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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.
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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
Second Life Creativity is Kah Blaisdale’s blog. I love her picture in Post 982. The dress is cute and the moonlight and flowers make this a romantic picture which makes it nice that she includes a SLurl to the location The Forgotten Gardens.
For more, click here:
The amazing thing about virtual worlds is that you make tangible connections with people from all over the real world. That also means, tragically, that the real world's troubles often fast follow behind.
Which brings us back to Hanna, creator of the beloved Second Life brand OSMIA, who also happens to be a Ukrainian. When I wrote about her a couple weeks ago, she was sheltering in place with her family in one of the major cities — while over six months pregnant.
Hanna just sent me this photo of where she spends most of her time — on a reinforced cot, as Russian soldiers patrol the streets outside. Her city is now under occupation by Putin's forces.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Alex Nova’s photostream makes me think of the phrase from Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass darkly” which has been made more accurate and less poetic in modern translations, such as: “For now we see a dim reflection…” I like the old phrase, as it is so much more fluid. It is an idea that suits more than just this picture “Ich habe auf dich gewartet” (I waited for you.) I love the lighting in this pic, so focused on her that we barely perceive him in the background.
For more images seen darkly, click here:
Of all the current metaverse platforms on the market, the smallest in terms of active users continue to be based around blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. As I wrote last month, platforms like The Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxel, and Somnium Space have extremity low user rates, with peak concurrencies in the four figures at most (but usually much lower).
One core reason — in a theme I keep repeating– is that these platforms put speculation before community, a stark reversal of how virtual worlds typically succeed.
Another core reason, as analyst Nick Mitham writes: Blockchain Metaverse platforms are effectively limited to adults.
This is because most (all?) crypto exchanges restrict wallet ownership to people 18 and over… but most metaverse users are under 18:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Heléna Hohenstein’s photostream is short but very focused. The pictures are all vintage cosplay and they are lovely. I love “Waiting Around.” It is such a beautiful example of the Golden Ratio and framing, using the trees and the awning as a frame for the woman waiting at the table. Even though she is shown from far away and is small relative to the size of the picture, it is clear she is the focal point because of her flawless composition.
For more mid-twentieth century pics, click here:
With global sanctions hitting Putin-aligned Russian oligarchs and their troves of ill-gotten gains, there's been speculation that these billionaires will hide their assets in cryptocurrency — a suspicion perhaps heightened by the fact that some crypto firms are refusing to shut down access by Russians to their exchange platforms.
How realistic a concern is this, and how should governments respond? I put those questions to Bill Maurer, Director at the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine, and one of the world's foremost experts on alternative/experimental forms of money and finance:
"If you look at real-time transactions right now on fiatleak, you'll see that most of the trading between rubles and crypto is to Tether, a stablecoin that markets itself as fully backed by US dollars," he tells me. "That would represent a flight to stability, in contrast to, say, buying Bitcoin. It's also interesting since there's been a lot of speculation about what the war will do to the price of Bitcoin — and my answer is, within the current pattern of trading, probably not much.
"Tether, meanwhile, is controlled by Bitfinex, a company that has moved around from tax haven to tax haven (from the British Virgin Islands to Switzerland), with questions about whether the reserves actually exist and where the reserves are really held. Pity the poor oligarch who is drawn to a stablecoin whose value may be based on nothing but thin air. Not."
The problem for oligarchs, he goes on, is that moving their fiat money to crypto means they'll have to keep it as crypto:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Rwah Yeetly’s “Vibes” is well-named. Her entire photostream has a modernist, pop art vibe and this picture is a great example of what she loves to do. She saturates her colors and desaturates the more neutral tones and then adds layers with text and texture. I love the way she suggests an entire lifestyle, hip and a bit outré in the best possible way. She is a leader, not a follower.
For more clever and hip pics, click here:
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 launch the university's virtual world campus:
The original Metaverse as envisioned by the cyberpunk fiction writers (Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Stross, etc.) was essentially an extrapolation of the Internet, as an immersive 3D parallel world where the users interact through their avatars, but with the gaming overtones, for literary purposes.
Somehow that degenerated into a now prevailing interpretation of the Metaverse as a gigantic collection of (interoperable?) games and social spaces, or even just calling individual games "metaverses", which makes even less sense. It is like calling one's website "my internet". Maybe this is because most people engaged in this business come from the gaming world. I think that this completely misses the point, and there is no future in it. All this will accomplish is to doom the term "metaverse" as a misguided notion that will be forgotten and/or mocked.
Instead, we will see a continued evolution of the Internet, where all of the humanity's informational content is, and where most of the human activities are, driven by the evolving technologies, including XR. There will be gaming and social spaces, of course, as there already are in the current incarnation of the Internet as a global parallel cyberspace, along with everything else that people do. And that is where the people will stay. To think that there will be a new, separate gaming and social cyberworld distinct from the evolving Internet, a gamers' Metaverse, is just plain foolish, in my opinion.
Incidentally, Zuckerberg does seem to understand this, never mind all of the usual critiques of him or his company. His record and vision give him a lot more credibility.
Reader Martin K. expands on this, arguing that a lot of the specific features attributed to the Metaverse, such as a vast contiguous virtual world, were also invented to make a cyberpunk story cooler:
Source: Cryptoslam.io
News that former Disney CEO Bob Iger is now joining the board of an NFT-based avatar startup called Genie reminded me that I haven't checked recent trends of non-fungible tokens lately.
Turns out that they're not too good!
According to the NFT tracker Cryptoslam, sales of NFTs on the leading blockchain Ethereum have dropped by nearly half over the last 30 days, with fewer than 300,000 buyers. This might not be a bad sign if alternative blockchains increased in sales volume and buyers, but the trend on much smaller blockchains like Solana and Ronin are also down quite a lot (see above).
Overall, this suggests that the NFT market hasn't grown since the start of 2022, when a Chainalysis study estimated that there were only 360,000 NFT owners, with only 32,400 wallets owning 80% of the total value.
Google Trends tells a similar story:
