New World Notes

Anyone in El Salvador Actually Using Bitcoin? Evidence Seems Scarce

Pictured at right: Top locations by usage of Bitcoin over the Lightning Network as of today.

Three weeks after Bitcoin officially became legal tender in El Salvador, its President claims that 2.1 million Salvadorans -- a third of the entire country's population -- are "using" Bitcoin. And while it's probably true there's about that many downloads of the official Chivo Wallet app -- currently over 1 million from Google Play alone -- there's a small problem:

Evidence of actual usage, i.e. transacting with Bitcoin to buy goods and services, is scant.

That's my conclusion after referencing the Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine, a layer built on top the Bitcoin network, and on which the Chivo Wallet runs. (Handy explanation for how that works below.) As of today, El Salvador isn't listed among its top locations of usage, and doesn't even show up in the engine's listings of usage by country.

BitcoinBeach, a Salvadoran beach town popular with international Bitcoin enthusiasts in El Salvador, currently only lists 55 nodes, i.e., payment points.

This is all, to put it technically, seriously sus.

Over 2 million Salvadorans now own Bitcoin -- anyone who downloads the Chivo Wallet gets $30 worth of free Bitcoin to spend -- yet somehow, not even 1% of them are using it on a regular basis. And El Salvador's government has been pushing Bitcoin for everyday use, i.e. buying groceries, paying employees, etc. 

My old Linden Lab buddy John "Pathfinder" Lester, a Bitcoin supporter, tells me that's it's too early to declare El Salvador's experiment with Bitcoin a failure.

"Time will tell," as he puts it. "It hasn't even been a month since everything went live (September 7th)."

That could be, and l'll be sure to check back next month. But my strong suspicion is almost everyone in El Salvador who owns Bitcoin is doing exactly what almost every Bitcoin owner around the world does with it: HODL-ing.

As for why El Salvador's government is actually interested in Bitcoin, this from my interview with UC Irvine currency expert Bill Maurer from last June:

"El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin has more to do with efforts there and elsewhere in Latin America to attract wealthy techno-libertarian investors than anything about financial inclusion or remittances (which is what the official line has been)," he tells me, and gives me more backstory.

"Concurrent with the declaration that Bitcoin is legal tender, El Salvador's president also laid out the welcome mat for crypto-entrepreneurs willing to invest in the country... for a certain amount in Bitcoin, you get permanent legal residency. Given the high barriers to actually using Bitcoin for anything--no one will accept it in payment, and you need to be pretty tech savvy to buy and send it-- I don't see it becoming a pathway for remittances, like the president has been touting. The real angle here is providing a tax-free, safe haven for the ultrawealthy Bitcoin bros to take it easy and rake in more crypto-millions in the tropics."

Emphasis mine! Meantime, more info on the Lightning Network from Pathfinder:

New World Notes Newsfeed: Metaverse Content I’m Currently Consuming

New links added (nearly) every weekday!

Watch: Eerie and amazing technique for depicting avatar expression by artist Chris Jones, who explains how he did it here. Hat tip Adeon, who observes: "My brain is fully willing to accept this as either a mocapped real face or some kind of painted real face It's rendered rather than realtime so it's not very impressive for games. But realtime always trails behind rendered." True that.

Metaverse company best practices for furry employees? Linden Lab's "Soft Linden" ponders: "If you worked at a company with a bunch of self-identifying furries, is there anything you would do to make the furries feel equally included?" An interesting Twitter thread follows. CC: Everyone working at VRChat.

23% in the US say they would "like to spend some time exploring the metaverse,” according to a Forrester research survey. Which sort of contradicts the accompanying Forbes article title, "Consumers Aren’t Ready For The Metaverse Yet". But 23% of the US is... over 75,000,000 million potential US metaverse users. That's roughly the number of Americans who watched Avengers: Endgame in a movie theater.

Second Life finally gets Multi-Factor Authentication for user's accounts. Helpful tip from u/jarmade: "Just remember to write down your two-factor authentication codes in a notebook or print the QR code image, in case you lose/break your phone or the app."

Here's TechMeme's news capture of Facebook's "responsible" metaverse imitative. New World Notes' mordant take gratifyingly included.

Yesterday's links below:

Virtual World Landscape Pics Elevated by Unique Angles & Framing

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

Burleh Leonard takes fabulous landscape shots of his travels in Second Life. This is a great example of his style, shooting from a low angle that adds a fresh perspective. I love the angle. He adds an aged look with an overlay that frames the picture. It’s gorgeous. You can see this site from any angle by visiting the Whispering Winds sim, click here. 

For more SL travels, click here:

Facebook Moving to Define the Metaverse's Future -- In Part to Rebuild Its Reputation and Despite Low Usage of Its Own Metaverse

Above: Facebook's Metaverse solution in the Oculus Store, currently rated at 2.5 stars

Facebook is ironically moving to define the future of the Metaverse:

Facebook has announced a $50 million fund that it says will help it develop the metaverse more responsibly. It’s officially called the XR Programs and Research Fund, and the company says it’ll be invested into “programs and external research” over the course of two years... Facebook says the fund’s goal is to make sure it builds its part of the metaverse with an eye towards compatibility with other services, as well as inclusivity, privacy, safety, and “economic opportunity.” Right now, Facebook’s metaverse biggest metaverse program is a platform called Horizon, which exists as a beta Oculus app that lets people have VR meetings.

But the thing is, according to its own listing on the Oculus Store, Facebook's "biggest" metaverse application only has 23 user ratings which now stand at an aggregate of 2.5 stars. (The low rating may have something to do with development turnover and lack of prioritization.)

Assuming the rule of thumb of 1 user review per 50 active users applies here, Horizon likely has less than 2,000 user downloads. As a comparison point: VRChat, which is still in Early Access, has 107,517 user reviews on Steam alone, with an aggregate rating of Very Positive. So on the face of it, is Facebook the best qualified organization to "develop the metaverse more responsibly"?

Which brings up the question of why Facebook is doing this in the first place. Here's my take back in July, when Zuckerberg announced plans to turn Facebook into a Metaverse company:

My cynical take (and it's hard not to be cynical, when it comes to Facebook) is this move is made in great part to stave off anti-trust regulation that is now looming over his company. ("Hey we're not really a social media monopoly, look at us trying to compete with Epic/Apple/ROBLOX etc!") But in fairness, Zuckerberg has long been passionate about VR, buying Oculus (with founding Linden Cory Ondrejka's guidance) many years before the Facebook backlash reached fever pitch.

According to a recent Washington Post report, some of that cynicism was warranted after all:

New World Notes Highlights: Inside VRChat's Massive Informal Economy, My Deep Dive Into Matthew Ball's Look at the Metaverse Generation

• FOX 'S Alter Ego: A Mixed Reality Competition Show From Producers Who Don't Understand Avatars Or Why Virtual Worlds Make Them Real
• Inside VRChat's Informal Economy: An Estimated 350+ People Make Real Money From That Metaverse -- Many Likely Earning A Full-Time Income!
• How The Pandemic Helped Make The Metaverse Respectable, The Rise Of The Metaverse Generation, And Why Metaverse Communities Matter Most
• 3D File To IRL Manufacturing Could Be A Killer Applet For The Metaverse

Virtual Town & Country Style Tips from Across the Second Universe

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

Nuria Nevin’s recent post “In the Country” is a cheery, fun picture of a woman with her puppies. She’s holding a bouquet of wheat and is sitting on hay bales. This tells me that she was not from farm country because they are scratchy as all get out. She should take that neatly folded blanket and avoid feeling itchy the rest of the day. She used Black Dragon viewer to fine tune the pose. 

• Blueberry - Ivy Overalls/ No Control Bodysuit (by BlueberryStore Resident)
• [BREATHE]-Shizuka Flats-FATPACK (by daisa Admiral) [New @ Collabor88]
  Amitie In the Country POSE #2 + Wheat Bouquet/Single (by BELEN Ackland) [
• SEmotion Libellune English Beagle Animesh - Premium 1, 2 and 3 (by Libellune Starlight) [New @ Anthem Event]

For a must-have dress tip, click here:

FOX 's Alter Ego: A Mixed Reality Competition Show from Producers Who Don't Understand Avatars or Why Virtual Worlds Make Them Real

Above: Pop star Grimes, who believes reality is a virtual world created by an omniscient AI, explains how Alter Ego works

Months after its producers began scouting among the Second Life community for avatar-based performers, the avatar-based reality competition show Alter Ego is here: Watch on Fox TV's site. 

