I’ve had the pleasure of writing about the art of Kitten (Joaannna) since 2022, and have never ceased to be stunned by her artistic ability when it comes to Second Life photography. Her work spans both landscape and avatar studies, with the former as engaging and rich as those of another Second Life landscape photographer I have long admired, Ziki Questi. Kitten’s avatar studies are equally as rich and evocative – and also contain that element I always enjoy with such pieces: the telling of, or hinting to, a story that reaches well beyond the framing of the subject.
I first encountered the latter during Kitten’s 2022 exhibition Nior, at Nitroglobus Roof Gallery (which also hosted Kitten’s Fourth Wall in 2023), and also through the like of Tales from the Wastelands, also in 2023.
Now Kitten has a further avatar-centric exhibition available for viewing. Hosted at the Kondor Art Centre, operated and curated by Hermes Kondor, Gothic present sixteen black-and-white images which carry with them strong Gothic / Victorian themes, and which touch on horror, mystery and a touch of literature.
Kondor Art Centre, November 2024: Kitten – Gothic
I’ve no idea if thoughts of Halloween – the exhibition opened on October 31st – sparked the idea for this collection of works, but the fact is that whether it did or not really doesn’t matter; these are pieces for all seasons, and which carry with them a richness of narrative that draws one into them.
Some might overtly put one in mind of classic literature, whilst others do so perhaps in a more subtle manner. Spectral Hound is perhaps the most obvious among the former, bringing forth as it does thoughts of Conan Doyle’s classic tale of The Hound of the Baskervilles, set within the Victorian era; whilst We Have Always Lived In a Castle and Gargoyle might act on that more subtle level, perhaps leading one to thoughts of Bram Stoker and Dracula.
Kondor Art Centre, November 2024: Kitten – Gothic
However, the truth is, each of these 16 pieces stands in is own right as a prompter for the imagination. No reference of literature is really required; only the ability to view each in turn and allow it to speak as the eyes travel over its detail, the words of the tale it wishes to tell evident in the pose and poise of the central character (Kitten herself) and the response to her by everything around her- animate and inanimate.
And I do mean response; setting and character in each image are deeply intertwined, rather than one being the backdrop for the other, as might be the case with a portrait; everything has to be considered as a whole. As to what the stories themselves might be is a matter for Kitten’s images and your imagination; I’ve said more than enough here – other than, as ever, Kitten’s art continues to engaging and enthral – and I will leave it to you to visit and see what the art says to you.
Tractionist World, November 2024 – click any image for full size
I dropped into SLEA 6 recently to visit a quite stunning installation / environment, mixing art, film and literature and events, all brought together by Asah (AsahelVerne Absinthe).
Entitled Tractionist World, it offers a visualisation / recreation of a pivotal scene from both the first volume of Philip Reeves’ quartet of novels, collectively known as the Mortal Engines Quartet (the first volume being Mortal Engines) and – more particularly – the 2018 film Mortal Engines, produced by The Lord of the Rings trio of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and based on their screenplay adaptation of the first book in the series.
Tractionist World, November 2024Whilst the film received a mixed audience and critical response, there is no doubting the strength of its visual effects – notably in the presentation of the mighty city of London, the undisputed king of the “traction cities” rumbling around the Great Hunting Plains of Europe and Central Europe, as it chases down lesser cities in a cycle of “municipal Darwinism”.
And it is London, complete with its pair of massive bronze lions resembling the (much smaller) Landseer Lions of Trafalgar Square, topped by the gleaming beauty of St. Paul’s Cathedral and fronted by its massive union flag doors, which forms one of the focal points of Tractionist World.
Tractionist World, November 2024
The scale of London is impressive, despite the limitations of scale and size imposed on it by a Second Life region; throughout Asah has fully captures the multi-level nature of London, crowned by the cathedral and its hidden menace, neatly surrounded by gardens and footpaths, with streets and buildings stacked one above the other from the bulk of the great engine room at its base, where captured lesser cities are ingested for materials and power.
