- The Making of Second Life’s Mobile App: Inside Its Multi-Year, Multi-Team, Multi-Country, Hilariously Buggy Development
- Second Life's Strange Connection to the 2024 Presidential Election
- Amazingly, You Can Now Import Your Minecraft Worlds Into VRChat. Here's How That's Possible.
- The Paris Olympics' Headless Marie Antoinette is Now a Second Life Avatar! Plus Other Amazing Images by Loute Diesel
- Survey Results: Second Life Community Strongly Agrees with Anonymous Creator's Acerbic Rant About SL Economy
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
The Got Blog Bloggers Challenge was launched by Sasy Scarborough of Sasy Scarborough dot com and Gorgeous Aurelia of JuicyBomb, who also created the I Heart SL feed. They are advocating that more people blog on their own blog site that they control rather than be subject to the ups and downs of Flickr or Primfeed and their changing Terms of Service.
“Photoblog style posting, also known as posting images with credits only, has become popular in the last few years, using platforms like Flickr or Social Media to provide exposure to content. For myself, and many others, it is a Blog/Website that engages with the public, both within Second Life, and outside of it in a more tangible way. With the number of changes occurring on Social Media and places like Flickr, we are seeing a return to the idea of Blogger having Blogs… and we are here for it. We encourage it, we applaud it, and we are excited about it… so we wanted to get those that have been Blogging that way all along to engage with their community and show us what, where and why.”
Sasy took up her challenge, click here:
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New and free for all on my Patreon: Second Life’s long-awaited mobile app launched last June to Premium subscribers, and is showing decent adoption so far. While development and design was led by a team at Linden Lab, the company had a secret weapon in its creation: Sine Wave Entertainment, the developer of Unity-based virtual worlds Sinespace and Breakroom.
For the first time, Sine Wave CEO Adam Frisby tells the story of helping create Second Life’s Unity-based mobile app, shares all the strange and hilarious bugs which popped up along the way — plus offers tips for both users and SL creators who want to get the most from their iOS/Android experience.
Read it all here, and please consider subscribing to my Patreon for more articles and premium benefits like this.
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Suki Blossom’s “New Horizons” made me think of those Facebook memes about kids nowadays that laments the many things today’s youth won’t be able to enjoy because parents monitor their children more closely and seldom allow unsupervised play. I grew up in the era of “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” and was allowed to ride my bike all over town, to any of three swimming lakes within twenty miles, and hang with my friends wherever. The railroad tracks were a favorite place. Flattening pennies by laying them on the tracks so the train ran over them was great entertainment. So was walking on the rails as Suki is here. We had so much fun and I feel bad for the kids who are denied the chance to do risky and silly things.
For more of Suki’s adventures, click here:
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If the Trump/Vance 2024 presidential campaign seems odd to you (to say the least), here's another bit of weirdness to contemplate:
Without the early success of Second Life, it's very likely that the Trump/Vance campaign would not even exist.
I'm quite serious. But to understand what I mean, we need to go back into ancient history — by which I mean 2004:
While it launched in 2003, Second Life first began gaining heavy media attention in 2004, after creator Linden Lab made an innovative announcement for the time: They made it possible to trade the virtual world's internal currency, Linden Dollars, for US dollars.
"The world will increasingly buy and sell and trade these things we are making [in Second Life]," as Philip Rosedale explained to me back then. "So I think that real digital worlds will naturally have real economies and real exchange with real life."
The move drove growing Silicon Valley excitement around the Second Life economy, leading to the hype wave of 2006-2008 fueled by the infamous BusinessWeek cover story and a slew of other coverage. Linden Dollars were mainly used to buy content in SL itself, though people began to experiment with using it to buy non-SL items. (For instance, someone experimented with selling PC graphics cards for L$.)
And then, in 2009, Bitcoin was invented.
The digital currency attracted growing excitement among hardcore technophiles, but the problem back then was this: There was no easy, legal way to buy and sell Bitcoin for US$.
Enter Linden Dollars. As I write in my book:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
The 2024 Olympic opening ceremony (watch here) was designed around the history and cultural influences of France. In the United States where we barely teach our own history, our lack of context provoked much sturm und drang in social media.
Many people were shocked by the headless woman during the Liberté thematic portion of the ceremony despite countless books and movies about the hapless Marie Antoinette.
Loute Diesel was inspired to recreate that tableau and it is magnificent. And for you roleplayers, she even provides credits:
– Dress : Pendulum – Revenant / Midnight Order
– Glitter tattoo and material : Effervescence – Sparkly Eve
– Hair: S-CLUB ANTOINETTE
– [NF] – THE HEADLESS HUD*
For more images from Loute Diesel , click here:
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Here's the reader response to that widely-discussed rant from an anonymous SL creator on all the challenges plaguing the Second Life economy. With 247 responses — quite a large sample, as these things go — a strong majority of 57% said they agreed with the essay, Strongly or Mostly. (Contrasted with just 16% in the Mostly Disagree or Completely Disagree camp.)
Personally I had expected the reaction to be much more evenly mixed; though to be fair, questions like these probably have a natural bias toward the negative. (If everything's going fairly great, why spend any time complaining in an online survey?)
If you missed it, read the whole essay here, where the unnamed creators inveighs against entitled customers, exploitative event owners, and lax bloggers; evidently, it all struck a chord among the SL community. While some of these complaints hold true in most other realms — offline, we come across entitled customers quite often at our local department store! — I think it fundamentally points to a need for more growth among the SL user base, so that there are other internal markets beyond high end mesh fashion, which comprises the majority of the Second Life economy.
As reader and creator Peter Strindberg puts it in comments, offering some advice as well:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Iggypop Starflare is celebrating the Olympics in Second Life with her hybrid Second Life pictures featuring places and events in SL with her own hand-drawn graphic characters. Here she is competing in the Equestrian events. On her Flickr feed, you can also see her playing beach volleyball, judo, and weightlifting.
I wrote her a note asking how she went about creating her pictures and got the most delightful answer. I will just share her pictures and let her tell her story.
Thank you so very much for your surprising and wonderful message.
I will share this with you, for it is mostly just about factual.
My favorite form of digital art is creating digital drawings. I have tried to do Digital photography within Second Life to mixed results.
Unfortunately for some time my meanderings in Second Life have been deeply curtailed by circumstances in Real Life. I still love Second life, and the many friends I have made there. So many wonderful people, and having participated in so many glorious adventures.
I now mostly capture my Second Life memories, using my drawings as stories. The drawings begin as pencil sketches, then are scanned to create digital files. Opening these files in Photoshop, I ink them, and then color, generally using many layers. The layering helps me add some various backgrounds. To hopefully create an overall image that others will find to be fun, and hopefully evoke a smile or two.
To explain how I came to use this technique, I shall share with you my autobiography, which is more or less completely, sort of, kind of, pretty much exactly the way it happened.
For her just about factual autobiography, click here:
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Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介 します
Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 