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.

  • Really Useful Aquarium Features Mesh Fish That Feed, Low Land Impact, Multiple Customization & Sizing Options (NWN Partner News)

    The Really Useful Aquarium is a cool product from New World Notes media partner Really Useful Scripts Corner — lead developer Grace7 Ling gracefully demonstrates its many features in the video above. Available in her Really Useful Scripts Corner on the Marketplace and at her SL store (click here to teleport), Grace’s fish tank is fairly unique among other virtual world aquariums:

    “Many of the older aquariums are using flat textures of fish that cycle around in a fixed way,” Grace notes. “The Really Useful Aquarium has mesh fish which swim randomly around the tank. The swim speed and turning speed of each fish can actually be customized if you know how. Secondly, if you are not using the display shelf, the tank is actually quite versatile and can be resized to rather surprising dimensions, and the fish will adjust automatically to the new dimensions of the tank.” (Watch below.)

    On top of that, aquarium owners or their guests can feed the fish:

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  • Twitter Usage Back Up to 2020 Levels Despite (Because of?) Trump Ban

    Twitter traffic Trump ban 2020 2021

    Twitter usage last month hit 6.42 billion total visits, according to SimilarWeb, with US-based traffic up 4.18% from February. This after traffic had dipped somewhat from January's  6.3 billion visits. March 2021 traffic is about on par to Twitter's traffic in November-December 2020 and actually a touch higher than traffic in October 2020 (6.3B), right before the last US Presidential election.

    Which is more or less a definitive answer to the following question that frequently came up, especially after the January 6th insurrection, when Twitter finally banned Donald Trump from the platform for inciting violence: Won't Twitter traffic collapse with Trump and all his roiling, news-grabbing tweets, not to mention all the bots amplifying those tweets, are gone?

    So far, looking at the data, that doesn't seem to be the case. 

  • Second Life Screenshots Cleverly Converted Into Manga Comic Images

    Second LIfe screenshot manga Flickr Cadwyn Daffyd

    At the risk of stepping on Cajsa's Flickr toes, I'm totally in love with these images by Cadwyn Daffyd which turn SL screenshots into frames from a manga comic. Compare above with the original screenshot below:

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  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Vivid Stories Told Through Virtual World Screenshots

    And in our hearts there is a boat

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

    Bambi Foxdale’s “And In Our Hearts There Is a Boat” drew me in with its nostalgic emotional effect. I love how she shows that a picture can move someone so profoundly. 

    What is an autumn hug? For the answer, click here:

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  • Second Life Unveils Strange New Homepage Featuring Real Life Model, Other Odd Non-Second Life Marketing

    Second Life New Site homepage Linden Lab

    Either this is a belated April Fool's joke, or this is the new official homepage for Second Life. Which is an online virtual world with 3D graphics, but for some reason, now features not an avatar, but a real life model.

    Yes, really: The flying elf is from an upcoming promo that Linden Lab teased late last year (watch below), featuring many more non-avatar models pretending to be avatars. Suggesting an implicit marketing pitch on the order of, I guess, "Sign up for Second Life so you can be a flying elf… but not the one here, as she's not 3D graphics, but you'll feel like this in your mind."

    The explicit messaging on the new homepage also feels as if it emanated from a marketing company with no actual first-hand knowledge of Second Life, or virtual worlds in general:

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  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Outdoor Images So Lovely, Even a Virtual Outhouse & a Prison Yard Look Picturesque

    Untitled

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

    Ifollow Rivers makes fabulous pictures of Second Life homes and landscapes such as this charming cottage by a river. They all remind me of the Romantics like Thomas Cole and John Constable. Her pictures represent the pastoral and picturesque aesthetics of Romanticism that include the human element such as this cozy little home. 

    To find out how even an outhouse can be picturesque, click here:

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  • “The” Metaverse Isn’t Happening (Comment of the Week #2)

    Core Games Epic Multiverse Metaverse

    Good points from reader "Kyz", reflecting on Core's mission to build a "multiverse" versus Epic's mission to build "the metaverse":

    There isn't going to be a metaverse or multiverse in the sense that fiction foretold. That global environment we think of as the metaverse already happened. It's called the Internet. Within it are worlds and nearly endless content.

