New World Notes

Dutchie Black Friday Weekend Sale: 30% Off the Entire Adult Store! (Partner News)

From today until next Monday, everything in the Adult store of Dutchie (a proud New World Notes sponsoring partner), is 30% off. And who knows, you may get to meet Dutchie's elegant owner herself! [Click here to teleport] 

Thanksgiving Week Watch: We Chat by a Roaring Fire About Midjourney Avatars, Metaverse Predictions, SL’s New VAT-Free Offer & Much More!

For our Thanksgiving week New World Video, Isabelle Cheren and I chat about Second Life’s new VAT-free plan, how to avatar-ize yourself in Midjourney, and play a game of SL Flickr Cliche Bingo! (And get way too deep discussing male avatar, um, attachments.) Plus viewer questions on metaverse addiction, enjoying Second Life with little L$, and predictions for next year.

And for the Thanksgiving holidays, here's more gratitude to Cajsa, who makes New World Notes beautiful with her Flickr column. Please consider sending her a nice Thanksgiving tip.

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Autumnal Images from the Virtual World

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

Isis Barom’s “Snow comes to Cherishville” is a pleasing introduction to the season, It has that storybook quality that suggests all stories have happy endings full of food, friends,, and family. It’s a slow, gentle snowfall that makes for fluffy snowballs. If there are no snow angels to be found, I will be sorely disappointed. [To teleport to Cherishville, click here]

For more lovely landscapes, click here:

Celebrating the Drag Queen Community in Second Life

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

Lady Arsenika Satanis’ shot this fab pop art self-portrait. I love her style -- and love to see that drag queens are active in Second Life. Her picture, “Pop Art Fantasy” is the apotheosis of drag queen glamor. It seems appropriate to amplify and honor the beauty and courage of drag queens after this weekend’s tragedy. 

Club Q’s drag show in Colorado Springs had just ended and the DJ had started playing when he was wounded, shot in the back, by a man radicalized and incited by political hate rhetoric. It is painfully ironic that the shooting was at midnight as the Day of Trans Remembrance began. While drag queens are not trans women, they are targeted along with people who are trans by a political party that centers itself on hate. The political strategist behind the current moral panic over drag queens and trans women advocates conflating the two because that makes them sound more frightening. 

As someone who has gone to countless drag shows, lurid is not the word I would use. Fun, glamorous, exciting, hilarious, friendly, warm, and welcoming are more apt descriptions. See for yourself at CLAT Drag Club [To teleport, click here.] The acronym stands for Club Legends Art Theater. Or you could try out the London club Madam Lala’s [To teleport, click here.]

For more Second Life drag artistry, click here:

Monday Memory: Greenies Showed How to Do Metaverse Marketing Right -- With Community Creator Participation & Genuine Delight (2007)

I recently mentioned how IBM's presence in Second Life led to an unexpected backlash, so here's a classic example of metaverse-based marketing done right -- "Greenies", an SL sim rendered in a giant-sized apartment users could explore like tiny ants:

[Greenies is] from a small British development company called Rezzable, which plans to use it for retail and events.  But where SL sites for large corporations like Dell, Sun, and Reebok attract but a few hundred visitors, Greenies is, with little official promotion, already bringing in several thousand visits per week. 

To make it a true Second Life experience, you need to bring your own sense of manic fun: explore the place with two Transformers, say, then a dancing fly and a silent crow on a WWII fighter plane, then maybe later on a flying hotdog, with reggae music streaming around you all the while.

But make no mistake, Greenies is still part of a company project-- just a rare one where the company's marketing demands don't choke out any possibility of genuine delight. 

Greenies was the site of a successful L'Oreal campaign, with giant-sized renditions of the real life product situated in the apartment. (Pictured at right.)

Two other things that made Greenies notable as a case study:

It hired creators from within the Second Life community, people who knew the tools best and how to make experiences that were maximally delightful.

And it also incorporated other real life brands into the experience in an organic way: 

Top Posts Last Week Including: Meta Employees Surveyed Post-Meta Era, How to Avatarize Yourself in Midjourney & Play SL Flickr Cliché Bingo

Wagner James Au author photo + "hipster starfleet commander" in Midjourney

• Visit In VRChat: 5 Impressive Worlds Inspired By Levels From Final Fantasy VII, Dark Souls, Legend Of Zelda, Sonic The Hedgehog & Team Fortress 2
• SL Flickr Always Showing You The Same Tired Tropes? Play Cliché Bingo!
• Midjourney Can Turn Your IRL Photo Into A Supercool Avatar - Here's How
• New World Notes Seeking Experienced Advertising/Bizdev Partners
• Meta Employee Survey: 82% Of Staffers Believe More Could Have Been Done To Prevent Current Layoffs
• Do You Prefer Green Screen Or "Documentary" Machinima?

Visit in VRChat: 5 Impressive Worlds Inspired by Levels from Final Fantasy VII, Dark Souls, Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog & Team Fortress 2

As a fun way of exploring VRChat and checking out the creative power of the platform this weekend, here's five VRChat worlds inspired on famous video game environments. (The above of course is City 17 from the Half-Life franchise, though it's currently defunct.)

Here's five more recommended and documented by Bradlee101, one of my favorite VRChat explorers on VRChat, based on spaces from Final Fantasy VII, Dark Souls, Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Team Fortress 2:

Friday Fashion: Fun & Fanciful Styles from SL Blogger Karalee Aeon

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

Nobody Does It Like Karalee is a fun and fanciful blog, but I may never forgive Karalee Aeon for suggesting it be expressed as the Saralee jingle and introducing a vicious earworm that is going to trouble me for hours. Her post “Amantha” features a delightful woodland sprite, a dragonfly fairy perhaps. She does a marvelous job of making pieces from different creators look like they were made for each other. 

• Wings- [Vaak] Bento Dragonfly Wings
• Outfit- :[P&E]:– Keraves – MEGAPACK @ warehouse
• Umbrella- ~MR~Mushroom Umbrella
• Tattoo 1-+ Abyssal Flower Tattoo FATPACK + {Aii & Ego}
• Tattoo 2- [AERTH]  Saturnalia Body Tattoos @ we love roleplay ends 11/28

For more fantastical fashion, click here:

SL Flickr Always Showing You the Same Tired Tropes? Play Cliché Bingo!

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

Is there a song you used to love but have come to dislike because it is played over and over and over again? I feel the same way about Second Life photo cliches. There’s nothing wrong with them, they might even be excellent, but they aren’t exciting because they have been done too many times. To make it a bit more fun, it’s in the form of a Bingo game. Sadly, I am certain everyone will often hit Bingo before they hit Page Down. 

Some notes on these tropes:

Midjourney Can Turn Your IRL Photo Into a Supercool Avatar - Here's How

Update, 6:35pm PT: I'm having trouble replicating this process with my own photo. If you have advice/tips, please post in Comments! 

Update 2, 11/18: Finally got this to work on my own photo. The original instruction included brackets and quotation marks but those aren't necessary when communicating with Midjourney.

The photo at top left is Nick Yee, founder of gamer market research firm Quantic Foundry; the others are variations of Nick in different genres, as interpreted by Midjourney. 

"It was always possible to do image-based prompts in Midjourney," Nick explained on social media recently, "but they used to be treated very loosely and couldn't be used to replicate faces. The newest version has much stickier image-based prompting."

Here's how you do that: Find a photo of yourself online, and then enter something like this into Midjourney's image prompt:

/imagine <image link> fantasy-hunter-warrior

/imagine <image link> futuristic-cyberpunk-hacker

/imagine <image link> captain-america

(Or instead of Captain America/cyberpunk/etc., whatever evocative genre terms you want to use, of course.)

The results are pretty impressive, especially since AI image readers have a notorious problem with racial bias.

New World Notes Seeking Experienced Advertising/Bizdev Partners

As I plow away on writing Why the Metaverse Matters, I'm also planning to expand New World Notes' reach next year. And I definitely need help doing that.

Are you interested in being New World Notes' advertising executive and/or bizdev partner? Contact me via DM on Twitter  or Discord (WJA #3523) or even actual e-mail (wjamesau at Gmail).

This is an opportunity to partner with brands that New World Notes readers would find valuable, and ideally, would also become an ongoing partnership. (More on that below.)

New World Notes is the longest running and most read metaverse/virtual world blog with a primary focus on Second Life and its many spinoffs, metaverse platforms, and related technologies, often cited by major outlets like the New York Times, the BBC, Bloomberg, Wired, and others. According to Similar Web, we typically attract 150,000 visits a month (sometimes more, sometimes less). It's also the most-read general news/culture blog with a major focus on Second Life.

We Love This SL Tribute to Anastasiya Dobrovolskaya's Viral Fox Photos

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

I always love a photo tribute when someone recreates a photo taken by a real life artist or photographer. It’s much more impressive, though, when the person shows the original so we can all appreciate her effort to honor the original while asserting her own point of view into the picture. With “Ladies” you can see Misaki did not do an exact copy, but instead got her inspiration from the original and then changed it up with the poses, a full body shot, and a more subdued lighting with less contrast. If she had linked to the original, her work would have been even more impressive because how else can we recognize the homage? 

To see her inspiration, click here:

Meta Employee Survey: 82% of Staffers Believe More Could Have Been Done to Prevent Current Layoffs

We saw Twitter employees' opinion of the company in the Elon Musk era last week, now here's a survey of Meta employees taken as the social media giant started laying off thousands of its own staff. Courtesy of Blind, the anonymous messaging app, this survey reflects the opinion of 1,179 verified Meta professionals in the U.S., and was taken between November 10 to 11, with a reported 4% margin of error.

The most striking answer is above: 82% of Meta staffers believe more could have been done last year to avoid the layoffs rolling out now. The way the question is phrased, this probably reflects at least some Meta employees blaming the company for spending many billions on making its metaverse platform. We saw a similar sentiment in anonymous Blind comments by Meta employees recently reported by Business Insider:

"The Metaverse will be our slow death," one user, who called themselves a senior software developer, posted on Wednesday. They added: "Mark Zuckerberg will single-handedly kill a company with the meta-verse." 

Zuckerberg apologized to staff for the need to cut 11,000 jobs, admitting that he "got this wrong".

In fairness, Meta's recent woes are more directly attributable to Apple's recent policy shifts which hurt advertising revenue collected via Facebook's iPhone, but Meta spending some $36 billion on metaverse-related technology is still a massive opportunity cost. 

Related to that, compare and contrast Meta employees' opinion of the company, versus Twitter employees:

This Artist Makes Second Life Screenshots Look Like Dramatic Movie Stills -- And Includes Teleport Links to Where She Shot Them!

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

Sare’s photostream has remarkable verisimilitude. The pictures look like they are stills from a movie, a gothic movie like Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey. Romantic-looking women staring out to see are the grist of gothic. I love how the picture is divided between the earth and the air and water in a nearly perfect diagonal line. The composition is exquisite. This was taken at Birdlings Flat. [To teleport, click here.]

For more, click here:

Do You Prefer Green Screen or "Documentary" Machinima? (Comment of the Week)

Good thoughtful comments from Kate Nova, reflecting on that amazing (and heavily post-processed) Second Life machinima from Teal Aurelia:

It's a gorgeous video! And a very cool "how to" companion video. [Watch above] Wonderful work by Aurelia and I wish her a great career journey!

One of the reasons people sometimes go gaga over Christopher Nolan films is that his fiction is "real". If a 747 crashes into a building, he buys a 747 and crashes it into a building. All the films with CGI 747s are amazing. But there's something both visually and conceptually powerful about Nolan making "real fiction".

I love Aurelia's story and vision. Yet the idea of "bringing all these influences together" while beautiful and wonderfully intentioned, is "fake". The different SL personalities that we see walking together never did walk together. It's all (excellent) green screen. [See above]

There's nothing wrong with any of this, and yes, the results are impressive!

For herself, Kate makes the case for "documentary" machinima:

Apple Hiring Junior Engineer to Help Develop "a 3D Mixed-Reality World"

Intriguing new job opening from Apple for a AR/VR Network Engineer stating "In this role you will work closely with other developers and build tools and frameworks to enable connected experiences in a 3D mixed-reality world."

I found the job listing via this Bloomberg story which interprets it in the broadest way possible:

The most interesting job listing is one that specifically calls out the development of a 3D mixed-reality world, suggesting that Apple is working on a virtual environment that is similar to the metaverse—though don’t expect Apple to embrace that term. Its marketing chief said at a recent event that metaverse is “a word I’ll never use.”

It's definitely interesting, but as with previous rumors of Apple about to go big on a mixed reality Metaverse and XR headsets, I'm still curbing my enthusiasm:

Top 6 Posts Including a Dazzling Tribute to SL Artists & What Twitter Employees Really Think About Twitter Under Elon

• BREAKING: 89% Of Twitter Employees Believe Twitter Won't Succeed Under Elon Musk; 95% Say Recent Layoffs Not Done With Empathy -- Blind Survey
• Top Second Life Fashion Brand Opens Up A Shop In Zepeto; Truth Hawks Compares & Contrasts The Platforms
• WATCH: Amazing Machinima Tribute To Second Life's Artist Community Is Also Among The Best SL Machinimas Ever Made
• Powerful Scripting Update Coming Soon To Second Life - Here's How It'll Improve Interactive Experiences
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年10月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
• Monday Memory: When IBM's Metaverse Campus Was Flooded With A Labor Union Protesters Including A Large Angry Banana

Friday Fashion Blog: Home & Fashion Shopping Ideas from Her Sketchbook

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

Her Sketchbook is a beautiful blog by DanayaRed. It appeals to me a lot. Her recent post "Fox Mist" is just gorgeous. I love the rich color and it’s fun to see someone blogging the outdoors. In particular, the ruin drew me in. I noticed it says “Urgent” on the arch. Is this a very ancient E.R? 

• GOOSE - Elizabeth Arch > Cosmopolitan (Ends on 11/12)
• NOMAD // Old Ruins
• JIAN Gray Fox

For great casual fashion, click here:

BREAKING: 89% of Twitter Employees Believe Twitter Won't Succeed Under Elon Musk; 95% Say Recent Layoffs Not Done With Empathy -- Blind Survey

Just got some pretty amazing new data from Blind, the anonymous online community app for employees: In a survey of Twitter staff using the app conducted from November 7 to 10, a full 89% say they don't believe Twitter will succeed as the social network company's new CEO.  (See image above.) 

Based on incessant reports of major layoffs and resignations by top execs, I expected a large-ish percentage of Twitter's staff to have a negative outlook on Musk's leadership. But 9 in 10, nearly the entire company? This also suggest Musk's reported all-hands meetings and internal pep talks at Twitter have not helped morale -- nor has his general reputation as a tech genius capable of pulling off seemingly impossible tasks. (Historically, admired tech executives are able to build overall morale after a layoff.) 

Elon Musk's Twitter takeover has helped helped one online community, at least: The Twitter employees using Blind. 

"The increase in usage from Twitter employees has been incredible," Blind's Rick Chen tells me. "They now check Blind an average of four times a day compared to an average of two times a day six months ago (i.e., before news broke about Elon having bought a stake in the company). Twitter users are almost exclusively posting and reading content in the private company channel."

In fact, over three in four Twitter employees are now active Blind users. 

"We now have more than 6,100 users from Twitter on Blind, or more than 80% of all Twitter employees," says Chen. "About a quarter of our Twitter users signed up in the last six months (between March and October 2022)." [Update, November 14: As of last Friday, Chen tells me, "There are now more than 7,100 verified Twitter professionals on Blind or about 95% of the pre-layoff employee count!"]

This survey also asked Blind employees how fellow staffers were treated in the recent layoffs ordered by Musk:

Top Second Life Fashion Brand Opens Up a Shop in Zepeto; Truth Hawks Compares & Contrasts the Platforms

Happy Halloween! 🎃 SL fam have you ever tried @zepeto_official ? I was recently invited as an official creator and my little concept brand Super Fun reached Hot Creator status 🙌 Here's our @wednesdayaddams inspired outfit 🐈‍⬛🖤 pic.twitter.com/Q0dsLyrfuI

— Truth Hawks (@TruthHairSL) October 31, 2022

Truth Hawks, one of Second Life's most well-known and popular fashion brands, recently opened a shop in Zepeto, a quickly growing metaverse platform from South Korea. Truth was actually recruited by Zepeto the company to do so, Truth told me, but through his non-SL design services studio.