I just saw the first episode and I have mixed feelings about its mixed reality presentation. Fundamentally, the whole concept seems to be directed at an audience who don't quite understand how virtual world avatars work, created by producers who definitely don't know how they work. Which is strange, because the vast majority of the show's target Gen Y/Z audience (I'm tempted to say all of them) have an avatar in Fortnite and other virtual worlds.

Speaking of which, as I suspected, the show uses Unreal, the graphics engine that also runs Fortnite:

Three Spectacular Shots of Second Life Avatars in Silhouette

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

Fabrizio Gigamon, also Known as Mr. G., seems to explore the nature of man in the universe. His “Jekyll and Mr. G., Mr. G., Mr. G.” shows us a visual representation of the multiplicity within all of us. It makes me think of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, 51” with one of my favorite quotes. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Bob Dylan was inspired by that poem to create “I Contain Multitudes.” However, Mr. G. was inspired by Pink Floyd’s “Set the Course for the Heart of the Sun” which refers to watching the watcher. I think this is a good example of how artwork can mean different things to different people.

Two more dramatic SL silhouettes below:

Inside VRChat's Informal Economy: An Estimated 350+ People Make Real Money from that Metaverse -- Many Likely Earning a Full-Time Income!

Above: One of nearly 1,000 VRChat-tagged items being sold on Gumroad

VRChat the company has yet to roll out its long-promised monetization options for creators -- but VRChat the community has went ahead and created an informal, unofficial economy of its own across many platforms. By my rough but conservative estimate, over 350 are making at least a side income from their VRChat content -- and of that number, likely over 30 are making a full-time living from VRChat. 

That's in addition to notable examples like StudioCyFy, a company started on the strength of the developers' VRChat game worlds, and "Jar", who recently announced she was creating VRChat worlds on a full-time basis.

"Over 350" is an educated guess based on a tally of top content creation platforms:

• On Patreon, over 160 creators are creating VRChat content (worlds, avatars, etc.) and have at least one patron.
• On Gumroad, nearly 1,000 VRChat-tagged items are being sold on the platform; primarily avatars, many selling for $50 or more. Assuming individual creators sell an average of 10 VRChat items, that's about 100 creators on Gumroad.
• On YouTube, over 90 channels are devoted to YouTube content and have 10,000 or subscribers. (Indicating a dedicated YouTuber with a large enough subscriber base to monetize through advertising and direct sponsorships.)

So that's at least 350 VRChat content creators earning some kind of income from their VRChat content!

But how many of them are making a full-time living? That's a controversial (and interesting!) question, but here's some back-of-envelope tallies to help us reach a safe base number:

Myth's Amazing Monochromatic Portraits of Male Avatars

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

Myth’s photos are mostly black and white. They are universally excellent. I love “The Cellist” and love that he links to an excellent performance of Astor Piazzola’s “Oblivion” by Stjepan Hauser who is more well-known as part of the 2Cellos duo who perform “cello-rock” and were the focus of a documentary. The music is beautiful and so is the picture. I love how realistically his hands are posed and how the star of the picture is the cello. Just as it should be. 

For more is it live or is it Second Life pics, click here:

How the Pandemic Helped Make the Metaverse Respectable, the Rise of the Metaverse Generation, and Why Metaverse Communities Matter Most

In preparation for my live audience Breakroom interview with Matthew Ball, I'm blogging his must-read, nine part metaverse primer over last Summer and this month.  My take on Part 1 (introduction to the framework) is here,  my coverage of Part 2 (hardware) is here, with Part 3 (networking) coverage here, Part 4 coverage (computing) here, Part 5 (virtual platforms) here, Part 6 (open standards) here, Part 7 (payments) here, and Part 8 (content) here.

The final section of Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, “Evolving User + Business Behaviors and the Metaverse” (part 9) covers the growing mainstream acceptance of the Metaverse and Metaverse activity, which he directly pins to the pandemic:

For decades, “gamers” have been making “fake” avatars and spending their free time in digital worlds while carrying out miscellaneous tasks and pursuing  non-game-like objectives such as designing a room in Second Life (versus killing a terrorist in Counter-Strike). A huge portion of society, if not the majority of it, considered such efforts to be weird or wasteful or anti-social (if they didn’t look down on it outright)... [Since the pandemic,] millions of the above skeptics have now participated in (and enjoyed) virtual worlds and activities such as Animal Crossing, Fortnite, or Roblox as they sought out things to do, attended events once planned for the real world, or tried to spend time with their kids indoors. Not only has this destigmatized virtual life, and “the Metaverse,” but it might even mean an extra generation will participate in it.

I’d quibble somewhat to say that skeptics haven’t necessarily converted into Metaverse users. (Hence the befuddled “What is this Metaverse thing anyway?” tone of most mainstream media coverage.) What’s more, the usage rates of the leading virtual worlds were massive even before the pandemic. (Fortnite for example already had 350 million registered users in early 2020, before COVID swept the planet.) What the pandemic definitely did do is make mainstream skeptics much more open to the idea that there might be more to all this than mere digital time-wasting.

This mainstream embrace is evidenced in all the major brands and media companies increasingly interested in getting into the Metaverse game, as Matthew notes:

More users and engagement naturally leads to higher revenues for developers, and in turn, more investment and better products. But over the past year, we’ve seen two other significant injections into “Metaverse revenues.” The first is the rapid legitimization and investment into purely virtual assets, most notably via cryptocurrencies and NFTs. The second is investment from major non-gaming brands and talent, from Prada, Ford, and Gucci to Neymar Jr. and Travis Scott. This investment also helps virtual platforms further diversify away from their historical focus on “game-like” objectives like win, shoot, kill, defeat, and score and towards more broadly appealing activities such as create, explore, identify, express, collaborate, and socialize.

To capitalize on this growth in revenue, content, and users, companies like Epic are creating experiences that stretch across multiple games, a Metaverse vision painted most vividly by Ready Player One: 

Ultimately, we should view Epic’s tests in cross-title assets and achievement unlocks as similar to its precedent setting efforts in cross-platform gaming and IP mashups. The company seems to believe that by reducing the friction to accessing different games (via free-to-play monetization), making it easier to bring your friends and items across these games, and giving players a reason to try/play these games, players will spend more time gaming, with more people, across more titles, and with greater spend. 

Again I have to wonder why the Valve/Steam Metaverse shoe has yet to drop, because it’s best placed to create a seamlessly immersive experience across the many games on its platform. But put a pin in that for now.

To close his Primer -- and my comments on it -- Matthew concludes by writing about the very young “iPad Native”/ “virtual world native” generation who made ROBLOX an unexpected phenomenon, and will in turn define the experience of the Metaverse in coming decades:

I Love These Second Life Homages to The Splashing Scene from Flashdance

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

When I saw Cascabel Czarny’s Flashdance homage, I immediately wondered if anyone else had done the same. I love how the backdrop makes it seem so much more part of a show. The hair is realistically wet, the water is gorgeous, but those lightbulbs in the back make the picture stand out. 

For more Flashdance water pics, click here:

3D File to IRL Manufacturing Could be a Killer Applet for the Metaverse

In the search for the Metaverse's killer app, here's a possible one proposed by "Kyz", who once made a good living from creating virtual world content before moving to physical items:

Probably true that anything digital is the meat of the Metaverse. I don't think car companies in SL or elsewhere managed to sell more cars. It may have helped bands a bit. Didn't seem to help movies market better. Maybe some fashion. Unless everyone is there it's not going to be a sales vehicle.

This is roughly right. Second Life-based expositions for car companies like Nissan didn't generate much sustained traffic (let alone actual sales), and apart from some one-offs like this SL campaign for a Harry Potter movie in IMAX, all the many SL-based marketing campaigns for movies didn't lead to increased theatrical ticket sales. I deeply suspect marketing campaigns on new platforms like ROBLOX and Fortnite (such as this ROBLOX campaign for In the Heights, a recent movie that bombed in the box office) have met a similar, low ROI fate.

So if RL marketing isn't a compelling killer app, is there another? Kyz proposes one, based on their own RL work experience:

Top 6 Highlights Last Week, Including: Raph Koster on His New Metaverse, a Metaverse Parody of Bo Burnham & What's Its Killer App, Anyway?

• What’s The Metaverse’s Killer App, Actually? My Take On Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 8
• Watch: Hilarious VRChat Parody Of Bo Burnham's "Welcome To The Internet" By YouTuber With Successful Career As A VR-Based Musician
• Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager To Shaping Future Of "Original Metaverse" Of Second Life -- But Mobile Experience Only A "Plus"
• Creator Advertises His 1930s-Era Second Life Fashion With Satirical Norman Rockwell Cosplay Pics
• Raph Koster On How His Upcoming Metaverse Is Unlike Steam
• In A Virtual World Economy, User-Generated Content Prices Are Controlled By The Company, Not The Market (Comment Of The Week)

SL Style & Houseware Shopping Ideas from Thais Akerman

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

Thais Akerman’s “Kitchen” post for her blog appeals just because it is the opposite of all the usual kitchens that are almost always too neat. This one reminds me of the summer kitchen my aunt and uncle had down by their two-acre garden. The counters were scavenged and had no doors. Instead, my aunt made a bright, colorful curtain uncannily similar to this one. When they harvested, everything was cleaned, peeled, and canned down in the summer kitchen. The compost piles were down by the garden as was the root cellar so everything was to hand. And of course, my aunt and uncle ‘borrowed’ me during the harvest. All the remaining items are listed in her blog credits, but my mind is fixated on the counters. 

• PITAYA - DIY kitchen Countertop  @Kustom9

For an eggcellent fashion piece, click here:

AI Makes Movie Posters Based on Short Description. Guess Which!

"Each of these images was generated by AI based on a brief text description of a movie. Can you guess the movie from the image?"

Some of them are incredibly obvious, while many (most?) seem utterly insane, but also with some elements that appear to be intuitively insightful. This project from Noah Veltman, who creates data visualizations and apps for Netflix's Science & Analytics group. (Which may explain why I often get totally odd recommendations in my Netflix queue.)

More fun with AI and culture below:

What’s the Metaverse’s Killer App, Actually? My Take on Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, Part 8

In preparation for my live audience Breakroom interview with Matthew Ball, I'm blogging his must-read, nine part metaverse primer over last Summer and this month.  My take on Part 1 (introduction to the framework) is here,  my coverage of Part 2 (hardware) is here, with Part 3 (networking) coverage here, Part 4 coverage (computing) here, Part 5 (virtual platforms) here, Part 6 (open standards) here, and Part 7 (payments) here.

Part 8 of Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer, “Content, Services, and Asset Businesses in the Metaverse” raises the most questions for me from the entire series. Overarching them all is the fundamental one: 

Does the Metaverse actually have a scalable, sustainable killer app beyond user-generated games and immersive socialization that already happens within Metaverse platforms?

Now I’d personally be happy if games and socialization is all (or mostly all) of what the Metaverse is used for -- these are two great and fundamental aspects of the human experience, especially when they’re democratized! But in their zeal to make the Metaverse the Next Big Thing, the investor community is searching for more ways to make money from them.

For instance, as Matthew mentions, marketing/ancillary sales of major media/fashion brands:

The largest activations in Fortnite to date have been Marvel, followed by Star Wars and the NFL, and the NBA continues to lead in NFTs. These sorts of franchises have endured for decades specifically because they work everywhere and dominate our endless imaginations and fandoms. Brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton are equally likely to thrive; humans constantly seek out opportunities for signaling and self-expression. 

But to take two of these: Fortnite’s Marvel and Star Wars activations in 2019 were huge, but Epic's revenue still somewhat decreased that year. As for real life fashion brands entering the Metaverse, this puts them in direct competition with grassroots virtual fashion brands, and I’m skeptical that the former can (or should) prevail. (Remember when Armani opened an official shop in Second Life, but was beat out by the local competition?)

How about the crossover of real life music stars? As Matthew notes:

This Artist Blurs Lines Between Real & Second Life Photos

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

DeFoe has an extraordinary collection of pictures in his photostream. “Isle of Scotland” is dreamy and fantastical with ruins on top of what we might call a mesa if it were in the West, a free-standing tablelike rock. The ruins almost completely fill the top of the rock. It must have quite the stairway. I love the smoky fog as though they have been burning their field to clear for seeding, the smoke blending almost seamlessly into the fog. He also provides a link to corresponding music here. 