    But one global 3D platform? Not happening. If it was going to happen it would have already. The market doesn't want it any more than it wanted VR on a global scale.

    I think this thing with Core is just wordplay. They're close to Epic because they're built on Epic tech, but other than that, they're basically a dumbed down way to create games. If you want better games, you'll use the Unreal Engine itself.

    Personally I find Core far too limiting compared to using the Unreal Engine directly and I don't see them overcoming the big problems like delivering the customers and buying power. The more customers, the more games and the more people trying to grab enough foot traffic to make a small bit of money before it becomes so saturated no one is making anything.

    At any rate, it's still a good time to be a creator and you go wherever your skill level and determination gravitates you to. But if any entities are the metaverse tools? It's the game engines, few people are writing all this from scratch these days like SL did.

    That sounds right. There's multiple popular web browsers and multiple smartphone devices running iOS or Android, so it's hard to see anything like a singular Metaverse dominating. It might not even be a matter of competing game engines (i.e. Unreal vs. Unity), so much as many metaverses for non-competing demographics:

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  • Second Life’s World Map Working After 5 Month Outage, CEO Announces

    Second Life Uplift Map

    Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg announced last weekend on Twitter that Second Life's world map is, after an outage that started last November, finally working.

    I'm fairly fascinated that it took so long to update this issue, and how it is (or isn't) related to Project Uplift, moving SL to the Amazon web cloud.  ("Now that Uplift has finished," the incident report read in January, "we are working to restore the map tile functionality.") I've reached out to Linden Lab for an official response and will update this post when/if I get one.

    Also notable: Ebbe Altberg announcing something about Second Life on Twitter after a long absence from Twitter — his last tweet before announcing the world map had been fixed was also from last November.

    Hat tip: Gogo, whose tweets get results!

  • Today’s SL Flickr Pick: Thought-Proving Images By Sheldon Bergman

    Losing their heads for love

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

    I discovered Sheldon Bergman by checking out Roseleiya’s favorites. When I paged down and saw “Losing Their Heads for Love”, I laughed out loud. I love how he made the metaphorical literal. His photostream is not very big. There are 31 photos, but all of them are thought-provoking and thoughtful

    More thoughtful pictures are up next, click here:

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  • SL At the End of Major Innovations After Uplift? (Comment of the Week)

    Second Life scripting LSL C Sharp Jim Purbrick

    My post on Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's long-ignored C#-in-Second Life integration provoked many "Oh what could have been" responses, both here and across social media. (Especially poignant to read posts by other former Lindens, remembering this project fondly, if bittersweetly.) For example, this comment from reader Pulsar, who not only bemoans the loss of this C# feature, but who also sees it as a sign of Linden Lab's waning interest in innovation:

    I can imagine what SL could have been with C# and many other things.

    Second Life instead has been a story of poor decisions, missed opportunities, half-baked new features, that also introduce new serious, user-experience hampering, bugs… that get fixed after ages if never.

    Now Linden Lab can't even fix the world map, broken since several months ago. Preview grid (Aditi) inventory can no longer be synchronized since November 2020. Screenshots still tend to fail to upload to my.secondlife, teleport failures, objects not showing up in the viewer until you right click and so on. All stuff that shouldn't have passed any serious QA check in first place.

    "It kind of works and it doesn't explode entirely" seems the way to go for Linden Lab.

    It would be great having C# in SL, but, yeah, VRChat allows that indirectly. I don't expect anything competitive coming out from Linden Lab anymore. Other virtual worlds are implementing anything that Linden Lab should have done, never did and probably will never do. People used to SL would be amazed to try out any other virtual world and see that it just works without falling apart. None of those can fully replace SL for now (in general, while subjectively it depends on what you do), but the strong points are getting fewer and fewer, while SL is being surpassed in so many other areas.

    My strong sense is Second Life is now basically in maintenance mode, and that the user base shouldn't expect any major innovations that might drastically impact the existing ecosystem or hurt the world's steady profit, now that it's going directly into the hands of a massive holding company.

    Anyway, the ironic thing about all these recent technical shortfalls is that they're happening after the completion of moving SL to the Amazon web cloud, dubbed "Uplift" — perhaps the last major innovation to the platform.  As reader Sally Crofton notes:

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