"I much prefer the standardized avatar to create from [in Zepeto]," says Truth, when asked to compare the two platforms.  "I think that's become a bit of a barrier to entry for SL creation-wise." 

That barrier is a whole other post in itself! But for this post I'll just highlight Truth's thoughts on Zepeto as a secondary market for other SL brands:

"If you're already creating 3D content in SL then the transition to Zepeto should be fairly easy. Most Zepetors only upload 1 or 2 variations of a creation, and as you only have to rig one shape, it could be a fun way to expand your brand with minimal time investment.

"Zepeto claims to have 15-20 million monthly users so I can see the potential, but I've just started out, so it's something you have to build up with inventory. SL is definitely more lucrative and I think always will be.

"I've read some [Zepeto] creators are making 6 figures and with it's large user base it seems possible. I'm not sure what the actual % split is, the currency is ZEMs and you can cash out a minimum of $103USD per 5000 ZEMs."

More from Truth on getting started with Zepeto:

Second Life Landscape Photos That Look Like Real World Paintings

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

“Lunaspina“ will have you asking is that real life or is it Second Life? Unfortunately, there are no teleports in life, but there is a teleport to this spot. Is this a She Shed? Is there some weird symbolism in a woman’s “room of her own” being outside the house in the yard.  [Teleport Link, click here] 

For more gorgeous landscapes, click here:

WATCH: Amazing Machinima Tribute to Second Life's Artist Community Is Also Among the Best SL Machinimas Ever Made

This jaw-droppingly awesome machinima, "Artists in SL", is a tribute to Second Life Flickr artists who inspired its creator, Teal Aurelia, and is in turn a tribute to Second Life as an artist's digital toolchest and community. I don't say this often, but it's also one of the best SL-based machinimas ever made in the metaverse platform's near-20 year history.  But please watch and judge for yourself.

Teal is a recent art school grad, and I sort of suspect we'll be seeing much more of her work for a growing fanbase. Her art degree was inspired by creating in Second Life:

"Making machinima in SL was one of the things that led me to my degree in animation," she tells me. "I started out learning real life wildlife documentary [filmmaking], but it didn’t really let me tell stories, so I tried filming in Second Life for fun. I was still limited by the animations I could find in-world.

"Obviously," she adds grinning, "the only solution was to get into ridiculous amounts of student debt and go study how to make things move myself."

Here's how she discovered Second Life and a glimpse behind her creative process: 

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Metaverse Pop Artist Rachelle Slade

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

Rachelle Slade loves to play with her screenshots and it shows. I am a fan of pop art so her visual play appeals. The title of this picture is “The secret, I think, is knowing when to stop…” Truer words. She disassembles and reassembles and creates a recognizable and fascinating portrait. She provides a musical soundtrack for every photo. For this pic, it’s "FineShrine" by Purity Ring. To listen, click here. 

For more playing with screenshots, click here:

Powerful Scripting Update Coming Soon to Second Life - Here's How It'll Improve Interactive Experiences

(1/24) There's a super great upgrade coming to @SecondLife scripting, that I don't think is getting great attention it should. Before I go on forever about why this is great and will fundamentally change #SL please consider a retweet and maybe a like - to help spread the word. :)

— NeoBokrug (@NeoBokrug) October 19, 2022

Longtime Second Life community scripter NeoBokrug (who keeps the legendary roleplay Wasteland regions running), has a meaty and important tweet storm (above) and blog post here highlighting LinksetData, a much-needed update to Linden Script Language. You should definitely share it with the LSL scripter in your life, but if you're not a scripter, the short version is: It'll make interactive experiences in Second Life much more powerful and persistent.

For instance, consider the Really Needy HUD (a former NWN partner), which turns Second Life into a first-person Sims-type roleplay game: 

Today's Second Life Flickr Pick: US Election Day Reminder to Vote!

Created for the 2020 election by Ryan Tailor, this image remains a perennial classic , along with its epigraph: "Not voting is not a protest. It is a surrender." 

More Election Day pics selected here from Casja, who's currently under the weather.