there's a fire that's been burning right outside my door, I can't see it but I feel it, and it helps to keep me warm

From Thane Woodford of Raven's Heart Sculpts:

If you were a member of Builders Brewery or the name now intrigues you …
Their bot had an issue and ejected most of their members, from 16700+ to now 434. So, to help you rejoin, here is group slurl secondlife:///app/group/04f595b0-cdc8-97f0-e710-9564824c03b2/about
Thanks Azure for getting the info on it.....Thane

Now me, I don't know what the issue was, but I wasn't one of the 434, so I logged back into the grid and re-joined. If you were a member, check your group list; rejoining is free. If you weren't, right now they have a Halloween build (the same cemetary structure from Pravda, it looks just as wonderful on their sim as in the Lunitarium haunt) where you can pick up lots of group-made freebies--if you're a group member. Plus, Builders' Brewery has a long-standing tradition of classes, instructional help, in addition to having a lot of items to build with for free, for cheap, and for reasonable prices above and beyond.

Frankly, if you build in SL, there's not many good reasons not to be in their group.

Just in time for the sacrificial season, comes the cuddle altar! No, I don't know why either, but hey, now you know there is one. It...proudly?...joins its fellow WTF builds like the sex coffins, the sex bookcase, and the bondage pickle. (I wish I were making that last one up. Thankfully, it seemed to be a hunt item, so might no longer be available.)

Miss Tateru Nino talked with Rhett Linden about the upcoming new UI, and there's some good (as well as bad) news found in that article. It's well worth the read, and does at least seem to indicate that (at least on alternate Sundays, when the third appletinis have kicked in fully along with the local intoxicants of choice) they're listening to grid residents. Well, some of the grid residents. Well, some of the time.

At any rate, Nalates Urriah took the first iteration of the build for a spin (as she put it). She also notes the laundry list of current bugs:

• The Viewer floater camera views and presets do not work.
• The Nearby Voice panel does not update to a new call or from
• nearby voice info once opened.
• Viewer crashes when updating UI size in preferences.
• The Speak button is activated when dragging and dropping between
• toolbars and/or moving back to the Tool Box.
• Viewer crash when moving the speak button from one toolbar to
• another when there is an active call request.
• Teleport history doesn't display visited locations.
• Viewer crash when double-clicking the mini-map in People & Nearby.
• Notification and conversation chiclets overlap.
• WASD controls don't move avatar while the Move floater is in focus.
• Closing voice controls while a group or p2p call also closes the
• group call/IM window
• Viewer crash after teleport
• Hitting back in the 'Create Group' panel or 'Blocked' panel requires multiple clicks for action to occur.

Bolding mine, and damn. So basically, right now, it's extraordinarily buggy and glitched all to hell. But how does it look?

Like this. And frankly--and I know, this will shock some long-term readers--I'm not disliking the look.

I know, I know, I am a fervid, avid, if not actively rabid detractor of Viewer 2, and of everyone--Linden and non-Linden alike--who had a hand in coding for it being dropped into an oubliette without internet service for the next forty years. That being said, however, this particular UI build looks clean, uncluttered, and it still looks like I can find everything.

Instead of a massive sidebar eating real estate on the right-hand side, by Ms. Urriah's description, we have individual icons tucked away on the left that open into moveable, floating windows. Along the bottom, we don't have a massive set of doubled bars with buttons, we have again, individual icons that when pressed, seem to open up what we need, only as long as we need it--the friendslist, the chat bar, help for new users, et cetera.

Also, it seems to have adopted more 'game-based' movement options--instead of walking forward with the arrow keys, now it looks like we'll have the option to click the ground ahead of us--something I got far too used to playing Runes of Magic--and we will move to that spot. I'm liking this potential, if it stays in the viewer.

Now, there's a LOT of info in Ms. Urriah's post, and it's picture-heavy--both of which are good things when talking about a new viewer. Something did pop up for me, though, that's setting off alarm bells, and it's not the crashing on almost every teleport. (Like that doesn't happen now some weeks, this is not just the new UI, it's Second Life in general.)

Here's the passage in question:

"It is fast. In my cottage I’m getting 35 to 45 FPS on my 8800 GTS Duel Core2."

Why is that a big red warning sign for me?

Listen, I know the way of the world is moving towards multiple cores in computers, I get that. I'd love to have a dual core system. One of my friends has a quad-core system, and there's talk in the works of either releasing--or possibly already have been released--an octo-core--that's eight processors in one.

But right now? Single-core. Single-core old. That's what I've got, and I'm on one of the faster computers in my house. So yeah, that's siren time for me--it may work (eventually), it may be very fast for her dual-core personage, but on my aging Pentium 4? Not even sure I'll be able to run it. Which is definitely on the depressing side.

Still, for once, it seems like they're doing things that will work for the residents on the grid, not against them. Unfortunately, Ms. Urriah does not build; there's nothing about the build menu and what things were moved where on the viewer. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see if a builder decides to download the new UI and try to build with it.

Won't that be fun?