New World Notes

Second Life Users: Media on a Prim Griefer Exploit Discovered; Update Your Firestorm Viewer!

Media on a Prim is a cool Second Life feature which enables users to stream web-based media content on primitives in the virtual world. It's also now being used for a griefer exploit that Linden Lab just patched up:

Today I was at a rental office and noticed a few people hanging around the welcome area, thought nothing of it then suddenly and simultaneously my viewer (Latest Firestorm) opened up search and some offensive words appeared in the text box, as well as a "create new group" window, with some errors appearing on the screen. I quickly left and closed out all these windows. It was quite a scary experience and I was only one click away from clicking the OK to create a random group at a L$100l cost. - AmerAaron

Fortunately, it's really just a griefer exploit and apparently not something that could be used for highly malicious hacking. As Firestorm QA rep Whirly Fizzle (yes) explains:

Midjourney Solely Credited as Article Illustrator in Major News Publication

The sharp eyes of New World Notes' image curator Cajsa Lilliehook caught what looks to be a pretty major breakthrough (or first step toward disaster, depending on your point of view): The Bulwark, a major US news analysis publication, is using Midjourney to create illustrations for their articles -- and crediting Midjourney as the image source. (As opposed to, say, an actual human illustrator.) From a cursory search, this seems to be the first example of Midjourney used for a non-tech, non-grassroots illustration by a professional publication that would normally pay a graphic artist and/or image bank like GettyImages or Shutterstock for work like this. 

So this is notable! Also notable: It's not very good. Meant to illustrate Trump's questionable legal defense fund, the image doesn't convey any of that context at all, and actually looks more like a pro-Trump graphic. (Except, that is, the "Save America" slogan is washed out by the background -- a sloppy look, whatever your political perspective.) In other words, a human illustrator would have done a much better job.

But then again, hiring a human is a lot more costly.

Top Posts: User-Made SL Commerce Tools Acquired by Linden Lab & I Talk About Metaverse Sex & Other Topics on a Steampunk Train

• Watch: Chatting Second Life, Metaverse News & Virtual Sex On A Steampunk Train
• The Community-Made Train Systems Of Second Life Are Over 15 Miles Long -- Take This Map To Start Riding!
• Linden Lab Buys User-Made Commerce System Too Valuable To The Second Life Community To Fail
• Best Laptops For Second Life: Recent MacBook Air Model Runs SL Surprisingly Well (With Some Graphics Settings Tweaked)
• Monday Memory: Before Mesh, Amazing Avatars Walked The Virtual World

Watch: Chatting Second Life, Metaverse News & Virtual Sex on a Steampunk Train

Just went live on YouTube: Episode 2 of New World New featuring Isabelle Cheren and me. This time we referenced Rydia's train map and shot the whole thing on a steampunk choo choo traveling through the SL mainland. Topics we discuss:

• Linden Lab's purchase of CasperTech
• Flickr's new Virtual Photograph category
• A VRChat explorer guide
• Mourning The Queen and others in virtual worlds.

Plus viewer questions from Gogo and Max Grafth: Will Second Life be around 10 years from now, and, of course, virtual sex: I.E., "Adult content: the make or break of virtual worlds?"

Friday Fashion: Styles for Male Avatars from Kai Wirsing

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

* SK * Hawat @ Engine Room is a recent post at Blue a blog by Kai Wirsing. I love the steampunk sensibility and the adorable zebra cat. A much more compliant cat than I have. I can barely get her to let me put her collar on. I just love his cravat. It is so lush. Most items are at the Engine Room event which starts on the 20th. For more info on the event and the teleport link when it opens, click here.

At Engine Room

• * SK * Hawat Giani by Bronte Denja
• * SK * Hawat Hat ( Resize ) 
• Blue Blood - Birdskull (Add)  by Cherelle Capra
• [A ] Inuit Shoes Legacy M Fatpack by Mr. Lambert (mister.mercury)
• [A] Steamvape 0.4 W/Hold  by Mr. Lambert (mister.mercury)
• Dirty Rat - Large Telescope [DECOR]  by n0th1ng Ackland

Elsewhere:

• Hotdog - Cravat Bow V2 . [email protected] by Hayden (hot.doge)
• [Rezz Room] British Shorthair Onesie Adult Animesh by Barazor

For the world’s best laundromat, click here:

The Community-Made Train Systems of Second Life Are Over 15 Miles Long -- Take This Map to Start Riding!

This is a pretty amazing map to the community-made train systems cutting across the Second Life mainland (click here for high res version, also available for free in the Marketplace), created by Rydia Lacombe, and updated from her 2021 edition. If they look longer and more complex than many real life train systems, you're right there -- they're longer, Rydia tells me, than the system in a major city in Scotland.

"Calculations in 2014 estimated that there was about 30 kilometers of track on the mainland. I would assume that this number is roughly correct - with the main line at least 12 km!" Rydia tells me. "This means that the SLRR Main Line is larger than the Glasgow subway system - which is fairly neat."

Anyone can ride these at any time, by the way -- just get a train (there's free models) drag it onto the track, and it'll snap to the rails, and you're ready to go. (Info below.)  I just took a leisurely train ride with a famous YouTuber, and can confirm it's a cool way to enjoy the rolling scenery while having a fun chat.

"I just like drawing maps," Rydia tells me, grinning. "I used to be told off in elementary school because it wasn't 'normal'. I just think it's neat."

There's also a broader motivation for her: 

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Rikutojam's Virtual Photos Are Rich With Color & Emotion

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

Rikutojam [email protected]’s “The Summer Twilight” is the trippiest picture I have seen on Second Life Flickr. His most recent pic (see below) caught my eye and I started browsing his stream and BAM! Suddenly, my head swam and I had vertigo. I didn’t think I could get vertigo from a picture, but I have gone back and looked at this pic five times now and every time, my head swam and my eyes rolled in my head. It needs a warning label. Still, how cool is it that there is a picture that can do that? Perhaps it’s because it’s not just on an angle, but that he is looking up as well? I am curious. Have any of you had an involuntary physical reaction to a SL picture? 

For see what caught my eye, click here:

Linden Lab Buys User-Made Commerce System Too Valuable to the Second Life Community To Fail

Here's the latest lesson for metaverse platforms:

• If you give your user base incredibly powerful content creation and scripting systems, some of them will create in-world products and services that become so popular with the user community, they'll effectively become integral to the virtual world.* 
• That also means if these user creators were to suddenly quit (boredom, business, sudden death, etc), the entire virtual world economy will feel the shockwaves.
• So, congrats: Your user-made product or service is now an official part of the platform. Get out your checkbook.

Latest example just announced today: Linden Lab acquired Casper Tech, creator of various virtual world commerce services (rental systems, vendors, etc.), run by a mostly-anonymous Second Life user known by his avatar "Casper Warden". (Interview below.)

"My feeling is that this is a risk reduction move," longtime SLer Da5id Kronfeld observes. "So many people rely on Casper that the service suddenly vanishing represents a significant risk to the SL economy."

Variations of this have happened to Second Life before, with (for example) the L$ open exchange system and the SL Marketplace ecommerce website originally starting as user-made platforms.

"I suppose it shows they're still keen to keep Second Life going as a project if they're investing money in some aspects of it," Sler Natalie observes. (Then again, it's probably more cost effective to buy CasperTech rather than hiring 2-3 Linden Lab engineers to recreate its functionality.) Echoing other veterans, she suspects Linden Lab will adding extra costs to use CasperTech's tech: "I can see Caspervend being a subscription thing, maybe bundled into a Creators tier which would be Premium Plus AND Caspervend etc."

All that to one side, it seems like a necessary move (and much congrats to Casper). That said, it does feel like another duct tape fix on top another duct tape fix, with the Second Life platform kept online by successive layers of short-term hacks, since it would be too costly to do what's really necessary: Overhaul the entire thing.

On that front, very longtime Second Life user Allegory Malaprop has an excellent and salty rant:

Flickr So Popular With Second Life Photographers That Flickr Adds a "Virtual Photography" Category to Platform -- Here's How to Use It

If you're among the tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of Second Life users who upload SL screenshots and video to Flickr, you'll want to watch this Flickr video tutorial above from Strawberry Linden, explaining how to add Flickr's new Virtual Photography category to your SL Flickr content. More info on the Flickr blog:

Virtual photography is an emerging art form specializing in photos taken inside a video game or virtual environment... we’re introducing this new category with two types of photography in mind: video game photography and content shared by the Second Life community.

As that suggests, this category was created primarily to serve the huge SL community on Flickr.

"The Flickr community manager was on Lab Gab back in May and she said they were looking to implement this feature for the SL community on Flickr," Strawberry tells me. (Watch that below.)

Ironically, Flickr itself was first created as an image sharing tool for a virtual world called Game Neverending, so it's fitting that another virtual world community has since embraced it as their own.

Flickr even sought SL creators' feedback on before adding it:

SL Image Creators Starting to Blend Midjourney Pics With the Virtual World

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

Loony Perl's “Daddio at PsyLounge” makes me want to go there, even though with a name PsyLounge, I can imagine they play techno and I want my music analog. But where else would you find a human-sized corvid working as a DJ. Real-life corvids are probably smart enough to be DJs if the only had the right-sized equipment. A crow has “adopted” a friend of mine and brings him presents of nuts and found objects such as a button and a rubber band. I love corvids, though I think in real life, corvids like jazz. 

Like other SLers, Loony's been experimenting with Midjourney and blending the virtual world with the AI image generator. Click here:

Best Laptops For Second Life: Recent MacBook Air Model Runs SL Surprisingly Well (With Some Graphics Settings Tweaked)

Thanks to reader "dkronfeld" for sending this photo which effectively demonstrates a pretty surprising point he made in a recent open forum: With the right settings, Second Life runs pretty damn well on a recent model MacBook Air! Pictured above is his 2020 MacBook Air with an M1 processor, 16GB RAM, and the 8 core GPU. (This one here, with a starting price of $999.)

Emphasis on "right settings", though, as dkronfeld explains:

Roblox Stats: 52M DAU, Down From 54M In Q1' 22; UPDATE: 58.5M DAU in July

Today's quick metaverse platform stat shot from Nasdaq on Roblox:

At the end of the second quarter of 2022, Roblox had 52.2 million Daily Active Users (DAUs) globally, which, however, declined from 54.1 million reported at the end of first-quarter 2022... Roblox is suffering from a reduced engagement level. In second-quarter 2022, hours engaged declined from 11.82 million to 11.29 million sequentially. Moreover, bookings declined 4% year over year to $639.9 million. Daily paying users also decreased from approximately 676K to 667K. Additionally, monetization per daily paying user decreased 3%.

Emphasis mine, because huh? I'm getting the impression that Wall Street doesn't realize metaverse platform use tends to be seasonal, specifically: It generally goes down in the Summer when people are offline and on vacation. I'm actually surprised hourly activity in Roblox went down so little. Update, 4:00pm: Or maybe that was just a temporary dip -- Matt Ball just reminded me that at its developers' convention last weekend, Roblox announced 58.5 million Daily Active Users in July.

Speaking of which,  Roblox is actively getting into ad monetization in the weirdest way possible:

This Artist Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Powerful Pop Expressionist Surrealist Images

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

Natalia Seranade may begin with a Second Life screenshot but she ends up closer to Pop Expressionist Surrealism, a modern art form sometimes called Lowbrow. (Eric Drummond Smith wrote a primer on the form here.) One of the essential elements he discusses struck me as most closely describing Natalia’s work: “Emotion, improvisation, and immediacy are central ends and means of our work.” When you look at “Plenitude” (above) isn’t your first reaction emotional? A reaction based in part on her color story. Red, black, and white, such visceral colors.

For works that are more explicitly pop and pop art, click here:

Monday Memory: Before Mesh, Amazing Avatars Walked the Virtual World

Latest addition to my New World Notes Classics archive (bottom right column) is my interview in 2007 with Tasrill Sieyes, who tells me about turning Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase into a Second Life avatar:

 I was showing someone my abstract avatars that I have made, and they mentioned that making a 3D form of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” would be great... [S]he loves the painting and after seeing my other work she wanted to see what it would look like transformed into SL form...

It is an interesting feeling [being this avatar]. Kind of... freeing. I am not bound by the normal limits of anthropomorphic avatar.  And I can think far more artistically. I don't know [why], to be honest. I don't think too much about how my various bits of art make me feel, I just let them make me feel, and let it wash over me.

More here, and see also my interview with the creator of this amazing exoskeleton. Created before the coming of mesh and mesh-enhanced avatars in 2012 or so, they illustrate how diverse and innovative Second Life avatars used to be.

Read My Interview With the Creator of Tunneler, 2022 Roblox Innovation Award Winner!

Congrats to "Homemade Meal", who just won a Roblox Innovation award in the "Best Use of Tech" category for Tunneler, a full-fledged, fully functional game inspired by Valve’s classic game Portal - including the original’s groundbreaking physics and teleporting mechanic. I interviewed Mr. Meal earlier this year, who told me one motivation he had for creating this game is to prove how powerful the platform could be:

Top Posts Last Week, Including: Great VRChat Worlds & Mourning a Real Queen's Passing in Virtual London

"RIP Queen Elizabeth II" , shot in St Alban's Church in Alba:

• VRChat Tips: Five Amazing Worlds To Visit Recommended By A Top Explorer
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年8月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
• London In Second Life Flooded With Mourners & Well-Wishers At News Of Queen Elizabeth's Death
• Best Laptops For Running Second Life: ASUS - ROG Zephyrus Recommended For Great Graphics & Power, MacBook Air For Lightweight Access
• Monday Memory: Mathematician Makes A Tesseract House In The Metaverse

VRChat Tips: Five Amazing Worlds to Visit Recommended by a Top Explorer

World name: もいらんどのラビットライド#VRChat #VRChat_world紹介 pic.twitter.com/2hUSx7LuCr

— Bradlee (@Bradlee1011) September 9, 2022

Bradlee is a superb Twitter account for anyone excited by the potential and creative community of VRChat, but for that very reason, is wondering which user-made VRChat worlds among tens of thousands they should visit first. 

 

That's where Bradlee's Twitter comes in. It was inspired by explorations with his his friend Juno, who he met in VRChat.

 

"Eventually I decided to share them on Twitter cuz I want people to also be able to see these worlds and make them hopefully go visit them or make them want to explore themselves," he tells me. (VRC name: Bradlee101.)

 

His Twitter stream is full of photos from his travels through VRChat, so I asked him to recommend five of his favorite worlds here. Read on for those, with links for directly teleporting to them in VRChat, along with his tips for exploring the platform:

Ask Isabelle & Me Anything About the Metaverse & Second Life -- Answers in Our Next Vlogcast!

Thanks to everyone who watched the first New World Video vlogast with SL YouTUber Isabelle Cheren last week! (Watch it here). We're preparing for our 2nd episode next week, and it will include a viewer Q&A mailbag. So if you have any burning question about Second Life, the Metaverse, and related topics, no matter how wild or goofy (and civil), please post in Comments below! We'll get to as many as possible. Please include your avatar name or social handle for credit, or make it anonymously as you prefer.

Friday Fashion: Swank SL Styles from Khitten Kurka

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

I almost did not blog about this lovely blush-colored dress and earrings because when I saw it was by Khitten Kurka, I was certain I had already blogged about her since she is an OG blogger. Just to be sure, I did a search. How in the world did I not blog about (k)iss (k)iss, her wonderful fashion blog? If you’re an OG blogger or photographer and I have overlooked you because you are so woven into my mental landscape, let me know. The dress is a winner for everyone since it is made with one of the four universal colors  that suit all skin tones. 

• dress – maria dress by beautiful dirty rich / b.d.r. (available at main store)
• earrings – kaya earrings by LaGyo

To see how Khitten dresses for success without being boring, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年8月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

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.

 

London in Second Life Flooded With Mourners & Well-Wishers At News of Queen Elizabeth's Death; UPDATE: Added SLImage Tributes

As news of Queen Elizabeth's death spreads across the globe, mourners in the virtual world of Second Life have been converging into London City, a sprawling island devoted to the UK's capital. I have tried over the last hour to take photos of the impromptu memorial, but as avatars keep teleporting into London, the surroundings continue to be a blurry as actual London in the worst fog imaginable.

You can see them in the screenshot here, green dots indicating users from around the world, piling into the town square, where the British flag has been lowered to half-mast, and the audio stream has been changed from the usual Britpop music to somber songs played on piano and pan flute.

"May she be in God's arms half hour before the devil knows she's gone," announces a mourner in chat.

"There is music on the stream now," says someone who helps manage London. "I hope it is fitting. I'm raising a glass to Her Majesty The Queen!"

As is often the case, the serendipitous mourning is basically SLers gathering and chatting together in the wake of monumental offline news at a virtual world location with some mirror relationship to that news. (See also: Mourners outside the virtual recreation of the Eiffel Tower, after a terrorist attack in Paris.) 

And as also befits Second Life, the arriving mourners include Superman in a Batman helmet, a sentient dog, and a humanoid fox (not to be confused), along with various supermodels. Many or most are from the UK, but mourners and well-wishers from outside Britain are arriving too:

Second Life Flickr User Posts Semi-Nude Protest Against Flickr's Coming Changes Blocking Nude Images from Unpaid Accounts

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

When I saw this pic from Sparklebottom Lasertits I laughed and knew exactly her point. Flickr has made some unpopular changes in the past year to encourage people to subscribe. As she writes in a long comment attached to this image: 

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Flickr will be making some changes to free accounts soon. Namely, free accounts will no longer be able to post moderate or restricted content. [I.E., images with nudity or porn. -WJA] That will now require a Flickr Pro subscription. There are other changes, but that is the biggest one driving Flickr’s business model from this point forward. This is the change I wish to address...

Flickr needs to make money. I get it. How? I don’t know. Will their current plan work? I very much doubt it. I’d like to see the data in a year or so from now to see the revenue they make from converted accounts compared to how much they lose from members quitting the platform completely. They may think that losing free accounts is not really a loss, but regardless of whether their customers pay or not, losing customers is never a good thing...

Read the whole thing here. I too hope Flickr finds a way to make money because it would really suck if they shut down. I think you can tell from her name that Sparklebottom is not shy. I love her stream but it took a while to find some Google-friendly pics. 

For more thought-provoking pics, click here:

Best Laptops For Running Second Life: ASUS - ROG Zephyrus Recommended for Great Graphics & Power, MacBook Air for Lightweight Access

Above: Whiskey's laptop running SL  -- photo courtesy Whiskey Monday

If you're looking for a new PC gamer laptop that runs Second Life well, acclaimed metaverse artist Whiskey Monday recommends the ASUS - ROG Zephyrus 16":

"This is my new laptop and it's light and ridiculously powerful in Second Life," she writes in Comments. "I can run Second Life and Photoshop at the same time and while the fans are loud, it runs like a champ."

It's currently selling for under $2000 on both Amazon and Best Buy so definitely worth a look. As for the loud fans, that's a frequently reported side effect of the Firestorm viewer grunting and groaning to process all those high end graphics. (For what it's worth, my Dell G5 15 gamer laptop runs the official SL browser pretty well without heavy fan action, but then again, I generally don't run it on maximum graphic settings.)

Above: High-res image created on Whiskey's Zephyrus laptop (via her Flickr)

"Light" by the way, might be a relative term, because (as reader Mondy notes), the Zephyrus is just over 4 pounds. That plus the AC adapter may get you in 5-7 pound range. Which might not seem heavy, but if you're planning on taking it many places, I'd definitely recommend a good backpack that distributes that weight well.

Speaking of weight, longtime reader "dkronfeld" recommends (somewhat surprisingly) the MacBook Air, which weighs in at under 3 pounds. However, that comes with a graphics hit and settings to adjust:

Stunning Second Life Landscape Photos Teeming With Virtual Birds -- And Teleport Links to Visit in Person!

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

Willow Cute takes pictures of Second Life landscapes. They are more than a little cute, though. They are stunning. They make our world come alive with beauty. Take “Flying High.”  This is from The Trace [SLURL to teleport here]. I’ve been there. I’ve stood in the same spot, but did I see it like a “Wish You Were Here” postcard? You can almost feel the adiabatic breeze off the ocean, the squawking gulls. And smell that strange fresh, yet funky smell of salt water, ozone, fresh air, and dying kelp. 

For more stunning landscapes, click here:

Monday Memory: Mathematician Makes a Tesseract House in the Metaverse

Just added to the Classic New World Notes stories section: "—And He Rezzed a Crooked House—", my 2006 post about a mathematics professor (a grad student at the time) who created a tesseract house inspired by Robert Heinlein's classic short story with a similar name. It actually makes more sense (but is still pretty mind-blowing) if you watch the video above.

Created by "Seifert Surface", the avatar of Henry Segerman, the Crooked House remains, like I recently told Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic, one of the most amazing examples of metaverse content: