Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.

The Virtual Worlds Museum. Click here to teleport to their Second Life hub with tribute to sunsetted worlds!

“TV POWWW!” by Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman. Read about the first televised videogame here.

The Fitting Room: Try out new SL fits in a secure, private space. Click here to teleport.

Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.

Top 3 Posts Last Week: Midjourney Images as Afrofuturist Art, VR’s True “Early Days”, and Second Life’s Quirky User Community from Japan

August 22, 2022

No, Virtual Reality Is Not In Its "Early Days" (Comment Of The Week)

Mobile phones in the 80s were incredibly expensive and bulky, the connectivity was sporadic and low quality, but their fundamental utility for communicating with anyone by phone nearly anywhere you carried one was immediately and universally obvious. This use case was so valuable, early adopters were willing to put up with their many shortcomings…

Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins Creates Utterly Stunning Art With Midjourney

"The images I'm generating is unique to me; it starts with my imagination. The machine attempts to understand and match my text with imagery. I don't think anyone who sees my work would say it's not art…"

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I Can’t Stop Looking at Hilariously Quirky Posts from Second Life’s Japanese Community on Twitter

August 19, 2022

今日も一日
Today is another day#secondlife pic.twitter.com/SXYQG81gT1

— Sanny Yoshikawa🌻🌻🌻 (@sannysquirrel) August 5, 2022

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

If you were to judge Second Life only by how it's mostly depicted on Flickr or Facebook, you'd assume it's a photorealistic fashion simulator. But among the Second Life users of Japan, many of whom congregate on Twitter, Second Life is just as much (if not moreso) a comically zany and quirky play space, where you're just as likely to, say, come across a giant circus hamster playing Pokémon GO.

"I think most Japanese SLers grew up in a quirky culture in real life," New World Notes' Japanese translator Sanny Yoshikawa tells me. (That's Sanny above, as the hamster.) "We played gacha or funny arcade games when we were little kids. Then we moved to Nintendo and PlayStation. Also, so many funny anime and TV shows were always beside us. I think we are native to quirky culture."

Sounds right to me. Now that I'm following hundreds of Japanese SLers on Twitter, my feed is blessed with adorably goofy and wacky images on the daily, depicting a Second Life that reminds me of its earlier, Bebop Reality days before mesh had moved the economy and culture toward high end fashion.

More on that topic another day, but for now, here's a glimpse of SL Japan, with some translation from Sanny when necessary. She helps explain, for example, why a buff naked guy with Gundam weaponry and a teddy bear helmet is wearing a salad on his crotch:

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Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Whirling & Romantic Dragon-Flavored Screenshots

August 18, 2022

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Kristal creates beautifully romantic fantasy-themed pictures such as “Fly Higher.” I love the movement created by her flowing hair, the blowing leaves, and the skirt. I love the bright light in the background blowing out the background and casting her avatar into semi-shadow. I love the color suggestive of heat and sunshine. She kindly included a SLurl. [Click here to teleport}

For more romantic fantasy snaps, click here:

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New World Notes Open to New Sponsoring Partner! Here’s What You Get

August 18, 2022

Above: Typical clickthrough rate for a NWN partner

While I furiously write my next book, Why the Metaverse Matters, I continue updating New World Notes as much as possible every day (with the indispensable help of Cajsa's Choices). I'm grateful to everyone reading these words. I see both my upcoming book and this ongoing blog as part of the same ongoing conversation we have on the daily, as we follow the future of virtual worlds and metaverse technology in all its strange twists and turns.

That also means I'm looking for a new sponsoring partner. (Or two.) I'm not great at self-promotion, but here's my pitch:

New World Notes is the longest running and most read metaverse/virtual world blog with a primary focus on Second Life and its many spinoffs, metaverse platforms, and related technologies, often cited by the New York Times, the BBC, Bloomberg, Wired, and other top outlets. According to Similar Web, we typically attract 100,000-150,000 visits a month (sometimes more, sometimes less), and more key, we get our partners results: Above are the clickthrough rates to the Second Life Marketplace listing of a recent media partner.

Who's an ideal media partner for New World Notes? Basically any brand or organization that New World Notes readers would be interested in and find valuable, including:

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Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins Creates Utterly Stunning Art With Midjourney

August 17, 2022

Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, an acclaimed Afrofuturist scholar who pioneered the Deep Dream neural network as an art medium back in 2019, is now experimenting with Midjourney, the new AI project that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate new imagery.

The results, some of which you can see here, are deliriously stunning. Nettrice's image above, for example, was generated by a line from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (one of her favorite novels):

“For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."

"[Midjourney] tries to understand human language," Dr. Gaskins explains. "It's about the text; the order of words. The cool thing about NLP AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) is another person can use the same exact text prompts (same order, etc.) and never be able to duplicate the ones I generated. This means every single image is one of a kind / unique."

Here's another that she generated through inputting the text, "Afrofuturistic Black woman botanist in trippy alien utopia":

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Metaverse Safety Week Announced to Help Prevent “Cambridge Analytica 2.0” & Other Security / Privacy Crises

August 17, 2022

Registration is now open for Metaverse Safety Week, an online conference from XR Safety Initiative (XRSI), the brainchild of Linden Lab veteran Kavya Pearlman.

"It is essential to getting things right at every level. especially when it comes to safety, privacy and cybersecurity," as she tells me. "Currently besides the XRSI privacy and safety framework there are literally no frameworks that factor these aspects into the risks assessment, along with factoring in several converging technologies."

This is probably why we regularly see huge privacy crises like this one happening in metaverse platforms even when they're backed by companies spending billions to produce them.

And the problems seems to be getting worse, not better:

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This is What Paris Looks Like in VRChat, Which You Can Access With Meta Quest

August 17, 2022

In case you're wondering, there's roughly a dozen Paris-themed worlds in VRChat, the metaverse platform that's accessible through Steam and Meta's Quest platform — including this one, "Paris Tour", an explorable portion of the City of Lights including the Eiffel Tower. It even comes with classic French music and a racing game!

I note this because at the moment, seemingly half of Twitter is gawking at a recent announcement that Meta's Horizon Worlds is expanding into France — because the official announcement looks like this:

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SL Name Survey Results: 75% Wouldn’t Pay to Change Their Avatar Name

August 16, 2022

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, readers were mostly not impressed:

"I really don't understand why this needs to cost money. There is no justification for this… why does it cost money? It's not like the Labs are employing someone to sit there and mash through a pile of paperwork forms."

Then again, the results also show that over 1 in 10 respondents are so interested in changing their avatar name, which when you think about, is quite a lot:

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Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Musician in the Metaverse on Multiple Instruments

August 16, 2022

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

mSilverwolf loves music and it shows in his pictures of himself playing various instruments in Second Life. “The Sax” is a gorgeous black and white with lots of fog. It comes with a song, as well, an old favorite, “Pride and Joy” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. [To listen, click here.]

For more musicianship, click here:

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France’s Le Monde Remembers the Fall of Second Life’s Biggest User-Run Bank & The Limits of Virtual World Libertarianism

August 16, 2022

French-fluent readers, the great Le Monde of France has a new article on a famous old story from the virtual world economy, part of a larger series on the topic: Comment Ginko Financial, la plus célèbre banque de « Second Life », s’est écroulée — i.e. "How Ginko Financial, the most famous bank in “Second Life”, collapsed".

Ginko, as longtime readers may remember, was an SL-based financial service offering incredibly high interest rates to users, attracting high skepticism over its management and cash liquidity, not to mention allegations that it was a Ponzi scheme, until Linden Lab finally shut it down.

As I discuss with Le Monde reporter Florian Reynaud, the Ginko case was another lesson for Linden Lab on the limits of libertarianism. Florian also managed to get an official statement on Ginko from Linden Lab, but it's very broad — because, he tells me, the Lindens don't have anyone still employed there who even remembers that far back.

Read the Linden Lab statement below along with an English excerpt (albeit with a mediocre translation from Google):

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