IMAGOLand Art Galleries, July 2026: Carelyna – Phantasmagoria
In October 2023, I visited and wrote aboutPhantasmagoria, an exhibition of art by Carelyna hosted at Mareea Farraco’s IMAGOLand gallery. For July 2026, Carelyna has returned to IMAGOLand with an continuation / extension to that exhibition entitled, appropriately enough, Phantasmagoria II.
As I noted with the original exhibition, while the title might well evoke thoughts of ghosts and spectres, it can also reference the idea of a sequences of haphazardly associative imagery as seen in dreams. This latter interpretation is close to what we see here (and as was the case with the original Phantasmagoria – from which several of the pieces in this exhibition have been drawn), a juxtapositioning of images that speak to ideas of memory, emotions, absence – perhaps even loss – and the inner workings of the mind.
IMAGOLand Art Galleries, July 2026: Carelyna – Phantasmagoria
The 16 images on display are offered within a darker surround that the original exhibition, one that presents a more immersive sense of night and dreams to those inner thoughts of the mind as we become lost in subconscious, rather than conscious, thought. Candelabras which further imprint the idea of being within a hallowed place of memory and remembrance.
All of the 16 is a sepia-rich pieces, with their washed tone and faded or ghost-like images designed to represent both fragments of memory – events recalled through the mists of time in which ghost-like individuals appear sometimes almost clearly, others almost completely washed out – and of emotions and feelings.
Some of this might be gained by peeking at the individual names of the pieces via a right-click & edit; but it is far better to spend time contemplating what each means to you, and how they speak to how memories important to us, together with their associated emotions and feelings, never truly vanish – although they might over time become transformed by the passage of time and by our own growth and change. They can come unbidden and jumbled, but they can also be a journey through times past, reframing them and comforting or even healing us as they give us a second chance to recall those times.
IMAGOLand Art Galleries, July 2026: Carelyna – Phantasmagoria
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Updates from the week through to Sunday, July 12th, 2026
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 – 26.2.0.25386466510, May 19 -“flat” UI and font update – No change.
Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 6.1.0.23768336784, April 29 – No change.
Hi-Café, July 2026 – click any image for full size
Update: August 28, 2026: Hi Café closed at the end of August, 2026.
It was sort-of back on the road in Mainland for me after catching a Tweet from Hico Spicy concerning her Hi-Café, tucked away on the northern arc of Heterocera’s Route 3. This is an utterly charming little corner of SL, lovingly packed into less that 1,500 sq metres to present a restful environment rich in colour and with a sense of fun, ideal for relaxing within and take photos.
With the rainy season at hi-cafe over, the season has shifted from hydrangeas to sunflowers! I hope you can enjoy the full-on summer atmosphere
– From Hico’s Tweet
Hi-Café, July 2026
Set a little back from the main road, the café / bakery offers its own bus stop, with two entrances to its garden space, the smaller passing by way of a newspaper and magazine stand to the one side of the building, and a larger one complete with a greeting to the regions the café is both with and faces, whilst leading to the other side.
Being effectively double-front in design, the building – which is of Hico’s own design and available in her Marketplace store – naturally lends itself to something of a mirrored setting, with brick-edged paths bordering it to either side which are in turn bordering by long, rectangular ponds.
Hi-Café, July 2026
The footpaths contrast nicely with the paving of the courtyard within which the café sits, whilst the trees lined up between each path and pond provide welcome shade.
The setting is surrounded by brick walls, giving it a nice sense of calm and separation from its surrounding without feeling overly enclosed. Even the tall viaduct-like bridge marking the back of the setting fits well with the scene, both blending with the trees and providing an arched space before which an aged tree grows, bench seating and a busker’s music stand under its spreading branches.
Hi-Café, July 2026
Given the paved nature of the courtyard, the majority of the trees have been trained up through tree grates which are also home to many of the sunflowers that give bright bursts of colour to the place, and which can be found in brick-built planters and the brick-retained front garden space.
Further depth is given to the setting through the use of signs and advertising boards, splashes of graffiti on the surrounding walls and the richness of the décor in and around the café. I couldn’t help but smile at a lot of the signage, such as the chalkboard noting that Our coffee is an experience that chalk is unable to convey.
Hi-Café, July 2026
Cats appear to be the overlords here as well; they keep an eye on things from various vantage points, and one appears to be prepared to help out in cleaning up dropped ice cream cones – although admittedly, the cherry which presumably once topped the ice cream is the centre of his attention.