Outside of area such as the control centre, the engine room, and the Cathedral, the buildings within the city are mostly empty – but with good reason: not only is London a representation of the the machine city from the world of Mortal Engines, it also provides gallery spaces for art exhibitions.
Tractionist World, November 2024 – the Steampunk Goddesses exhibition
At the time of my visit, the city was hosting two such exhibitions – although Asah informed me more are in the planning stage and will be appearing soon. The one of these exhibitions is hosted – appropriately enough – in the city’s Museum, a place where artefacts of the “old tech” are revered and studied. Entitled Steampunk Goddesses, it features AI art by TaccaExotic and Princess Soobania (Soobania).
Above this, and in the room behind the city’s control room, is an further exhibition of AI generated art, this one by Lalie Sorbet. Entitled Anima, it presents – in Lalie’s own words – an exploration of “the expression of the passionate relationship between humans and animals through time.”
Tractionist World, November 2024 – the Anima Exhibition
Also located within the city’s engine room is a stage for hosting music events (with a further such space up in one of the airships overhead). In terms of getting around London, there are a number of stairways and walks linking various levels, but by far the easiest route down (and up!) is the elevator at the back of the control centre.
The city is part of a larger scene making up region, one depicting the climatic show-down between it and the Shield Wall of Batmunkh Gompa, as it protects the anti-tractionists of Shan Guo – a place Thaddeus Valentine is determined to over-run – with the great airship station of Airhaven floating above. It is within Batmunkh Gompa that the main landing point for the setting resides, complete with teleporters to carry visitors around (simply walk onto a teleport disk to activate it and right-click the beams).
Tractionist World, November 2024
There are a number of points of interest within the Shield Wall to explore – and the opportunity to find a little air car rezzer available to scoot around in. Beyond the wall, meanwhile, is the beauty and peace of Shan Gao, together with floating islands of rock, such as the Lighthouse. The best way to visit the latter, Shan Gao, and Airhaven is, as noted, the teleports at the landing point.
As both a place to visit, and an art / events venue, Tractionist World is an absorbing and engaging visit.
Milk Wood, October 2024 – Click any image for full size
With November on the horizon and the start of National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo – or NAN-oh-RY-moh) I received an invitation from long-time acquaintance in Second Life, Lizzie Gudkov, to pop over to Milk Wood, the home of Virtual Writers, as they gear-up for their new event for November each year, Moxie Madness.
Virtual Writers is an on-line community of writers, originally founded in 2007. The group is committed to showcasing both experienced and emerging writers in a range of interactive and immersive environments around the globe. Milk Wood provides a focal point for the group’s activities, offering an environment which writers can come together to share in the writing experience, socialise, have fun together and – if they wish – find a virtual home.
We offer a space for all writers at all stages, within a digital medium. This unique place allows the user to more fully develop their characters and settings, meet other likeminded individuals, share experiences, and learn and grow as writers.
We know the challenges writers face because we’ve each had similar roadblocks. Many of us have had expert help along the way and want to pay it forward. We learn from each other and share our expertise gladly. Whether you’re an experienced writer or just starting out, there’s a place for you at Virtual Writers.
– from virtualwriters.org
Milk Wood – The Stone Circle, October 2024
Occupying a Full private region leveraging the Land Capacity bonus, Milk Wood has been crafted by Harriet Gausman to provide a gorgeous setting in which to stir the creative juices whilst escaping the distractions of the physical world. It is a place Inspired by the BBC-commissioned radio drama Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas, a play itself deeply interwoven with Dylan’s short life, and his passing away in 1953 whilst on a tour of the United States with the play (which he was still revising at the time, having roots reaching back into the early 1930s and the very start of his writing career whilst still in his late teens.
Within the region is a mix of public and private spaces – the latter being a range of rental cottages, beachfront cabin, houses and the like – stirred together without obvious boundaries in places, which can make exploration a little difficult for the casual visitor. So if you are visiting out of curiosity, then please bear this in mind as regards wandering into someone’s personal space.
Milk Wood, October 2024
That said, the blending of both public and private fits the region well, given its primary intent to bring writers together to allow them to share time and experiences, engage in a shared experience of writing and reading – and as noted, provide a home for those wishing to rent one.
The 500 word snatch is a popular way of breaking down a large writing project – such as a novel – into much small, easily-digested bites by scheduling a specific time each day to write 500 words. Nor does the snatch have to be related to a single work; the challenge can be used for many different writing forms, such as outlining ideas, drafting a blog post, writing poetry, producing a short story, and so on.
Poem-a-Day (PAD)
April, 08:00 daily
To coincide with National Poetry Month. Write a poem every day for the month of April.
Milk Wood – Forest Coffee Bar, October 2024
Moxie Madness
November (all 30 days)
The group’s new challenge in respect of NaNoWriMo: write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. As a part of this Moxie (standing for Month of Xtra Inspiration & Effort) provide a wealth of support for those participating in NaNoWriMo with daily write-ins, resources, and a selection of workshops/seminars from successful authors.
Details of sessions, workshops and events associated with Moxie Madness are available via the Moxie Madness information boards (such as found at the Forest Coffee Bar).
A more relaxed version of the November novel writing event. Sessions are held in both April and July, with writing challenges with word-counts of between 5,000 and 25,000 for any type of writing project. The time can also be used to edit your Moxie manuscript from November, plan for coming Moxie Madness or delve into research.
I’ve attended Milk Wood poetry readings, daily dashes, and the intense annual NaNoWriMo event in November. Milk Wood provides a forum for interacting with other writers, both newbies and published professionals, and a place to promote books and literary events. It’s possible to join a writing circle and set your avatar to work at a computer while you type away on a real world project. There’s always someone to offer encouragement, sympathy or advice when you hit a snag or need a break
Poet and author Patricia Averbach (via virtualwriters.org)
Milk Wood – Camp Site, October 2024
It’s fair to say (having sat-in on a 500 Word Snatch – even if this blog post did run to more than that as I was writing it at the time!) events at Milk Wood are well-attended and the folk are friendly and easy-going. Therefore if you are a writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a blogger or diarist, and so on, and haven’t dropped into Milk Wood, I would genuinely recommend doing so.
In terms of exploration, the majority – but not all – of the rentals are located around the region’s coastline, with most of the public spaces – the Forest Coffee Bar, the Boho Bean Coffee Shack, the Fiesta Bar and Dance Floor, the Milk Wood Camp Site, and the Milk Wood Drive-In – located within the western half of the region, and reachable one to the next on foot without fear of colliding with someone’s home; only the Stone Circle, on the north side of the region is very close to any rentals. To ease getting around, there in an in-region teleport system, together with a local Experience to help with hopping around.
Milk Wood, October 2024
Whilst not primarily intended for the purposes of photography, the region is nevertheless beautifully designed and landscapes and offers a relaxing environment with some public spaces in which to sit and pass the time / think about what to write next in addition to the group’s various events.
Hailey’s Mystical Forest, September 2024 – blog post
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 29th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from the chat log and Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – my thanks to her for providing it.
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.
Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.
Simulator Deployments
No deployments for this week, just rolling restarts across the grid.
Simulator Deployment Plans
The next simulator maintenance update will be Barbecue (or BBQ), which is currently awaiting further bug fixing. This should include:
Support for “alpha-gamma” which will allow an object owner to adjust some of the PBR alpha values that were impacting legacy things like hair.
A new warning on receiving direct IMs from Scripted Agents (“registered” bots): if a Scripted Agent “right clicks” you and sends you a message, it will trigger a warning about sharing personal information with bots within the chat window.
Following Barbecue should be Apple Cobbler, which should include:
llTransferOwnership which enables a prim give itself to a new user (subject to owner permissions already set).
An extended llGiveInventory to allow for a destination folder (system folders + RLV/a) to be specified as well (+ the use of a parameter list, so further options can be added in the future).
SL Viewer Updates
No changes at the start of the week:
Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, etc), dated September 11, promoted September 17 – No change.
Aesthetics improvements: new Antialiasing setting – SMAA; Contrast Adaptive Sharpening; Khronos Neutral Tone Mapping (can be changed to ACES via the RenderTonemapType Debug setting).
Game Control
Leviathan Linden noted the latest news on this work:
GameControl is in develop branch, not sure when it will reach an official release or find its way into TPV. Meanwhile game controller hardware support has been temporarily disabled on Mac (although it didn’t work very well there anyway since most devices are not recognized by the OS) until we sort out some “duplicate keypress” issues.
In Brief
Please refer to the video below for the following:
Reports indicate the the most recent simulator deployment appears to have fixed most of the lost / ghosted attachment issues experienced during teleport / physical region crossings.
A general discussion on RLV and possible #RLV folder structure, and RLV extensions to folders. For those curious about RLV/a, given RLVa is currently to be incorporated into the official viewer, please refer to (among other sources):
Further discussion on llTransferOwnership and llGiveAvatarInventoryList. Part of the latter included the extent to which scripts should be able to use it to create new inventory items (e.g. such as preventing it from using the Current Outfit Folder, whilst removing the burden of everything going to the Inventory root folder.
Both the RLV and LSL commands above lead to a wider discussion on inventory, folder structures, how / where items should be placed when received via script, etc., filtering inventory, and so on.
There is no current work on HTTP/2 for CDN and asset fetching. This is described as something LL want to get to, but keeps getting stalled due to the focus being on other areas of work. Monty Linden also noted a move to HTTP/2 may not yield any significant loading improvement over HTTP/1.
† 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.
On Tuesday, October 29th, 2024, Linden Lab announced that the company’s founder, Philip Rosedale has been appointed to the full-time role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in a move that will undoubtedly cause excitement in some quarters.
As well as founding the company, Rosedale served as its CEO through until 2010, when he departed the company to work on various new ventures, including Coffee and Power and, most notable, the VR-centric virtual world / social spaces company, High Fidelity.
The latter actually became an investor in Linden Lab / Second Life in January 2022 in a deal which included the transfer of some staff from High Fidelity to Linden Lab, together distributed computing patents held by High Fidelity, which has transitioned by that time toy working on solutions focused on spatial audio that would allow people to work collaboratively whilst geographically separate. Also as a part of that deal, Rosedale took up the role as a special advisor to the Second Life management team and the Board at Linden Lab.
In this role he has spent the last 2+ years providing advice and support to the Lab’s Board under Executive Chairman Brad Oberwager and the executive team, and has been visible at a number of Lab-led town hall meetings and similar events as well as participating in various Lab Gab events.
In his new role as CTO, Rosedale “will guide technology and product strategy daily” alongside the executive management team, and he will also resume a seat on the company’s Board.
Over the last four years since the acquisition, Linden Lab has re-focused itself on improving and serving Second Life. We’ve divested ourselves of unnecessary projects, streamlined our operations, increased the quality of customer support, and grown our overall revenues and profitability. We’re now in a unique position to define the future of virtual worlds, and Philip is returning to help myself and the exec team achieve that goal.
– Brad Oberwager, Linden Lab Executive Chair, via the announcement
Philip Rosedale Round Table Event
The announcement also indicated the Lab will be holding a Community Round Table event on Friday, November 1st, 2024, at 10:00 SLT featuring Philip Rosedale. At the time of writing, the venue for the event was TBA – this post will be updated with details when available. However, questions are being sought from Second Life users, so if you have a question for Philip Rosedale, you can submit it via this form.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, October 27th, 2024
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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 7.1.10.10800445603, formerly the DeltaFPS RC, dated September 11, promoted September 17 – NO CHANGE.
Release Candidate: ExtraFPS RC, version 7.1.11.11296522354, October 18 – NO CHANGE.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld