New World Notes

LOOK: Artist Blends Real Life Photos of Herself With Her Second Life Avatar in Midjourney to Amazing Effect

Five faces of Whiskey Monday and her IRL owner -- via her Flickr

You can create an avatar based on yourself in Midjourney, but famed Second Life artist Whiskey Monday went a step further, combining multiple images of her SL avatar with photos of herself in real life to create an incredible new persona. 

"I put my RL pics first, and then it generated a Midjourney version of me," Whiskey explains. "Then I added SL pics, and did the same thing, and then I blended them all in several steps. I found that Midjourney doesn't do well with glasses, so I tried an older pic without glasses." (See above.)

In the process, she learned something about Whiskey in SL and Whiskey IRL:

"I used to try hard to make my avatar look like RL me. But over the past couple of years, I’ve stopped caring so much and have just played with new faces for Whiskey. I think it would be interesting to try this again with an older Whiskey face. But what I learned this round is that I still have a certain look, even though Whiskey is less like Jenn." (I.E. Whiskey's offline owner.)

Here's some other variations courtesy Ms. Day:

Fashion Friday: Bridgerton / Historic Second Life Cosplay Ideas

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

LK is a Flickr microblogger. This picture is Waiting for Bridgerton which is a great title since fans do not know when Season Three will begin. I love the dress and the dogs which are so perfect for the scene and marvel that she manages to take a regency dress and make it seem kawaii while she does it. The exciting thing about LK is she shows how to do more than just credits in a Flickr microblog.

• Dress: [Nobel Creations] Antoinette Dress This stunning dress is made 4 Maitreya and Legacy and comes in Cream, Floral and Gray, all with a pink or gold choice. Here's shown Floreal in the pink and gold option.

For another pastel confection, click here:

GTA Online Roleplay Tips from Top Second Life YouTuber Meela Vanderbuilt!

Meela Vanderbuilt is one of Second Life's top YouTubers and she recently expanded her fun, chatty, seriously glamorous brand of videos into the world of GTA Online roleplay. (Watch above.) Here's her expert take on the similarities and differences between roleplay in GTA versus SL:

"The general concept is the same. GTA is more focused on voice role play and the majority of Second Life role play is text based. Over the years, SL role play has evolved from strict guidelines and paragraph-emoting roleplay to various types existing, including just playing out different lifestyles and not focusing much on the delivery, just the overall story.

"The later is closest to Grand Theft Auto roleplay. In GTA, people create a character, have a general background story and then navigate through cities as that character. Story progression will depend on their interactions with other characters and the features of the role play server.

"Servers are comparable to Second Life sims. They’re independently owned and will have different features or stories even though they share the same general framework of GTA’s Los Santos. A lot are centered around crime because of the nature of GTA, so gangs, police, general civilians may be a large part. Some cities may focus on the university, some on commerce and business ownership, etc."

As with Second Life, you can customize your avatar quite a bit in GTA Online, but options vary from server to server -- and unfortunately, are still somewhat limited for women and non-white avatars:

VRChat Groups Launches in Open Beta; IBM/SL Vet Andrew Sempere Helping With System Design!

This is actually more of a milestone for VRChat than the Sony body trackers I mentioned earlier this week, and that was also huge -- VRChat just launched a group function in open beta:

Groups is a huge system that we think is going to change VRChat forever. Most of the features we’ve mentioned today will be released in the first, groundwork stage of Groups. Others will be released – along with polishing dictated by your feedback – in the weeks following the launch of Groups. We want to push these updates out relatively quickly, as we’d like to get Groups up and running as fast as possible.

While this group feature has long been in development by the startup, it's notable that a Second Life veteran is helping with its progress: Andrew Sempere, recently hired as VRChat's Senior Systems Designer, who was a key member of IBM's Second Life team back in the day.

While VRC and SL's group systems are very different (watch the video above), they share some commonalities with the thought of Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom and her theory of collective action:

Gorgeous SL Landscape Photos & Teleport Links from Mr. Badass (Yes)

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

Since Mr. Badass’ hay bale sent me off on a hay bale tangent yesterday, I jumped back to his stream today to give it the attention it deserves. I love his stream, a mix of gorgeous landscapes and candid pics of him having fun. “Morning Haze’ is at Endless Birdlings Flat [To teleport, click here] and shows that even though we think of industrial sites as blights on the landscape, they have their own sort of stark beauty. 

For more of Mr. Badass’ gorgeous landscapes, click here:

Watch: This Sexy Platform Game is Actually an Ad for a Steampunk Brand in Second Life

In the platform game of Love, you only win when the final boss gets hugged. And while this looks like a fun iPhone game, it's actually an ad for Sky Pirates steampunk decor by D-LAB. Though come to think of it, this also shows how Second Life machinima is a great tool for pre-visualizing games and movies. 

It's by Teal Aurelia, who also created the acclaimed tribute to SL artists we watched recently. (More on her process here.) There was some debate on documentary versus green screen SL machinima (Teal's technique), and this is another demonstration of how green screen creates the opportunity to showcase great Second Life content in a new, high quality context.

There's a Community of Virtual Photographers Inspired by the Famous Haystack of Walsh County, a Second Life Sim Inspired by Walsh County, ND

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

After seeing Pedro’s haystack in “Walsh County” and recognizing it as THE HAYSTACK [See stories One, Two, and Three] I thought it might be fun to collect some more pictures of the famous haystack of Walsh County. I looked for the Flickr group devoted to it, with hundreds of haystack photos, and noticed that the sim was inspired by Walsh County, ND.

I know Walsh County. I lived there for four months when my sister was paralyzed by a spider bite from a brown recluse. I left fifth grade about a month early to go to their farm and take care of her, the kids, and the housekeeping. No wonder these images speak to me. I love Pedro’s picture because it catches the field when flax is in bloom. It’s such a beautiful sight to see these pale blue blankets of flowers extending for acres in all directions. 

For more haystacks, click here:

Artist Feeds Her Childhood Diary Into an AI Chatbot -- And Has a Moving Conversation With Her Younger Self

What you're looking at above is an excerpt from a moving conversation between tech artist Michelle Huang, and Michelle Huang as a young girl.

"I trained an AI chatbot on my childhood journal entries - so that I could engage in real-time dialogue with my 'inner child'," as she recently explained on Twitter:

I kept diaries for about 10+ years of my life, writing almost everyday — about my dreams, fears, secrets... I used GPT-3 as my playground, and ended up taking samples of text from a bunch of different entries that I felt were representative of my personality and values during that time... this way, i could accurately simulate what it would be like to talk to my childhood self, based on real data sources during that time period.

Michelle tells me she learned something crucial about herself by engaging with this simulation of her younger self:

"I would say, for me personally - the kindness and understanding I felt from my 'past self' helped me untangle some knots and stuckness that I felt," as she puts it. "It illuminated to me how hard I was on myself, but how much I extended understanding to others. It felt really rewarding to receive this kindness as well, from a younger version of myself.

"From a broader learnings [perspective], what stood out to me was the ability for technology to be used for mental health and wonder."

I also see amazing potential in this for NPCs and avatars. Imagine entire digital personae you can engage with that are directly based on yourself. Or for that matter, NPCs directly based on novelists, poets, and public speakers from history and fiction.

Michelle agrees on that front:

"This is the stuff I think that has the most interesting ramifications: more broadly, more immersive human / computer interface loops, from conversation with virtual therapists to in-game interactions for virtual worlds, given there is user input, AI could be used to train highly customizable responses or generate unique storylines per use."

It could even become the seed of a new virtual world product:

Watch: VRChat Partners With Sony On New Mobile-Based Motion Capture Product

This announcement from VRChat is impressive for many reasons:

Mocopi is supported in VRChat! We teamed up with Sony to integrate their mobile motion capture solution, on both PCVR and Quest!

Watch Mocopi in action above. It's a much more user-friendly way of doing motion capture, and relatively affordable at $358:

Today's Second Life Flickr Pick: Stunning Avatar Portraits by Yoli

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

Yoli’s “Follow me down where the waters run deep. I’ll let you drown in the worst of me” is beautiful to look at, but the title suggests some malice that we can’t quite see. Still, just looking at the picture, we know there is a story there. Perhaps this is a female Narcissus, so drawn to her own reflection she drowns. However, there is a bit too much movement in the water, the reflection must be distorted or is that the “worst bof me.” The picture is inspired by Joy Oladukun’s “Breathe Again.” Click here to listen.

For more stories that combine beauty and story, click here:

Monday Memory: How the Metaverse Illustrates the Limits of Libertarianism

With a certain tech billionaire currently railing against companies including Apple withdrawing their ads from Twitter, it's a good time to remember a fairly related story from 2007-2008 -- when Linden Lab began to pivot away from its libertarian approach to governing Second Life content:

In 2006, for example, Philip Rosedale refused to intercede against Ginko, the SL bank with a high rate of return, which many Residents accused of being a Ponzi scheme.  That same year, in response to Residents protests against age play (i.e. simulated avatar-based pedophilia), Robin Linden said it would be forbidden "[i]f this activity were in public areas"-- implying that it was still permissible in private.  Casinos and other gambling institutions, of course, were rampant over the land.

The reversals started last year, continuing into this one: 

Top 3 Posts Celebrating SL's Avatar-Based Drag Community, Smart Metaverse Marketing & a New New World Video!

• New World Video: We Chat By A Roaring Fire About Midjourney Avatars, Metaverse Predictions, SL’s New VAT-Free Offer & Much More!
• Celebrating The Drag Queen Community In Second Life
• Monday Memory: Greenies Showed How To Do Metaverse Marketing Right -- With Community Creator Participation & Genuine Delight

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: