My Patreon Supporters
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.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
The Puppeteer is Sisch Firecaster’s blog. It’s a dual purpose site that also features her store Kokolores. The home page, though, brings you to the blog, the store info requires a click on the store’s page. Her most recent post is this is not how I woke up
For a steaming hot dress, click here:
While it may seem strange to believe — unless you're a longtime reader of this blog — all the wild forecasts and grand pronouncements about the Metaverse that you're reading now across the media have been made before, over a 15 years ago. (Maybe even wilder!)
Back in 2006, I was part of a "Metaverse Roadmap" conference which brought together a who's who of tech experts including virtual world pioneer Randy Farmer and professor/Internet activist Ethan Zuckerman, who all gathered at the famed Silicon Valley think tank SRI International thinktank. The website as still online.
To be sure, many of the great minds gathered there (Ethan notable among them) were skeptical that the Metaverse would be as big and transformative as quickly as the rest of us imagined. But looking at the pronouncements we made back then is a nice exercise in humility. Here are some of the metaverse predictions we made, charactered in terms of future news headlines:
Future headlines from 2011-2016:
That last prediction, cringeingly enough, was made by me. None of these have come to pass, though I suppose you could make the case that a variation of "Organized crime destroys 10% of virtual wealth" has happened with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency.
Speaking of which, many of our Metaverse Roadmap predictions did pretty much bear out:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Klint Kord has the capacity to create very romantic and sensual images that are emotionally powerful while being perfectly safe viewing. I love this one. They aren’t even kissing, but there is such tender intimacy between this couple. Their bodies gravitate toward each other, their heads touch as they look down. It’s beautifully evocative.
For more outstanding pics, click here:
Important comment from Brazil-based reader "Moanna", responding to my economics survey which suggests that the cost of entrance into the Second Life economy has become so high, it's difficult for newcomers to break in.
For people in developing nations like hers, those costs are far higher than what they'd be for creators based in the EU/North America. She breaks those expenses down in terms of Brazil's currency, the Real. (Currently valued at 20 cents USD per 1 Real.)
I've been trying to learn because I want to enter this market.
To create something good, we spend on courses (I paid 600 Reals), programs (Avastar, Marvelous Designer, brushes, molds) and other things that need to be purchased (image services, tables, furniture, parts, equipment, all quoted in US dollars in Brazil). It's very difficult to find support…
I still analyze it from a different angle, because I'm Brazilian. My country has a very undervalued currency. So imagine that we have to pay 4.7 times more for a Linden Dollar…
1,600 SL creators earn over USD $10,000/year from their virtual content and services. However, that's 3X more than what a Brazilian earning minimum wage in their country makes:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Artemis Fate and her action photos were featured just a few months ago [click here] but yesterday’s column about magazine covers reminded me of her Avatar Trading Cards [for full album, click here.] She wrote about her project beneath this picture of some of her card collection.
This is a project I'd been working on for a bit now. Even though I don't RP much, I like creating characters and thinking through details that help make them come to life. I had been thinking of ways to show them off easily which was the idea behind the "Usual Suspects" photos, but they were a bit tough to deal with and didn't give much personality or info in themselves.
When I was a kid, I used to collect these sorts of Marvel Trading Cards that just highlighted a character's biography and stats. I realized it might be fun to replicate that with SL characters (especially since a lot of them were originally made for a superhero themed MMO), so I set up this series. Going to try and keep them up to date when I redo avatars or make new ones.
For examples of her cards, click here:
Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワー
ルドニュースを日本語で紹介します。
Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.
