April Linden Leaves the Lab

 
Fans of April Linden, the self-described "Gridbun" of Linden Lab, are getting some sad news. On Friday November 5, she announced she was leaving.

Hello Residents!

Today is my last day at Linden Lab. I am gonna let this account go dormant after today. Watching y'all use the things we build in ways we didn't expect (or even know was possible!) has been an amazing joy the last eight years, and I am going to miss it. (heart)

My personal Twitter account is @bunnyhalberd , but I'm not a very exciting person to follow. I live in a small town in rural Washington and mostly just post about the silly things I build in my workshop because I figured they needed to exist.

Thank you for making the last eight years be a wonderful experience! I am very muchly going to miss being on the inside of this wonderful and crazy world that we all build together. (heart)

April's announcement got dozens of replies, including some from noted residents. Prokofy Neva, "Dear April, you left the virtual world a better place than you found it with your devoted work on the cloud migration and all that followed. Good luck on your future projects!" Daniel Voyager, "Thanks for all of your hard work to make Second Life a better place and keeping everyone updated when the grid had downtimes. Good luck for the future." Inara Pey, "Nooooo!! Say it's not true! We need Lindeny Gridbun! Seriously, am saddened to hear you are leaving LL, but wishing you all the very best for the future. Shall add your other account to my Following list!" Will Burns, "You will be missed... teh cute shall go on!" Luca, "April noo! =c will miss April, but best of luck with whatever April's going to do next x3" Caitlin Tobias, "Dear April, I wish you all the best and hope you’ll have fun on your new adventures!" Pantera Polnocy, "Thank you for being the awesome gridbun for all this time. ~"

April Linden joined the Lab in 2013, and became instantly known by her purple Luskwood bunny avatar. She would appear at numerous Bay City events, and others such as the Happy Vixen's Luskwood Tribute Party and just walking down the road at Second Life Birthday events. She eventually rose to the position of operations manager, and would take it upon herself to apologize to the residents when something went very wrong. With the move to "the Cloud," she would occasionally update the residents on the Lab's progress, and about a year ago announced all data from the sims had been transfered over.

In July 2019, April was interviewed along with Oz Linden. April revealed she had originally a regular resident who signed up in 2006, whom still came on using the accound and had a couple regions. She considered Second Life important as she came from a family where certain issues "were not to be discussed," and one could listen and talk about them here. Of maintaining the Grid, she called it a complex job with one "generation" of Lindens building on top of one another year after year, and sometimes the only way to fix things was to take the Grid offline, which she disliked, partially because it kept happening to her so much in her days as a regular resident.

On a more personal note, April Linden was spoken of fondly by some friends and neighbors of mine. She will be missed. 

Image credit: Inara Pey

Bixyl Shuftan
 

"We Are Now In The Cloud"

 
It's been about a month since April Linden announced that the data from all the sims (aside from a few Linden ones) had been moved to Cloud servers. But there was still some work to be done. This week, there was some more news about the last stages of the move. On Tuesday, it was announced that "as part of our overall migration to the cloud, some of our web publishing tools ... may be unavailable for our internal editorial team." And so the Second Life Destination Guide was getting a temporary freeze on updates. Also on Tuesday, according to Inara Pey, at the Simulator User Group meeting April and Oz Linden had stated all Second Life systems and service were now running on Amazon Cloud Servers. So the Lab was clearing all of it's equipment from it's "former co-location facility in Arizona."

At the Wednesday Third Party Viewer Meeting, supposedly Oz Linden was more direct, "Actually, we disconnected the datacenter last night ... everything is now running in AWS."

It's not an announcement that's being celebrated by all. There's been a number of glitches on the Grid lately, and Inara Pey stated in the same article that the Lab was working to fix an issue on the map. While the move to the Cloud may be done, the job of taking care of the bugs and glitches as a result of the move remains.

Source: Modem World , SL forums 

Bixyl Shuftan

More Merchandise Available In Second Life Redbubble Store

 

In September, Linden Lab launched a Second Life merchandise store through Redbubble. Earlier this week, the Lab announced some new items had been added to it. There's now winter-themed shirts and coffee mugs in the selection, as well as April and Coyot Linden bear themed t-shirts. 

We'd like to announce that we've added a couple wintery items to our official merchandise store on RedBubble. A wholesome and humorous play on our logo, we hope these can bring some lighthearted joy to kick off a hopeful and positive attitude for the start of 2021.

We've also added the Linden Bears of April and Coyot to our collection of pocket tees.

