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: Comment of the Week
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I was right about to blog a good reader comment on my post about Matthew Ball's new metaverse framework for succeeding the mobile web, when news dropped about Amazon Lumberyard (previously on NWN here) which enforced its points even further: Amazon is contributing its Lumberyard game engine to open source, and it will be known as the Open 3D…
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This recent video from gaming YouTuber Micky D is hilariously cringey but necessary viewing, shared by reader Lyndka Cochrane as a response to Second Life's new glitzy marketing video. As Lynkda comments, "There's still an 'image' problem around what Second Life is and how to play it or live it", going on to observe:
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Some social media readers were skeptical over last week's post highlighting Linden Lab veteran Gene Yoon's policy paper on virtual currency addressed to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen. One reader snarkily suggested that that amounted to saying, "I was responsible for managing the currency used as commodity for pixel furries to use at strip…
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Good points from reader Erik Mondrian, on how Linden Dollars help drive the success of Bitcoin, and why L$ is still more often used than BTC to buy goods and services: The other issue that I think is important to bring up in this context is exchange rate, which weighs the scale even further toward…
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Reader Soda Sullivan posted this comment last week as a tribute to the late Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg: What a guy. I do not think it is an overstatement to say that Altberg was Linden Lab's best CEO and Second Life's best "leader' since its creator. As I read this news about his ongoing…
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Great comment thread on Whiskey Monday's excellent and helpful rant last week, on all the frustrations customers take on when trying to shop in Second Life. Some of these, such as allowing content creators to use non-standard symbols in their store listings, even though that utterly frustrates SL's search function, could have been fixed years…
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Good conversation by readers around last week's post about a universal metaverse protocol, and whether we really need it. One reader was skeptical when I described Steam as basically "[A] metaverse portal, taking you from VRChat to Rec Room and beyond with a few clicks and several minutes of wait time", asking: Are you serious…
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Important comment/update to last week's post, when I cautioned against creating NFT from Second Life images. When the EFF lawyer I quoted referred to the "dark interesting mysteries" around IP ownership of user-created content in SL, Linden Lab had not addressed derivative works in its Terms of Service. Since then (in 2017, it looks like),…
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Good points from reader "Kyz", reflecting on Core's mission to build a "multiverse" versus Epic's mission to build "the metaverse": There isn't going to be a metaverse or multiverse in the sense that fiction foretold. That global environment we think of as the metaverse already happened. It's called the Internet. Within it are worlds and…
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My post on Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's long-ignored C#-in-Second Life integration provoked many "Oh what could have been" responses, both here and across social media. (Especially poignant to read posts by other former Lindens, remembering this project fondly, if bittersweetly.) For example, this comment from reader Pulsar, who not only bemoans the loss of this C#…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 