St. Patrick's Moon Dance Almost Falls Apart, Leprechauns Blamed

 

 

 Every Thursday, the Relay for Life's Sunbeamer team holds their weekly Moon Dance. On the one around St. Patrick's Day, they do a special one by making the moon green, which gets it's share of jokes of green cheese along with the green beer. But on the one for Thursday March 14, there was a problem. Much of the set just up and vanished, notably the lunar surface. This left new arrivals arriving via the Moon Cannon plummeting back to the ground, at least until Shockwave Yareach inserted a temporary floor. 

Cynthia Farshore, who hosts the event, had been knocked off, but was soon back, and the normal lunar surface was restored, and she was playing the tunes. Somehow Yogi Bear snuck in (perhaps looking for picnic baskets?)

But this being the St. Patrick's dance, it wasn't too long before we had the green moon back.

 

People were saying the reason things fell apart was because of leprechauns. But no one saw any.

At the end, team captain Rita Mariner, along with Shockwave and Cynthia, thanked everyone for coming. 

The Moon Dance is every Thursday at 6PM, and is BYOK (bring your own kiosk) with all Relay teams, and everyone else, invited.

 

https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Sunweaver%20Space/108/113/50 (Moon Cannon)

Bixyl Shuftan

 

Internet Trouble

 

For some reason, been having some trouble staying connected to the Internet, loosing my connection twice in two nights and having to spent time with technical support. Things seem fine for the moment as the connection is back once again (as I write this), but things can still go wrong.

Technical Difficulties

 

If you can read this, then somehow I lost my connection to the Internet (or was too sleepy to reset the "deadman's switch").

Hopefully it'll be fixed, soon.

Bixyl Shuftan 

Sunbeamer Moon Dance

 

A slight "oops" on our part.

While the Sunbeamer Moon Dance has been going on every week this spring, we didn't include it in SL Clubbin' as it wasn't at an actual club. A couple readers have requested we "make it so." And so we'll be listing the Sunnie's weekly dance on the lunar surface as part of SL Clubbin', at least until the Relay Weekend after which the Moon Cannon goes silent, until next February.

Go Relay!

Thursdays, 6PM, Sunweaver Space (108/113/50)

Technical Difficulties

 

If you can read this, then somehow I lost my connection to the Internet (or was too sleepy to reset the "deadman's switch").

Hopefully it'll be fixed, soon.

Bixyl Shuftan
  

Techinical Difficulties

I had some computer trouble this weekend. While it appears to be more or less fixed, it took some time. So some things I was working on may be a little delayed.

Bixyl Shuftan

Busy Time

 
It's been a busy time in real life for the writers of the Newser. For yours truly, real-life has gotten busier then ever in the past few days. So not only am I prone to the occasional mistake, like the failsafe message that appeared earlier today that wasn't supposed to until if something happened that kept me from updating the computer for a month, for whatever reason. But some things I planned to write about soon will have to wait a little. But we'll keep updating. 

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Ooops!

If you can read this, then somehow I lost my connection to the Internet (or was too sleepy to reset the "deadman's switch").

Hopefully it'll be fixed, soon.

Bixyl Shuftan

More on The Scheduled Maintenance Outage

On late Monday night just after 9:30PM SL time, Second Life experienced an outage that offlined practically all the residents. While some trouble was expected due to the scheduled maintenance that night, what happened was a surprise. Not just logins onto the Grid, but Marketplace, secondlife.com, JIRA, mysecondlife. and more were disabled.

In the forums, Grumpity Linden would respond the the comments of residents in the "Network Maintenance" and the "Second Life is Down" threads, "It's probably cold comfort to reiterate to everyone here that this is not our idea of a good time either." "We're not actually that crazy about taking down the grid, but we had to bang on some things, and are terribly sorry! "

Reactions from the residents varied. One person messaged me, asking me if I thought Linden Lab hand finally shut down Second Life for good. Others grumbled. Some began cracking jokes about not knowing what to do with their time now that they couldn't log in (not unlike the Facebook outage a couple months ago), that there'd be a small baby boom in nine months, and that finally Sansar had more people inworld than Second Life had. And of course there were jokes about the Lindens "banging on things," someone tripping over a power cord, and the cleaning lady causing a short after plugging in her vacuum in the wrong place, Grumpity commenting, "I feel like the cleaning crew is getting a bad rep here!"

Finally at 1:43AM Tuesday morning, the Lindens announced on the Grid Status Report, "We are bringing services back online. Logins have been turned back on. Your experience may still be bumpy as normal concurrency resumes. Thank you for your patience!" Grumpity would say, "Thank you all for your patience.  We can't wait to call it a night! "

But on Tuesday night as this was a second night of scheduled maintenance, there were some worries this would happen again. Grumpity assured that this was highly unlikely, "While you may experience minor disruption, it will be nothing like last night.   Just in case though, we've sacrificed a goat.  It gives us just a little extra confidence." Fortunately, there was no major disruption that night, and residents appear to have more or less gotten about normally.

Third image credit, JB Raccoon

Bixyl Shuftan

Breaking News: Second Life is Down

 If you got knocked off online, you're far from alone. Shortly after 9:30PM SL time, most residents were logged off the grid. A look at the Firestorn viewer showed only a few hundred still on the Grid. A look at the Grid Status Report showed logins were disabled.

While this was the first of four days of scheduled maintenance, it's doubtful they intended to log off everyone. For now, they've disabled logins. Grumpity Linden says people should be able to get back on "soon."

