Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Justice’s “Surreal” portrays a broken-hearted woman who hides her face in her arms so we cannot see that she is crying, perhaps. The description describes the surreal aspect of broken relationships, the movement from caring so very much to not at all. How does that happen? It’s easier to understand moving from love to hate than from love to indifference. How can a person truly be indifferent to someone they once loved?
Last Friday I got an an official statement from Linden Lab on a subscription problem that impacted many SL merchants on Marketplace:
At this time, affected Residents and merchants should be fully refunded for L$ charges on any erroneous transactions related to Wednesday's outage with our service provider. We apologize for the frustration and thank everyone for their patience. As always, the best place to get updates about such situations is on our status blog.
If you're wondering what that is, or if you were affected, read on for details, originally published on August 7th here:
Above: Imogen and her partner in Resonance – Voice and Hangout (SLurl below)
"Blackout August" is the name of a proposal from SL content creator Imogen, a call for the Second Life community to take a break from the endless, often monotonous and frustrating loop of weekend shopping events — and instead, to explore the virtual world itself.
"This movement was never about shutting Second life down, it was about stepping back," as she puts it to me. "Some people are lost in the shopping loop and others genuinely enjoy the shopping simulator. But let's be honest… events and weekend sales have turned SL into a nonstop digital mall and it's affecting everything, even the Linden Exchange.
"There's little sense of community left. Too many treat SL like it's Etsy with avatars. and here's the truth: if your business is built on a solid foundation, one month of pause wouldn't destroy it. In fact, a reset might be the very thing that brings real connection and better business back." (In fact, many or most mainstores are amazing places to visit in themselves*, and as I've reported, most SL brands make more money from mainstore sales, rather than events.)
If Imogen's idea resonates, she has some personal recommendations of SL sims to visit — click the link for the map/SLurl:
What you’re watching above is a Second Life birthday / nightclub party for Emily Silkstone, but also one of the coolest combinations of gen AI and the virtual world I’ve seen so far. She converted her club, Basilica, into a kind of self-contained Second Life bubble that floats through the real world, to the shock and surprise of people gazing inside. But adding another layer of virtual to the experience, most of the people in the real world are actually AI-generated.
“There’s a green sphere around the club,” she tells me, explaining how she did it, “so I streamed with an alt and she just de-rendered the club. So she only saw the dance floor and a green screen. In OBS, I replaced the green screen with the footage of the RL people. The people watching the avies are AI-rendered in Veo3 from Google.”
She also incorporated stock footage which is meant to ironically reflect Second Life culture:
“The real life video showed the things we do in SL too, shopping, partying and, bit of kinky stuff,” she adds, laughing. “So the concept was: humans looking at avatars, but also avatars looking at humans.”
But wait, there’s yet another layer of recursion to the experience:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Katie Horten posted this great pic of her in a field with some sheep and a rather old tractor. I love the bluish tinge to this picture.
I was thinking about tractors today because they had a big tractor pull at the county fair and my niece’s granddaughter, my great-grandniece, competed. She is still in high school and was the youngest competitor. She was also the only female competitor. And she came in first place! I am so crazy proud. Anyway, that led me to looking at the tractors of Second Life and I have to report that most residents do not take good care of their tractors, leaving them out in the field to rust. Where are the Quonset huts to park them in?
Camus once wrote, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
And the Internet replied: lol no
Remember Monument, the incredible VRChat world which has no other purpose than to gather together and build an infinite, Tower of Babel-like edifice into the sky? The construction is still happening now, but with an added (probably inevitable) twist:
Instead of fetching bricks, painstakingly climbing up the high tower, and placing those bricks at the summit… someone has figured out how to automate thi building process.
Again, Monument has no explicit goals and certainly no rewards. The sole point of building the Monument is to be with other VRChat players from around the world, engaged together in this task for its own sake. A work of collective art.
But now, that art project is being gamed. Even though gaming it also has no goal:
Pelayo Martin posted the banner showing his fabulous “Amazon” was being used for a group header. Intrigued, I looked for the full picture and it was so much more than I expected. I love how he frames his head with the falling leaves. It is truly extraordinary.
Launched in late April, Linden Lab’s Creator Partnership Program is one of the most ambitious bids by the company to grow Second Life in recent history. As part of my special Patreon report on the state of the Second Life economy, I talked to the program's founders, Marketing VP Brett Linden and Steeltoe Linden (Manager of Product & UX Design), for their advice on the kind partnerships they are looking for, and the best practices creators should follow, when creating a submission.
When we talked in June, Linden Lab had received nearly 500(!) submissions. So here's some of Brett's advice on getting your proposal the best chance possible for a green light:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 