Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: Avatars and Identity
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting Tweeko loves to shoot her pics from dramatic angles that reveal her subject in a new light. Take “That’s just the way” where she shoots from below, from her feet toward her head, the opposite as more usual pics. The lighting casts…
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First published in 2008, "The Husband That Eshi Made" is an essential New World Notes story of how the virtual world can connect us with people in the material realm, even long after they're gone: [M]emories of her late husband] wracked her in the grocery store, on the second anniversary of Glenn’s passing. Since then,…
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Five faces of Whiskey Monday and her IRL owner — via her Flickr You can create an avatar based on yourself in Midjourney, but famed Second Life artist Whiskey Monday went a step further, combining multiple images of her SL avatar with photos of herself in real life to create an incredible new persona. "I…
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Update, 6:35pm PT: I'm having trouble replicating this process with my own photo. If you have advice/tips, please post in Comments! Update 2, 11/18: Finally got this to work on my own photo. The original instruction included brackets and quotation marks but those aren't necessary when communicating with Midjourney. The photo at top left is…
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Female Users of Virtual Worlds Get Bodyshamed About As Much As They Do Offline (Comment of the Week)
Great rant from reader "Nadeja", leaping off from my interview in CNN about prejudice against non-attractive human avatars — specifically, on how it impacts female users in virtual worlds: Sadly, it's true. Also it's more than just being fat or slim. I had messages from guys commenting on the physical appearance of my avatar (i.e.…
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"Virtual body-shaming: Why the metaverse won't fix our IRL beauty standards" is a thoughtful CNN article partly inspired by a New World Notes story from 2017, about full-figured avatars protesting a fat-shaming Second Life store. I largely lay the blame on the arrival of mesh-based avatar enhancements, which placed a premium on realistic human appearances.…
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On the bottom right column, I'm starting to add classic New World Notes posts from over the years, most of them written as an embedded avatar journalist. Today's post is "The Skin You're In", a story which illustrates how racism crosses into the virtual world through realistic avatars and customized avatar "skins":
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Scrambling in response to much Internet snark, Mark Zuckerberg recently updated his Keane-eyed Horizon Worlds avatar that he posted to Facebook last week (above left) with a much more detailed and realistic version (above right). Writing: I know the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic — it was taken very quickly to…
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What's the value of an avatar name? With 138 responses, here's the results to our survey, "Will you spend $15 to $50 to change your Second Life account name?" (Which is how much it costs to do just that, via a new Linden Lab offer.) Nearly 75% answered No. In Comments to the survey post,…
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting Kunisaki Izumo is a fascinating SL avatar and about as meta as they come. Based on the manga character of the same name, our Kunisaki imagines himself all grown up and running a kabuki theater company on Izumo island. Just as men…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 