Stay tuned for more information.

Scenes From The Relay

Taken by Carmella Santana (Carmelasia Resident) and posted in Fantasy Fair chat, "See, doing so good." Earlier, she had been talking about a race today at 1PM, " Ima run over alia with my atomic kitty bus!" Seeing this, others chuckled, "Yepp, thats about what I expected to see when I clicked that link."

Scenes From Second Life: Who Smoked The Tree?

via GIPHY

From Snubby Nitely. Looks like somebody put a candle ornament on a tree somewhere in Raglan, and it tipped over.

Reader Submitted: My Psychotic Little Friend

Kain Scalia, also known as Maus Merryjest, recently send the SL Newser a reader submission about a tale from his early days in Second Life ten years ago. It was one of those stories in which at the time he was terrified, but now he can look back at it and laugh. In his first experiment with scripting, he tried to make a virtual pet that would follow him, and anyone else, around. What could possibly go wrong, he felt. As it turned out, the answer was "plenty."

Read Kain's reader submission in Design.

A Correction: Sansar Won't Require Users to Use Real-Life Names

By Bixyl Shuftan

A the Tuesday "Meet the Lindens," I showed up and listened as Ebeb Linden, the CEO of Linden Lab,was interviewed by Jo Yardley. The event being held in voice, I took down notes on paper the best I could, and after logging off I wrote about the event. The notes I had taken suggested Ebbe had been leaning toward having residents use their real-life identities in Sansar.

This caused me to scratch my head, but from my point of view this wouldn't be the first time the Lab had made a questionable move. So I went ahead and wrote the story, confident I hadn't missed anything important. Later in the week I saw some transcripts on Inara Pey's newsletter, and it seems I had only written down part of the information (link).

Second Life is on, I would say, the far spectrum of the anonymity side; and on the other side you have what we call real names, real identities, like probably the most successful real system on planet Earth is Facebook. 

And there’s a reason why they’ve been extremely successful with that; and there’s probably a reason why 100% anonymous networks like Twitter and Second Life run into some really interesting challenges. And there are pros and cons; and we’re trying to think of ways of potentially mixing these models, but we have not made final decisions yet.

I have a preference, some other team players have slightly different preferences, so we’ll see where it ends up. But I think what would be best for Sansar would be real names, and then the ability to have personas underneath that.

so I could go into a role-playing, or into an experience as an anonymous user in that context. But to the platform, I am not anonymous. And so, without making that too complicated and confusing, is that the right answer? We’ll see. But I think to, it would certainly help with griefing and other things. And it also supports a lot of interesting use-cases where anonymity is actually just really confusing, and actually gets in the way.

You can think of a lot of professional use-cases where there are teachers and students and professionals having meetings where these anonymous identities makes things really confusing; “I know Bob, I want to talk to Bob. Who the hell is this Jumping Jack guy?”

So we’re still debating this, and I’m pushing in one way, and people are pushing in different ways, and we’ll see where we end up. I mean, unfortunately, to implement real names is also really complicated. Do you hitch a ride with Facebook, or do you have to somehow build your own real name system.

And building a real name system is incredibly difficult. Facebook did it in an extremely clever way, by basically relying on the social graph to ensure real names. Because just having everybody having to put a credit card down, or identification to prove their real identity is super cumbersome. So, interesting topic. 

Taking a look at the transcript, there's room for interpretation. But it seems while pondering briefly how certain parts sounded, he was asked about the question of anonymity, being identifiable to the Lab through Paypal, though anonymous to everyone else.

If we have to reply on like, for some it’s PayPal, for some it’s this, for some it’s that, it gets really complicated for us to do that.

It’s definitely something we’re thinking a lot about. but do I want that people in Sansar should be able to walk around anonymously? Absolutely! You can in the physical world. I don’t have to have a name tag on myself and show my ID to every person I approach on the street. not that I’m trying to hide anything, but I also don’t think everybody should know what the hell I’m doing all the time. It’s none of your business; it’s my business.

So I totally want to have that mix of, we know who you are but you can also be whoever you want to be, and still have a somewhat functional society going on within that. So we’ll see where we end up.

So it seems by brief inattention caused me to miss an important line.

I apologize for the error, to you the readers and to Ebbe Linden, and resolve to be more careful in the future.

 Bixyl Shuftan

"Cheesy" Tournament at the Happy Vixen: More Pictures

Well, sometimes when you think you've lost something, you've found it again. When I was looking for pictures of last weekend's "Cheesy" tournament at the Happy Vixen, I found fewer than I thought I took, and many of those I did couldn't be used. As it turned out, I had relogged, and saved the pictures with a slight misspelling in the name. So here are a few more images of the event.

 The goal was to win two matches. But several players won one before someone finally came out on top.

And here's ScentualLust, the winner. While "au naturel,"she always keeps her fur brushed over certain parts of the body that would make a picture unusable in this publication. She gave her prize to a friend in Derpyland.

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

An older picture from 2007, taken at a sandbox. Note the "MISSING" pattern on the guy's shirt and pants, which would simply be gray today.

by Bixyl Shuftan

Disaster at Shelz' Haven

It's happened to the best of us. You log into Second Life, expecting all to be well in the Metaverse, and CRACK! You find your world turned upside down. Our roving reporter Shellie Sands describes her own experience as she logged into her home one day, and cannot believe what she found.

Read about Shellie's story in our brand new section: People