Halloween is approaching once again, and so too is the annual Second Life Creepy Crawl, a time when those from the Lab, together with residents, go hopping around the grid in an avatar answer to trick-or-treating.
This year the event will take place on Thursday, October 31st, starting at 10:00 SLT. As with previous years, it will feature locations suitably Halloweeny in décor suggested by Second Life users, as the community blog post on the event explains:
Some may argue that the winter holidays are the most wonderful time of the year, but in Second Life, we know how to celebrate year-round. Halloween is easily among the most popular holidays amongst the SL community, and we are so ready to have some screaming good times as the Creepy Crawl is back in all its creepiest and crawliest glory. We are looking for venues to host us as we hop from spooky spot to spooky spot for some conversation, dancing, and fun.
If you’d like to host a stop along the Creepy Crawl, own a spot that will be decked out for the holiday, and don’t mind if a parade of Residents and Lindens come through, then you might be just what the witch doctor ordered. We’re looking for spots that have entertainment (we like to dance around in our costumes!), are appropriate for general and moderate audiences, and can handle a crowd.
If the event is run along the same lines as previous years, selected venues will likely be visited for around 30 minutes at a time (although this is subject to confirmation), and people will be welcome to join the entire Creepy Crawl, or drop in and out of it as they wish.
Here’s how to submit your venue for consideration:
Complete the 2017 Creepy Crawl sign-up formbefore October 25th.
Watch for a selection e-mail and / or note card after October 25th, if your venue is selected.
The Haunted Halloween Tour is back, see below
In addition, the Lab recently blogged about a month of events and activities running up to Halloween, highlights of which include:
The Halloween Swaginator Hunt: four exclusive Halloween decorations have been scattered across the Bellisseria continent – can you find them all? To get started, look for the special haunted edition of the Swaginator gift-giving station to grab your free HUD.
The Halloween Haunted Tour: has once again opened. Hop in a coffin and take a ride through the halls and rooms – and tunnels beneath – a haunted house. This year sees a number of Glytches have invaded the house as well, so if you are a Glytch hunter (see Of Glytches and gems: the Lab’s grid-wide Second Life game), make sure your Glytch capturing equipment tools are at the ready as you take the tour. The Haunted Tour can be reached via Portal Park 1 or Portal Park 2.
For Premium members who enjoy them, a Premium gift of Halloween decorations, available via the Premium Gift Collection kiosks.
Currently open through until the end of September 29th, is the 2019 Spoonful of Sugar festival, bringing together fashion, home and garden, breedable designers and creators, artists, DJs and live performers to help raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
Also known as Doctors Without Borders, MSF was founded in Paris, France in 1971 as a non-profit, self-governed medical humanitarian organisation delivering emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters and exclusion from healthcare around the globe, based on need, irrespective of race, religion, gender or political affiliation.
Since that time, MSF has grown to a movement of 24 associations, bound together as MSF International, based in Switzerland. Thousands of health professionals, logistical and administrative staff – most of whom are hired locally – work on programmes in some 70 countries worldwide. See the video at the end of this article for more on MSF.
Spoonful of Sugar is now in its fifth year, and has thus far raised US $40,000 for MSF as a part of the organisation’s Vital Pact Campaign – and hopes to take that total to at least US $50,000 in 2019.
Spoonful of Sugar 2019 – market town
Every year, Spoonful of Sugar selects a theme for its core event. This year, the focus is very much middle-eastern: a desert environment with out of which have grown four small “towns”, each an oasis of human life in which the streets form a souq and home to many of the merchants participating in this year’s event. Large sponsors of the event are to be found gathered around the oasis a short walk from the landing point.
But the setting is not simply about the romance of the desert and camel trains of traders; it actually underscores the focus for Spoonful of Sugar this year: the plight of refugees, which over the last several years has been brought sharply into focus by the crises that continue to rock the middle-east. World-wide, there are now a recorded 70.8 “forcibly displaced” people (only 20 million of who are officially designated “refugees”) who – however unwillingly – have had to flee their homelands due to war, political or religious extremism, gang violence, terror, or other life-threatening circumstances.
Spoonful of Sugar 2019
These 70.8 million recognised refugees make up a significant portion of MSF’s work – as the Spoonful of Sugar landing point reveals. And in an age when those of a certain political stripe repeatedly opt to demonize people who are fleeing their homelands – and often leaving behind friends and families – to escape death and destruction as “the worst people” and / or “rapists and murderers”, focusing on the huge humanitarian efforts performed by organisations like MSF is fully warranted.
I’m here to tell you that nobody wants to leave home. They love their cities, their neighbourhoods. They love speaking their own language. The people fleeing their home countries are running because their home countries aren’t safe. They are fleeing for their lives.
