Sea Monsters

Open through until the end of September 2018, is Sea Monsters by Citta Wiskee. Created on a homestead region, it forms both an art exhibition and a place to visit, and offers a unique environment for explorers.

Sitting under a stormy sky lies a series of green islands caught within a dark sea. The largest of these islands is ringed by the others, and forms the landing point. Wooded and devoid of buildings, it is home to little water drop spirits, with more scattered across several of the other islands. Tiny and white, these little spirits offer a greeting to travellers or play instruments or paddle leaf boats on a pond or simply watch / listen. But they are not the only inhabitants of this region islands; there are others around the islands and some quite literally watching over them.

Sea Monsters

Look up, and you’ll see…

Carnival of the Arts: Silas Merlin

The Dirty Grind Independent Artist community is celebrating its fifth anniversary over the weekend of Friday, September 7th through Sunday, September 9th, 2018 with a Carnival of the Arts. The weekend will be marked by live music sets throughout the three days, and also art displays by Enola Vaher, Toysoldier Thor and Silas Merlin, who appears at the Dirty Grind as the celebration’s featured artist.

The focal point for the event is a newly revamped venue building, where the artists can be found, and a stage area has been established in the back lot area. Inside the building, 2D and 3D art Enola and Toysoldier is located on two floors to one side of the building, with Silas’ 2D pastel art from the physical world and his 3D mesh sculptures created for Second Life can be found at the back of the…

Destiny Gardens – click any image for full size

Destiny Gardens is a fully region island primarily landscaped by Adalynne Romano (AdalynneReed) and held by Destiny Milos. Making use of the additional 10K land capacity available to full region owners (to give a total capacity of 30K), Destiny Gardens is a veritable temperate summer paradise – but visits to it may come at a cost to some.

This is a place that, from the landing point in the south-west through to all three other corners, is awash with colour from trees, shrubs and flowers. The landscape, raised to the south and low-lying to the north, is cut by waterways and pools, some of the latter quite large, the channels themselves crossed by a variety of bridges, all of which make for interesting rambles along trail, through grass and across shady glades.

Destiny Gardens

The landing point, in…

National Museum of Caledon: Phrynne

Opening on Wednesday, September 5th, 2018 at the National Museum of Caledon, is an exhibition of the physical world photography of Phrynne, Dean of Commons at Caledon Oxbridge. Entitled Land, Water Sky, Phrynne describes the exhibition as a record of some of the places in North America she has visited and loves.

The upper floor and the centre in the lower floor contain photos of the Genesee River Gorge as the river flows through Letchworth State Park [the] oldest state park in New York … Also on the upper floor are photos taken on Oahu of sea and sky and wildlife. Downstairs are photos from Vermont, West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland and Minnesota, landscapes both wild and tame.

– Phrynne, describing Land, Water, Sky

National Museum of Caledon: Phrynne

The resultant images in the exhibition are dramatic in tone and scope…

Cat Museum

If you are, like me, a cat lover, you might like to take a little trip out to the Cat Museum in Second Life. Curated by Selena Alexandre, it makes for a curious, playful visit – in much the same way as cats are curious, playful companions.

Currently featured in the Destination Guide, the museum occupies a 2048 sq m parcel of mainland, making for an easy visit. It is divided into a number of areas, again for easy browsing; on the ground floor, to the left as you enter through the front doors are plaques and boards honouring famous cats from the physical world, film and cartoons – with 10 Downing Street’s cats prominently featured (pity they aren’t actually running the country, particularly given Larry’s Twitter account 😉 ), together with Félicette, the first of two cats to fly in space (launched by the French Centre…

The Concierge & Land User Group meeting area

In my week #35/1 SL projects update, I referenced the upcoming re-launch of the Governance user group. Since then, the Lab has added a further group to the list that people might want to take note of.

The Concierge & Land has a fortnightly schedule (meeting every other Thursday), commencing on Thursday, September 13th, 2018, between 12:00 noon and 13:00 SLT; this puts it immediately before the Content Creation User Group. It will be led by Theresa Linden, and it will be held at the Linden Estate Services meeting area.

The focus for the meeting is described as being:

Discussion & education of SL topics such as current known issues and bugs, project viewers and new features, and general Mainland issues.

I assume the “known issues and bugs, project viewers and new features” relate directly to the land management tools…

The Rose Gallery: Biancajane Juliesse

The Rose Gallery, curated by  Shakti Sugafield (Shakti Adored) is hosting a”late summer” exhibition with a focus on physical work art, of which the greater theme within it might be said to be of an abstract nature.

On the ground floor, in Halls 1 and 2, the marvellous art of Sisi Biedermann continues to be exhibited. Her work – always marvellous to see – was a focus of what might be called the “early summer” ensemble of art on display at the Rose, again in Halls One and Two, and was a subject of my review of the Rose exhibitions at that time. Her display has been refreshed, with a further offering of her stunning art, some of which can also be found in her What a Wonderful World exhibition at the Lin C Art Gallery (read here for more).

The Rose…

Missing Melody – click any image for full size

The heat of summer has left the grass long and golden, roots reaching deep into the soil to gain moisture. Closer to the local stream and river, the grass and moss are still green, benefiting from both the plentiful water seeping into the land on either side of the waterways and from the shade offered by tall trees of a rich woodland. But the seasons are turning; the sky offers a paler Sun than might have been blazing down in the midst of summer and the trees are slowly losing their canopies of leaves, scattering them across the ground below, where their gold and reds form a slowly decaying carpet and litter the calm surfaces of the river’s arms.

Such is the tranquil scene awaiting visitors to Missing Melody, a Homestead region designed by Bambi (NorahBrent). Still under construction, it…

Firestorm fund-raising market

The Firestorm team has launched a fund-raiser, primarily to help cover the cost of a new main server, used to host the team’s JIRA, web site, wiki, code repository, and so on. However, as the Firestorm blog post on the matter also notes, the team also have recurring costs involved in the license they have to pay in order to use the Kakadu codec for rendering in the viewer, and costs involved in running the land costs (albeit subsidised by the Lab) involved with the Firestorm Community Gateway.

To this end, the new fund-raiser is planned as a hopefully long-term event, and also designed to help people get rid of their unwanted gacha items.

Located over the Firestorm gateway regions is a “Firestorm market” featuring stalls and vendor boards where visitors can purchase collected and donated gacha items. Note that despite the confusing blog title…

Seanchai Library

It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s home at Holly Kai Park, unless otherwise indicated.

Sunday, August 26th

13:30: A Study in Enerald, a Lovefest Special

With Corwyn Allen, Kayden Oconnell & Caledonia Skytower.

13:30: Tea-time at Baker Street

Back from a well-earned break, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson return to their rooms at 221B Baker Street to be joined by Caledonia Skytower, Corwyn Allen and David Abbot and Bryn Taleweaver, as Seanchai Library’s popular Sunday feature resumes.

This week comes one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most well-liked mysteries to have engaged his Great Detective, and which first appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1891, before going on to be the first story…

On August 23rd, Philip Rosedale announced High Fidelity users can now convert High Fidelity Coin (HFC) into U.S. dollars.

This is a major step for the blockchain based crypto-currency used by the platform, and for High Fidelity users. In the latter regard, Rosedale notes:

This opens the possibility for people to earn real money creating and selling virtual goods and services within High Fidelity. We see this as a vital step in the emergence of a thriving High Fidelity economy: the flywheel of innovation and creativity in any marketplace starts when creators have positive incentives to contribute to the growing body of content for sale. In time, we hope creators will be able to support themselves by selling items in the Marketplace, charging for the experiences they create, and offering useful in-world services to other creators and performers.

– Philip Rosedale, High Fidelity CEO

The move is one of three…

DiXmiX Gallery: Cecilia Nansen Mode (December 2017) and Uma Sabra (September 2017)

DiXmiX Gallery is one of the most prolific galleries in Second Life in terms of the frequency of exhibitions. With three halls available for art, the gallery can feature up to three artists a month on a rolling basis, sometimes with exhibitions in the respective halls overlapping one another in their duration, a move which further helps to keep visits to the gallery fresh.

For the four weeks from August 17th, 2018, curator Dixmix Source is hosting a slightly different exhibition from the “norm” at the gallery: it is something of a retrospective of exhibitions held through 2017 and 2018, with the work of some 30 artists on display across all three halls and within the basement gallery of The Womb. As such, it is an opportunity to both revisit memories of past exhibits and  – for those…

Sisi Biedermann – What a Wonderful World

Now open at the Lin C Art Gallery, curated by Lin Carlucci, is What A Wonderful World, an exhibition of the extraordinary art of Sisi Biedermann.

I’ve reported on a couple of exhibitions featuring Sisi’s art of late – and with good reason; her work – all of it original pieces she has painted and composed – is quite unlike art produced within Second Life and exhibited in-world – nor is it quite like any real world art uploaded into Second Life by artists. Rather, and in a sense, thanks to Sisi’s imagination, style, and rich use of colour and ideas, to me it straddles the two. So many of her pieces could depict settings and situations waiting to be created in-world, whilst all offer doorways into fantastical worlds that come to life as virtual places within our imaginations.

Sisi Biedermann…

Athenaeum – click any image for full size

Athenaeum is an Adult-rated region we were pointed toward (once again!) by Shakespeare and Max. The name piqued my curiosity for two reasons: the school for promoting literary and scientific studies founded by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and the Athenaeum Club in London; founded in the 1820s for those of both sexes with intellectual interests encompassing the likes of science, engineering, literature and the arts – although it is not necessarily exclusive to these disciplines.

A full region designed by Dema (Dema Fairport), Athenaeum also caters for those with a specific grouping of interests, albeit those of a distinctly adult nature, and offers a welcome to all visitors, no matter what their gender preference or sexual orientation.  It is also, and more particularly, a quite breathtaking region in its design and execution.

Athenaeum

Within her Profile, Dema offers a description that builds…

With Seanchai Library in the foreground, the new Holly Kai Gallery looks out over the Balboa islands, domes catching the morning Sun

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks re-working Holly Kai Park. This came about for a couple of reasons: I found that trying to run this blog, spend time relaxing in-world with Caitlyn (and running the bar) as giving time to that “real life” thing, meant trying to organise up to six artists per month to exhibit at the park each month got to be just a little too much. So for the last several months I’ve been mulling over precisely what to do with the park and pulling at the threads around the edges with little changes here and there.

In the end, it was a visit to Erebos Harbor (which you can read about here) that spurred an idea for me. Not to try…

Seanchai Library

It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s home at Holly Kai Park, unless otherwise indicated.

Sunday, August 19th, 14:00: A Study in Enerald, a Lovefest Special

With Corwyn Allen, Kayden Oconnell & Caledonia Skytower.

Who could possibly pour Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft into the cooking pot of the imagination, add a sprinkling of their own verve and narrative powers, then simmer for a while to see what happens? That was the aim of editors Michael Reaves and John Pelan, who challenged 18 authors to do just that for the 2003 anthology Shadows Over Baker Street.

Of the 18 stories published within it, Neil Gaiman’s A Study In Emerald stands as the lead-out story and one of the finest examples…

Lovefest 2018: H.P. Lovecraft watches over the town

Lovefest – the Second Life celebration of the birth of H. P. Lovecraft – opened its doors on Friday, August 17th, 2018 and will continue through until Sunday,  August 28th. The theme for the festival this year is The Path of Madness.

This year marks the event’s 7th anniversary, and marks the 128th anniversary of Lovercraft’s birth on August 20th 1890. As with previous Lovefest events, there is once again a wide range of celebratory activities – shopping, music and dancing, live music, film showings, open microphone events, live storytelling in voice, dance troupes and an adventure for people to enjoy.

A high point for event Lovefest is the associated adventure visitors are invited to join. This year, things are taking a slightly different route, taking a walk along the event’s theme.; although the opening of the adventure has been…

Visiting Wurfi’s little Gallery with Silas Merlin

A while back, Linden Lab offered Sansar users a free, basic gallery building space. It’s not overly complex or particularly big; but it remains a nice freebie to have. At the time I thought it could make a neat little studio gallery for showing off SL photography; all it needed was the right artist.

Step forward Wurfi, virtual worlds explorer, blogger and photographer.

Wurfi has  – entirely independently of my own thoughts on the idea, which were never passed on to anyone – done just that. Wurfi’s Little Gallery is exactly what it says on the label: a little gallery exhibiting some of Wurfi’s SL photography; eight pieces in all (at the time of writing).

Wurfi’s Little Gallery: the bear in his art!

It’s a simple, elegant approach, the gallery sits essentially as a skybox, a spawn point inside, and the four…