Category: Second Life

Gods, Odds and Trees in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Seanchai Library

It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s home in Nowhereville, unless otherwise indicated. Note that the schedule below may be subject to change during the week, please refer to the Seanchai Library website for the latest information through the week.

Monday, October 5th: Running from the Deity

Gyro Muggins reads the 10th (chronologically speaking) story of Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx series.

Continuing his pursuit of an alien weapon’s platform, the Krang, Flinx finds himself heading into the Blight. However, his ship, Teacher, announces it is in need of repairs and that while its autonomic systems can handle them, it will nevertheless need raw materials from a planet. Flinx therefore opts to land on the nearest world – the planet the “Arrawd”, place roughly equivalent in technology to Earth in 19th century – and therefore normally forbidden as a destination within the Humanx Commonwealth.

The planet has a lower gravity than more Humanx worlds, something that benefits Flinx physically – but things go awry when he injures himself and is forced into the care of a local couple, who find his abilities and technology  – if the expression might be used – out of their world.

Despite his protestations, Flinx finds himself increasingly the centre of attention and the idea that he is some kind of deity – and while he finds himself drawn to the less complicated life on Arrawd and the fact it separates him from all the cares and worries he faces in the Commonwealth, he realises he must leave.

Unfortunately, by the time he arrives it this conclusion, three of the governments on the planet have decided to wage war in order to “earn” his blessings and claim him as their deity. And so, reluctantly, he has no other option but to both get involved in matters whilst simultaneously trying to escape the world view that he is some kind of god.

Tuesday, October 6th:

12:00 Noon: Russell Eponym, Live in the Glen

Music, poetry, and stories in a popular weekly session at Ceiluradh Glen.

19:00: Odd and the Frost Giants

Willow Moonfire reads Neil Gaiman’s story, originally written for World Book Day.

Winter isn’t coming – it’s refusing to go away, but no-one understands why.

Not only that, but Odd has run away from home, despite the fact he can barely walk and has to use a crutch. Nevertheless, he finds his way to the forest, where he encounters three animals: a bear, a fox, and an eagle, and they have a strange story to tell. Listening to them, Odd realises he must now embark on a strange journey, one he can barely imagine.

For he must now set out and save nothing less that Asgard, City of the Norse Gods. For it has been invaded by the Frost Giants, and while they hold it, winter will not pass away. 

It’s going to take a very special kind of boy to defeat the most dangerous of all the Frost Giants and free the mighty Gods. A boy who is resolute, cheerful and infuriating and clever…

…A boy just like Odd, in fact.

Also at Ceiluradh Glen.

Wednesday, October 7th, 19:00: The Halloween Tree at the Haunted Hollow

A special Halloween tale from Ray Bradbury for a special Halloween event in Second Life.

On All Hallows Eve, young Pipkin is due to meet his eight friends outside a haunted house on the edge of town. But as runs through the gathering gloom, Something sweep him away.

Arriving at the house in expectation of meeting Pipkin, his eight friends instead encounter the mystical Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud, who informs them that Pipkin has been taken on a journey that could determine if he lives or dies.

Aided by Moundshroud and using the tail of a kite, the eight friends pursue Pipkin through time and space, passing through the past civilisations of the Egypt, Greece, Roman, the Celts … witnessing all that has given rise to the day they know as “Halloween”, and the role things like ghosts and the dead play in it.

Then, at length they come to the Halloween Tree itself, laden with jack-o’-lanterns, its branches representing the confluence of all these traditions, legends and tales, drawing them together into itself…

Thursday, October 8th

19:00: The Night Stalker – Interview With A Vampire?

 Shandon presents another adventure into the unexplained from the canon of Carl Kolchak. Also in Kitely – teleport from the main Seanchai World grid.kitely.com:8002:SEANCHAI.

21:00: Seanchai Late Night

Finn Zeddmore presents contemporary Sci-Fi-Fantasy from such on-line sources as Light Speed, Escape Pod, and Clarkesworld ‘zines.

Art and the ecosystem at Nitroglobus in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Animals on Earth

The start of October brings with it the opening – on Monday October 5th at 12:30 SLT – another provocative exhibition at Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, curated by Dido Haas.

Nitroglobus remains one of my most-visited (and most written about!) galleries because month in and mouth out, Dido encourages some of the most engaging artists to display their work there, and to do so within the frame of a theme she – or more usually the artist – has set. The result is that each most, Nitroglobus plays host to art that can provoke, evoke, emote, and engage on a level that I personally cannot help but find magnetic.