– Dr. Ahmed Abdalzarag, MSF neurosurgeon
Spoonful of Sugar 2019: the work of MSF
Thus, the landing point offers visitors an opportunity to look inside a typical refugee camp and witness the work that MSF carries out, from triaging injuries and illnesses to working the logistics of food, drinking water and other essential supplies to providing shelter. Information boards throughout outline the work and offer insight into MSF’s multi-faceted work. Yes, the setting may desert, but it could also so easily be the grasslands of Africa, the forests of South America – or any of the multitude of places around the globe where refugees are attempting to seek help and support; as such I do recommend that rather than hopping straight on to the teleport boards and going shopping, people spend a few minutes within the camp.
As well as the shopping opportunities, there is also entertainment taking place over the weekends of the event – with a schedule available via the Spoonful of Sugar website. Also forming part of the event is the gacha area and the event raffle, while updates and information can also be found on the Spoonful of Sugar website.
The Second episode of Lab Gab streamed on Wednesday, September 11th, hosted by Xiola and Strawberry Linden, and featuring special guest Reed Linden.
Running to just under 44 minutes, this was an informative segment, although there were a number of questions asked that where outside of Reed’s specific remit and which he was only able to answer in general terms (Land, Linden Homes, pricing, etc.). Most of these are not summarised below, and I refer people to the embedded video for comments.
About Reed Linden
Reed Linden, aka (at present) Penguin Fabuloso, has been with the Lab for just over eight years, having joined in August 2011. He started in the support team, serving there for three years, then moving to the Engineering team for a time. While there, Grumpity Linden, Director of Product for Second Life, selected him to join the Product team.
As a Product Manager, Reed has particular responsibility for the Lab’s Second Life web infrastructure – the Marketplace, Profiles, main domains like secondlife.com, and so on). He’s also been involved with Bakes on Mesh, and has knowledge of account management (including Premium), billing, and – given his time there – support.
Reed Linden (c), flanked by Xiola (l) and Strawberry (r)
He views his progress through the Lab as uniquely reflective of the manner in which knowledge of the platform is distributed: those who potentially know the most about SL are the users who put it to work every day, coding, building, uploading, texturing, creating, and so on. The next level of knowledge below that is the support teams who handle hundreds of user requests on a daily basis, and get to use the broad spread of the platform’s tools and capabilities. Then, after support come the engineering and product teams, who have sharply defined focuses on Second Life.
From this is should come as no surprise that he sees the community as his favourite aspect of the platform, together with the manner in which it can bring people together from around the world, and help them find a voice or outlets or connections – and even to find love. In this latter regard, he reveals that not only have SL residents built their physical world relationships out of a Second Life meeting (a-la the Love Made in SL series), but also that some LL staff have met their physical world partners through SL!
Web Properties – Project and Updates
As a part of his web infrastructure responsibilities, he has been running the work to bring Profiles back into the viewer. This involves two key elements:
Moving user profiles back to their own floater in the viewer, rather than pulling in the web profile. This element of the work is currently available for testing in the Legacy Profiles Project Viewer, which can be found on the Alternate Viewer Page.
A further aspect of the work is to move Profile Feeds into a dedicated tab within the Profile floater.
Left: SL Profiles will be returning to a dedicated floater (rather than using a panel to display the web-base user profile). In the future, Profile feeds will also become a part of this floater with their own tab. Right: recently delivered to the Marketplace (among other updates) is the ability to list all the gifts you have received (MP → Account Name → My Account Page → Received Gifts)
Reed also highlighted three recent updates to the Marketplace:
Notification of purchase – when you visit a Marketplace listing for an item you have previously purchased with the account you are using, the date purchased is displayed at the top of the listing.
Some of the upcoming Marketplace features touched upon include:
Optimising the Marketplace for mobile use.
Purchase notifications: store owners will receive a viewer notification of purchases made through their Marketplace stores. This will be an opt-in capability, so as to avoid those with popular brands from being constantly spammed with purchase messages.
Refunds: the ability for Merchants to offer refunds through the MP is being looked at.
Continuing work on quality-of-life capabilities within the MP, together with bug fixes.
Search is being strengthened right across all of the Lab’s web properties.
For the Marketplace, this will include listing top-selling products first within search results
Better granularity on searches will potentially be supported, together with better filtering
There are also projects in progress or on the horizon related to improving the Destination Guide and for Events (this has been mentioned in one or two technical user group meetings, but again without specifics being given).
Bakes on Mesh
As a Product Manager, he is very pleased with the take-up of Bakes on Mesh (BoM) – as is the Lab.
LL have been tracking take-up among mesh head / body makers, etc., and the gradual adoption of the BoM viewer code by TPVs.
There is an unofficial list for BoM support (last updated at the end of August) which may help those interested.
The hope remains that BoM will encourage more lightweight content in terms of graphics resources (e.g. less complex Mesh heads and bodies, plus the ability to bake down multiple textures into a single composite).