A cosy, memorable place to visit – limited rezzing for photographic is available via joining the local group, but please do clean-up when done!
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026 – click any image for full size
The Last – and until recently, the only – time I visited Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat was in late 2024, when the region was in the depths of winter. Unsurprisingly, with the changing of the seasons comes a brighter, warmer feel to the setting and what – if memory serves correctly – are a number of small changes to the design. All of which gives plenty of reason for a return visit.
Welcome to the enchanting Loch Tredach Inn and Retreat – a place where romance and magic come together to create unforgettable memories.
Loch Tredach Inn and Retreat About Land description
The setting is a Full private region leveraging the Land Capacity bonus, and the majority of the landscaping and décor is by region holder Isabelle Larkspur.
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026
I say largely, because the entire north-eastern extent of the region is given over to a private residence and its gardens and surrounds. These have been landscaped in keeping with the rest of the region by the property holder allowing them to merge seamlessly with it but are most definitely not open to public rambling. This property extends down a portion of the the east side of the region to butt up against the Landing Point.
Signs notify visitors that the land around the large house is private and a 30-second delay security system will also give fair warning before the hammer drops (to use an auctioneering term); but do take care when first arriving so as not to wander north from the Landing Point. Even with a long delay on actions being taken, encountering a warning from a security system so soon after arriving within a setting can be off-putting to the point of leaving anyway, which would be a shame because Loch Tredach has a lot that’s worth seeing.
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026: “Are you all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…”
Outside of this residence, the rest of the region is free to explore, and so long as you heed the signs the private residence doesn’t really interfere with ramblings and spending time relaxing along the way.
As noted, not a lot had physically changed since my December 2024 visit, but the colour Isabelle has brought forth for summer totally change the appearance of the setting from one of winter’s charm, excuses for skating and the excitement around Christmas and the New Year, to one very much of beauty, tranquillity and romance.
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026
In my wanderings, I noted several elements I recalled from that first visit, if not their exact position in relation to one another. This made their rediscovery feel somewhat like bumping into old acquaintances. The Aviary, the ruined folly offering a bibliophile’s hideaway, the pavilions, the arching little wooden bridges – all served to pop-up in greeting as I explored.
With the arrival of summer, deer have come to enjoy the grazing of the grasslands and the shelter of the woodlands; geese patrol the shores of the inland lake, and foxes and rabbits roam and play whilst seagulls have come inland to circle overhead.
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026
The Landing Point sits to the east of the region as noted, being located on the south-eastern headland. It presents my kind of coffee house (“Bad Day? Coffee. Good Day? Coffee. Lots of Work to Do? Coffee”). It offers indoor and outdoor seating, with more to be found in a garden shed converted into a little summer house close by (beyond which the private land commences). A large lighthouse sits out the southern bluff of the headland, with a little camp site between it and the coffee house.
Exploring the region from here is achieved by following the path down to a covered bridge passing over the narrow channel marking the exit point from the region’s large central lake – on the shore of which the Landing Point sat at the time of my original visit.
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026
To the west the region retains its air of misty age and wintry mystery within the open-air event space occupying the north-west with its sense of age and history with the columns and ruins. The latter include the TLC Chapels Ruins, complete with wisps and phantoms of mist wrapping themselves around it. The Chapel is a personal favourite of mine I frequently use in my own builds, and here it offers a kind of “private” dance space set to one side of the main dance floor, although I cannot help but feel it really deserves some added décor; it was simply created to be decorated.
Alongside of this, but separated from it by a curtain wall of rock, is the mystical-feeling “winter’s gorge”. Here is a place of great crystalline walls backed against the high blocks of rock. The waters here are eternally frozen and snow surrounds them at the feet of the tall crystals. It’s a place watched over by the Spirit Maiden and where exotic flowers grow and a stone stairway climbs a gentle turn into the clouds to reach a floating island of rock, a romantic retreat in itself. It would perhaps be nice to see this location have its own EEP setting (shape allowing), but in lieu of this I do suggest flipping your time of day over to Midnight whilst within it to full capture its beauty.
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026
Elsewhere, there’s the gentle looping walk that carries visitors to the reading nook folly as it and converted shed before returning to the large red house which sits to the south of the region on the main paths coming down from the Landing Point, and which appears to be open to the public. There’s also the path up another gorge to a little snug overlooking the feet of the waterfalls which created the gorge and fee its fast-flowing stream.
And all of this barely touches on the level of detail awaiting discovery. These include multiple places to sit, some obvious, others tucked away and perhaps easily missed. Itan dancing columns are also to be found throughout the region giving people the freedom to dance almost anywhere (including up on the floating island!), and more.
Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat, July 2026
Whilst the public expanse of the region has its own Shared Environment which gives it a further air of romantic mystery, it also lends itself to other EEP settings for those wishing to experiment with their photography (I’ve used one personal EEP for the photos here). All of which reaffirms Loch Tredach Inn & Retreat an ideal visit and photogenic visit.
The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
Default viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25386466510, -“flat” UI and font update, dated May.
Second Life Project Viewers – Lua Editor Alpha viewer 6.1.0.23768336784, April 29.
Viewer Notes
26.3 is back in development with some additional texture streaming work added. It’s currently awaiting QA testing.
The Lua viewer (with Linux support) still looks set to be the viewer to proceed to release status after 26.3.
The Graphics Care Package (GCP) viewer should be getting some attention “soon”.
Geenz Linden indicated that he’d to try and get more PBR fixes into GCP, and encouraged anyone with a broken environment to send details his way (+ landmarks to places that are broken vs. non-PBR).
The fixes for water (reflections, etc.), are “mostly there” in GCP, but there are still several edge cases that need tracking down.
The alpha-gamma work still doesn’t yet have a home in a viewer .
More on Updating from OpenGL
So, as everyone knows we’ve been on OpenGL for a very long time. And we’ve kicked the can on this for a while – mostly because although things aren’t moving most of the time in OpenGL land, it’s not really – moving. However, deprecation is still landing in various ways across various drivers and the like whether we like it or not, and we’re forever stuck on GL 4.1 because thanks Apple. That limits our options as far as further optimisations. But we can’t just up and move everything over night. There’s a good bit of tech debt that needs clean-up, API calls that are using a lot of older ways to do things, etc., and things that just don’t really make sense even in a “modern” OpenGL context.
– Geenz Linden, discussing plans for “after OpenGL”
Geenz went on to note:
The “first big chunk” of work – already underway and will hopefully ship with the Graphic Care Package (GCP) viewer – is cleaning up a lot of how OpenGL is used. There are still a lot of “exposed” OpenGL calls. A separate fork of the viewer cleans this up, and should be landing in GCP in the near future.
There needs to be work to update and modernise a lot of elements of the viewer that assume a surprising amount of old fixed function pipeline-style GL usage. This is also being worked on, and the hope is it will land in the GCP viewer.
There then needs to be some significant work on LLPipeline separation.
At its core, this means getting the rendering engine into its own library and making it so the viewer can more directly function in a headless state.
Whilst the viewer has had a headless mode for a while, it’ is currently under utilised, and more-or-less banks on LLRender being compiled with some flags that disable OpenGL.
The new library-based approach would make it so the rendering pipe is entirely its own library and optional; it just won’t have any render output on its own (it will require a render interface).
The current thinking at the Lab is to build a new renderer interface to replace LLRender, which can then be used to:
Either port the current rendering engine to Vulkan through, maybe something like an LLPipelineVulkan/ LLPipelineMetal/LLPipelineD3D12(?) + something called LLGPUDriver (which is pretty much where OpenGL/Vulkan/Metal lives).
Or TPVs can port in some other third party rendering engine without any coupling with LLRender.
Thus, the point of the renderer interface is to further decouple the viewer from the concept of rendering in the first place. Basically, there’ll like be LLRenderEngine which is probably going to be a (mostly) pure interface that LLPipeline gets to be the first consumer of.
He noted that this second option is still going through internal decision-making processes, and that both it and the first option are very much “a bit of a large lift”.
The reasons for this approach is about having an offramp from the OpenGL pipe without being super disruptive (as might be the case if the new pipeline ships prematurely, forcing people onto it similarly prematurely in a similar manner to PBR). So what is likely is that:
There will be an OpenGL pipeline that lingers for a while (aka “years”) as the legacy renderer.
Whatever lands as the “new” renderer (whether that’s a direct port to Vulkan or something else)
A debug setting to select which one is to be used.
A lot of what happens vis OpenGL overall is going depend on overall confidence in a new pipeline reaching a maturity across across a broad enough range of machines used to access SL so as to consider retiring OpenGL.
As such, the main thing LL will be tracking once a project is initiated, is how well adoption is holding up on the low-end for this thing by the way. Some of those machines might be stuck on OpenGL forever, and might not get all of the shiny Vulkan stuff eventually.
Geenz further indicated at:
He’s been working on a rendering engine of his own for some time, and that is a potential option.