For October, the gallery is playing host to an installation put together by two artists working together under the banner of Dreamers & Co. They are Nette Reinoir (Jeanette Reinoir) – who is exhibiting her work within a gallery for the first time – and Livio Korobase, and they are  supported in part by drawings from the portfolio of physical world Dutch artist, Redmer Hoekstra.

Entitled Animals on Earth, the installation is designed to encourage us to use this time of enforced pause in our lives courtesy of the SRS-COV-2 pandemic to consider what is happening to the world’s ecosystem – its flora and fauna – directly as a result of mankind’s impact on the planet.

Modern societies have been treating Mother Earth as if it was their property; extracting resources, polluting constantly, changing the landscape, killing the animals and destroying its natural balance.
Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has killed 83% of all wild mammals and half of all the plants on Earth. Two hundred species of living beings are extincted every single day. We collectively need to change so many things in areas such as the use of plastic, meat consumption, contaminating energies, day-to-day overconsumption and more.

– Statement by the artists

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Animals on Earth

Now to be sure, statistics and figures need context, and those relating to “daily” extinction rates can be called into question, as they tend to be inconsistent. For example, in 2015 the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that perhaps some 24 species of plant, insect and animal became extinct either regionally or globally every day – but the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity put the figure at “up to 150”, a far larger number, even allowing for the “up to”. Other models present further differing rates, and all appear to be distanced from the fact that historically, we have “only” seen around 800 global extinctions of animals (land, air and marine), during the last 400 years.

However, this does not negate Animals on Earth‘s thematic message. The current epoch – the Holocene – is regarded as encompassing the sixth mass extinction level event (ELE) this planet has seen, the Anthropocene extinction; and event that is still very much on-going, and potentially accelerating. It has its roots in natural climate change as the Pleistocene period, with its rolling waves of ice ages, gave way to the warmer, wetter Holocene period, leading to the extinction of many of the large mammalian species that had acclimatised to the cold, dry ice ages, and an a matching marine megafungal extinction event that brought an end to many marine reptiles and fish due to changing sea temperatures.

But this period of extinctions was influenced by another factor: the rise of humans as organised hunter-gatherers, which gave rise to the first wave of over-hunting, accelerating the demise of many species. It was the start of a trend of human intervention and meddling in Earth’s ecosystem that has continued throughout the Holocene period such that within a few thousands of years, humankind has had one of the most dramatic impacts the Earth’s biomass has witnessed.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Animals on Earth

From over-hunting, to disrupting natural environment as a result of increasing agricultural needs (notably livestock rearing) through to large-scale urban and other development and its associated infrastructure and waste, humans have significantly altered the world’s biomass in multiple ways,  own of the biggest being the distribution of mammalian life on Earth, which in 2018 was shown to be 36% humans, 60% livestock (notably cattle and pigs) and just 4% wild animals (source: The biomass distribution on Earth, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Nor does it end there; as the pre-eminent apex predator, human kind is regarded as a megahunter due to our predisposition to hunt and kill creatures pure for “sport” – an act that significantly increases the risk of regional (and even global) extinction of multiple species.

Thus, through our actions, we are directly responsible for continuing the Anthropocene extinction, and thanks to our broader impact on the climate, we are pretty much its primary driver. Our actions are bringing multiple species of fauna and flora and biota dangerous close to the edge of global extinction, we have irrefutably been responsible for many regional extinctions (rendering portions of the world and its oceans no longer habitable by species that once occupied them, even if those species survive to some degree elsewhere) over the last several decades.

It is all of this that Animals on Earth tries to encompass, and it tries to do so not by brow-beating with facts and figures or by doing so by being unduly heavy in its imagery, but by presenting us with images and models and interactive elements that in places fun (do make sure you kiss the frog) and which also serve to get the grey matter working, even if subconsciously.

Nitroglobus Roof Gallery: Animals on Earth
Flow with the thoughts and you’ll discover nature illustrates the Creator’s powers, whoever he/she is. Most of us, however, fail to appreciate nature because we’re entangled in our fast-paced lives, and life’s problems cloud our minds from grasping its beauty and lessons. Climate change, overpopulation, pollution, unfettered urbanization, and wars cause disasters to the natural environment. Little wonder we see less of nature and more of guns, nukes, and bloodshed in our cities.

Statement by the artists

Rich in colour thanks to Nette’s images, and very interactive thanks to Livio’s models and scenery (be sure to mouse-over things carefully – even  Redmer Hoekstra’s drawing are more than they seem – Animals on Earth encourages the visitor to consider Earth’s biodiversity as represented by the creatures with who we share the world, and presses us to imagine what life would be like in general terms were we to lose them.

With much to see and do – and to mull over / research – Animals on Earth officially opens to music by DJ Gorilla on Monday, October 5th,  appropriately enough, and will remain open through the rest of October.

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Rock Your Rack 2020 in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Rock Your Rack

Rock Your Rack is the annual fund-raiser for the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) opened its doors on Saturday, October 3rd, and remains in full swing through until Sunday, October 18th, 2020, offering shopping, music, fashion shows, entertainment and art.

Some 1.7 million women – and men – were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, the year in which Rock Your Rack was founded by Jamee Sandalwood and the team at Models Giving Back. Today, the figure still stands at around 1.6 million world-wide. NBCF’s mission is to help women in the United States by providing help and inspiring hope to those affected by breast cancer through early detection, education and support services. NBCF is also joining hands with organisations around the globe to provide breast cancer education, and Rock Your Rack aims to raise funds to support all of these activities.

Located on a single region, the event this year has a distinctly tropical theme, and is sponsored by Digital Farm System, Dark Betty, Darkstar’s Speakeasy, Designs By Soosy, NY NY Piano Lounge, Rapture, and Swank Events. and has more than 60 designers and merchants taking part.

As with previous years, supporting designers have been asked to provide a limited edition item, of which 100% of all proceeds of sales go towards Rock Your Rack. In addition, and to encourage visits to the event, designers have been asked to offer an exclusive item their customers can only purchase via Rock Your Rack.  You can find out more about the limited edition and exclusive offers at the event here.

Rock your Rack 2020: art show

Entertainment will be on offer each weekend of the event and features bot DJs and live singers. Special performances by Terpsicorps Artwerks are also a feature of this year’s event. Just under 40 artists are participating in the Rock your Rack art show this year, presenting a rich mix of art covering SL avatar studies and landscape and physical world art created by the the artists involved. And, of course there will be the event fashion shows.

The complete event schedule can be found in the calendar below – all times SL. However, be sure to check the Rock Your Rack website for concise schedules for things like the weekend entertainment schedules.

Those so minded can also take part in the Rock Your Rack hunt. Many of the designer and other booths at the event  have a L$10 item available as part of the Rock Your Rack Hunt – look for the heart-in-a-clothes hanger objects. Then can be found all over the event region – including the art show!

Rack Your Rack 2020: fashion show stage

About Rock Your Rack

Rock Your Rack is the annual fund-raiser for, and officially endorsed by, the National Breast Cancer Foundation in the United States. launched in 2012, the event has been held every year since then, operating on the basis of complete transparency. All documentation relating to the funds raised at each event from screenshots of totals raised, through the Lindex credit processing of US dollar amounts out of Second Life to donation receipts from the MBCF, are posted each year directly to the Rock Your Rack website.

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Stopping by a Paradise on Sea in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Paradise on Sea, October 2020 – click any image for full size

Paradise on Sea came to our attention via Shawn Shakespeare (who has perhaps the most unique talent for finding regions that are open to photographing / writing about). A Full region held by Bellita (Belle Onedin), it offers a home for her SL business, Heart Poses located on a sky platform high above the region, and a ground level that is open for visitors to explore and appreciate.

Set in summertime, the region offers a warming visit for those of us sitting in the northern hemisphere, where the weather seems to have decided to skip autumn entirely, and settled on scowling, rainy, winter-like days. Given this lean towards summer, Paradise on Sea is a bright, lush setting, full of greenery and with flowers – wild or potted – in full bloom to offer bright splashes of colour against the rich greens.

Paradise on Sea, October 2020

Although offering the “on Sea” in its title, the region has the appearance of being located within a landlocked lake, verdant hills cut by a single  serpentine river surrounding its three islands. The largest of these, forming the bulk of the region, is home to the landing point – which is not enforced (in fact the coordinates found in About Land’s Options tab are actually off, and will drop you into the waters of the region’s east side) – is located in an old stone ruin that offers a teleport disk up to the Heart Poses store.

The landing point sits at the feet of a tall, blunt-topped peak of rock that rises from a broad base that mixes grassy slopes with pools of clear water fed from numerous falls that tumble from multiple points in its sheer faces. It’s a distinctive rocky mass, vying with the huge form of a wooden windmill sitting on its own rocky upland to the south, and a nearby cedar of Lebanon for recognition as the tallest object on the island.

Paradise on Sea, October 2020

From the landing point, a cobbled path points both north and south – the former direction leading to the open fields that wash tall grass around the base of the windmill’s rocky foundation, while the latter direction winds its way to the north side of the region and the shallow cove of a beach.

Here wooden platforms rise in individual tiers from the narrow lip of grass between the beach the the walls of the high peak, ladders linking them to provide the means to scale the heights, passing water that drops to feed the beach-side pools that don’t reach the lake but instead offer places for birds and ducks to take a drink. Climb the ladders and platforms, and they’ll take you to a point just below the summit where a hot spring resides – or for the daring, a hang glider can be launched for an aerial view of the region and its surrounds.

Paradise on Sea, October 2020

The windmill is not the sole building within the region: four houses await discovery by explorers, with three of distinctly Tuscan design, suggesting the region might be somewhere inland in central / northern Italy. Two of these are to be found on the smaller islands that lie to the north-west and on the east side of the main land mass. Both are furnished and offer much to see both indoors and in the grounds around them The third and largest a villa occupies a south-west headland that is just a jumble of rocks away from becoming separated from the rest of the landscape as it dominates the flat sandstone slab of rock on which it sits. Again furnished, and with an inviting courtyard within its walls, it calls to visitors to come and explore it.

A surfaced, single-tracked road curls outward from this villa’s humped bridge. Passing around the shoulder of the windmill’s table of rock, the road ends close by a gabled cottage with an air of rural France about, it neatly juxtaposed by the very British presence of an old red telephone booth facing it over a parked car. Sitting within its own gardens and grounds, this cottage lies just above the waters of the lake and shares its location with a charming little painter’s studio and a small houseboat linked to the land by a wooden pier and deck to offer something of a floating summer house.

Paradise on Sea, October 2020

This is a region packed throughout with detail and many, many opportunities to sit and relax as well as for taking photographs. As noted, all of the houses are furnished – as is the windmill, while the outdoor sitting spots can be found in their grounds or gardens, along the beach, up on the tall peak and elsewhere. Cars (roadworthy and not) add a further sense of human life to the setting, whilst the birds overhead and the horses in fields and close to houses add their mix of life and presence to the setting.

With so much going on within a region that uses the private region land capacity bonus, there is a lot for the eye – and the viewer – to take in, and it would be remiss of me not to note the fact that the volume of mesh and textures can take its toll on older systems, and disabling shadows for those that use them might be advisable when moving around. Nevertheless, Paradise on Sea is a rewarding and engaging visit, and photos taken within the region can be submitted to its associated Flickr stream.

Paradise on Sea, October 2020

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2020 TPVD meeting week #40: summary (more cloud uplift)

Posted on by Inara Pey
Eterea, August, 2020  – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on Friday, October 2nd, 2020. These meetings are generally held every other week, unless otherwise noted in any given summary. The embedded video is provided to Pantera – my thanks to her for recording and providing it. Time stamps are included with the notes will open the video at the point(s) where a specific topic is discussed. Note these summaries are not intended to be a full reporting on all topics discussed, but focus on those items that are more directly user-facing.

This was an exceptionally brief meeting, with some discussion in chat, so please refer to the video as well.

Cloud Uplift – Agni

[0:06-3:39]

In my CCUG meeting summary, I noted that regions running on AWS are starting to appear on the main grid (Agni).

Commenting on progress of the Uplift project at the start of the meeting, Oz Linden indicated the Testylvania region (a restricted access region intended for testing purposes) is also running via AWS. It is regarded as “feature complete”, and the region is specifically available to TPV viewer developer for compatibility testing.

Any TPV developers who cannot access the region should contact one of Mazidox, Maestro or Kyle Linden.

