Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I love “To the Moon” from Alfred Wessex. I love how he shows the avatars’ love for each other in such a simple way, how she leans into him, how he rests his arm on her leg. It shows a couple attuned to each other in an ordinary moment enjoying the night sky. I also like the subtle light that illuminates some of the grass but fades quickly outside their magic circle.
Wessex does great fashion shoots; for more, click here:
This is a fun VRChat-based tribute to the beloved Doggface Fleetwood Mac skating video. Which would be great in itself, but VRChat being VRChat, it’s also a video promoting an upcoming VRChat world with physics-enabled skating:
“The world itself is based on Jet Set Radio Future, a game released back in 2002,” explains Lakuza, who created and stars in the video, and is a developer of this world:.
”It’s inline skating with a heavy emphasis on grinding across objects… it'll be the first VRChat world to allow for grinding in this manner.” He’s being modest: It’s probably the first VR-enabled skating game in any virtual world that’s not specifically engineered for skating. Anyway, follow him on Twitter for launch updates.
“I’m not clever enough to understand how it works,” says Lakuza, “but he's basically created a system of movement options that allows double-jumping, wall-running, grinding as well as being able to control acceleration speed over time.”
As for bringing the Doggface vibe into VRChat, he’s actually using the platform VR mouth tracking technology:
Metaverse technologist Kim Nevelsteen, who created that quite cool project which seamlessly connects different Minecraft servers to each other, has promoted an epic manifesto from the M3 group proposing Metaverse connectivity between a wide variety of virtual worlds, including WebVR, VRChat, Minecraft and beyond:
"People are searching for a standardized Metaverse protocol," Kim says, summarizing his purpose. "Even if that's achieved, the overhead of updating the integrated systems will impair a Metaverse. An architecture with dynamic evolution is required and currently IPSME is the only one that satisfies all criteria, as far as I know." (That stands for Idempotent Publish/Subscribe Messaging Environment, on which he co-authored this academic paper .)
This is all admirably ambitious, but with self-described metaverses like ROBLOX and VRChat already quite massive, I'm starting to wonder if we need a single Metaverse protocol connecting them:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
“The Magician” seems so perfect for a 1970’s roch concept album. I love the psychedelic exuberance of the picture with the mirror-like shards exploding outward from the epicenter where the Magician has materialized from some hole in the stage before some dramatic opening riff during which the rest of the band arrives. This is one of the many creative and exciting pictures by Hermes Kondor.
/SecondLife, the largest SL-related subreddit, recently grew past 10,000 subscribers. Over the years (it had only 2,000 subscribers back in 2015), it's evolved into a solid go-to hug for interesting and informative SL/virtual world-related content and conversation. Since it's on Reddit, the participants tend to skews towards SL veterans, especially developers and scripters, and unlike most (all?) social media hangouts for SLers, isn't an unceasing cascade of fashion pics and shopping announcements. (Though there's still a lot of that!)
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I like pictures that confound me. “Snapshot 45” is confounding. She’s standing on a wall for a house that looks like it’s built on a dock and there are fish swimming by. It makes no sense which is perfect because I can imagine the fish are actually taxis swimming from fare to fare or the house is underwater and people have gills. On the side of being underwater, there is the seagrass and the sandy bottom. On the side of being aboveground, there is the electric pole with the isolators. Is it both? In Second Life it can be anything.
Setting aside Bill Maher's usual "Old Man Yells at Woke Millenial Cloud" tone, this is a pretty good and funny takedown of cryptocurrency hype, mostly hitting the right targets, such as its Ponzi scheme nature, for instance, and the absurdity of Tesla CEO Elon Musk promoting Bitcoin despite the fact that its environmental costs utterly undermines any green advantages achieved by Tesla the company.
Maher's rant, however, fails when he notes that major companies like Microsoft, Etsy, and Starbucks accept Bitcoin as a currency… without noting that hardly anyone uses Bitcoin to buy goods and services. As I wrote in 2015:
According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency — lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 – is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)
The wild thing is, Bitcoin's daily transaction rates have not grown that much since then, fluctuating between 200,000 and 400,000. In another words, a daily transaction rate of a small city, and still less than Linden Dollar transactions in Second Life.
As usual, fellow HBO comedian John Oliver had a better take on the topic, back in 2018:
With its arresting visuals, sardonic dialog, and music like the ironic Sinatra throwback heard above, the LANG series is something Quentin Tarantino* might make, if he was in the mood to make a comedic neo-noir machinima in Second Life. Created by Zatch Ixchel and company, I wrote about LANG last January, and it's not only kept up its solid pace, but is now teasing Season 3 as coming soon.
"At this point, I’m inspired by the characters themselves, the world we’ve built here," Zach tells me, when I ask how he keeps inspired to keep creating episodes. "I want to know what happens to these people. I want to know why Lang is the way he is. I want to know if Sadie will ever be satisfied."
Watch Season 1 and Season 2 below so you're all caught up before S3 drops:
