SLEA 8: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Eternal Bastion
The world is changing in multiples way. From politics through economics to climate, everything is in flux; and in the case of the first in particular, established norms so long a part of our lives are being torn down, or at least remodelled into something unfamiliar – and not necessarily better. Foundations we once believed to be firm and unchanging are crumbling, and we are increasingly faced with daily confusion and uncertainty. Given this, it is essential we have a place of silence and solitude; a place where we can have room to breathe, to think, to regain clarity.
This is the central theme offered by Sophie de Saint Phalle in her latest installation Eternal Bastion, which recently opened at SLEA 8, and will remain so for the next 6 months. This is something of an interactive installation, featuring Sophie’s copper etchings and lithographs, which visitors are invited to explore in light of the core theme for the installation, and the need for a sense of stability and peace.
SLEA 8: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Eternal Bastion
The ETERNAL BASTION is one such place: Beyond the noise, beyond the headlines.
It stands for our innermost self — the centre, the core, the untouched soul. A bastion on an island — far away, and yet only a spiritual sea journey from your own inner self. But to get there you often have to travel through the darkness.
To truly see, we must first close our eyes. The blindfold becomes a paradox: it covers the visible world so that another one is revealed — an inner world, an invisible truth. In the darkness, another light emerges: A view, not of the eye, but of the mind.
– Sophie de Saint Phalle, Eternal Bastion
On arrival, visitors will be asked to join the local Experience, which enables the auto-teleport. The Landing Point, a small outcropping of rock – one of three – lying off the coast of the main installation island, features a plinth and a circle of slowly rotating, floating stones. The former offers an introduction to the installation, a blindfold and a note to step through the floating stones when ready. The instructions should be read for the full context for the installation, while the blindfold is an illustrative means of representing the one Sophie references in her introduction.
SLEA 8: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Eternal Bastion
Providing you have accepted the local Experience and shared environment, and you’ve enabled both local sounds and the music stream for the installation, walk through the slowly rotating floating stones to be teleported to the main installation island.
It is here that a massive edifice of basalt columns, concrete blocks and glass resides. It stands as a cross between a modern take on a cathedral and a kind of fortress of solitude. It ideally represents the idea of an inner world, a place in which we can feel safe – and contemplative. Within this structure, beautifully illuminated with point lights, hang Sophie’s etchings and lithographs.
SLEA 8: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Eternal Bastion
Those familiar with Sophie’s work may recognise these from her own Subcutan gallery, about which I’ve written on several occasions within these pages, and / or her 2022 installation Cyborgs (see: Art and Cyborgs in Second Life). That they have been seen / used before doe not make their use any less impactful here; they are vivid and carry a depth of narrative which greatly encourages contemplation and (potentially) self-reflection within the framework of the installation’s central theme.
Surrounding the “fortress” are grounds overlooking the surrounding sea and offering points of interest – waterfalls, sculptures (one of which is by Sophie) and a stone grotto overlooking one of Lia Woodget’s sailing vessels. I think the latter may have been left over from the opening event, offering as it does a bar, cabins and clay pigeon (skeet) shooting. It does not appear to be connected to the rest of the installation via teleport (unless I missed it), so I wasn’t sure quite what to make of it.
The above aside, Eternal Bastion is a deeply engaging and thought-provoking installation.
SLEA 8: Sophie de Saint Phalle – Eternal Bastion
Paradise Of Fantasy, August 2025 – click any image for full sizeParadise Of Fantasy is both a home to the Vanaheim family and a setting open to the public to explore and enjoy. A Full private region, the location is the work of BarB Randt Vanaheim (BarBarella Darkrose) and Ivy Vanaheim (Ivory Ireton), and encompasses within itself multiple aspects of fantasy – although it is not per se a role-play setting.
Nature meets fantasy in this home for the “Vanaheim Family” and all fantasy creatures. This magical place where fantasy creatures stand strong together in light and darkness.
– Paradise Of Fantasy About Land / Destination Guide description
Paradise Of Fantasy, August 2025
The Landing Point sits just off of one to the many trails winding through the setting, and close to a large manor house. Like all the buildings in the region, it is open to the public, although the furnishings are an esoteric curio. Rooms include conventional lounge-style furniture to more period pieces, to a classroom (for magic?) and offices with a mystical air about them, whilst the loft is devoted to games and pastimes.
The Landing Point itself includes a Welcome scroll. When touched, it will provide an introductory notecard for visitors, together with the local rules. The latter are minimal and easy to remember, being common sense.
Paradise Of Fantasy, August 2025
Where you go from the Landing Point is entirely up to you; as noted, there are numerous trails winding through the setting, and signposts (and warning signs in some cases!) offer direction or humorous cautions.
The landscape itself is beautifully put together, presenting a wooded setting, rich in colour from trees, shrubs and the flowers carpeting much of the ground. Two streams cut through the setting, one rising form waterfall on the south-east coast of the land to meander northwards to empty into a pond tucked in the north-east corner of the region.
Paradise Of Fantasy, August 2025The second stream might be considered more of a channel. It enters the region from a bay on the west coast and runs inland before turning north to once more return to the coastline, essentially splitting the north-west corner of the region into its own island. Both streams are spanned by wooden bridges (and tree trunks) so feet need not get wet when crossing them.
Sitting within north-western corner of the region are two more structures: the Woif’s Grotto and Eiarion. The former is a cottage literally built / hewn into a rock formation, carrying with it a Nordic / medieval sensibility. The latter occupies a headland reaching out from the bay mentioned above. Taking the form of a fairly intact ruin, Eiarion presents a mystery as to how to access it; all of the windows are either intact and glazed or boarded-up.
Paradise Of Fantasy, August 2025
The solution to the mystery can be found in the teleport stones which can be found close to each point of interest in the region. These form a network of teleports, and using the Eiarion destination will deliver you to the interior of the ruins – I’ll leave you to reflect on how to move between the two rooms.
This teleport system also provides access to those locations not necessarily directly accessible from the ground. Two of these are in the sky, one of which is well rooted in a fantasy sky, the other offering a Japanese setting. A third lies under the western sea of the region. Taking the form of an octopus’ garden, it comes with the not unreasonable request don’t pee in my sea(!).
Paradise Of Fantasy, August 2025
A further cottage lies to the north-east of the region. Set as a witch’s home, it offers broom parking outside and potions and seed for sale in the garden. It sits not far from where a fortune teller is waiting to tell you all about your future – or perhaps, how to cover up your past – as the song goes.
Nor is this all; throughout the setting is a richness of detail in glades and along the trails. Ruins sit partially overgrown, little shrines mark hallowed clearings among the trees; benches, chairs, blankets, and boats offer places to sit. For those who enjoy music there is a grassy clearing set up for events, details of which I gather can be obtained by joining the local group.
Paradise Of Fantasy, August 2025
In all, a beautiful, well-designed region mixing nature, mysticism and fantasy in a package rip for exploration and photography.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 12th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (which I refer to as the “SUG Leviathan Hour”). These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from my chat log of the meeting.
Meeting Overview
The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.
Simulator Deployments
There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.
In Brief
Harold Linden – SLua:
Has been working on “some major garbage collector surgery” so that memory usage is “properly less than Mono” and general memory profiling will be much better under SLua.
The garbage collector is good with creation and deletion of lots of small objects, with Harold noting:
SLua is weird in that most of the objects managed by the GC are built-in things that will never go away as long as the script is running, so I’ve changed the GC to ignore those entirely to make garbage collection much much faster … I’ve added some code to the GC that’s inspired by some work that was proposed for Lua proper that makes the GC get more aggressive if it thinks it might run out of memory soon .. Luckily GC is _incredibly_ cheap now so you could run it tens of thousands of times a second and it wouldn’t make much of a dent.
Next up, Harold is hoping to work on SLua events, on which he notes:
The event style will be similar to the EventEmitter API in JS `whatever.on(‘someevent’, callback)` with an alternative form that’s similar to how they’re currently specified … It’ll return a handle you can use to unsubscribe … I’m writing a pure-SLua implementation of the new event API first so people can comment on it before it’s solidified as production code, I’ve got a WIP version but I’m just sorting out some unsubscription bugs; the most notable ones, lists-in-lists and the ability to use dictionaries / objects.
He also indicated the the LSL → SLua compiler “will be open-source once we’ve start the beta phase on Agni so people can feel free to improve it. It’s much more approachable than the current compiler.”
Overall, the hope is to start beta testing of SLua on Agni in the next few months; ahead of that, Harold hopes to get an updated alpha to Aditi (the Beta grid) “to make sure events are sound”.
Leviathan provided an update on another issue he has been looking into – a bug that would sometimes cause objects to not show up on login. In providing his update on this work, he noted:
The repro case we had was delicate and would not always show up. In any case that work finally merged into the next server update. The problem was: we were clearing out the server’s “interest list” info on login that would cause the viewer to have to re-request static/cacheable data. With the change going forward we now do a better job of resetting your interest list when you arrive at your final position in the region (on login or teleport from far away). This causes the stuff to show up maybe just a second or two sooner, and less likelihood of some stuff being missing.
However, regarding the issue of issue of some people experiencing failures on logging-in (see my summary of the previous Leviathan Hour), Leviathan noted the fix he thought he had isn’t going to help. Instead, he was able to get a reliable repro which has helped better pin down the problem, which he described thus:
It turns out… if you login with lots of inventory folders at a lull in the traffic in SL you will be more likely to succeed. The system will happily handle 100k inventory folders in less than 10 seconds when the database and login.cgi servers are not under load. However, when things are busy the viewer might decide to timeout after 40 seconds. So… Signal has an idea for how to reduce the problem. It turns out you can configure Mysql server and clients to use gzip data transmission. This would happen between login.cgi and the database, while the login server is trying to compile the big chunk of data that it sends back to your viewer. Perhaps that idea will just help login.cgi and the database keep up and the problem may happen less frequently. That is the status of that.
He further noted another workaround would be to tweak the viewer’s timeout on that particular HTTPS request. This approach would allow TPVs make suitable changes and help their users get around the issue.
Restoring LindenWorld:
This has been a repeated request – to have LindenWorld (the Lab’s first attempt at a virtual environment) “brought back to the grid”, which has had pretty much the same answer with each request.
In essence – the LindenWorld code is very different to the Second Life code; it is incompatible with the current account system. While these problems could be fixed, they would require time and effort.
Harder to solve, as noted by Leviathan at this meeting, are matters of all the backend support: asset system, user database, spaceserver, etc.
All of this would divert developer resources from Second Life, it “would require an unknown amount of backburner work. Couldn’t be done as a first priority”.
Date of Next Meetings
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.
Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 2025.
† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
For August, Cica Ghost presents A – Maze, an interactive setting offering a little fun and turning a quote from author John Green somewhat on its head.
As the name might suggest, the core theme of A -Maze is just that – a maze. Formed by capped brick walls, it covers most of the region. Unlike most mazes, however, this one doesn’t have a centre or destination / goal, nor is it a unicursal; neither is it precisely a branching tour-puzzle (although it does have a form of branching). Rather, it is a means to offer assorted routes of exploration around the setting, with assorted points of exit and re-entry.
Cica Ghost: A – Maze, August 2025
While it can be travelled on foot, the maze is can also be explored via the vehicles Cica presents to visitors alongside the Landing Point. As is typical with Cica, there are no ordinary vehicles; instead they add to the region’s whimsy by taking the form of four animals carved from wood – a duck, horse, elephant and giraffe – all set on wooden chassis. Two sizes of vehicle are supplied, the smaller set of four lined up to one side of the Landing Point and potentially offered for Tinies.
By default, the vehicles move at a pedestrian speed. But if you are feeling daring then tap the Page Up key to apply the second gear and and little more speed (Page Down to slow down again). In this respect, the smaller vehicles are possibly more fun, as they are small enough to zip around the maze in comfort.