It addition, Oz noted:

We currently have several dozen regions [on Agni] running uplifted, some of them user-accessible and some not. We will be ramping that up over the next few weeks. … At some point we will be moving the regular RC [deployments]  there as well, but we’re not quite ready for that yet due to back-end considerations that shouldn’t affect users directly … But one of the ways you can ask for trouble when dealing with computer programmes is by saying it “shouldn’t” do something.  

Oz Linden, TPV Developer Meeting, October 2nd

There may be a issue with attachments ghosting more frequently when teleporting between two regions running on AWS, but this has yet to be confirmed / a bug report raised.

SL Viewer News

[2:45-6:08]

As per may SUG and CCUG meeting updates, the current official viewer pipelines are as follows:

  • Current release viewer :Love Me Render #4 (EEP fixes), version 6.4.9.549455, released September 24, promoted September 28th.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Cachaça Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.4.10.549752, issued October 1st.
    • Mesh uploader RC viewer, version 6.4.10.549686, October 1st.
  • Project viewers:
    • Project Jelly project viewer (Jellydoll updates), version 6.4.10.549690, October 1st.
    • Custom Key Mappings project viewer, version 6.4.5.544079, June 30th.
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9th, 2019.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22nd, 2019.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17th, 2019. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16th, 2019.

General Viewer Notes

  • With the promotion of the LMR #4 viewer, the graphics team are turning to other graphics / rendering projects.
    • Note that LMR #4  appears to resolve the issue of the large performance hit linden Water has on EEP viewers.
  • The next viewer liable for promotion is likely to be the Mesh Uploader RC viewer, most likely in week #42 (commencing Monday, October 12th, 2020).
  • An upcoming series of viewers will be focused on UI improvements. /one of the aims of this work will be to overcome some of the long-standing viewer issues, as well as adding some new features.
  • For the project viewers:
    • The Legacy Profiles viewer is still awaiting the back-end changes.
    • The Custom Key Mapping viewer has not had a lot of feedback, and as a result is being considered for update to RC status.
    • The remaining project viewer are unlikely to change in the short-term.

In  Brief

  • [8:10-8:45] There are concerns among some Mac users on older hardware over their upgrade path with Apple’s announcement of a move to using ARM-based CPUs. LL is trying to get hold of an ARM-based test system directly from Apple to enable them to carry out in-depth investigation / testing.

 

JudiLynn’s Mindscapes in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Mindscapes: JudiLynn India at Janus Gallery II

I made my second visit of the week to Chuck Clip’s Sinful Retreat region in order to see Mindscapes, an exhibition by JudiLynn India, and which can be found within the region’s Janus Art Gallery II.

JudiLynn is a remarkable abstract artist who has been active in Second Life since 2009. Having studied graphics design at the Tyler School of art, at the opening of the new century she decided to focus her creativity on acrylic and digital painting, particularly exploring the opportunities for textured painting in the former and the ability to play with light and colour with the latter. When combined, these two approaches give her art a genuinely tactile dimension which in turn breathes a fascinating sense of life into them.

The title of this exhibition appears to be drawn from the fact that much of JudiLynn’s work originates within her mind’s eye, rather than being inspired by external sources. These are bold, vivid pieces, clearly drawn from her love of colour, their finish retaining the layered, tactile look that is so intrinsic to her art.

Mindscapes: JudiLynn India at Janus Gallery II
It is my goal to make charitable creation my life’s work. My intent is to share my craft and use it to raise much needed support for organizations that improve the quality of life for people at home and abroad.

– JudiLynn India, describing her art and her approach to life

Fourteen pieces are offered – twelve as conventional canvases, two as totems standing within shallow alcoves in the gallery’s curved wall. While all the pieces naturally draw and hold the eye, their mix of bright tones and more organic colours quite captivating, I confess that I found Mindscape 2 Totem particularly attractive; the colours within it richly organic, its form – a rectangular block – primal, its entire form exceptionally Earthly – by which I mean it has an element of having been drawn from the very crust of the planet, and raised up to offer a story of the ages that progresses down through its colours.

but each of these pieces that make up Mindscapes has something to say to those looking upon it; there are subtle narrative running through each, be it due the the shapes that are suggested within each or the manner in which colours ebb and flow with one another or intertwine gracefully, or the suggestion of things half-seen produced by the mix of line, colour and textural layering.

Mindscapes: JudiLynn India at Janus Gallery II

Captivating, entrancing, emotive and offering a combined journey into the art and imagination of their creator, the pieces presented through Mindscapes are not to be missed.

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