Pride Launch

Join us for the launch of  London Pride at Madame Lala's.. Starting right now and featuring some top secret very special guests!

London Pride the Launch Party, starts 1pm SL time (9pm UK)

Madame Lala's http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/London%20City/241/38/23

Second Life new pricing structures

Linden Lab has announced a new pricing structure for Land, Premium membership and  Credit processing fees.   To see the full announcement, head to their blog here.

Effective from 24th June, these changes will take effect.  Additional Premium benefits are still to be announced.

Quarterly Billing will be retired, leaving only the option of Monthly or Annual billing.  Both increase, but there is an option to renew early at the old price.  The Lab promises new features to offset these price increases.

Free Basic accounts will see the amount of group slots fall from 42 to 35, whilst Premium members will see an increase from 60 to 70 groups.  Offline IMs will be similarly affected.  Basic accounts already using 42 groups will retain these groups memberships, but will be unable to join new groups until they reduce to under 35.

From 3rd June, Land Prices for full regions reduce once again.  

Credit Processing Fees will increase from 2.5% to 5%, with a minimum transaction fee of US$3.

For the full story, see the Second Life Blog https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2557-land-price-reductions-new-premium-perks-and-pricing-changes/

It is not yet known if there will be a special incentive announced to encourage Basic users to upgrade to Premium accounts.   If there is, we will blog this.

For full detail of  the Premium membership package, visit this page https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/premium-membership-r346/

LONDON PRIDE FESTIVAL BEGINS!

Celebrate Pride Festival throughout June in London City.

Top Turns this year include, Erasure, Tina Turner, Pet Shop Boys, Diana Ross, Donna Summer and more!

With Concerts every week, daily club events and Pride Memorabilia to collect, we think you'll agree that our 10th Pride here at London City is the best one yet!

With London City now an official Community Gateway, many newer residents will probably not have experienced this festival in-world before.  You can see what to expect at London City Pride, from the links below showing some of our previous Pride events:

Pride 2012    Pride 2013    Pride 2014    Pride 2015

The Festival gets under way on Saturday 1st June with Tina!

Don't forget to check notices from all the London City clubs throughout the Pride season for great events, especially from Madame Lala's, our longest running gay/trans club celebrating its 9th Birthday.

You don't have to be gay, lesbian or trans to enjoy Pride with us.  It's a festival or freedom for open minds.  So get shopping for some great costumes.   It is positively inexcusable to looks drab!

Bank Holiday Weekend!

Another holiday already?  Yes indeed.. you know us Brits like our public holidays and it has been almost 3 weeks since the last one.  High time for us to have another long weekend.

We hope you will join us throughout the long weekend here in London City, where all our clubs are running full tilt.  Weather permitting, we will be holding a virtual Barbecue on Bank Holiday Monday!

The Beach in London City West

Saturday - Elton Returns

For the first time in 2 years, singer/song writer, Elton returns to Party in The Park this Saturday.

With fifty top 40 hits, selling over 300 million records, Elton is one of the biggest selling artists in the world..

Come and enjoy a dazzling evening showcasing all his most popular songs, at London City on Saturday.   The Party starts at 12pm SL (8pm UK) with the show an hour later.

Going going gone

Theresa May ends her premiership as she began it.. with the UK still hopelessly entwined with the European Union.

The Prime Minister has just announced, she will step down on Friday 7th June.  She can expect an amazing send-off as American President Donald Trump will be in the UK on a state visit from June 3rd to June 5th.   We are sure he will have some kind words to say, and won't make the "L" for loser sign at her at all!

Good bye Theresa.  So long and thanks for all the fish.

EU Election - Great Britain is a lion, led by donkeys.

The Brexit Party - The likely winners of EU Election and our only chance to actually leave.

Our embarrassing Prime Minister  has U-turned on absolutely everything.  We must not put up with this a moment longer.

Three years after voting to leave the European Union, our government has failed to deliver on their promise.

Thursday's European Election of MEP's, would not involve the British people, if our government had honoured their pledge.

You will recall Mrs May saying 108 times that Britain is leaving the EU on 29th March, but we did not.  Then we were definitely leaving in May, in June and October.  Strong'n'stable Theresa, then told us, No deal is better than a bad deal, and this too was quickly forgotten as she capitulated for the umpteenth time, and removed our most critically important bargaining chip from the table.

Just go!

Next, the Prime Minister threatened us with either her lacklustre deal, or no Brexit.  Her deal was essentially staying in the EU without ever having a say on how things were run.  Her final and most desperate betrayal was yesterday, when she declared that MP's would get to vote on a second referendum if they support the rehash of her insane treaty. A treaty akin to a surrender from a country that has fought and lost a war.

Can anyone believe a word she says?  There is only one more possible U-turn she can make, and that would be to revoke Article 50.   Do we seriously believe her, when she says that will not happen?

Thursday is our chance to send a clear message to the Government, for more of the same flimflam that has dogged our country for so long, or to give them a bloodied nose for ignoring the results of the largest ever democratic vote in the UK.

The only good thing to come out of this EU election tomorrow is that its boiled down to a polar vote.

If you still want to remain, you need to vote Liberal Democrats.
To tell them you still want to leave, vote for The Brexit Party.

European Elections, Thursday 23rd May.  Polling from 7am to 10pm.

Eurovision - We was robbed (as usual)

Last night was the Eurovision Song Contest.  A four hour show that overran as usual, ending at 12.15am in the UK.

So first off, congratulations to those of you who stayed with the show, here in London City for the full endurance.

Congratulations to the Netherlands, and Duncan Laurence for winning Eurovision 2019.

Commiserations to the UK and Michael Rice, who came last, as once again the usual two-fingers up to the Brits from the people on the continent prevailed.

If anyone deserved to come last, it was probably Madonna, for her astonishing 2 song act at half time.

Her live rendition of Like A Prayer, was an absolute shocker.  In the past she has been accused of miming, but this flat and wobbly performance was most definitely live.  We could tell!

Her second song had the auto-tune set at eleven, but even that could not save her.

Eurovision is a camp night out, a laugh not to be taken seriously.  It is however a trifle irksome that no matter what entry the UK sends to the show, for many years now, we come last, or just one up from the very bottom.

For the vengeful of you in the audience, remember there is a vote on this whole sorry mess, with the European elections this coming Thursday!

Grid outage autopsy

April Linden has blogged about the outage this week that saw all users unable to connect to Second Life for four hours.

You can see the full blog here: https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2550-the-road-to-downtime-was-paved-with-good-intentions/

It reads..


Hi Residents!

We had one of the longest periods of downtime in recent memory this week (roughly four hours!), and I want to explain what happened.

This week we were doing much needed maintenance on the network that powers Second Life. The core routers that connect our data center to the Internet were nearing their end-of-life, and needed to be upgraded to make our cloud migration more robust.

Replacing the core routers on a production system that’s in very active use is really tricky to get right. We were determined to do it correctly, so we spent over a month planning all of the things we were going to do, and in what order, including full rollback plans at each step. We even hired a very experienced network consultant to work with us to make sure we had a really good plan in place, all with the goal of interrupting Second Life as little as we could while improving it.

This past Monday was the big day. A few of our engineers (including our network consultant) and myself (the team manager) arrived in the data center, ready to go.  We were going to be the eyes, ears, and hands on the ground for a different group of engineers that worked remotely to carefully follow the plan we’d laid out. It was my job to communicate what was happening at every step along the way to my fellow Lindens back at the Lab, and also to Residents via the status blog. I did this to allow the engineering team to focus on the task at hand.

Everything started out great. We got the first new core router in place and taking traffic without any impact at all to the grid. When we started working on the second core router, however, it all went wrong.

As part of the process of shifting traffic over to the second router, one of our engineers moved a cable to its new home. We knew that there’d be a few seconds of impact, and we were expecting that, but it was quickly clear that something somewhere didn’t work right. There was a moment of sheer horror in the data center when we realized that all traffic out of Second Life had stopped flowing, and we didn’t know why.

After the shock had worn off we quickly decided to roll back the step that failed, but it was too late. Everyone that was logged into Second Life at the time had been logged out all at once. Concurrency across the grid fell almost instantly to zero. We decided to disable logins grid-wide and restore network connectivity to Second Life as quickly as we could.

At this point we had a quick meeting with the various stakeholders, and agreed that since we were down already, the right thing to do was to press on and figure out what happened so that we could avoid it happening again. We got a hold of a few other folks to communicate with Residents via the status blog, social media, and forums, and I kept up with the internal communication within the Lab while the engineers debugged the issue.

This is why logins were disabled for several hours. We were determined to figure out what had happened and fix the issue, because we very much did not want it to happen again. We’ve engineered our network in a way that any piece can fail without any loss of connectivity, so we needed to dig into this failure to understand exactly what happened.

After almost four very intense hours of debugging, the team figured out what went wrong, worked around it, and finished up the migration to the new network gear. We reopened logins, monitored the grid as Residents returned, and went home in the middle of the night completely wiped out.

We’ve spent the rest of this week working with the manufacturer of our network gear to correct the problem, and doing lots of testing. We’ve been able to replicate the conditions that led to the network outage, and tested our equipment to make sure it won’t happen again. (Even they were perplexed at first! It was a very tricky issue.) As of the middle of the week we’ve been able to do a full set of tests including deliberately disconnecting and shutting down a router without impact to the grid at all.

Second Life is a really complex distributed system, and it never fails to surprise me. This week was certainly no exception.

I also want to answer a question that’s been asked several times on the forums and other places this week. That question is “why didn’t LL tell us exactly when this maintenance was going to happen?”

As I’ve had to blog about several other times in the past, the sad reality is that there are people out there who would use that information with ill intent. For example, we’re usually really good at handling DDoSes, but it requires our full capacity being online to do it. A DDoS hitting at the same time our network maintenance was in progress would have made the downtime much longer than it already was.

We always want what’s best for Second Life. We love SL, too. We have to make careful decisions, even if it comes at the expense of being vague at times. I wish this wasn’t the case, but sadly, it very much is.

We’re really sorry about this week’s downtime. We did everything we possibly could have to try to avoid it, and yet it still happened. I feel terrible about that.

The week was pretty awful, but does have a great silver lining. Second Life is now up and running with new core routers that are much more powerful than anything we’ve had before, and we’ve had a chance to do a lot of failure testing. It’s been a rough week, but the grid is in better shape as a result.

Thanks for your patience as we recovered from this unexpected event. It’s been really encouraging to see the support some folks have been giving us since the outage. Thank you, you’ve really helped cheer a lot of us up. ❤️

Eurovision Replay of 2018 - We Was Robbed!

It's the Eurovision song contest on Saturday!

Here is a Eurovision replay.  This what happened last year..

[originally blogged 13 May 2018]

British entry SuRie, sang like a German band in a performance that was exciting for all the wrong reasons.  In the last minute of her song, what police describe as "a European citizen but not British", ran on to the stage snatching the singers microphone and appeared to shout, "Nazis of the UK media, we demand freedom."

Apparently, this as yet unnamed scumbag, also invaded the stage in three similar incidents during the National Television awards, The Stephen Noland show and the final of last year's, The Voice.

Someone really should get his name and stop inviting him to these functions.

Although our entry was probably not the winning number of the night, it deserved to do a little better than it did, ending in 24th place, beating just Finland and Portugal.  To put this into perspective when  Bonnie Tyler represented us we came 19th, and with Engelbert we came 25th of 26.

Eurovision ceased to be anything about music a very long time ago. In fact a dreadful entry from Israel featuring an overweight Chinese lady at a Takeaway, scooped top prize by winning  the so-called popular vote, having been in an obscure place on the leader board only moments before.

We are used to losing this contest, and in recent years the BBC has twice played canned cheering when our contestants take to the stage to drown out the booing in the auditorium.  So although we never expect to win due to political reasons (ie the rest of EU not liking us for Brexit), we always have fun at this event and the indignation we suffer each year, is actually just part of the cabaret that is Eurovision.

We had a terrific evening in London City, enjoying old Eurovision acts Brotherhood of Man and Bonnie Tyler during the intermission as we collectively watched the Live show, whilst sucking our teeth.  Hope you enjoyed it too!

Second Life Maintenance reminder..

Starting today and running for 4 days, the grid is undergoing essential maintenance.

Linden Lab blogged:

Our engineers will be performing maintenance on the Second Life network May 13 -to- 16. 

We hope to perform most of the maintenance early in this window, but it may extend several days if needed.  Residents may experience problems connecting to, being disconnected from, or an inability to log-in during this time, as well as possible issues rezzing objects, teleporting, or crossing regions. 

We hope to keep these disruptions to a minimum and greatly appreciate your patience during this time as we work to make Second Life more robust. We will resolve this status once the maintenance has been fully completed.

Jessie J Tribute Band on Saturday

The British singing sensation tribute to Jessie J is on Saturday.

Cornish singer/songwriter, Jessie J, born Jessie E in 1988, grew up and studied muzak at the Brit School where she penned the dead classy tune Do You Like it Dude? which made its way into the charts at Number 2.

After Jessie's number two, she followed up with a number one which she called Price Tag, then a debut album Who Are You in 2011.
The Party starts at 12pm SL (8pm UK) and the show is an hour later at 1pm SL.

In the words of Jessie J, "Be wiv us!"

Location http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/London%20City/114/111/23

Biden or Bernie

We asked who you would like to see take on the great Orange leader, out of the two most likely candidates..

And your sense of humour has most certainly prevailed as 32 (76%) of 42 total votes, want to see Bernie Sanders in the ring with Mr Trump as America goes to Election next year.

Sleepy Joe did not do anywhere near as well as Larry King lookalike Bernie.

Another fun poll soon.  Thanks for playing!

It's a Baby!

Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on the news of the arrival of their first child, a baby boy.

Her Majesty the Queen, is said to be 'jubilant' at the news of the arrival of her eighth Great Grandchild.

The Royal Instagram account reads, "We are pleased to announce that Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Sussex welcomed their firstborn child in the early morning on May 6th, 2019. Their Royal Highnesses’ son weighs 7lbs. 3oz. The Duchess and baby are both healthy and well, and the couple thank members of the public for their shared excitement and support during this very special time in their lives."

May and The Bank Holiday

It's holiday time again with two Bank Holidays in May to enjoy in your favourite Second Life destination!

London City Sizzles

Throughout the month of May, everyone is invited to enjoy street entertainers, live buskers, nightly club events, and weekend concerts at the outdoor amphitheater. Get a tan while lounging on the sun deck, and come and soak up the sizzling summer fun at London City. For details see mainlandlondon.blogspot.com

Visit in Second Life

Another Bank Holiday, Another Party

London City West - The Beach

This public holiday is well overdue.  It has been almost two weeks since the last one.

All this partying makes for thirsty work.  We can expect lashings of cheap grog and last minute sales from all the major supermarkets, with cheap sausages and burgers thrown in for the inevitable Bank Holiday Barbie.

As usual, as part of our public service, we've looked around for the best star deals on booze for this weekend as the boozy Brits sup their pints like there is no tomorrow.

 And they are.. Peroni, 12 bottles for £14 and Stella, 18 cans for £14, both from Sainsbury's.

Carling, 18 cans for a tenner, from Asda!

London City will have a whole host of drunken happenings for everyone to enjoy throughout this holiday!

That concludes this public service announcement!