=== ENGLISH VERSION ===

Hello friends and fans of Stark Islands!

We are glad to tell you after 9 months of absence that we are back and will be releasing a new and optimized version of Stark Islands in the near future!

We have had some time to think through the concept and the technical foundation. The huge (server-)workload of Stark Islands was one of the biggest issues we had to fight with in the past. To offer you a better experience, we've made some important changes and are working on other important details. New Stark is the same size as before (though it may expand in time) but split in 4 different regions on different servers to reduce the workload per server.
The region will have a new footprint, based on the old main island, and the best of old Stark you will find in the new version too. We reduce prims, meshes and scripts as much as possible without changing the soul of Stark Islands. This all means a lot of work and we will need some time, though as you all know, a sim will never be finished.
When we think, the sim is in an acceptable state, we will open the gates!

We're thrilled to bring you this announcement today and hope you're as excited as we are, so stay tuned for further updates!

Wishing you a happy Easter 2022!

With love, pride and respect and all the values that make Stark great.

Mathilda and Niki


=== DEUTSCHE VERSION ===

Hallo Freunde und Fans von Stark Islands!

Wir freuen uns, euch nach 9 Monaten Abwesenheit mitteilen zu können, dass wir zurück sind und in naher Zukunft eine neue und optimierte Version von Stark Islands veröffentlichen werden!

Wir hatten Zeit, um das Konzept und die technischen Grundlagen zu überdenken. Die enorme (Server-)Arbeitsbelastung von Stark Islands war eines der größten Probleme, mit denen wir in der Vergangenheit zu kämpfen hatten. Um euch ein besseres Erlebnis zu bieten, haben wir einige wichtige Änderungen vorgenommen und arbeiten an weiteren wichtigen Details. Das neue Stark hat die gleiche Größe wie zuvor (es könnte sich mit der Zeit aber auch erweitern), ist jedoch in 4 verschiedene Regionen auf verschiedenen Servern aufgeteilt, um die Arbeitslast pro Server zu reduzieren.
Die Region wird einen neuen Grundriss haben, basierend auf der alten Hauptinsel, aber das Beste von Alt-Stark werdet ihr auch in der neuen Version finden. Wir reduzieren Prims, Meshes und Skripte so weit wie möglich, ohne die Seele von Stark Islands zu verändern. Das alles bedeutet viel Arbeit und wir werden einige Zeit brauchen und wie ihr alle wisst, wird eine Sim niemals fertig sein.
Aber wenn wir denken, dass die Sim in einem akzeptablen Zustand ist, öffnen wir die Tore!

Wir freuen uns sehr, euch heute diese Ankündigung machen zu können und hoffen, dass ihr genauso aufgeregt seid wie wir!

Also seid gespannt für weitere Updates!

Wir wünschen euch frohe Ostern 2022!

Mit Liebe, Stolz und Respekt und all den Werten, die Stark so großartig machen.

Mathilda und Niki

Well, Easter is almost here! I've made some decorated eggs on stands to add to the festivities.

The textures are included in the Peter Rabbit Egg. You can use them as is or mod them for different coloured stands or eggs. I have them on display as room size but you can of course mod them to any size from table top to giant :).
It all really depends on the size of the chickens and Easter bunnies I suppose :D.

Have a fabulous day!!

DJ Riker's Saturday night Blues Showcase tonight at Rockin' the Blues at 6:00PM (SLT)!
Where: Wyldwood Bayou Rockin' The Blues
When: Tonight at 6:00! [9 Apr 2022 18:00 SLT]
DJ Riker spins the blues, all the blues, all the time! Tonite we get 2 sets of his incredible tunes and 3 hours of friends, chat and laughter!! Riker spins original blues artists, blues covers and "Out of the box" blues! Old blues, new blues and blues you didn't even know were blues!! Riker loves to pull tunes out of his magic box of blues and does he ever have a big box of them! Totally awesome, totally unexpected, totally Blues!!! Join us tonight as Riker Starts your Saturday night with a BANG!!
wyldwoodbayou.com:8002:Wyldwood Bayou Rockin' The Blues

NOTHING BUT THE BLUES!
════════━┈ ROGUE GALAXY LIVE ..━════════
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ EVENT SPACE ☆ ☆ ☆ ★ ★
★ ════ ☆ 12:00pm Grid Time
★ ════ ☆ MAP: sv3d.fr:8002:EventSpace
★ ════ ☆en concert à l'Event Space Vendredi 08/04/2022 à 21h00 (heure de Paris)

Yesterday, April 3rd, Kelso and I (Dabici) were Mal Burn invitees at Inworld News
It was a nice opportunity to showcase the four seasons of Novale
You can see it here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyxiqIalaRM

tl;dr: Sims with Adult ratings but General liberties (= no nudity) aren't always run by older, conservative, uptight Americans who hate kids. They're often run by people who aren't native English speakers, who don't know that "Adult" has a meaning beyond "grown-up" and whose culture completely demonises nudity.

* * * * *

I've come to the realisation that there's another factor in why ratings can't be trusted, neither in general (when Adult sims have the same liberties that General sims can have) nor on OSW (when the OSW rating is different from the in-world rating): We're from different countries with different cultures and different languages.

This clashes with the culture of Second Life which supposes that everyone is an American or even from Northern California. OpenSim is still forced to hold on to this because neither Ubit nor the viewer teams have the development capacities to deviate from it.

An American will know by heart right off the bat what "General", "Moderate" and "Adult" may mean. The official definitions are more or less only there to specify the meanings. But it may be somewhat less clear for a Brit, a Canadian, an Australian etc. unless they've fully picked up American culture. It doesn't help that most grids by far don't have their definitions of the ratings written down anywhere. Why write down what "everybody knows"?

It's even worse for people from non-English-speaking countries. This may come as a surprise, but not exactly few of them can only use OSW by running the entire website through Google Translate. But when Google Translate translates "General", "Moderate" and "Adult", it neither necessarily gives out the same translations as in the viewer, nor does it necessarily give out a translation with the same associations as Americans have with "General", "Moderate" and "Adult".

For one, this is why particularly sims run by people with a different native tongue than English tend to rate their sims differently in-world and on OSW. On OSW, they have Googlish for "General", "Moderate" and "Adult"; in their viewer, they have more sensible translations by people who actually know that language. And they may fail to see a parallel between these. Not knowing what to choose, they end up just clicking on something because they have to.

I'm German so I can explain it to you from a German point of view. The first problem is that, like in many other countries with many other languages, there are no words for content ratings. Literal translations of "General", "Moderate" and "Adult" don't sound like content ratings to a German, a Swiss or an Austrian. "Adult" means "grown-up" and only "grown-up" and nothing else. It refers to the age of a person or an animal or so. It does NOT refer to content. And it contradicts neither what "general" means in German nor what "moderate" means in German. The German translations of "general" and "moderate" don't contradict each other either.

In just about every other language in the world that isn't English, it's the same.

By the way, "Adult" is still "Adult" in the viewer if you set it to German, it isn't translated because that'd make less sense rather than more. It's "erwachsen" in Googlish, though. As I said, that means "grown-up". "Moderate" is "moderat" in both. "General" is "generell" in the viewer and "allgemein" in Googlish.

If you want to make clear in German that it's a content rating, you'll have to use USK codes (or FSK codes for those born before 1980). However, they don't really line up with American content rating systems, and neither really line up with the Second Life content rating system. Second Life Adult is either German USK18 or "banned in Germany". Second Life Moderate is German USK16, USK12 or even USK6 depending on the region, and yet, the region itself is always strictly 18+.

So much for the language, now comes the culture. Linden Lab's home is already somewhat liberal. There are much more restrictive and prudish places in the USA to the point where a little bit of visible areola is seen on the same level of naughty as hardcore porn and outright BDSM.

Outside the USA, it's more extreme. And I'm not even talking about places where women even have to fully cover their faces in public, lest they get sentenced to death. Not even Europe is as homogenous as some Americans believe it to be. In most areas of the world, nudity is a big no-no. The results range from being forced by law to cover up a lot to very daring beachwear that's just barely legal.

Denmark, in contrast, doesn't have much of a problem with nudity and allows public nudity as long as it isn't explicitly sexual. AFAIK, the same goes for the Netherlands. In Germany, public nudity is allowed a) as long as it isn't sexual and b) as long as nobody is disturbed by it, so it's slightly more complicated. But Germany also has a long tradition of nudist movements, especially FKK (Free Body Culture).

Now let's take this to in-world. A Dane may pretty well build a sim that's rather Danish in style, give it a General rating so that it's for all ages, but allow non-sexual public nudity everywhere. They won't be able to do that in Second Life, but in OpenSim, especially on their own grid, they can get away with it. It just mirrors real-life Denmark.

There's an actual Moderate-rated German nudist sim on the Hypergrid that both absolutely requires everyone to be naked and at the same time allows the presence of child avatars. Yes, this leads to naked child avatars. An American will cry out "paedophilia" and "child porn", as will people from other places in the world. Bad enough that a nudist sim is only Moderate-rated, it should be Adult-rated.

For a German, it's just your standard run-of-the-mill nudist camp. It isn't like kids must cover up on real-life German FKK beaches while grown-ups must not (FKK usually means strictly nudity as in you must NOT wear clothes). By the way, sexual activities are strictly forbidden on this sim, just like real-life FKK beaches and camps strictly ban public sexuality, just like real-life FKK fans never get tired of explaining that FKK is absolutely nothing sexual, full stop. Most people from outside Germany still won't get it.

Next, let's add rating misunderstanding to the mix. So someone from one of those more prudish places around the Mediterranean builds a sim. As for the rating, there are three choices: "doesn't sound like a content rating" (General), "doesn't sound like a content rating either" (Moderate) and "something with grown-up that doesn't sound like a content rating" (Adult).

The only reason to pick a rating, namely "something with grown-up that doesn't sound like a content rating", i.e. Adult, is to declare the sim adults-only and keep kids out. There's no other apparent difference between these ratings. Again, unlike an American, a French or an Italian or a Greek won't necessarily know by heart that Moderate is naughtier than General, and Adult is naughtier than Moderate. So they pick Adult if they don't want kids on their sim and randomly either General or Moderate if they don't care. Apart from the child avatar policy, everything else is strictly kept on the same level as General.

Add to this that not all grids are run by Americans. Even if they were, they'd still have different standards. Someone from NYC, Tulsa, Berkeley or Seattle would run grids on somewhat different rule sets. But someone from abroad may have even more differing rules and standards. The smaller the grid, the wilder the rules and standards can be, also because nobody can control a personal grid than the grid owner.

There's no stopping a Dane from declaring public nudity legal even on General-rated sims on their own grid. But there's also no stopping someone from completely banning nudity even on Adult-rated sims and redefining the Adult rating as "grown-up avatars only" but otherwise General on their own grid because that's their understanding of the Adult rating. And as it seems, there's no stopping someone from doing the latter on most public grids either.

We sort of took over from Stark 10 months ago ... was a mad rush to get land available for many ex Stark residents who had no where to go ... many have remained and are valued residents and friends. Some have left and we will be releasing their land to others in 2 months unless they come back. We started with an 8x8 var and now have a 4 more 4x4 vars all interconnected to the zeta ocean. We have events 3 or 4 days a week and its all 100% clothes optional ..

Did you always wonder where to find an octagon shape for ur building and hadn`t found anywhere on metaverse? No need to look for it anymore! Here comes a FREE and FULL PERM basic geometric shapes pack (*) for you.. Thx for my friend @Areum Yeoshin (AMV) who had asked me for a hexagon shape and gave me an idea? Why not make it for others who are in search of such odd shapes here.. And i Said.. why not :) hope u like it.

(*) For obvious reasons, some shapes like square or ring shown on pic are not there as its easily done by any prim.