Creator of Slink Avatar Announces Closing of Stores

 

In what can only be described as a surprise move, the creator of the Slink avatar, Siddean Munro, announced on Saturday December 31, 2022, she was closing her stores, taking her avatar and other products off the market.

Following two stressful years of pandemic which I am sure we have all been affected by in one way or the other, I suddenly lost my mother in September of 2021, my grandmother in January of 2022 and my cat Cleo in June. I have been unwell and enduring a lot of chronic pain. I have to be very honest, my spark has dimmed a little and I no longer have the energy to pour into this business like I once did.

I’ve done a lot of soul searching over the last 18 months and have come to the very difficult decision that for my own physical and mental wellbeing, I need to move on from Second Life. I am starting something new, and can only hope it will be half as much fun and as fulfilling as my time in Second Life has been.

She would thank her customers for years of loyal business, "I cannot express what your support has truly meant to me, and I know these words will never be enough...."as well as other content creators who made products for her avatar, "you made what I do so much better! Thank you so much for your fabulous, innovative and gorgeous creations that made mine look so awesome." She announced she would no longer be answering messages made to her or her alts.

 

Checking her Marketplace page, it was cleared out, empty, one day before the announced closing. Same thing with her inworld store, at a sim also named "Slink." Entry was restricted to one tiny area with ban lines around it. There was a redelivery terminal, but the items for sale were out of reach.

 

Siddean had been creating items for sale since 2007. Her avatar shape has been around for some years, and has been described as "The Tesla for mesh bodies," applauded for it's low-lag design, which contrasted with some popular but complex and lag-inducing avatar shapes that multiplied two to three dozen times could make attending an event unreachable for those with older computers. 

On the official forums, there was praise for her on a thread about her closing. "I was very surprised (and a little sad - Slink is still my favorite and most worn body), but it sounds like a change will be good for her, and I wish her the best in her new endeavors." ''I wish Siddean and her team all the best for the future. Slink has been an innovator in SL and Siddean is just a lovely person." "I'm wishing the creator all the goodness, it seems they need a whole lot of happy thoughts from all of us. They were one of the amazing trend setters in SL back in the day and I'm sure their contribution will always be remembered!" "My heart goes out to Siddean, if I'd been in her shoes with all that RL threw at her the last few years, I'd probably do the same soul-searching. I hope she finds a new venture beyond Second Life where she can put her talents to good use and get that spark back." "It seems they had an awful year, and I am not surprised to hear they are stepping away. Lets hope one day they come back with an amazing creation that knocks us all off our feet " "So sad to hear this, Siddean was one of the pioneers of mesh bodies in SL, I don't think we'd be where we are now without her.  I wish her all the best for the future." "Sad news ...15 years of visible accomplishments and a very nice goodbye with hope for the future. Rare in SL for creators it seems."

The other products around for Slink avatars will likely be around for around for a while. But with the avatar no longer for sale and the creator gone from Second Life, it is unclear if any more will be made.

Sources: Slink, New World Notes  

Bixyl Shuftan

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