the first time in some unclean manner due to time-out?).
  • Getting inventory syncing between Agni and Aditi working once more is also being worked on, with the hope that the fix will be available Soon™.
  • Work on Map tiles is progressing, but still no ETA on when the remaining fixes are liable to be deployed. Again, in lieu of a fix, people can use the following alternatives, each with its own functionality: