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!
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Category: Comment of the Week
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My post on UdonSharp, the user-made C# compiler for VRChat, inspired me to reach out to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick. Because when he worked for Linden Lab, he was aiming to make it possible to script in Second Life with C#. Sad to say that didn't come to pass, and he left the Lindens in 2010.…
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Fun comment from Joey1058, reflecting on the NFT art gold rush, which has led to some NFT art galleries in blockchain-based worlds like Cryptovoxels and Decentraland: In terms of broader community, I'm starting to see virtual worlds aligning into classifications. Cryptovoxels and Decentraland are similar to the richer cosmopolises, like New York. Here is where…
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Reader David Cheney recently tried out these detailed instructions for running Second Life on an Oculus Quest 2 via Firestorm ("This is a lot of fun and works pretty well!"), and added some further tips in Comments: On my cabled Quest 2 I had to take a couple of steps I found at the VR Firestorm…
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Photo of Catwa sale mob crush by SL blogger Kirsten Corleone; large version is not worksafe. The L$1 sale of Catwa avatar heads caused the Marketplace website to crash due to heavy demand, provoking Linden Lab to remove the item from the store, and instead, make it available in-world on several sims… which also overloaded…
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Very good point by Adeon on the importance of mirrors in VRChat, jumping off from Strasz's video, where he notes, "While vision is key, where that vision emanates from [in VRChat] is even more important. We need to believe that it comes from our own eyes, and that the body parts we see are in…
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Good conversation on the SL Marketplace and the argument that it helped "kill" Second Life by becoming an Amazon-like web giant that crushed in-world stores — including this comment from oldbie insider Flipper PA: Disclaimer: I was the founder and coder of SLBoutique.com, one of the original web-based SL marketplaces. I eventually sold it to…
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What went wrong with Second Life? Bryan Ogden has an intriguing take in that post of the same name last week: The thing that killed SL IMHO wasn't a specific technical feature… It was web-based shopping for stuff. And point-to-point teleportation. It was an attempt to make SL convenient and consumer friendly. Why? When I…
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Pictured: Official 2009 commercial for Second Life which very briefly shows the in-world creation tools in the background only once — and doesn't mention them at all in the captions Reader "Pulsar" posted a comment last week that touches on one of Silicon Valley's greatest mysteries that fascinates me to this day: How did Second…
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Works by the artist known as AM Radio in Second Life's pre-mesh age Philip Rosedale's open challenge to name another metaverse with dynamic, collaborative content creation evoked this response from reader Vivienne Schell: I think that Second Life's initial success was tied to in-world, collaborative content creation offering in-world tools. Leaving the Prim (do it…
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Protip: It's not a great idea to announce "X in virtual worlds is the future of Y" before checking to see if there are instances of Y successfully happening without X. For instance: "Live performances in virtual worlds are the future of music concerts." It's part of that future, we can safely say, but as…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 