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: New World Culture
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Pictured: Barbenheimer meme created through generative AI programs Midjourney and Gen-2 In the near future, will we keep wanting to watch Hollywood movies like Oppenheimer and Barbie, works of visionary highly personal art by beloved human artists — or will much of their work be replaced by generative AI programs? In recent months I've been…
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Here's five of the best books for understanding virtual worlds and internet culture as recommended by, well, me. Featured on Shepherd, an author-driven book recommendation site, the editors asked me to write about the books that informed my own book, Making a Metaverse That Matters. Those include the face-punchingly obvious influences, like Snow Crash: The…
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The Golden Screen is a new book from longtime colleague Jeff Yang, and it's a fun and inspiring tribute to the movies which help shape Asian-American culture, from acclaimed recent hits like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Crazy Rich Asians to influential international classics like John Woo's The Killer and Park Chan Wook's Oldboy.…
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Virtual world experience from Wild Palms starts around 45 minutes in I asked readers for favorite depictions of the Metaverse/virtual worlds in movies and TV besides Ready Player One, and they delivered — starting with this oddball post-Twin Peaks TV classic from the 90s recommended by Ariane Barnes: Back in the 90's when VR was…
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Amazing cyberpunk-made-real story of the month, made possible by the fact that Counter-Strike Global Offensive is extremely popular with young gamers in Russia (most of them either in Putin's military or likely to be conscripted into it), but where news of the nation's real invasion of Ukraine is censored. Here's what Finnish reporters did with…
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Starting October 21 on Amazon Prime starring Chloë Grace Moretz, this is the teaser trailer to The Peripheral, based on William Gibson's novel of the same name. Premise: Flynne Fisher lives in the rural American South, working at the local 3D printing shop, while earning much needed extra money playing VR games for rich people.…
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You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed with new ads to view from affiliates of WarnerMedia (a subsidiary of AT&T). You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and, well, pretty much the same thing happens. Much has changed since The Matrix movies premiered: Now, instead of Philip Rosedale…
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Twitter usage last month hit 6.42 billion total visits, according to SimilarWeb, with US-based traffic up 4.18% from February. This after traffic had dipped somewhat from January's 6.3 billion visits. March 2021 traffic is about on par to Twitter's traffic in November-December 2020 and actually a touch higher than traffic in October 2020 (6.3B), right…
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A descendant of migrants and anti-fascist resistors brings their memory to the metaverse You can have a virtual home in Hangars Liquides, the massive and awesome cyberpunk city in Second Life which boasts a skyline of skyscrapers before which Oprah Winfrey once gave a speech, and William Gibson himself once praised. But why pay to…
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Virtual economy pioneer Philip Rosedale recently unveiled a simulation which suggests that a universal basic income — the kind recently popularized by Andrew Yang — cannot ultimately prevent widening divides between rich and poor. However, that’s not the end of the story. In a new simulation just posted on his newsletter, Rosedale proposes a pretty…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 