Your source of news about the people, places, things, and events across Second Life.
This Saturday, February 12, there's a special event going on at Bellisseria. It's the Valentine's Day Love Boat Cruise. The cruise starts at 10 AM, and should go on for slightly less than an hour. This will be followed by a four hour party at Bellisseria Fairgrounds.
On Saturday, February 12 starting at 10am SLT, join us for a romantic cruise and after party, featuring a live performer and DJ’s!
The cruise will begin at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Campwich Forest/181/104/22
Collect your map of the route and the urls to the music streams from one of the kiosks placed out in-world. The actual cruise should last approximately 50 minutes.
If you do not wish to sail you can either spectate along the sailing route, or head over to the event area at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bellisseria Fairgrounds/172/244/24
Live DJing will begin at the start of the event in the Fairgrounds region. You can listen to the stream as you sail or go directly to the fairgrounds.There's a live performer, of who the name hasn't been disclosed yet as of the writing of this article. The Lab states while smaller boats may follow the cruise ship (large ones that may block waterways are unwelcome), any decorations have to be in theme with Valentine's Day with no political messages.
For the original blog post, Click Here.
*
Check out the stories and the storytellers!
All events at Nowhereville (203/43/26) , unless otherwise noted.
Stories told in open voice unless otherwise noted. All times SL/PT
--------->> COMING THIS WEEK
**MONDAY, Feburary 7th: Kody Boye's WHEN THEY CAME Book #1 of a Trilogy begins with Gyro Muggins.
**TUESDAY, February 8th:
~ at Noon: RUSSELL EPONYM, Live in The Glen http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nowhereville/194/131/21
~ at 7pm: KLAWDE: Evil Alien Warlord Cat concludes with Caledonia Skytower.
**THURSDAY, February 9th, at 7pm: ROMEO & JULIET, (Yes, THAT "Romeo and Juliet") presented by Shandon Loring.
***
(Click here if the video does not play)
From the Wall Street Journal on Feb 3, "Second Life – yes, the virtual world from the ‘00s – is staging a comeback to challenge tech giants like Meta that are throwing billions into the metaverse. Its creator explains to WSJ how he plans to refresh the platform – no VR headsets required."
By Bixyl Shuftan
Gemma Cleanslate over at the SL Newser has been reporting comprehensively on BBB2B. You can read her enthusiastic thoughts on our birthday party here and here. Thanks, Gemma. I was only teasing when I said you were making me, as editor of the Gazette, redundant but you certainly made this article a lot shorter than it would otherwise have been!
Always happy to hear when the hard work of our journalists is acknowledged.
By the end of the event, a total of 157,505 Linden dollars had been raised in both kiosks.
The next event is scheduled on Sunday Feb 27 at 4 PM SL time, once again at the Events Hangar.
Bixyl Shuftan
From Nydia Tungsten on February 3, "This time we have done Alexandra Stan's - Lollipop (Param Pam Pam)
Thank you, Toki, Brandi, Ginger, and Skylark for dancing with me in this one.
We had a lot of fun and as always we don't do this for money but for fun, and we sure did and hope you enjoy it too!"
The names are:
Cupid
Lovely
XOXO
Desire
Enamour
Cuddles
Snookipuss
Schatzi
"Schatzi" is a German term meaning "sweetheart."
It should be interesting to see how often some of these names are adopted. There will likely be few males adopting the surname "Snookipus."
As a reminder, only Premium account holders can change their last names, and there is a $39.99 fee for doing so.
To read the blog post in full, Click Here.
The event started on Wednesday February 2, with those in the official Second Life Birthday group getting early access. The Lab also invited residents to share pictures of their purchases in the official Second Life Shop and Hop Flicker photo pool, as well as checking out what was available to buy.
To check out the ten sims of stores, you can check them out on the Destination Guide. You can also get a list of the SURLs of each of the store locations on the blog page. Or you can just drop in at Snapdragon (128/94/52).
The Lab would also mention the Linden-owned Valentine's Day themed area, the Isle of View. The location is scheduled to open today, Friday February 4. The site will be the location of Linden Lab's "Dunk and Hug a Linden" event on Monday February 14, Valentine's Day. There was also a mention of new limited-edition last names available, themed to Valentine's Day. Finally, the Destination Guide has a Valentine's Day category of locations, such as the setting for Madpea's "Cupid Catastrophy" game.
To see the blog page in full, Click Here.
Bixyl Shuftan
Well, this is not the way we wanted the past week to go -- multiple outages in the same week! Not fun for anyone. Here’s what happened.
Login and Inventory Issues: Monday, 1/24 - Friday, 1/28
On Monday, January 24, residents’ inventories stopped responding to
requests. Some residents were unable to log in as a result. We
identified the affected accounts, addressed the problem and restored
services to full operation in a little under 3 hours.
Beginning on Wednesday of this week, we received reports of intermittent inventory issues – failures to rez, unpack and delete inventory items; and intermittent errors upon login.
When the number of reports increased, it became clear that this was an outage. Several Lindens jumped in to diagnose the reports. After some digging, we discovered our back end infrastructure was being overloaded. Once this was resolved, the positive impact was almost immediate. The data now looks good -- on the back end and we are no longer receiving inventory reports.
We’re taking steps, including a deploy late last week, to prevent these issues in the future - and we have already seen progress in making the service more robust.
Weekly Rolling Restarts: Tuesday, 1/25
Every week we restart the simulator servers to keep them running
smoothly. We only restart a certain number at the same time, allow them
to finish, then start another batch. That’s why we call them “rolling
restarts.” But on Tuesday a recent upgrade to the simulators meant that
the usual number of simultaneous restarts was too much for the system to
handle. The result was load spikes and numerous regions going down.
Ultimately more than 12,000 regions were stuck in restart mode, which is
40% of the grid. Not good!
The team came together quickly to bring simulators back up in smaller batches, and then manually fixed blocks of regions. After some trials and monitoring, we found a smaller number of concurrent restarts that worked better. By 1:00 PM all regions were restored and operating normally. We apologize for this lengthy outage!
Advance… Retreat!: Wednesday, 1/26
We had planned a deploy to the production grid that would help us
gather information on group chat performance. Unfortunately, the
procedure used during testing did not work in production. We figured --
OK, we’ll just roll back. But then the rollback itself had problems!
Residents experienced issues with login, group chat, and presence
information. The team was able to isolate the problem and complete the
rollback, getting a few more gray hairs in the process. We’re going to
take what we’ve learned and do a better deploy that will give us the
information to improve group chat in the long run.
Last week was no fun for a lot of people at the Lab. Thank you for your patience. We really don’t like interrupting your enjoyment of Second Life. Here’s hoping we don’t have to come back with another one of these blog posts for quite some time!
* * * * *
The Lab expressed hope that "we don’t have to come back with another one of these blog posts for quite some time! "
By Bixyl Shuftan
(Click here if the video does not play)
Yesterday on Monday January 31, the special episode of Lab Gab with Philip and Oberwolf Linden (Philip Rosedale and Bradford Oberwager), interviewed by Strawberry Linden, aired. The Newser will have an article about the interview soon. For now, check the video out for yourselves.
*
Check out the stories and the storytellers!
All events at Nowhereville (203/43/26) , unless otherwise noted.
Stories told in open voice unless otherwise noted. All times SL/PT
--------->> COMING THIS WEEK
**MONDAY, January 31st, at 7pm: Larry Niven's A WORLDS OUT OF TIME with Gyro Muggins continues.
**TUESDAY, February 1st:
~ at Noon: RUSSELL EPONYM, Live in The Glen http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nowhereville/194/131/21
~ at 7pm: CELEBRATING THE YEAR OF THE TIGER with Caledonia Skytower.
**THURSDAY, February 3rd, at 7pm: THURSDAY NIGHT SCI-FI, presented by Finn Zeddmore.
***
National Space Society (104,124,3005)
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/National%20Space%20Society/104/124/3005
Our Space Remembrance playlist is now playing in our region or at:
http://spacemusic.gclefstreams.eu:11032
SETTING THE DATE for Space Remembrance Day:
The three American space tragedies which roughly define this observance are the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia missions. NASA sets their date of observance inconsistently, based on scheduling and other considerations at the time, and different NASA Centers may hold events on different days. This is not publicly announced very far in advance, so we set our own date. NSS in SL considers that this is likely to be an important annual observance for future space settlers, and that they will want consistency (and a three day weekend!), so we have instituted the “Space Remembrance Monday Holiday Bill”…we hold our observance on the final Monday of January. This year, NASA will observe their Day of Remembrance on Thursday, January 27th:
