Category: Second Life

May 16th, 2021: Bay City marks 13 years in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Bay City 13th Anniversary – Sunday, May 16th, 2021

Bay City, the first major project undertaken by the Moles of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW), will be marking its thirteenth anniversary on Sunday, May 16th, 2021. Citizens of Bay City and residents of Second Life are invited to join in with the celebrations, which will include the traditional parade down “Route 66,” followed by a live music event in the Bay City fairgrounds.

First opened for initial viewing in May of 2008 and with parcels throughout the city being auctioned soon after, Bay City has shown itself to be one of the highlights of Second Life: a blending of Linden infrastructure and a strong, friendly community of involved residents who give the area its unique charm.

Celebratory activities will kick-off at noon SLT with a parade line-up at the band shell in Bay City – Harwich. At 12:30 SLT, the parade will make its way down Route 66, and proceed to the Bay City Fairgrounds in the North Channel region. DJ GoSpeed Racer will be providing the music throughout the parade, which will be followed by at live concert from 13:30 SLT onwards at the fairgrounds.

The line-up for the concert this year comprises (all times SLT):

  • 13:30-14:30: Mimi Carpenter – active in Second life since 2006, and active throughout all her in-world time as a live singer, Mimi hails from France although she now resides in Canada. She performs a broad rang of songs and is noted for her multi-lingual abilities, singing in English, French and German and accompanying herself on the guitar and occasionally on the piano.
  • 14:30- 15:30: Parker Static – Parker started singing at a very early age; being in a musical family her passion for singing was inevitable. Her repertoire ranges from pop through ballads, jazz, R and B to soft rock and more. She has received numerous awards including Showtime Magazine’s TOP 10 performers in SL and  the Soul Train’s Best Female entertainer of the year.
  • 15:30-16:30: Noma Falta – a noted blues rock / soul singer and guitarist, Noma has been performing in Second Life for 12 years and has also dipped her toes into other virtual domains. When not singing, she spends some of her time producing mixed media art pieces focusing on portraiture.

As usual, celebration goods, including parade float bases and ideas, are available at the Bay City Community Centre, in the Daley Bay region for those who wish to be a part of the parade. Ample viewing areas are provided. The music event is also open to all who desire to attend — not only Residents of Bay City

About Bay City and the Bay City Alliance

Bay City is a mainland community, developed by Linden Lab and home to the Bay City Alliance. The Bay City Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote the Bay City regions of Second Life and provide a venue for Bay City Residents and other interested parties to socialize and network. It is now the largest Bay city group, and home to most Residents of Bay City.

Each year, in honour of Bay City’s founding, Bay City residents come together with this special celebration.

Anniversary SLurls

The Kondor Art Square in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kondor Art Square, May 2021: Sugah Pancake

As a part of his work to make the Kondor Art Centre a hub for artistic expression and community sharing, Hermes Kondor opened the Kondor Art Square on Thursday, May 13th, 2021.

Comprising three parts, the square is designed to resemble a fashionable square in a European city (the surrounding façade to me suggests somewhere in Paris or Madrid. Its open space is intended to host open-air exhibitions by guest artists, with the area further graced by sculptures by ArtemisGreece.

The Kondor Art Museum, May 2021

At the north end of the square is the Kondor Art Museum, a space devoted to rotating exhibitions of art by Second Life artists that Hermes has purchased over the years. Facing this from the south is a book shop where visitors can buy books celebrating past art exhibitions by Hermes himself.

The 2D art currently on display within the museum comprises individual pieces by Adam Cayden, Awesome Fallen, Bamboo Barnes, Caly Applewhyte, Bebop Xue, CybeleMoon Carelyna,  Diconay Boa, Dido Haas, Etamae, Flamered, Hermano, Ladmilla Medier, Marie de la Torre, Milena Carbone, Milly Sharple, Monique Beebe, Mony Pedroya, Moora Mcmillan, Mystic Audion, Patrick Ireland, Rosehanry, Sina Souza, Traci Ultsch, Vanessa Jane and Zia Branner. All of whom make for an engaging collection – although the display could perhaps do with a little more space to allow for the volume of art to be properly appreciated – rounded out by further sculptures by ArtemisGreece.

Kondor Art Square, May 2021: Sugah Pancake

Sugah Pancake is an artist I’ve not previously encountered who describes herself as a fantasy fanatic – and this is certainly reflected in the art displayed within the Kondor Art Art Square as the inaugural guest art exhibition. The pieces presented are amongst the most vibrant, energetic and story-rich pieces I’ve had the pleasure of viewing in Second Life.