Using slang-rhi is very much an option asl well, so multiple APIs can be targeted APIs at once, and then just tweak depending on what is required to support a specific platform.
In terms of the up-front clean-up, etc., mentioned in Geenz’s opening statement on the subject, this was noted as being not that far away.
A request was made for the new renderer to support more than one pipe at a time with different camera angles, so that a single account could make use of them for shooting machinima, etc.
Geenz noted that this is unlikely to be officially supported.
Other Items
Some discussion circled the topic of “SLMesh2” (see my week #27 CCUG Summary), with Geenz noting:
His work on the project is liable to be more high-level, with Product Engine developers doing the coding work.
It will be an iterative project, with the first major element being more getting off of the current SLMesh format.
An update on the status of work in porting RLVa to the official viewer was requested. This was a project started a few years ago and then appeared to be moved to the sidings. No response was given, possibly because the question was missed in the OpenGL / renderer discussions.
A discussion on water and reflections towards the end of the meeting.
Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Lo CoeurI recently received a series of invites to visit the Michiel Bechir Gallery in Second Life and witness the July 2026 / summer exhibition there, which features four artist-photographers, three of whom present images from Second life, and the fourth photographs taken in the physical worlds and scaled for presentation in-world. Of the four, two follow clearly-stated themes, whilst the remaining two appear more free-form, albeit with undertows of emotions themes.
Through My Eyes by Lo Coeur, is a personal catalogue of her journeys through Second Life – journeys she undertakes with a positive outlook which is reflected in the bright, and in some cases suitably saturated, colours found within many of the pieces presented. Lo additionally uses a mix of styles and tone with which to present moods within several of the pieces (take, Light, Lonely, and Sky on the Water for example), whilst the use of saturation can both enhance the mood of a piece (Misty Mountain) and encourage focus (Passion, for example).
Rich and inviting, these are pieces that help reveal the magic of exploring SL.
Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Rebeka Demjórus Tƶimişce (RebekaNLady)
Each photograph in this gallery tells a story. Not just of places and things, but of feelings, of life. Of the quiet beauty that surrounds us every day, if we stop to look. … We chose these photos not because they are perfect, but because they are honest. They capture the world as it is: messy, beautiful, fragile, and resilient. They invite you to pause. To reflect. To feel.
Rebeka Demjórus Tƶimişce (RebekaNLady) introducing her exhibition
Thus Rebeka introduces a collection of 17 photographs captured in the real world which are as rich in colour as they are in subject matter. Their sweeping range encompasses riverside views, woodlands and parks, macro studies of flowering plants, reflections on water rich in reeds or the natural detritus of nature accumulating in shallows – and more. How we respond to them – the feelings or emotions they might cause is, obviously, entirely personal and not something to be ascribed here. All I will say is that all of them do hold the eye and present outlooks on life that might easily be missed if they are looked at too quickly, with the two offered purely in monochrome perhaps conveying a deeper sense of personal message than the others.
Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Karma Nirvana
There is no introduction for the collection of 14 pieces presented by Karma Nirvana – and one simply is not required. These are pieces which speak quietly but firmly, each with a distinctive voice, of the beauty and wonder of Second Life.
I confess that I’m not sure if I’ve witnessed Karma’s work in the past, but if that is the case then it is to my loss. These are pieces captured in some of Second Life’s most familiar public regions – Loch Tredach, The Far Away, Grand Harbor Isle and so on – which may to some be instantly recognisable, but here are given new depth and meaning thanks to Karma’s use of subject, focus, angle, cropping and post-processing. Whilst no over-arching theme may have been intended here, each piece is in and of itself deeply emotive.
Michiel Bechir Gallery, July 2026: Michiel Bechir
In Reflections, photographer Michiel Bechir invites visitors into a world where surfaces, shadows and mirrored light reveal more than they conceal. Each image captures a moment in which reality folds back onto itself – water becomes memory, glass becomes emotion and architecture becomes a quiet echo of the avatar observing it.
– The introduction to Michiel Bechir’s collection Reflections
And so through a series of 12 images, Michiel takes us on a journey across Second Life, each piece offering a singular view that is subtly split through the use (most often) by reflection, encouraging us to look as much below – so to speak (or in the foreground in most cases) as what might be taken as the primary subject within it. These are pieces where the play of light on water, of the rippling reflections and refractions of the world above are, together with lighting and tone, the drivers of our emotional responses to each image. Relying most particularly on the use of EEP settings more than post-processing, these are works all waiting to tell a story to the ears that are ready to hear.
Four excellent and engaging exhibitions sitting under a single roof.