General Q&A
As a hobby, Reed enjoys painting model miniatures (D&D being specifically mentioned) and building dioramas.
Work on an iOS client was re-iterated. No new updates, as this is not one of Reed’s areas of work, so those interested can refer to a summary of comments by Kiera and Oz Linden on the work (including a link to a transcript of the comments), and my July mini-update on this project.
Last Names: yes, still being worked on, but a complex project. Again, see my June update, which includes the most relevant comments from LL.
Feedback
An informative segment, with Reed providing a lot of hints – he touched very loosely on possible new Premium account options, for example – as well as outright information for those who do not attend the various in-world user group meetings or follow summaries of said meetings as provided on this blog and others of a similar nature.
Some of the questions did hit on the issue of keeping people aware of a specific guest’s area of expertise; even when warned Reed is not directly involved in viewer development, land management, etc., a number of questions on those subjects came up (and were dutifully asked). However, these fortunately did not interrupt the overall flow of the session to a great degree.
Voice quality continues to be an issue; I assume the participants are using the SL voice binary rather than hooking Skype or an alternative service into the mix. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed once the upcoming voice update viewer goes into circulation and Lab staff can use it.
No details on what the next segment will be about – so it’s a case of watch the official blog posts.
The second segment on Lab Gab has been announced as streaming live on Wednesday, September 11th, 2019 at 15:00 SLT, when it will feature special guest Reed Linden.
Lab Gab is the title given to the new fortnightly (thus far) chat show hosted by Xiola and Strawberry Linden. The first segment was streamed on Wednesday, August 28th, and those interested can read my summary here. It formed a general intro to the show, with Xiola and Strawberry chatting about a number of topics and taking questions from people watching the live stream on YouTube.
The second segment promises to be more formal, featuring – as noted – Reed Linden. AKA (at present) Penguin Fabuloso, Reed has been with the Lab for just over eight years, having joined in August 2011. Most recently, he’s been in the hot seat for the monthly Web User Group meetings (which I “skilfully” keep missing on account of – well, let’s be honest here – not remembering to check the schedule). As a Product Manager at the Lab, Reed has his fingers in a number of areas including the Marketplace, Profiles and SL web properties, and also with Bakes on Mesh.
All things being equal, I’ll be watching the show and will hopefully have a summary available in these pages some time thereafter. Those wishing to tune-in to the stream can do so via the Lab’s official YouTube channel.
Strawberry and Xiola Linden with “Gabby”the cat (name TBC) on the Lab Gab set
The first episode of Lab Gab streamed on Wednesday, August 28th, hosted by Xiola and Strawberry Linden, and drew a comfortable audience. I intentionally stayed out of the chat but saw a few familiar names there.
Running to 35 minutes, the programme was not deeply revelatory with regards to Second Life news – that will likely be for future segments of the show. However, it did offer a comfortable, if slightly frustrating start – I say frustrating because the broadcast gremlins raised their little heads to try to keep Strawberry from being heard over the stream.
The first few minutes – up to around the 9 minute mark – of the show covered Xiola and Berry’s roles at the Lab, and folded in notes on the Lab’s various social media presences and also the Destination Guide for finding places to visit.
Bakes on Mesh (BoM) then got a plug, being the latest update from Linden Lab. Berry attempted to clear-up confusion as to what it is (simply put: a means to apply system avatar wearables to suitably prepared mesh bodies and heads in a manner somewhat akin to how they used to be used with the system avatar, albeit with the option of supporting high resolution textures than available for the system avatar).
The official blog post on the release is available here, and I attempted to cobble together a basic primer on the subject (although I suspect that in part might also veer a little too close to the technical).
In talking Bakes on Mesh, Berry underlined at that BoM will require mesh body and head creators to provide updates to their offerings that are correctly flagged to use Bakes on Mesh natively. She also noted to the experimental Omega Bakes on Mesh applier system that I also referenced in my primer article. This is available from the Omega in-world store. However, I was interested to note that it did not work for Berry – and I actually found it less than satisfactory when testing. Overall, the results seem variable, with some having absolutely no issues with it, and others (like Berry and I) encountering problems – hence, again, why it is called “experimental”. For those who wish to try it out, step-by-step instructions, courtesy of Theresa Tennyson (who is not associated with Omega, so please don’t crowd her with questions if you do have issues!) are available here.
Additionally, Berry pointed to an alternative HUD (L$125) which apparently works just fine, although I’ve yet to try it myself.
One of the key points with Bakes on Mesh is that it should enable body / head creators to make their products less complex, simply because they do not need to include so many onion skin layers, hence why the release advantage with BoM really lies in updates to existing bodies and heads, as the various creators will hopefully make available in the coming weeks (Slink has already updated). Thus, even for those who don’t use applier systems for clothing that mush, Bakes on Mesh is important, as adoption of updated bodies / head can have the potential to help reduce general rendering load for everyone.
Around the 14:40 mark, Xiola indirectly replied to some speculation on my part (raised when writing about Lab Gab ahead of the show), when I wondered:
I also admit to being curious as to whether the show might at some point down the road – depending on its longevity – also occasionally “hop over the fence” into Sansar or even perhaps take some “behind the scenes” (desires for things like privacy allowing among staff) looks at the Lab itself. “Lab Gab” seems to be too broad a title to remain purely about Second Life (although there is a lot to explore on that subject alone), even allowing for it being intentioned as a “catchy” name for the show.
By way of “reply” (I’m not sure Xiola’s comment was driven as a result of my speculation or not) Xiola noted:
I know the name of our new show here is “Lab Gab” – we just really likes how that sounded … but currently, short-term, our plans are to definitely focus on Second Life, although obviously we work for Linden Lab and Linden Lab also has Sansar … but the focus of this show is, initially and short-term, Second Life and the Second Life Community.
After some general chit-chat around giveaways, the show turns to a mini Q&A session from around the 19:15 mark, some of which are summarised below:
Linden Lab is currently working on an communications / companion app for iOS
There is no time line on availability.
The last update I can offer on the app can be found here: Second Life iOS companion app – mini update, from July 1st, 2019, and which includes comments from Oz and Vir Linden.
When are last names coming back?
Still being worked on, have a lot of variables involved in terms of back-end systems and complexity.
Again, those interested can catch the last formal update I have (including comments from Oz Linden) in the First and last names section of my coverage of Oz’s appearance at SL16B with April Linden in June 2019. This also addresses a number of questions on the topic.
Linden Homes:
There is now a weekly roll-out programme (Mondays, Wednesday, Fridays) when homes are made available through the Linden Homes web page.
New types and styles of Linden Homes are still in the works, but no release dates.
Will Lab Gab include interviews with Lab staff? – Yes.
Upcoming major updates:
Bakes on Mesh is now out, per above.
The Environment Enhancement project (EEP) is progressing towards release – but no definite time frame other than Soon™ as bugs are being stomped on.
Not directly mentioned in the show is the new Animesh enhancements work (Project Muscadine) and also back on the horizon is the restarting ARCTan (two name but two of the more user-facing projects – there is also a lot of under-the-hood work going on).
An interesting start to the series, nicely relaxed, and a segment where the voice issues didn’t spoil things too much. Some nice teasers were dropped on future shows and direction which suggest Lab Gab will be a good option for tuning into every couple of weeks. In the meantime, you can catch the entire first show below.
Lab Gab is the title of a new live stream event being hosted by Xiola and Strawberry Linden, that commences on Wednesday, August 28th at 15:00 SLT. Initially announced in a blog post on August 23rd, Lab Gab is intended to be:
A variety show of sorts – we want to explore Second Life, answer your questions, talk to Residents from all over the world, and stream it through the internet and into your homes, phones, and wherever you get your quality entertainment.
With Xiola going on to note:
In our first show, we’ll be introducing ourselves, talking a little bit about what Lab Gab is, and interacting with you through YouTube live. In the future, we will invite special guests to come visit us on the set and talk about events and issues that impact the communities in Second Life.
For those interested, Lab Gab will initially be streamed via the official Second Life You Tube channel – although other platforms will be added in the future – with shows planned to go out every couple of weeks or so.
I confess, I’m not a great fan of live streamed events (outside of things like meetings, where there tends to be a more formalised approach to things), simply because at times things can get dragged out or take a sudden right turn away from something that might have otherwise been interesting. However, there is no denying the seat-of-the-pants sense of adventure those actively leading / participating in such events can feel, and the very unpredictable nature of where things might lead can add to the appeal for a watching audience.
At the same time, I also admit to being curious as to whether the show might at some point down the road – depending on its longevity – also occasionally “hop over the fence” into Sansar or even perhaps take some “behind the scenes” (desires for things like privacy allowing among staff) looks at the Lab itself. “Lab Gab” seems to be too broad a title to remain purely about Second Life (although there is a lot to explore on that subject alone), even allowing for it being intentioned as a “catchy” name for the show.
Certainly, dipping the occasional toe in Sansar’s waters might help dispel some of the many misconceptions that circulate among SL users concerning that platform, while taking a peek inside the Lab could also help both dispel certain myths and offer greater insight into what goes into keeping Second Life chugging along. Just a couple of ideas I’m throwing out there, LL, if you’ve not already considered them 😉 ).
In the meantime, if you are curious to see how Lab Gab sets itself up as a magazine show look at Second Life, be sure to watch tonight’s instalment via the You Tube link above, and keep an eye on the Lab’s social media and blog for updates about future shows.
Pendle Hill, October 2018 – blog post
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 