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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While Linden Lab has saved Tempura, we discussed how preservation does not guarantee survival. Reader "Nadeja", however, thinks Tempura has better than average prospects: Tempura is arguably a special case. Visitors know they can meet someone always there, so the traffic has always remained high even without any event (25K today). It is also a…
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While it's great that Linden Lab swooped in to save the much-loved private sim of Tempura, there are still concerns as to whether that's the best way to preserve great virtual locations. Echoing thoughts from her own blog, longtime reader Nodoka Hanamura reflects on some of the challenges, citing an SL community project inspired by…
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Tempura, the popular and much-loved Second Life island, is now gone from the grid, with only screenshots and video to remember it by, another victim of SL's high monthly server maintenance fees. As when any other beloved virtual place meets a digital death like this, community members post well-meaning if belated ideas on how to…
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Is "the Metaverse" as we typically understand it mainly made as a literary device, i.e. to tell a cool fun story? On that theme, here's an interesting couple of reader comments inspired by Gabe Newell's skepticism over the Metaverse (at the least in its current incarnations) — first from Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, who helped…
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Why does Valve seem so bearish about making the metaverse when it has everything it needs to do so? Reader Martin K. proposes this pretty good analysis: It might be useful to break down the most popular ideas of what today's metaverses are. Partly, Newell appears to refer to the crypto bros' metaverses, which were…
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Longtime metaverse analyst and developer Gwyneth Llewelyn recently posted a good reader comment analyzing Meta's early efforts in the space. And I do mean "longtime" — this is her avatar from 2006 when she was in a trademark dispute over a collectivist utopia in Second Life. (Yes, that's a thing.) Leaping off from my observation…
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Now that Philip Rosedale's back advising Linden Lab, challenging modern metaverse platforms like Meta's Horizon, can he help fix Second Life's complex avatar system? I asked that question last week and a pretty amazing reader conservation ensued — culminating in this excellent rant by the excellently named content creator Allegory Malaprop, of the style brand…
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Good comment from Dee, one of many Second Life users welcoming back Philip Rosedale to advising the virtual world he founded: I am MUCH more optimistic than I have been for a while where SL is concerned. I hope that Philips' return will bring renewed enthusiasm and fresh ideas that are outside the Linden Lab…
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Lots of interesting reader comments about my podcast interview with Philip Rosedale, including this reaction to my suggestion that a successor to Second Life running on a modern engine like Unity should be integrated as an option in the official viewer. For illustrative purposes, imagine two big buttons side by side on the log-in page,…
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Good reader discussion in last week's post about VRChat's new peak usage numbers. This growth inspired "Timo" to ask why so many VRChat avatars seem so low detail, as compared to Second Life: I read many comments here recently about how VRChat uses more modern technology, custom shaders from Unity etc. Which is supposed to…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 