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.

Watch: What Second Life Looks Like in 4K With Black Dragon

September 16, 2021

You may need to click through to YouTube and play with the resolution settings (which go all the way up to 2160p60!) in order to get the full, bandwidth-choking effect, but here's Second Life displayed at 4K resolution. Redditor "tb_inuyasha_x" shot it with the Black Dragon viewer with some pretty impressive hardware (specs below). However, as he explains in the thread, frame rate varied hugely across Second Life:

"It was really depending on what sim I was in and how far I set the view range too… I would say some places, 8-25 FPS and others I could get 35 – 45 range… but, it was all still recordable."

Which is, well, yikes: 30 FPS is a not-bad framerate for an online world, so it's painful that FPS is still hitting below 10 in some places. Also as you'll see from shot to shot the visual appearance varies widely based on lighting presets, and frankly, the advanced age of Second Life's internal graphics.

Anyway, specs and sims shot below:

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Watch: Hilarious VRChat Parody of Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” by YouTuber With Successful Career as a VR-Based Musician

September 15, 2021

"Do you want to live in the Metaeverse all of the time? Little bit of Metaverse all of the time?"

This is a pretty brilliant VRChat-themed parody of Bo Burnham’s very brilliant “Welcome to the Internet”, created and performed by YouTuber TFMJonny, who tosses the original lyrics into the Internet content vortex of the Metaverse, and spins out some clever and on-point tweaks along the way.

For instance, where Burnham had the lines "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime", TFM tells me, “I rewrote those lines to ‘apathy's an amnesty and boredom is sublime’ to reflect the dichotomy between regular Internet culture and VRChhat culture.

“Most of VRChat consists of sitting around doing nothing and just being social with friends," he explains. "There aren't any particular goals and thus the game can quite often turn into a money and time sink. Those lyrics were some of the last I wrote and are probably my favorite because they differ entirely from the original because it highlights this stark difference.”

TFM shot the entire video in VRChat using VRCLens to insure every angle matched that from the original video — and went into Unity, to recreate Bo Burnham’s set:

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Cajsa’s Choices: Wildelands is Today’s SL Flickr Pick

September 15, 2021

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

Wildelands [Auttumn986] has an intriguing and beautiful photostream with pictures of two people who seem to have ensorcelled each other. They are shot together and apart and every picture is well done. I love this untitled picture with a recently harvested field in the background. The sunlight turns the remaining stalks into bright gold. She is in the foreground. Sunset is approaching and her skin has a blue cast from the shadow on her. Her makeup is smeared so there is a story there.

For a great black and white picture, click here:

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Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager to Shaping Future of “Original Metaverse” of Second Life — But Mobile Experience Only a “Plus”

September 15, 2021

This is quite possibly a dream job if you have experience in game/Internet product development:

As a Senior Product Manager, you’ll utilize in-depth product knowledge to successfully drive key projects on Second Life. You’ll work alongside a supportive team of people across engineering, design, QA and other cross-functional teams to build products and new experiences and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the original metaverse.

But apparently, if you scroll all the way toward the end of the job description, that future is not mobile-centric:

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Creator Advertises His 1930s-Era Second Life Fashion With Satirical Norman Rockwell Cosplay Pics

September 14, 2021

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

Nicholas Huntsman is the creator for a couple of stores, Lux Aeterna that is a home and garden and L & Co. Clothiers that feature vintage clothing from the 1920s and 30s. He has pretty standard vendor pictures, but he also has a series of delightful sendups of The Saturday Evening Post in the style of J. C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell;s mentor. Of course, Leyendecker and Rockwell never had such a model as Nicholas. He included a short story, a small excerpt will explain the picture.

…Five times a year Jo and I make the pilgrimage to a sequestered cemetery by a lonely creek; his birthday, Father's day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the day it happened. We leave the city behind, the shop, our friends, our adulthood, forget our lives ever existed there, and head back to our childhood, when it was just us and the Manor. The only five days of the year when the mask isn't put on, because she needs to know I'm there…

For more delightful covers, click here:

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Raph Koster On How His Upcoming Metaverse Is Unlike Steam

September 14, 2021

In case you didn't check the blog of Raph Koster's Playable Worlds late last week, he is, as anticipated, building a Metaverse:

We have built a metaverse platform. Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working. We have a working massively multiplayer server…

And you’ll be able to hop between worlds without needing to switch clients. It permits a single, shardless, ever-expanding, ever-changing online universe.

I've heard that "hop between worlds" promise many times before, but I've been skeptical that this in itself makes a Metaverse experientially different than, say, Steam. After all, the game worlds in Steam are separate, but you can run them within the same Steam launcher (which also comes with a social network, payment system, etc.) Exit out of Skyrim back to the Steam launcher, see that your Steam friends are playing Among Us, jump in to play with them via the Steam launcher, etc. Isn't all that which we already do in Steam, basically hopping between worlds?

Raph Koster tells me that what Playable Worlds is building is quite different:

"In Steam every [game] world is an install. It's a separate app. Steam is just a a launcher. Not in our case. It's one app for all of the worlds."

Raph says it's different from my example of hopping from Skyrim to About Us on Steam:

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In a Virtual World Economy, User-Generated Content Prices Are Controlled by the Company, Not the Market (Comment of the Week)

September 13, 2021

Really interesting conversation on the problem of virtual currency in virtual economies last week kicked off by "Kyz", who explained how difficult it was for them to reliably run a successful business in a virtual world. Replying to the idea that the value of their content is decided by the market, Kyz goes deeper into the analysis:

That's true to an extent and there are parallels between virtual and real life markets. But there's more to it than just market demand and pricing.

For instance, my SL experience put an extra layer of cost into the mix. Linden Dollars are a product or were, to Linden Lab. The currency wasn't just added to the company as a convenience for users, it was acquired by Linden Lab from someone that discovered that virtual money was itself a product that could be profitable directly or indirectly.

The last part isn't quite accurate but the full story enhances Kyz's argument: Linden Lab reportedly made an offer to the user-made Gaming Open Market, which circa 2004/2005 was a popular platform for the community, then in late 2005, officially productized the Linden Dollar through the launch of the LindeX.

"I mean, I get it," Kyz goes on. "And if I ran a virtual world, creating an extra revenue stream from currency is something I wouldn't lightly ignore." But for content creators like Kyz trying to monetize on the platform, this led to additional hurdles and regulations:

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Top 4 Posts Last Week Including Stylish Avatars, Akira Avatar Cosplay & The Real Problem With Virtual Economies

September 13, 2021
Amazing SL Cyberpunk Avatar Style Ideas from Morningbeasty

September 10, 2021
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Just in time for the new Matrix trailer, Morningbeasty’s blog features cyberpunk fashion and accessories in Second Life. This image above from “Fly With Me” features a surprise twist on the old “Come Fly With Me” slogan because who ever thought they would be flying with a cyber greyhound? I love several elements of this futuristic outfit, but in particular, the mask and the dog. You should click through to the blog post to see all the credits, but for those two highlights, you can look right here.
- Phase Mask & Glasses (unisex) by: Wicca's Originals – Wicca’s Flickr – & – Wicca’s Releases – Available @ Access Cyber Fair
- Cyber Greyhound (Animesh – Companion & Static) by: Rezz Room – More Info / – Video
For one of the creepiest avatars ever, click here:

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Seriously Stylish & Dramatic Avatar Portraits by Fredizzle Brown

September 9, 2021

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

Fredizzle Brown’s “Black Licorice” is a wry title for a guy with a cigar though the way he’s smoking it and the long ash, perhaps we should call it a cee-gar. The avatar looks a bit rough around the edges, but then that is the point. Fredizzle is not interested in cookie cutter avatars with conventional beauty. He’s looking for folks on the downside of power, folks who struggle and whose struggles show on their faces. His photostream is a gallery of what Hank Williams once called “Pictures from Life’s Other Side.”

For more pictures from life’s other side, click here:

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