"Emergency Vet Sale" Project Regalia by Sugarcult

For anyone who doesn't have the Regalia, now is the best time to get it!  The creator needs as much of L she can get to help her cat, who has been poisoned, and she needs to pay the vet bill. Please, help her out.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Sugarcult-Project-Regalia-EMERGENCY-VET-SALE/18217485

Even if you've already payed for the Regalia, you can send L directly to Alex; Alias Aura on SL. Thanks guys~

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/AwwHeck for her payment.

From Becky Nosferatu 

Addition: Becky would later say the cat wasn't actually poisoned, but had a severe ear infection bad enough to look like poisoning. 

Gamer Gets Help For Friend Having Seizure 5000 Miles Away

To those who say online friends aren't real friends, the parents of a 17 year old gamer, Adian Jackson, would disagree. They were watching TV in their home in Widnes, Great Britian, while their son was playing games on his computer upstairs. They had no idea anything was amiss until two police cars with lights flashing drove over. The three officers told them they'd gotten a call that something was wrong with the boy. Going upstairs, the boy was found "severely disoriented and not fully conscious of his surroundings." He still had his headset on, and a gamer friend, the one whom had made the call, was still online trying to talk to him.

The other gamer was Dia Lathora of Texas, 5000 miles away. While they were both gaming online, he suddenly stopped talking Dia was able to guess he was having a seizure. She had his address, but not his phone number, so she tried to reach an emergency number. While she couldn't find it, she was able to talk to someone, and though that person was able to explain what was happening.

"We always say to the kids, be careful who you speak to online," Caroline Jackson stated, "but in this case, it was invaluable."

Sources: BBC News, Liverpool Echo

Firestorm Viewer Undergoes Emergency Update

By Bixyl Shuftan

Users of Firestorm are having to upgrade their viewers once again, at least those whom had just upgraded to the version before. Linden Lab informed Team Firestorm the viewer was causing them problems. So the team went to work on a new update in a hurry.

It was June 26 when Firestorm released version 4.4.1 of their viewer. Jessica Lyon told the users this was a mandatory upgrade due to it's Project Sunshine and its upcoming rolling out of server-side baking, or server-side appearance as it's being called now. Five days later, The Firestorm blog had some bad news.


According to Jessica, when the viewer was being beta-tested, it was made to "enable special data logging." This sent a sizable amount of information to Linden Lab's servers and user logs, "mainly avatar appearance debugging data and usage data."  Unfortunately, this feature wasn't turned off for when the viewer was released. The "usage" information was the bigger problem as the viewers were sending this information "every 30 seconds … instead of the usual 10 minutes. The result according to Linden Lab was their statistic servers were being overwhelmed. So Team Firestorm had to act fast.

Version 4.4.1 was removed from their downloads page right away. The team then went to work on a new version of the viewer with the feature for the extra data disabled. They stated it would be available on July 2 at latest. Later in the day, work on it was finished and it was made available as Version 4.4.2. Team Firestorm then began blocking the logins of Viewer 4.4.1s in service.

Those whom had yet to upgrade from 4.4.0 do not have to upgrade right away as their viewer wasn't blocked, at least not for a few days when Linden Lab's server side appearance goes into effect.  But it was recommended they make a "clean install," that is "clearing the settings from the hard drive, along with uninstalling the application and manually wiping the cache."

Jessica accepted responsibility for the error, "we screwed up, and because of our screw-up, thousands of you are going to need to upgrade yet again, only this time with little to no notice or choice whatsoever. We acknowledge this will be, at the least, very inconvenient to most of you and on behalf of myself and the entire Firestorm Team, we extend our deepest apologies."

"… we won't make this mistake again."

Various residents across the Grid also acted. Hearing about the emergency update, they spread the news, telling friends in-avatar as well as IMs, group chats, and group notices.

Jessica stated July 9 is when Linden Labs rolls out server side appearance. For those still using Phoenix, she urged them to upgrade to Firestorm, or use another Third-Party viewer that can handle this new way avatar data is processed. Otherwise for them, Second Life may become a very colorless place.

Source: Firestorm Blog

Bixyl Shuftan