To get to the store, Click Here.

April Linden Announces All Sims Moved To The Cloud

 

It was just about a week ago in which it was announced half the sims had their data moved to the Cloud. So with all the time that had been done before, one would probably expect quite a bit of time before the other half were moved. Well, that's not quite what happened. Yesterday, Thursday November 19, April announced that all of the sims now had their data moved to Cloud servers.

The team just finished up moving all of the regions to the cloud! We did it, before our goal of Thanksgiving!!! Uplift isn't done, we still have things to move, but getting the regions done FEELS SO GOOD!

As April stated, this isn't the end of the work on the Cloud move. And there's still glitching going on. For instance, there were issues with group chat, teleporting, and reading the world map. But it is a notable milestone that hopefully will lead to an improved Second Life.

Bixyl Shuftan

Number of Sims Moved to The Cloud Passes 50%

 

Of the move of sim data to Cloud servers, a noteable milestone was achieved a few days ago, at least according to Daniel Voyager. In his blog, he reported that Stawberry Linden had told him that April Linden had told her that half the sims now had their data in The Cloud.

Hi Daniel, this is Strawberry. I have confirmed with our Sr. Engineering Manager, April Linden, that over half the regions in Second Life are now running in the cloud.

Since this was a few days ago, The Lab has no doubt continued it's work. How long will it take until the move is complete? Daniel Voyager himmself thought it would be "six weeks or so."

Source: Daniel Voyager's Blog
Image Source: Linden Lab

Linden Lab Asks For Patience For The Next Few Weeks With Cloud Migration

 

It's no secret things have been more glitchy in Second Life than usual. Last Friday, Linden Lab through Oz Linden came out and apologized for the various glitches, crashes, and bugs recently, saying they were from it's moving things to cloud servers. Yesterday, Wednesday October 21, in the "Tools and Technology" blog, it was April Linden's turn. She gave an update on how much has been done so far.

We’re in a really exciting time in the history of Second Life. We’re in the home stretch on moving the grid to the cloud. We hit a fun milestone a few days ago, and now there’s over 1,000 regions running in the cloud!

Everyone in the Lab is working hard on this project, and we’re moving very quickly. I just got out of a leadership meeting where we went over what’s currently in flight, and there’s so many things moving that I lost track of them all. It’s amazing!

However, not everything was good news. She asked residents to be patient.

I’ve come to ask for a favor.  ... I’ve come to ask you for is your patience. 

We’re doing our very best to fix things that come up as we go. This means that we might need to restart regions more often than you’re used to, and things may break just a little more often than we’ve all been accustomed to.

In order to get this project done as fast as possible and minimize the time (and resulting bugs) we have to spend with one foot in our datacenter and the other in the cloud, we don’t want to limit ourselves to restarting regions just once a week. We’re ready to get this project done! We’ve seen how much better Second Life runs in the cloud, and we’re ready to have everyone on the grid experience it.

I’m sorry that things might be a little rough over the next few weeks. It’s our goal to finish the cloud migration by the holidays, so that everyone, Resident and Linden alike, can have a nice quiet holiday with our friends and families.

 We can’t promise we’ll make it by then, but we’re sure giving it all we’ve got. The mood around the Lab is really positive right now, and we’re all working hard together to make it happen. I’m really proud to be a part of the team that’s transforming Second Life as we know it.

Thanks so much for hanging in there with us. We know it’s frustrating at times, but it won’t last for too long, and there’s a better future on the other side of this. We truly appreciate your understanding and patience as we finish up this project.

So it appears in addition to the glitches we've been seeing, we're very likely to have to deal with sim restarts as well. Perhaps the Lab may slow things down a bit next week interfere with Halloween less. If not, residents may have to contend with having to suddenly leave sims in a hurry in addition to the ghosts and goblins.

To read the Linden blog post in full, Click Here.

Bixyl Shuftan

EOTB: April Linden Explains Last Weekend's Issues

If you had some trouble getting on Second Life on Sunday August 30, it wasn't just your imagination. April Linden would explain things this week in the Tools and Technology section of the Linden Blog.

A lot of people had trouble connecting to Second Life yesterday (Aug 30th, 2020), and I want to explain a bit about what happened, and why we didn’t post on the Second Life Status page right away.
Early in the morning (US time) yesterday one of the major Internet providers had an issue that impacted a lot of the Internet as a whole, including Second Life. Several other Internet companies have written their own really good blog posts about what happened. We got caught up in the same thing. 

The reason we were slow to post on the Second Life Status page is because, from our monitoring systems’ point of view, Second Life itself and all our systems were functioning normally. That means, our operations team wasn’t getting alerted. Of course, from the Resident point of view, Second Life was effectively down in some parts of the world, and that’s really what matters.
To help us react quicker in the future we’ve made a few changes. 

Yesterday evening we added a new monitoring service that checks on some of Second Life’s core systems from all around the globe. It’s a service that a lot of other companies use too, so we’ll get alerted better in the future. When Internet-scale events like yesterday happen there’s not a lot we can do about it, but we can post on the status page quicker to let our Residents know we’re aware things aren’t right.

April Linden would apologize for the earlier lack of communication, "We know how important Second Life is to our Residents, and we’re taking steps to increase our visibility into issues outside of our servers. It’s our hope that these steps will enable us to communicate better with y’all in the future."

Source: Linden Lab

Hat Tip: Inara Pey

Bixyl Shuftan

Linden Lab Announces Improvements on Sim Crossings

One of the pet peeves a number of residents have is sim crossings, or "region crossings" as Linden Lab calls them. Sometimes there's a short pause. Occasionally there's a longer pause. And sometimes there's the "walk of lag" that results in you going walking on and on until you either "rubberband" back to the sim crossing, or the viewer crashes and you get knocked offline.

Last year, crashing after teleporting and sim crossing was getting to be worse of a problem. Though after a while, things began to improve. So how are things now? Yesterday on the "Tools and Technology" Linden blog, April Linden, announced that the programing on how sim crossings/teleports was changed and the results were that they were easier and less glitchy than ever.

The process of crossing from one region to another when you’re riding in a vehicle is pretty involved. The region you’re leaving needs to be able to tell the region where you’re arriving  everything it knows about the vehicle, and has to do it really quickly. That includes all of the scripts in the vehicle, everything that’s attached to it, the direction and how fast it’s going, and lots of other stuff. 

To make this happen quickly, early on in Second Life’s history we made some assumptions about our network, including things like how big a packet can be. Those assumptions generally worked okay on our own network, but not outside it. 

When you crossed from one region to another, the regions were putting a lot of information into large packets and sending them across our network. This was usually okay because our network was purposefully built to run Second Life. Then, as soon we tried to do this on someone else’s network (in the cloud), things didn’t work quite right. The problem was most noticeable when crossing from a region in our data center to one in the cloud. 

The first thing our engineering teams tried was breaking those large packets up into smaller ones, but that actually made the problem worse. Rather than send one big packet and wait for the other side to say it received the data, with smaller packets, it had to repeat that bunch of times for each packet. (Send, get an acknowledgement, send another piece, get an acknowledgement, etc.) It was still mostly okay across our network, but way worse when a region in our network was talking to one in the cloud. We now knew this code would never work well, so we needed a different approach. 

Next, our engineering team decided to use another way to send the data across the network, using the same protocol and method we use for other types of data. Most importantly, it is faster and more reliable. That did the trick! We’re still collecting statistics on the impact this change has, but things are looking very positive. 

Once this new code was written, the performance when going  from region to region got a lot better, and it worked between our data center and the cloud! The improvement was so dramatic that we decided to not make our Residents wait for uplifted simulators, and rolled the changes out right away. That code is what rolled out to the grid this week.

"It’s really exciting that the cloud migration is helping us find really old bugs and make Second Life better as we go," the "gridbun" would conclude.



Luca decided to test things out for herself. This video she did shows her testing several vehicles. Although some took longer than others, she concluded all showed some improvement, a few making the crossing in less than a second.

Have you found sim crossing and teleports easier? What about vehicle crossings? Please leave comments below.

Source: Linden blog, Luca 
Hat tip: Cynthia Farshore, Liffento 

Bixyl Shuftan

April Linden Explains Last Sunday's Outage

If you tried to get on Second Life on Sunday October 27th, then you may have been blocked by issues that persisted all afternoon. On Wednesday, April Linden, the Operations Manager of the Grid, posted in the Tools and Technology blog just what happened in "The Sunday That Was Not a Fun Day."

The trouble started back on Thursday. We had some pretty bad problems talking to key services (packet loss) on one of our Internet links. It didn’t impact everything, but the stuff it hit was pretty important. It started for a few hours on Thursday, but just magically went away on its own. It’s never good when a problem just magically fixes itself because it’s pretty likely it’s gonna happen again. 

The same thing happened again on Friday, but once again it went away on its own before we were able to debug what actually happened. 

We were nervous going into the weekend, and sure enough, it bit us again on Sunday. We started having more Internet communication problems, but this time, it didn’t just go away. 

Now that we had it in a bad state we started to troubleshoot and figured out really fast that it wasn’t our equipment. Our stuff was (and still is) working just fine, but we were getting intermittent errors and delays on traffic that was routed through one of our providers. We quickly opened a ticket with the network provider and started engaging with them. That’s never a fun thing to do because these are times when we’re waiting on hold on the phone with a vendor while Second Life isn’t running as well as it usually does. 

After several hours trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, we decided to swing a bigger hammer and adjust our Internet routing. It took a few attempts, but we finally got it, and we were able to route around the problematic network. We’re still trying to troubleshoot with the vendor, but Second Life is back to normal again.

April went on to say that the power outages affecting much of California had nothing to do with the outage, although one of the people working on the issue was, "One of our engineers was working in the dark in a house without power, with his laptop being powered by a long string of extension cords that ran to a generator outside."

We’re really sorry that this past Sunday wasn’t very fun. The weekend before Halloween is a really fun time to be Inworld, and it was a frustrating day all the way around. (I personally love the way our Residents really get into Halloween in a way that’s only possible in Second Life!) Knowing that it wasn't as awesome as it could have been makes me sad, and we’re working to make it better in the future. 

April requested that if anyone suspects an issue that may have been caused by the outage, please let the Support team know.

Source: BBC, Tools and Technology

Bixyl Shuftan

SL Video: "Meet The Lindens: April and Oz Linden"

(Click here if the video fails to play)

On Tuesday at 2PM, Saffia Widdershins interviewed Oz and April Linden, followed by a Q and A session with residents. Video was made available after the event.

Editor's Note: For those who want a summary, one will be provided later today

"Meet The Lindens" Oz and April Linden

"Meet The Lindens" continues today, with Oz and April Linden.

* * * * *

Today, don’t miss a Q&A with Senior Director of SL Engineering Oz Linden and System Engineering Manager April Linden.
 

ABOUT OZ LINDEN
Senior Director, Second Life Engineering

Prior to joining Second Life, Oz spent many years developing all sorts of networking code -- eventually including contributions to the development of HTTP and from there to open source SIP (voice over IP). Internet Telephony turned into something of a corporate nightmare, so he looked around for something more fun. A friend who was working at the Lab recruited Oz to help with the open source program. Since he had already played a little with Second Life, he thought that it certainly met the "fun" criteria but he had no idea just how much fun. Nine years later, Oz is responsible for Second Life Engineering and having the time of his life. He is proud to be working on a product that means so much to so many people.
 
ABOUT APRIL LINDEN
Systems Engineering Manager, Operations
Before joining the dark side and going into management, April was an operations engineer herself for over 20 years. It’s the operations team that handles the care and feeding of the computers that power Second Life.
April has been a Resident of Second Life since 2006, and a Linden since 2013. She adores Second Life and the power that it has to change lives by providing people a safe place to explore themselves, and giving them the courage to change their lives in positive ways.

2PM at the SLB Auditorium
https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SL16B%20Dazzle/7/202/23 

The Luskwood Tribute Party

If another community you admire isn't able to organize a key anniversary event, what do you do? The Luskwood community, the oldest in Second Life, turned fifteen this fall, but it's founders couldn't hold a grand anniversary event. For the the Happy Vixen, the beach club of the Sunweaver/Angels community, the answer to the problem was to hold a tribute party. The party was a big success, with a number from Luskwood dropping by. To everyone's surprise, so did one of the Lindens.

Read the story in Events.

April Linden Confirms Sunday DDoS Attack

 Second Life residents often found themselves disconnected and/or had trouble logging in. On Wednesday afternoon, April Linden announced in the Tools and Technology part of the official forums that it was the reason some residents suspected: A Directed Denial of Service attack.
On Sunday,

Hello amazing Residents of Second Life!

 

A few days ago (on Sunday, October 28th, 2018) we had a really rough day on the grid. For a few hours it was nearly impossible to be connected to Second Life at all, and this repeated several times during the day.

 

The reason this happened is that Second Life was being DDoSed.

 

Attacks of this type are pretty common. We’re able to handle nearly all of them without any Resident-visible impact to the grid, but the attacks on Sunday were particularly severe. The folks whothat were on call this weekend did their best to keep the grid stable during this time, and I’m grateful they did.

