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, March 14th, 19:00: A World Out of Time
After being cryogenically frozen in the 1970s to await a cure for his (then) incurable cancer, Jaybee Corbell awakes after more than 200 years – to find his own body destroyed and his mind and memories transferred into the “mindwiped” body of a criminal. And that’s is not all that has changed: the Earth is now overseen by an oppressive, totalitarian global government called “The State”, and Corbell’s existence is to be determined by a “checker”; if he is found wanting, he will be discarded.
However, Peerssa, the checker, recommends Corbell as ideal fodder in The State’s attempts to seek out exoplanets suitable for terraforming – whether he wants to join the programme or not. Disgusted by his treatment, Corbell works out a way to take control of his one-person ship on its otherwise one-way mission, and heads toward the galactic core. Entering suspended animation, he is unaware his vessel skims close enough to the super-massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy to experience time dilation.
Emerging from his suspended state, and believing only 150 years have passed, Corbell returns to the solar system to find it again vastly changed: more than three million years have passed, and the Sun has become a bloated red giant, and Earth – well, Earth appears to have been relocated to an orbit around Jupiter, whilst humanity itself had endured extensive changes; and Corbell must face an entirely new set of challenges if he is to survive.
Caledonia Skytower reads the fifth of Salman Rushdie’s major publications and his first since The Satanic Verses.
Written for the younger reader, but with plenty with it suited to older ears, it is of an allegorical nature and addresses a number of societal problems, particularly those found in the Indian subcontinent.
Dedicated to Rushdie’s son, the book looks at the issues it raises – including that of censorship (unsurprisingly, given the reaction following the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988) – through the eyes of Haroun Khalifa, the son of a doctor and master storyteller.
Both father and son are struck by afflictions related to Haroun’s mother deserting them; Haroun has a form of attention-deficit disorder, whilst his father is prone to bouts of depression. Both can only be relieved of their afflictions should Haroun’s mother, Soraya, return.
Before then, however, Haroun is set for an adventure and discovery.
Wednesday, March 16th 19:00: The Quiet Man
Released in 1952, John Ford’s The Quiet Man is regarded as a classic Irish-American romantic comedy / drama. Starring John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara (and assorted members of their RL families!) and Barry Fitzgerald, it is a popular choice among critics and film-lovers.
The screenplay for the film was drawn in a large part from a short story of the same name originally published in 1933 in the Saturday Evening Post, and penned by Irish author, Maurice Welsh. Together with a number of other short stories by Walsh, The Quiet Man was gathered into a single volume of his short stories, The Quiet Man and Other Stories, which dealt with many recurring characters living in rural Ireland of the 1920s, and set against the backdrop of the civil unrest which affected the country at that time, while examining the complexities and occasional intrigues of life, love and Irish traditions.
Join Caledonia Skytower as she reads Walsh’s original tale of The Quiet Man, Paddy Bawn Enright to Mark St. Patrick’s Day.
Thursday, March 17th 19:00: Irish Legends: Celtic Myth and Magick
An Introduction to Fairy Lore and Enchantments presented by Shandon Loring.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, March 13th, 2022
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 version 6.5.3.568554 – formerly the Maintenance J&K RC viewer, promoted Monday, February 28 – no change.
Release channel cohorts:
Lao-Lao Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.5.4.569191, issued on March 11th.
Now open within the sky gallery spaces at Monocle Man Galleries, operated by curated by Kit Boyd and Lynx Iuga, The Song of the Selkie is a collaborative exhibition featuring six visual artists and the voice of Electric Monday (perhaps best known in art review circles for formerly running the excellent Sim Quarterly region and its immersive installations) that is, I gather, the first under to be opened under the umbrella title of Voice and Art.
The idea – as indicated by the umbrella title – is to bring together images and voice / music in a combined experience married to a story. However, the twist is that while each of the participating artists knows the theme of the exhibition, they are unaware of the other images being produced for the exhibition.
For The Song of the Selkie, the exhibition takes as its theme the legend of the selkie, as brought to us through the words and music for Dutch alternative metal-gothic rock group Blackbriar, and featured on their first album The Cause of Shipwreck (April 2021). For those unfamiliar with them, selkies are mythological beings capable of Therianthropy (shape-shifting). In this case from seal to human and back by shedding / re-wearing their pelt, whilst tales of selkie often focus on female selkies being coerced into relationships with men by the latter stealing their pelts whilst they are in human form, thus trapping them.
Monocle Man Galleries – Song of the Selkies
This is the tale presented in the exhibition, with the six artists – Hilaire Beaumont, Kit Boyd, John Garrison, Lynx Iuga, Tresore Prada and Evie Ravens – each presenting what is a single frame of the story, from a man discovering a selkie in her human form through his theft of her pelt to the eventual tragedy that arises from stolen / lost love. Each image is accompanied by a giver in the form of an electronic tablet that provides a biography of the artist when touched.
A HUD offered to visitors as they enter the hall from the landing point teleport disk provides the voice element of the exhibition – lines from the Blackbriar song read by Electric Monday. Use of the HUD is simple: attach it from inventory, then view the first image in the exhibition (Lynx Iuga) before click “image 1” on the HUD. After a pause, a recording to Electric reading lines from the song will be played back; when you have heard them and finished studying the first image, click the HUD image again to turn off the recording before moving to the next image in the gallery, and repeat with the HUD, this time clicking “image 2”, then repeat through the remaining images / recordings.
The final touches to the exhibition come in the hall in which it is being staged. Within its wood interior and heavy beams, the hall carries with it a sense of it having a Celtic / Norse edge, in keeping with the origin of selkie mythology. This is increased by the mail box (inviting artists to participate in the next story to drop their details into it) that rises from the middle of the floor, appearing to be some latter-day Mjölnir awaiting the return of its wielder. Finally, at the far end of the hall relative to the landing point, a large board will offer visitors to hear Blackbriar’s song via You Tube.
Monocle Man Galleries – Song of the Selkies
Small and engaging, Song of the Selkie presents an interesting audio-visual exhibition.
The war in Ukraine continues to have repercussions in international space activities. some of them somewhat bizarre in nature.
In particular, the head of Roscosmos and noted Putin hardliner, Dmitry Rogozin has been putting out a series of tweets that have been increasingly threatening – in my previous Space Sunday update, I noted that Rogozin had threatened to allow the International Space Station ISS to slip into an uncontrolled de-orbit and potentially crash into a Western city (since the shuttle’s retirement, Russian Progress re-supply vehicles have been used to routinely boost the station’s orbit as drag with the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere), despite the fact the multiple means by which the United States can boost the station’s orbit. In fact, NASA is planning a test using the current Cygnus NG-17.resupply vessel that docked with the ISS on February 21st to do just this, the test being scheduled for early April 2022.
Since then, there have been threats to “abandon” US astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the station at the end of his tour. Vande Hei flew to the ISS in 2021 aboard Soyuz MS-18 in April 2021. He is due to return to Earth at the end of March aboard Soyuz MS-19, but Rogozin has publicly tweeted that Russia will deny him his seat on the flight unless US and International attitudes towards Russia are reversed.
Whilst denying Vande Hei a seat on a Soyuz would mean his return to earth would be delayed, it is hardly “abandoning” him. NASA has at least two options for returning him directly to the United States using the SpaceX Crew Dragon, which can carry up to seven people – although flights thus far have not exceeded four -, whilst Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, once operational and as a longer-term option, might also be used.
Most bizarrely, and in connection with Vande Hei, on March 5th Russian state media company RIA Novosti posted a video apparently put together by Roscosmos that showed Russian cosmonauts packing up and detaching the Russian segment from the ISS utilising edited footage of actual activities on the ISS, together with studio-developed CGI images, it is unclear if the video is intended to be a threat or not, although it does end with the words “This is based on unreal events”, but it appeared to be a further part of the Roscosmos / Rogozin belligerency, the latter issuing a statement at more-or-less the same time, also through Russian media:
The blame for the collapse of cooperation in space lies on the shoulders of the United States, Britain, France and Germany. These countries destroyed what was created by mankind with such difficulty, what was created by the blood and sweat of those people who mastered space.
– Dmitry Rogozin, Roscosmos director
Russian gov't-controlled RIA Novosti @rianru posted a video on Telegram made by @Roscosmos where cosmonauts say goodbye to Mark Vande Hei on #ISS, depart, and then the Russian segment detaches from the rest of ISS. @Rogozin is clearly threatening the ISS program. #NASA#Ukrainepic.twitter.com/fj2coK1xR1
But could / would Russia take such an act? The Russian elements of the station sit as an individual group of modules connected to the rest of the station at a single point. So technically, they could be detached. However, doing so would require more than a simple packing up of bags, closing a couple of hatches and pushing off; there are a lot of interdependencies to be considered – and the flow of power, etc., is not one-way as Rogozin has attempted to paint. As such, numerous activities would have to be completed ahead of time so as to avoid risk to the Russian crew. As such, seeing the video as an outright threat, per the NASAWatch tweet above, this seems unlikely.
More to the point, Roscomos has already announced plans for a new dedicated space station – the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS) – they intend to start assembling in 2025. This will use at least one module (SPS-1/NEM-1) originally intended to join the ISS in 2024, but which Roscosmos has stated will be repurposed for the new station. This will be added to using a second “former ISS” module and the Nauka module that arrived at the ISS in July 2021, both in around 2028. As such, detaching modules such as Zarya and Zvezda, already practically at the end of their operational life, from the ISS and which would serve no real purpose would seem unlikely. But then, international space cooperation is one of the more significant areas in which Russia could express itself without necessarily escalating tension on Earth in an irreversible manner.
Given their plans to fly ROSS – the Russian Orbital Service Station, it would seem unlikely Roscosmos would unduly threaten ISS operations. Credit: Roscosmos
Currently, NASA is stressing that from their perspective, and despite Rogozin’s rhetoric, it is cooperation as usual with the ISS, although some voices are urgent the agency to put together a tiger team to explore options should Russia opt to do something unexpected with the ISS. However, ISS missions aren’t the only target.
As I noted last time around the worsening situation in Western-Russian relations means that a number of ESA launches have potentially been impacted, and the fate of the joint ExoMars lander / rover mission, due for launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in September – a date a lot closer than the other threatened missions.
More directly impacted has been British satellite internet company OneWeb. They had contracted Roscosmos to launch 36 of their internet communications satellite network – part of an initial network of 220 such satellites (eventually rising to 600), However, OneWeb was rescued from bankruptcy by the UK, which now holds a 51% stake, and Roscosmos initially refused to go through with the launch until the UK government sold its stake in OneWeb – a demand that was refused. As a result of the action by Roscosmos, OneWeb has cancelled all further launches using Russian vehicle, and has joined a growing number of businesses no longer utilising the Russian launch vehicle fleet, and taking their business elsewhere.
Spektr-RG telescope. Credit: DLR
But it is not all one-way. The German Aerospace Centre (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt or DLR), one of the largest space agencies in Europe announced it has cancelled its partnership with Roscosmos across all space research and development, with no intention of resuming cooperative ventures with Russia in the future.
In response, Dmitry Rogozin immediately ordered the shut down of the German-built eROSITA x-ray instrument on the on the Spektr-RG high-energy astrophysics space observatory, launched in 2019. Occupying the Earth-Sun L2 position 1.5 million km from Earth, Spektr-RG was a flagship mission for both DLR and Roscosmos. However, shutting eROSITA down is something of a pyrrhic response on Rogozin’s part, as it is the primary instrument aboard the satellite, and its loss impacts Russian space science as much as German.
China Offers Station for Commercial and International Cooperation
China is planning to open its space station to commercial research and activities, according to a senior human spaceflight program official. It is first indication that the national space agency will allow Chinese commercial enterprises to participate in the programme, and is being seen as a similar step to NASA’s “public/private” partnerships for crew and cargo vehicles for the ISS.
When our space station is completed and running, we will actively encourage the private sector to engage in space through various ways. There are many possibilities. We hope there will be competitive, cost-efficient commercial space players to participate in areas including space applications and space resource development. The prospects are good.
– Zhou Jianping, director of China’s human spaceflight programme
Construction of the Tiangong station is due to be completed this year with the addition of the Wentian and Mengtian modules (May / June 2022 and August / September 2022 respectively), two cargo spacecraft and two crewed missions – Shenzhou 14 and 15 – are also due to visit the station, marking the start of a 10-year operational lifecycle for Tiangong.
An artist’s impression of the Tiangong space station. Credit: CNSA
As well as national interests, China is also seeking international involvement with the station, calling directly to scientists and universities around the world to provide experiments and engage with China to research and station activities. China has also extended an invitation to United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), following in the footsteps of America’s Sierra Space in offering the opportunity to those countries that do not have easy access to space with the ability to fly experiments to Tiangong (Sierra Space is due to fly the first UNOOSA mission aboard its Dream Chaser Cargo space plane in 2024).
Nor is this passing unnoticed. Nanoracks, a company that specialising in flying experiments to the International Space Station in behalf of clients, has admitted China has already lured one of the significant customers to start flying to Tiangong in preference to the ISS.
A this blog shows, I enjoy playing around with houses, either building my own or kitbashing those I purchase; another thing I enjoy is landscaping and “SL gardening”. I love fiddling around and building an environment around my SL homes that both fits with them and adds ambience to them (at least in my eyes, others might think otherwise!). I’m not sure what the attraction is; perhaps I’m compensating for the fact that in the physical world, the only manner in which I’m remotely green-fingered is when I dip a hand in in tin of paint…
In February, I picked up the InVerse Orlando House (see: The InVerse Orlando House in Second Life), which just happened to be of a length and height such that it pretty much “slotted into” the split-level landscape I’d established from my previous InVerse house, the Tarzana (see: An Inverse House in Second Life), and which (at the time) I didn’t want to change too drastically.
However, the hands of the clock march inexorably forward, and the itch to re-develop the gardens more in keeping with the Orlando – with it’s mansion-like presence of tall columns, shading terraces and railed verandas – grew. So for the last week and as time has allowed I’ve been gradually re-working things to both better present the house and better integrate the Mesh Romance Flower Cottage by FelixvonKotwitz I’d picked up roughly around the time of the Orlando purchase (see: A Romance Cottage in Second Life) that has made a cosy little summer house-come-garden folly.
Isla Myvatn
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to gather something of a library of landscaping kits, tools, plants, and so forth, and have developed a number of “go to” creators I most frequently turn to for my needs. These include (as they have the most relevance here):
Alex Bader: I don’t think anyone does landscaping kits as comprehensively as Alex under his Studio Skye brand. Landforms, cliffs, shorelines, beaches, rivers, streams, waterfalls, ponds, woodlands, forests, plants, and so on; together with a host of buildings, structures and textures to boot, Studio Skye can be a one-stop shop, and I’ve been using Alex’s items for over a decade.
Cube Republic: Cube is another creator with a prolific output that is coupled to at eye for detail and a solid sense of care in working with mesh. His plants are second to none, and he also offers a range of landscaping kits and has venture into the world of EEP settings as well. Like Alex, he also offers texture packs and structure kits such that between the two of them, I can pretty much always find what I need.
Sasaya (Sasaya Kayo): through her HPMD (HappyMood) brand, Sasaya offers a range of general trees and shrubs that are well-optimised, look good and relatively low LI. Her shrubs and flowers / grasses are often ideal for landscaping / wild gardens.
Kriss Lehmann: again, Kriss again offers a range of plants and garden kits through his Botanical brand, together with structures of assorted types (his Forest Ruins Tower has been a long-standing part of many of my past landscaping) and items that help bring a garden to life.
Isla Myvatn
There are other brands I use – We’re Closed for trees with LI is a factor, for example – but the above tend to by my go-to brands. I particularly like Cube, Alex and Kris, as their items tend to be optimised such that linking parts of their kits can help in managing LI (indeed, I’m surprised as to how many don’t understand the benefits of considered linking to help manage LI, but that’s a subject for another blog post I’ve had sitting in my Drafts folder for so long, it has probably taken root).
But, back to the garden. With the previous house, I’d focused on using the Studio Skye Zen Garden Kit to give something of a wild garden look. For this time around, I’ve kept some of this, but also opted for a more formal approach with lawns and planters to the front of the house, some of which extends to the back garden, with the Zen elements mixed in, together with a wilder look to the rear. For this I focused on kits from Studio Skye – notably the Tiered Garden Wall Building Set, which offers a lot of flexibility when using wall shapes to break up a space and to create planters.
Isla Myvatn
While terraforming can be used for hills and raised areas, particularly in private estates where terraforming is allowed, it can also be problematic if you don’t have terraforming rights, or where issues of texture matching, smoothing, etc., are concerned. To this end, I opted to use the Studio Skye Land Forms Building Set One to provide clifftop hills and slopes running down to the house and around it. While mesh forms like this will inevitably lead to somewhat angular slopes in places, with care and blending, a reasonably consistent finish can be obtained, and without spending hours in smoothing terrain and facing the potential for blurred-looking ground as a result of morphing and raising the terrain.
Alongside of these came elements from Kris Lehmann, such as his Edged Brick Path (which sits will with the likes of Studio Skye Tiered Garden Wall set, with shrubs from HPMD – although for flowers, I admit I opted for Kayle Matzerath’s ~*GOD*~ Lumenaria Flower Fat Pack, which offers (me, at least, as I’ve been using them since encountering them at 2013’s Fantasy Faire) a good solution for garden flowers in planters, although they can decimate at moderate camera distances.
Isla Myvatn
Something that can add a good deal of depth to a home setting is the use of wildlife / animals. This does have to be excessive – but the sight of song birds here and there can really help with bringing a garden to life – particularly if you’re using an ambient sound scape that includes bird song. Two of my preferred creators in this regard are:
Morgan Garret (Fishgod): while I am not sure if he is still active in Second Life, Morgan Garret created the Grizzly Creek brand that includes some of the most detailed birds from around the world I’ve owned. They are naturally animated, their song works with that of any ambient sound scape, and they are incredibly life-like. At 3LI apiece, they aren’t going to eat into your land capacity.
│T│L│C│Animals: operated by Lautlos and True Redrose, this is another excellent source of birds and fish – and other animals. Some of their waterfowl might need a little resizing, but if you have a pond or lake, I cannot rate them highly enough – particularly as their ducks, geese, fish, etc., can be set to swim on / under both Linden Water or other water planes.
Isla Myvatn
Obviously, there are other brands out there as well – JIAN being one – just as there are for landscaping and plants. The ones I list above are the ones that suit my needs and have allowed me a happy week of playing with kits and landscaping at home. Which in turn has given me the excuse for writing the above 🙂 .
La Plage Perdue, March 2022 – click any image for full size
Vally Lavender passed a personal invitation to me to drop in to the latest region design she has opened to the public. Entitled La Plage Perdue (“The Lost Beach”). It is another design by Dandy Warhlol (terry Fotherington), presented on a homestead region. and come its own back-story, which reads thus:
In 1852 a French family occupied this small island, hoping to live a happy life by the sea. Why they chose to abandon it remains a mystery. Come see what they left behind, for clues about why they vanished into thin air.
– La Plage Perdue About Land
La Plage Perdue, March 2022
The result is a rocky island topped by an aging, rotting mansion. The vegetation here is sparse – stunted trees and course grass that pushing its way through the sands that fight the rocks for dominance of the landscape; a war the sand will likely win; such is the fate of rocks under the tireless onslaught of wind and sea.
Along with the mansion, and scattered across the island are multiple signs of habitation, some of which are old enough for that sand to also be seeking to eradicate them – most likely with greater expediency than will be the case with the rocks. Much of this detritus of the human life that once existed: a sand filled former boathouse, an old gazebo, broken walls, the carcass of a car that may have once puttered along the cobbled roads of Paris or another French city in the 1890s, and forgotten children’s swings. I say “much” because there are also elements that come from times much more recent than the late 19th Century.
La Plage Perdue, March 2022
The most apparent of the latter is the broken hulk of a relatively modern freighter, possibly a bulk grain carrier lies caught within the rocks of the coastline. Elsewhere, along the beach deckchairs largely untouched by time sit upon on the sand, changing huts ranged behind them, the bag of a sunbathers sitting before one of them, whilst further along the sands a makeshift bar has been established.
As noted in the About Land description there is a tale of mystery to be unfolded here: just what happened to those who came to live on this little island, wherever it may be? And this story also forms the basis for a photo / story contest, as noted on the ValiumSL website. In short:
Only one entry per person, entries to be via the competition Flickr group.
Images may be colour or black and white.
The entrant submitting an image must be the person who took it.
The accompanying story must be written in English, and must not be less than 25 words and no more than 250 words, it should be written in the Description section of the submitted Flickr image.
By entering, people agree that their image may be used in the ValiumSL website.
La Plage Perdue, March 2022
The deadline for entries is 18:00 SLT on Thursday, March 31st, 2022. The winner will be selected and announced on Saturday, April 2nd, 2022. The Winner will receive: L$1,000 cash, plus a gift cards to the value of L$1,000 each from .::THOR::., and Fancy Decor! Further prizes may be added prior to the winner being selected.
This is another engaging setting to add to the ValiumSL family, and as always rezzing rights are available to ValiumSL group members. My thanks to Vally for the invitation, and apologies to her for taking a few days to pay the region a visit.
After being cryogenically frozen in the 1970s to await a cure for his (then) incurable cancer, Jaybee Corbell awakes after more than 200 years – to find his own body destroyed and his mind and memories transferred into the “mindwiped” body of a criminal. And that’s is not all that has changed: the Earth is now overseen by an oppressive, totalitarian global government called “The State”, and Corbell’s existence is to be determined by a “checker”; if he is found wanting, he will be discarded.
Caledonia Skytower reads the fifth of Salman Rushdie’s major publications and his first since The Satanic Verses. 
Released in 1952, John Ford’s The Quiet Man is regarded as a classic Irish-American romantic comedy / drama. Starring John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara (and assorted members of their RL families!) and Barry Fitzgerald, it is a popular choice among critics and film-lovers.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 