Featuring mermaids, creatures of mythology, suggestions of inspiration gained from comic characters and fantasy / sci-fi / horror literature, these are pieces with an evocative vitality that is evident through their colour, posing, framing and focus. Within each we have an entire story waiting for our imaginations to unfold.

Kondor Art Square, May 2021: Sugah Pancake

What I particularly like about the Kondor Art Centre is that the square offers a focused presentation of work by a specific artist while the museum presents the opportunity to become familiar with works by a range of Second Life artists. It makes a worthy addition to the Kondor facilities.

SLurl Details

2021 TPV Developer meeting week #19 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Frogmore 4.0, March 2021 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, May 14th, 2021.

These meetings are generally held every other week.  They are recorded by Pantera Północy, and her video of the meeting is embedded at the end of this report – my thanks to her for allowing me to do so – and it is used with a transcript of the chat log from the meeting and my own audio recording to produce these notes.

This was perhaps the shortest TPVD meeting on record.

SL Viewer

The Project UI RC viewer updated to version 6.4.19.559612 on Friday, May 14th. The remaining viewers in the pipelines remained unchanged through the week:

  • Release viewer: Eau de Vie Maintenance viewer, version 6.4.18.558266, dated April 23rd, promoted April 29th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Love Me Render (LMR) 5 viewer, version 6.4.18.558365, dated April 22nd.
    • Maintenance 2 RC viewer – Fernet, version 6.4.18.558441, dated April 21rd.
  • Project viewers:
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.4.11.550519, dated October 26th.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, dated December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, dated November 22nd, 2019.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, dated July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • All three RC viewers are pretty much ready to be considered for promotion to de facto release status. Of these, Maintenance Fernet now includes the fixes for helping with Voice updates, and is with the Lab’s QA team, so it could be the next in line to be promoted.
  • The Legacy Profiles viewer is finally receiving attention, with some cosmetic UI changes being made, after which it should be appearing as an RC viewer, rather than a project viewer.
  • LMR 6 is still gathering graphics bug fixes.
  • The Simplified Cache viewer is still awaiting its turn to re-enter the the pipelines.
  • The Mac notarisation fixes viewer is also awaiting a time to enter the available viewer pipelines.

Secondlife.com splash screen gets a further tweak

Posted on by Inara Pey
The small but noticeable update to the secondlife.com splash screen menu that appears to have been recently rolled out

Update May 17th: It  appears LL may either have released a change to the splash screen and have rolled it back, or are experimenting with ideas. On Monday, May 17th, the splash screen had reverted back to the April update.

Back in April Linden Lab slipped out a revamp to the secondlife.com home page.

At the time, it came in for a very mixed response, featuring as it does an actress in elven-like make-up rather than the more usual avatar.

The  image used was actually a still from the broadcast quality advert Levitate Media produced on behalf of Linden Lab in August 2020, and which was previewed in December 2020, a point that seemed lost on at least some of  those who responded negatively to splash screen re-vamp.

The re-vamp also brought the secondlife.com property more into line with other Second Life properties such as the enterprise micro-site, in that scrolling down the page reveals further information on Second Life under a trio of headings.

The secondlife.com splash screen image as seen with the April re-vamp, inset, the scene of the Second Life advert from which the image was taken, being filmed by Levitate Media in August 2020. 

The latest update – seen at the top of this article – was quietly rolled-out during the week. It now features an enlarged version of the still from the Levitate Media video and a re-worked menu. Gone are the options found in the top right corner of the screen, to be replaced by the more “modern” three-bar menu icon favoured by website designers and which offers a mobile device friendly solution to accessing menus. The rest of the page remains unchanged from the April 2021 update.

To be honest, I liked the April update, and the upset over the use of a live model seemed a little overblown to me; as I’ve said elsewhere, Second Life is supposedly “your world, your imagination”, so why not someone dreaming about being Galadriel or somesuch? That said, the image in this latest version is – to me – a little too large and in-you-face and as a result looses a lot of the mystery  / enticement it presented in the April version of the page; better, perhaps to have left it untouched and simply re-work the menu access.

As it is, the latest update is a small tweak, and presumably part of the Lab’s preparations for the deployment of revamped new user on-boarding process and new user experience. It  also makes the secondlife.com splash screen  a little more mobile device friendly (although the rest of the web pages have a long way to in that respect).

Note: you need need to be logged-out of secondlife.com in order to see these changes.

Going Soul Deep in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Soul Deep, May 2021 – click any image for full size

Kaelyn Alecto (TheNewKae) opened her latest Homestead region design in April 2021. Called Soul Deep, it is once again a richly detailed setting that is both fun to explore and also forms a restful retreat for those so minded to take advantage of its offerings.

Set within a ring of mountains that sit off the region and lie separated from it by a ring of blue water, Soul Deep comprises a main low-lying island around which are a number of small islets and raised promontory. These huddle around it like hatchlings making their first swim upon the calm waters under the watchful eye of their mother.

Soul Deep, May 2021

The landing point sits to the west of the main island, set upon one of Cory Edo’s converted shipping crate. Raised on shout wood and steel legs, this commands a view out over the island’s impressive lake, a body that looks as if it might once have been largely open to the surrounding waters, but time – or the hands and machines of humans – has surrounded  it with slim arms of earth, grass and reeds that gently embrace it so that waterfowl now treat it as a quiet sanctuary.

Running around the inner shore of the banks of this lake is a wooden board walk that offers a gentle walk around the water and leads visitors past various landward points of interest – places to sit out in the Sun or under the shade of trees, decks facing the waters surrounding the island, a little music venue – and the one centre of commerce to be found within the setting.

Soul Deep, May 2021

Clustered to the east, this takes the form of a group of wharves and decks on which sit assorted building that look to be related to the fishing trade – although whether fishing boats still put in alongside is perhaps questionable; the wharves appear to be devoted to rowing boats, and the boatyard seems to now be more the home for a very large shark, rather than a place for building boats…

South of this is one of the regions two uplands, a rocky table with a rather eclectic top – Doors that stand sans any surrounding building or ruins. Falls drop to the water below to one side of this strange monument to bookend one side of the arc of sand that forms a little beach  – one of two gracing the island’s shores. The second beach lies just to the south, facing a curving bay that links the rocky table with the west side of the island, where another upland sits amidst oak and fir.

Soul Deep, May 2021

This looks to have once been a part of the main island, so close are the two, but whether by accident or design, a narrow channel of water now separates them, necessitating the use of bridges to cross from one to the other.

Heavy in foliage thanks to the oak and fir covering it, this is home to an old ruin, whilst the crown of the hill features a place where visitors can literally hang out: a platform extends outward from the crown of the hill. Down below, a kayak is drawn up on the shore close to a little camp site in the lee of the hill. Thanks to the screening of the trees, this entire area feels as if it is deep in the wilderness, despite the proximity of the landing point just across the little channel.

Soul Deep, May 2021

And that’s the charm of Soul Deep: the feeling of openness and the mix of locations and open water that gives it a sense of being much larger than the region in which it sits.

Whether you want to explore the main island or hop over to the outriggers – one with a cosy house upon it, another with the remnants of an old church, a third with a simple deck of which to sit – there really is much to discover and appreciate here, while the boats liberally scattered over the waters (some of which can be driven), offer still more opportunities for discover and / or relaxation.

Soul Deep, May 2021

SLurl Details

RelayStock 2021 and Bid a Linden Bald (there be Linden Bears!) in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
RelayStock 2021 event stage

It’s a weekend of Peace Love and Hope and great music as the 8th annual RelayStock takes place between Friday, May 14th and Sunday, May 16th inclusive, once again raising funds for Relay For Life of Second Life and the world-wide work of the American Cancer Society (ACS).

Paying homage to Woodstock, and hosted by the Relay Rockers, RelayStock brings together Relay teams from diverse communities across Second Life for a celebration of the Relay season. Teams raise their banners above makeshift tents and old VW campers as they gather for three days of Peace Love Music and Hope.

A long-time staple of the annual Relay for Life season in Second Life, Relay Stock is also the venue to two special events – Bid a Linden Bald and the Celebrate Remember Fight-Back Top DJ Fund-raising Competition.

Bid A Linden Bald and Obtain a Limited Edition Linden Bear

2021 marks the 5th year that the Lindens have joined in the fun at RelayStock through Bid a Linden Bald – and this year the event has a couple of extra for folk to appreciate: the Moles of the LDPW are joining the fun, and those making donations via the special Bid a Linden Bald kiosks can receive a Limited Edition Linden Bear!

As the name suggests, Bid A linden Bald sees a number of teams from Linden Lab challenge one another to see who can raise the most in Linden Dollar donations for RFL of SL. At the end of the event, the team raising the least amount of money see their avatars get their hair shorn by the team raising the most. Or as the event advertising puts it:

Top team gets the scissors – lowest team gets the haircut!

RelayStock 2021: Bid a Linden Bald

The six teams from the Lab participating this year comprise:

  • Team 1: Alexa, Dottie, Izzy, Mint, Rhea, TJ, Wendi
  • Team 2: Cammy, Ellie, Kit, Oberwolf, Rocko, Tommy, Whitney
  • Team 3: Dakota, Evie, Kreide, Obi, Simon, Vanessa
  • Team 4: Darcy, Grumpity, Kristin, Patch, Spots, Vix
  • Team 5: Derrick, Hobbes, Maggie, Patsy, Theresa, Volo
  • Team 6 (Moles): Abnor, Alotta, Chronos, Dion, Hazel, Itsa, Maximus, Milli, Notta, Spirit.

For those who have been asking about the Lab’s new Board members and their interest in Second Life, it’s worth pointing out that Team 2’s Oberwolf Linden is in fact Board member and Executive Chairman Brad Oberwager, who is getting fully into the swing of the event and showing further support for activities in Second Life, along with the Lab’s new Chief of Staff, Cammy Bergren (Cammy Linden), who is also a member of Team 2!

Linden Lab’s Chief of Staff, Cammy Bergren (centre left) and Board member / Executive Chairman, Brad Oberwager (centre right) are Participating in Team 2 for Bid A Linden Bald through their respective avatars, Cammy Linden and Oberwolf Linden, seen flanking them

Since its inauguration in 2017 (at the Second Life Birthday event) Bid A Linden Bald has helped to raise L$3,000,000 (approx. US $12,000) for Relay For Life and the ACS.

Every year, I look forward to the Rockers’ Bid Me Bald fundraiser. This is one of the longest running team fundraisers in our Relay’s history and it has become a touchstone moment for so many of us. I have enjoyed watching the event grow and evolve over the years and am grateful to the Lindens for getting into the spirit of this time-tested fundraising challenge.

– Stingray Raymaker, ACS representative in Second Life

Biding is now open at the RelayStock event space, and will remain so through until Wednesday May 19th, when, at 12:00 SLT, the team to lose their hair will be announced and the Official Haircutting will take place (and all are invited!).

Bid A Linden Bald Linden Bears

The Limited Edition Bid a Linden Bald Bear

This year, people can bid by making a donation directly to each team’s kiosk, or by making a L$250 donation to the accompanying Limited Edition Bid A Linden Bald Linden Bear kiosk and receive a pair of Limited Edition Linden Bears.

Designed by Chronos Mole, these comprise a wearable Animesh Bear and a seated static bear for home décor. It would have perhaps been nice if the wearable bear was a little smaller and rigged to sit, say, on your shoulder rather than just a simple “carry” pose that is easily overridden by any walking animation, but they are nevertheless a cute pair, and already proving to be very popular.

Bid a Linden Bald can be found at the large barn immediately adjacent to the RelayStock landing point.

Celebrate Remember Fight-Back Top DJ Fund-raising Competition Grand Final

The CRFB event features Club and Radio DJs from all over Second Life as they try to see who among them can raise the most Linden Dollars in support of the Relay For Life, with RelayStock hosting the Grand Final between the two top fund-raisers.

In 2020, DJ Baggie and DJ Kayla went head-to-head in their sets at RelayStock, raising more than L$330,000 in the process, with DJ Kayla taking home top honours. This year will see finalists DJ Tanis and DJ Stormy compete in back-to-back sets on Sunday, May 17th.

RelayStock 2021: Relay Team camp sites

Stage Schedule

The event’s activities line up as follows (all times SLT – check the official event page for any late updates):

Friday May 14th Saturday May 15th Sunday May 16th
13:00:  DJ Zen Greywolf

14:30:  DJ Melinia Firehawk

16:00:  Keeba & Maniacs – LIVE

17:00 : Quartz – LIVE

18:00:  DJ Sasha Fairywren

19:30: DJ Kewl

 09:00: Shay Dezno-Gary Jonstone-LIVE

10:30 Noon: DJ Kayla

Noon: DJ Corruptor

13:30: DJ Selene Jashan

15:00-16:00: Todd Rumsford – LIVE

16:00-17:30: DJ Jennylynn Capalini

17:30-19:00: DJCynthia Farshore

19:00-20:30: DJ Toocool

20:30-22:00: DJ Stephanie

 09:00-10:30: DJ Caesey Sawson

10:30-12:00 Noon: DJ Rora

Noon-13:30: Brisas Ar – LIVE

1:30PM – Max Kleene – LIVE

2:00PM – CRFB FINALIST – DJ Tanis

3:30PM – CRFB FINALIST-DJ Stormy

5:00PM – Trader Whiplash – Time Machine

7:30PM  – DJ Mattie Carlson

So, let the spirit of the Age of Aquarius enter your life this weekend, don your kaftan (and galoshes!), put flowers in your hair and head on over to RelayStock for great music, great dancing, great fun – all in a good cause!

Event Links