Cica Ghost: A – Maze, August 2025
The maze is not the only feature of the setting. Towards the middle of the region is a little village raised on the back of a steep-sided plateau, with bottle houses and a windmill. It is slightly overgrown by great vines, some with seed-like seats hanging from them. Elsewhere thumb-like hills are topped by trees or have ladders climbing them to individual bottle houses. Also waiting to be found are some of Cica’s little critters, while some of the walls of the maze are painted with more of Cica’s creations, brightening their brickwork.
The quote accompanying the build is from Looking for Alaska, John Gren’s 2005 novel for young adults:
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
Cica Ghost: A – Maze, August 2025
In its original form the quote references the central themes of the novel – that of coming of age, the meaning of life and grief. As such, it can be seen as slightly dark in tone and meaning. Here, Cica turns it on its head, offering an underscoring to the idea that mazes can offer journeys into the unknown (as is life itself, really), filled with unexpected delights. In this, if one wanted to be totally analytical, A – Maze echoes the ultimate message from the book, that of hope.
Not that any analysis of quote and setting is required; A – Maze is enjoyable in and of itself.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, August 10th, 2025
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.
Outside of the Official viewer, and as a rule, alpha / beta / nightly or release candidate viewer builds are not included; although on occasions, exceptions might be made.
Official LL Viewers
Default viewer 2025.05 7.2.0.16729091892, issued August 5, promoted August 8 – New.
glTF mesh import ( should have similar constraints to COLLADA upload, but does not support a unified material upload solution).
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025 – click any image for full size
I recently received an invitation from William Gide to visit Oscarton Forest Park, a setting designed by William and his SL partner, Dekon Carter.
Comprising a number of parcels spanning two regions within the south-east of Heterocera, the park offers around a quarter of a region of a landscaped setting with something of a unique history.
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025
The Park started life as a “COVID sanity project”, helping William – who designed the majority of the ground level elements – cope with lockdown by allowing him to exercise his creativity. Since then, the park has remained open as a public setting which visitors can use as a place to enjoy a sense of nature and recharge their batteries.
Given this, there are a number of distinct Landing Points to be found throughout the park. For the purposes of this piece, I’m going with the “main entrance”, so to speak, as it is here visitors can obtain a notecard with landmarks to the main hangouts within the setting.
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025
Bordered by part of the SLRR to the west and a river gorge to the south, the latter spanned by a bridge leading to what I believe to be William and Dekon’s private home, the public park runs northward. Passing a vegetable garden, the landscape opens out to offer a choice of possible exploration routes, the clearest being the main path.
The latter sweeps out to the east side of the park, passing between two Chinese lion statues, the first of multiple pieces of sculpture awaiting discovery as one explores the park. In making its sweep, the footpath skirts the lower end of the forest, a copse of silver birch. However a trail also runs through the birch trees, almost doubling back on the main path to drop down to where a trail points to the north and west, winding through the forest proper.
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025
The main footpath, meanwhile descends to where a bridge spans one of the parks streams, joining another path as it follows the bank of the stream northwards. Passing by way of a secluded cabin, this path eventually drops down to the setting’s camp site prior to making a sharp left turn to arrive at the octagonal pavilion.
This pavilion can also be reached via one of the many paths branching off from the second trail mentioned above, all of which pass various places to hang-out and also admire some of the large wood sculptures to be found among the trees.
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025
The northern end of the park includes two newer elements. The first is the Oscarton Forest Café. Occupying a large building by Cory Edo, on its east side this overlooks one of the park’s bodies of water and the pavilion beyond. On its west side, the café offers a terrace with seating a view of any passing trains.
Steps lead down from the terrace to a stone footpath and walls forming a border to the park, looking like it may have been some form of ancient fortification. Tucked within a part of these works – which also run along the northernmost extent of the park – is the Oscarton Forest Park Reflection Cove, described as a place for meditation.
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025
Also to be found within these walls is a Zen garden watched over by two large rune stones, whilst the woods in this northern extent of the park also hide the teleport platform up to the sky platform – but I’ll leave that for you to find.
Offered with a richness of detail, Oscarton Forest Park is an idyllic location, and for a first-time public build, is exceptionally pleasing to the eye and rich in opportunities for photography and for relaxing.
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025
My thanks to William for the invitation to visit; I really enjoyed doing so.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 