General News

What is Second Life’s Focus Magazine?

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FOCUS Magazine
FOCUS Website

If you like looking at pictures of Second Life™ or making them or want to learn how to make them, Focus Magazine will likely be of interest. If you are posting SL images to Flickr then it is very likely of interest, as they have a group on Flickr named, I’m too sexy for this group. And a similar group name in SL, Too sexy for this group (SLURL).

It is a monthly magazine published in SL. You can also find it on the web at FOCUS Second Life. To subscribe to the in-world magazine join the SL group. Angela Thespian and PINK (PinkLady2) are the owners of the SL group. People are often posting links to Flickr images in the group’s chat.

The group is pretty active all week. It picks up on weekends.

Flickr Group
Interesting Stuff

If you want the current issue of the magazine, join the group and ask Angela to send you a copy.

The magazine has the events-schedule for the month, 2 or 3. This includes their photography classes.

They now have a gallery in-world, FOCUS Magazine building (Map URL). There are the gallery and classroom. It is a very modern gallery-feel build. Well done.

I encourage the Too Sexy people to join in the SL Form thread, How does your avatar look today? and vice-versa.

What is Happening with Linden Lab’s New Continent: Bellisseria?

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Bellisseria is the new continent south of Sansara. It is the location of new houseboats and box homes. A very middle-class neighborhood and surprisingly popular. Homes and houseboats can be owned… leased… by Premium Members. They are selling out in minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWDZTfvC_8E

I can’t account for the popularity. It just is.

The popularity is leading to a number of blogs focusing on Bellisseria and the going-ons there. Daniel Voyager points to some of them.

The Bellisserian opens with a first issue carrying an interview with Patch Linden. It is here we hear the first reasons for the popularity of Bellisseria. Seems previous homes were designed as ‘starter homes.’ Bellisserian homes are designed to be “homes.” I suppose that makes a difference. Well… apparently…

While there are currently only a couple of styles of homes in Bellisseria more are planned.

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What took Second Life down?

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Last Monday early the Second Life™ grid went dark. I have heard the total number of concurrent users was 2.

The details of what happened were published Friday, The Road to Downtime Was Paved with Good Intentions.

The TL:DR is a complex plan had been devised to allow replacement of the routers that connect the SL system to the Internet without taking SL down. The complexity came from figuring out how to make the switch over without taking SL down. At home, you would just concede that replacing a router would interrupt your Internet service and deal with it.

The Art of Rain
The Art of Rain

The SL system has a boatload of routers and considerable redundancy. Meaning some number of those routers should be able to fail with the system falling back to the remaining operational ones without users ever noticing. Something the equipment manufacturer, network consultant, and Lindens had not imagined went sideways and cut the system off from users when it shouldn’t have. While they are not giving out exact details, the newly discovered way for the system to fail has now been built into the Linden planning to hopefully never cause a problem again.

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Feed a Smile, a charity serving Kenyan school children.

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The Silk Road Series #1 FUND RAISER for Feed a Smile is a combined RL & SL LIVE EVENT held at The Writers Centre, Singapore and a region in Second Life™ from which it will be streamed.

Time: Saturday, May 18  – TIME: 5am-8am SLT

Location: Caravanserai, (SL Map URL) the Crossroads of the Arts In SL and a Monash University, Melbourne Australia region.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-JErgwvpoY

Twitch stream: http://tiny.cc/tktk6y – Try this during the event.
Second Life link:  http://tiny.cc/9gtk6y or Map URL.

From Singapore to Second Life: come to the Caravanserai for a one-night stopover to witness a grand live concert, streamed online as Singapore wordsmiths and improv musicians team up with accomplished artists, writers, musicians, comics, filmmakers and poets from Germany, UK, Holland, Portugal, Japan, Mexico, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Canada and the USA.

This coming together of SL and Singaporean artists is in aid of Feed a Smile, a charity serving Kenyan school children.

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Getting Ready for “Bakes on Mesh” Bodies

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The end of March Linden Lab released the latest version of the Bakes on Mesh (BoM) Viewer. It is in RC so we could see BoM coming out in final version soon. The recent Disconnects Problem has likely delayed BoM and other projects. That problem seems solved or at least greatly reduced. Other projects will move ahead now and BoM is probably just a couple of weeks from final release… say soon…

The questions I have all deal with how well will my clothes will work with the new BoM Mesh Bodies? Siddean the designer for Slink has provided information on what we can expect. Siddean’s Slink body is built… um… that doesn’t sound quite right, rephrase… ready for release or at least down to the final tweaks.

Whatever you look outside, the real value is what you have inside
Whatever you look outside, the real value is what you have inside

April 3rd,2019 Siddean answered questions about what she is doing with the Slink bodies. You can find this information in Siddean’s Discord channel.

The new bodies are a re-thought new design. So, we are going to be re-learning how to manage bodies, clothes, and tattoos.

The new body will work with clothes made for the previous body. Said in tech-speak, the body size and weighting remain the same. Also, the previous versions of the body will continue to work. BoM will only work with the new bodies.

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