 

Sunday is our busiest day in Second Life each week, and we know there’s lot of events folks plan during it. We’re sorry those plans got interrupted. Like most of y’all, I too have an active life as a Resident, and my group had to work around the downtime as well. It was super frustrating.

 

As always, the place to stay informed of what’s going on is the Second Life Grid Status Blog. We do our best to keep it updated during periods of trouble on the grid.

 

Thanks for listening. I’ll see you inworld!

 

April Linden

 
Second Life Operations Team Lead

 

But Second Life's troubles weren't over quite yet. Later that day in the evening hours, it happened again, residents getting logged off and unable to log back in. Yours truly was able to log back in after a few hours. There was talk about another DDoS attack by some residents. But the Grid Status Report didn't show any problems.

Hopefully that's the last of the trouble this week.

Hat Tip: Inara Pey

Bixyl Shuftan

Second Life Hit By Large Scale DDOS Attack

Second Life has been under attack by trolls many times. But this time, hackers are the ones causing the trouble.

For the second day in a row, residents have had trouble getting inworld. People couldn't log in, or if they were already in, they'd be logged out. People had trouble bringing up the Second Life webpage as well as Marketplace. Yours truly couldn't get on until after 7PM SL time. Curiously, Firestorm was also described as being down. There was naturally speculation about the cause. One person wondered if one of the twelve employees Linden Lab recently let go had something to do with it. Others suspected a DDOS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attack.

Finally just after 11AM SL time, April Linden finally announced the cause, an unusually large DDOS, one that the Lab stated were "at a level that we rarely see."

As I’m sure most of y’all have noticed, Second Life has had a rough 24 hours. We’re experiencing outages unlike any in recent history, and I wanted to take a moment and explain what’s going on.
The grid is currently undergoing a large DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Second Life being hit with a DDoS attack is pretty routine. It happens quite a bit, and we’re good at handling it without a large number of Residents noticing. However, the current DDoS attacks are at a level that we rarely see, and are impacting the entire grid at once. 

My team (the Second Life Operations Team) is working as hard as we can to mitigate these attacks. We’ve had people working round-the-clock since they started, and will continue to do so until they settle down. (I had a very late night, myself!) 

Second Life is not the only Internet service that’s been targeted today. My sister and brother opsen at other companies across the country are fighting the same battle we are. It’s been a rough few days on much of the Internet. 

We’re really sorry that access to Second Life has been so sporadic over the last day. Trying to combat these attacks has the full attention of my team, and we’re working as hard as we can on it. We’ll keep posting on the Second Life Status Blog as we have new updates.

As I am writing this, I've been hearing that various online retailers have also been hit with DDOS attacks. Although the Grid Status Report suggests there are still problems, some are telling me they can get on again. Hopefully the issue will be resolved quickly.

Image Credit: Spooked Dreamscape

Bixyl Shuftan

Meeting Lindens at the SL14B

You'll come across many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different people going about the SL14B. One I came across was a newcomer here on day one, whom I talked to some and gave her a landmark to "The Shelter." And among those there were some Lindens. One I found skipping down the path: April Linden. She stopped to chat with me and a couple friends at the Second Life Coast Guard exhibit.

The "Gridbun" as she called herself was happy to pose for a picture with Skylark Lefavre, the manager of the Happy Vixen club. Skylark is a big bunny fan and happy to see the furry Linden going about as one.

 A chance to meet more Lindens was at the Masquerade Ball on Monday June 19, which ran from 11AM to 1PM at the Cake Stage. Yours truly showed up as an avatar with it's own built-in mask.

Unfortunately for me, and presumably a number of others, the large number of avatars present (and perhaps some of what they were wearing) kept causing my viewer to overload and crash. The pictures I managed to take were mostly of crowds half-rezzed, half-naked, or both. This was the best picture I could get of Xiola Linden, who organized the event, before my Firestorm quit on me again. There was at least one other Linden at the event, Simon Linden, but I never did see him with my crashy viewer.

There was a 5000 Linden dollar prize, which was won by Polly Ellsmere.

There will be one other event in which you can expect Lindens to show up, the "Come As You Were" party, also at the Cake Stage, today from 6-8PM SL time.

Bixyl Shuftan

Bay City's Tree Lighting Party

Last Saturday, Bay City, Second Life's largest urban area, had their annual Christmas-themed party, the "Tree Lighting." There was music dancing, a Linden among the crowd, a "silent auction" to help raise funds for a children's charity, and of course the Christmas tree.

Read the story in Events.

April Linden Explains Tuesday's Grid Problems, "We're Sorry About This Outage"

As some of you already know, there were some problems with the Second Life Grid on Tuesday. For a while around Noon and the early afternoon, residents were unable to log in and some were being logged out. At the time, Linden Lab posted an "Unscheduled Maintenance" notice at 11:03 AM stating this, and asking residents to temporarily stop making purchases inworld and buying Lindens.

We are aware that some users are currently being logged out, and all users are currently unable to log in to Second Life. Additionally, please refrain from transacting on the LindeX on in-world as purchases are likely to fail. Some regions are also unavailable at this time, and teleports to other regions may fail currently. We have identified the issue causing this situation and are currently working to resolve it. Please monitor this blog for additional updates.

It was 2:49 PM when they finally gave the all-clear. A few residents I talked to later mentioned the downtime. One would later tell me adjustments she had made at the time while she was going through a number of sets of clothes had been undone, and wondered if what was going on with the Grid had something to do with it.

Several years ago, downtimes happened regularly. With the sometimes self-depreciating humor of the days of Philip Linden, they'd post a picture parodying the monolith and apes scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, "The Grid Is Down While We Bang On Things." Today, downtimes are much less frequent. And this time, April Linden decided to make a statement the following day explaining what happened.

Shortly after 10:30am, the master node of one of the central databases crashed. This is the same type of crash we’ve experienced before, and we handled it in the same way. We shut down a lot of services (including logins) so we could bring services back up in an orderly manner, and then promptly selected a new master and promoted it up the chain. This took roughly an hour, as it usually does.

A few minutes before 11:30am we started the process of restoring all services to the Grid. When we enabled logins, we did it in our usual method - turning on about half of the servers at once. Normally this works out as a throttle pretty well, but in this case, we were well into a very busy part of the day. Demand to login was very high, and the number of Residents trying to log in at once was more than the new master database node could handle.

Around noon we made the call to close off logins again and allow the system to cool off. While we were waiting for things to settle down we did some digging to try to figure out what was unique about this failure, and what we’ll need to do to prevent it next time.

We tried again at roughly 12:30pm, doing a third of the login hosts at a time, but this too was too much. We had to stop on that attempt and shut down all logins again around 1:00pm.

On our third attempt, which started once the system cooled down again, we took it really slowly, and brought up each login host one at a time. This worked, and everything was back to normal around 2:30pm.

My team is trying to figure out why we had to turn the login servers back on much more slowly than in the past. We’re still not sure. It’s a pretty interesting challenge, and solving hard problems is part of the fun of running Second Life.
Voice services also went down around this time, but for a completely unrelated reason. It was just bad luck and timing.

We did have one bright spot! Our status blog handled the load of thousands of Residents checking it all at once much better. We know it wasn’t perfect, but it showed much improvement over the last central database failure, and we’ll keep getting better 

My team takes the stability of Second Life very seriously, and we’re sorry about this outage. We now have a new challenging problem to solve, and we’re on it.

"We're sorry." Not words that we hear from Linden Lab every day. But this time, it's on the record that they spoke them.

Hat Tip: Inara Pey

Bixyl Shuftan

Lindens at the Cake Stage

There's been a lot going on at the SL13B, and a little time to write it. One event that stood out was called the "The Roleplay Mashup Meetup," which took place on Monday. But for many residents, the name was a little confusing as it was intended as a costume party and not a roleplay, and to many the costume part got lost in that it was a chance to meet up with a number of Lindens. Some were Lindens whom were familiar faces, such as Xiola and April Linden. But others were less than familiar. There were also a few other notable personalities, and no shortage of avatars.

See the pictures in Events.

Bay City's Seventh Anniversary

Sunday May 17 was the day Bay City, Second Life's largest city area and the community behind it, held it's seventh anniversary celebration. The event was marked by several performers and the largest annual parade in the virtual world. Bixyl Shuftan was there, whom took a number of pictures.

See more in Events.

Bay City's Sixth Anniversary

On Sunday May 18, the Bay City region in Second Life celebrated its Sixth annual Anniversary event. People and their costumes, floats, and bikes, gathered at a meeting place, and after some last minute planning went down the main road with leading resident Marianne McCann in the lead. Following the parade was a music and dance party. The event was not a typical event as only last week a popular resident had passed away, and at one point a Linden showed up.

Read Gemma Cleanslate's story in Events.