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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Opie Kiko’s “Come” is so clever and extraordinary, I had to share it right away. What a gorgeous picture. It reminds me of a common criticism that the background of an image should not be the same as the color of the subject’s dress. Well, Opie Kiko has just given a master class in how that’s not always the case.
For more of Opie’s genius pics, click here:
Ren Matsura – れんまつら never disappoints and I have featured the LETCIRREN blog before back in 2020. But Don’t Go Yet is too magical to not stop and share. I love this on so many levels. The utter shock of seeing an elephant on an old chaise lounge is the first delight, but then there is the perfection of the man posed so delicately at the far end, holding a tea cup with pinky extended, legs crossed. A perfect dandy! And then, suddenly, his feet aren’t touching the floor. The elephant has lifted him off the ground and he hasn’t lost a whit of his poise. His suit is immaculate and his shoes shine so perfectly.
For more from Ren, click here:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Shoko Tachikawa shoots storytelling pictures that are so charming. Here she is holding a bow and arrows made of metal with very little fletching which makes me wonder how well they fly. But in Second Life, that sort of thing does not matter. Scripts will make it fly. I love this picture, the contemplative look. She has long sleeves, which might be advisable with a metal bow. After all, if you hold the bow wrong, the string can whack your arm. A metal wire? Owwie!
I wonder if everyone did archery in their physical education classes in junior and senior high? We did. It was so much fun and among my favorite sections during the year.
For more great stories, click here:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Mogovtle’s art is a wonderful illustration of creative limitation, the idea that setting limits actually expands creativity, or as the artist Phil Hansen said, "We need to first be limited in order to become limitless.”
She limits her color palette to shades of black and white with touches of red, blue, and gold. But that does not mean her pictures are simple. Her pictures are ornate, baroque with their adornments of lace and filigree. So very beautiful. To see her photostream, it’s astonishing how creative and varied her work is within her aesthetic boundaries. This is “Kamilah” (above) featuring a feline who shows up occasionally in her pictures.
For more of her work, click here:
This 2024 prediction of mine came true sooner than I expected, as first reported by Matthew Ball this morning:
According to leading Roblox analytics service RTrack, Roblox had an estimated 354 million monthly active users in December 2023. That's an addition of 54 million from last June, when RTrack estimated Roblox to have 300 million MAU. A knowledgeable insider I trust tells me RTrack is a reliable service, by the way, so I'm inclined to believe these figures as roughly accurate — especially as they're in line with the company's publicly reported daily active users of 70 million.
In other words, yes: Roblox now has more monthly active users worldwide than the USA has people. (I.E. 336 million, give or take.)
Roblox the company has moved away from calling itself the Metaverse in the last year or two — likely to avoid the negative connotations created by failed usages of the term by Meta and various web3 startups — but did indeed describe itself as the metaverse in its very IPO filing:
Some refer to our category as the metaverse, a term often used to describe the concept of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces in a virtual universe. The idea of a metaverse has been written about by futurists and science fiction authors for over 30 years. With the advent of increasingly powerful consumer computing devices, cloud computing, and high bandwidth internet connections, the concept of the metaverse is materializing.
Given its record user growth, however, the term may soon be synonymous with Roblox itself.
Unsurprisingly, several developers and content creators who got their start with Second Life are now working full-time for Roblox (either for the company or on the UGC side). Richard Nelson, who was an engineer at Linden Lab for nearly 20 years, is now a senior dev at Roblox.
In my book, he described some of the secrets to the platform's success:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Lying Cat is an artist after my own heart. She combines the high-tech/low-life aesthetic of cyberpunk with the simplicity and visual appeal of pop art. Think Philip K. Dick goes to The Factory. Her pictures have the disciplined simplicity of Andy Warhol, but Warhol’s cultural critique focused on the dangerous ennui of mass consumption. Dick’s cultural critique was more systemic and dystopic. There was no time for ennui. Warhol is the early warning bell and Dick is the evacuation siren. We’re in their transhumanist world now.
She describes her artistic process with Second Life screenshots in her Flickr bio this way: “I edit them for fun, typically with a cyberpunk theme. I use the pre-PBR Alchemy viewer for shots. The only post-processing my photos undergo is my own editing with Pixelmator.”
For more from Lying Cat, click here:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 