To see how DeFoe makes art of the most mundane, click here:

Watch: What Second Life Looks Like in 4K With Black Dragon

You may need to click through to YouTube and play with the resolution settings (which go all the way up to 2160p60!) in order to get the full, bandwidth-choking effect, but here's Second Life displayed at 4K resolution. Redditor "tb_inuyasha_x" shot it with the Black Dragon viewer with some pretty impressive hardware (specs below). However, as he explains in the thread, frame rate varied hugely across Second Life:

"It was really depending on what sim I was in and how far I set the view range too... I would say some places, 8-25 FPS and others I could get 35 - 45 range... but, it was all still recordable." 

Which is, well, yikes: 30 FPS is a not-bad framerate for an online world, so it's painful that FPS is still hitting below 10 in some places. Also as you'll see from shot to shot the visual appearance varies widely based on lighting presets, and frankly, the advanced age of Second Life's internal graphics.

Anyway, specs and sims shot below:

Watch: Hilarious VRChat Parody of Bo Burnham's "Welcome to the Internet" by YouTuber With Successful Career as a VR-Based Musician

"Do you want to live in the Metaeverse all of the time? Little bit of Metaverse all of the time?"

This is a pretty brilliant VRChat-themed parody of Bo Burnham’s very brilliant “Welcome to the Internet”, created and performed by YouTuber TFMJonny, who tosses the original lyrics into the Internet content vortex of the Metaverse, and spins out some clever and on-point tweaks along the way.

For instance, where Burnham had the lines "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime", TFM tells me, “I rewrote those lines to ‘apathy's an amnesty and boredom is sublime’ to reflect the dichotomy between regular Internet culture and VRChhat culture. 

“Most of VRChat consists of sitting around doing nothing and just being social with friends," he explains. "There aren't any particular goals and thus the game can quite often turn into a money and time sink. Those lyrics were some of the last I wrote and are probably my favorite because they differ entirely from the original because it highlights this stark difference.”

TFM shot the entire video in VRChat using VRCLens to insure every angle matched that from the original video -- and went into Unity, to recreate Bo Burnham’s set:

Cajsa's Choices: Wildelands is Today's SL Flickr Pick

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

Wildelands [Auttumn986] has an intriguing and beautiful photostream with pictures of two people who seem to have ensorcelled each other. They are shot together and apart and every picture is well done. I love this untitled picture with a recently harvested field in the background. The sunlight turns the remaining stalks into bright gold. She is in the foreground. Sunset is approaching and her skin has a blue cast from the shadow on her. Her makeup is smeared so there is a story there. 

For a great black and white picture, click here:

Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager to Shaping Future of "Original Metaverse" of Second Life -- But Mobile Experience Only a "Plus"

This is quite possibly a dream job if you have experience in game/Internet product development:

As a Senior Product Manager, you’ll utilize in-depth product knowledge to successfully drive key projects on Second Life. You’ll work alongside a supportive team of people across engineering, design, QA and other cross-functional teams to build products and new experiences and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the original metaverse. 

But apparently, if you scroll all the way toward the end of the job description, that future is not mobile-centric:

Creator Advertises His 1930s-Era Second Life Fashion With Satirical Norman Rockwell Cosplay Pics

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

Nicholas Huntsman is the creator for a couple of stores, Lux Aeterna that is a home and garden and L & Co. Clothiers that feature vintage clothing from the 1920s and 30s. He has pretty standard vendor pictures, but he also has a series of delightful sendups of The Saturday Evening Post in the style of J. C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell;s mentor. Of course, Leyendecker and Rockwell never had such a model as Nicholas. He included a short story, a small excerpt will explain the picture. 

...Five times a year Jo and I make the pilgrimage to a sequestered cemetery by a lonely creek; his birthday, Father's day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the day it happened. We leave the city behind, the shop, our friends, our adulthood, forget our lives ever existed there, and head back to our childhood, when it was just us and the Manor. The only five days of the year when the mask isn't put on, because she needs to know I'm there...

For more delightful covers, click here:

Raph Koster On How His Upcoming Metaverse Is Unlike Steam

In case you didn't check the blog of Raph Koster's Playable Worlds late last week, he is, as anticipated, building a Metaverse:

We have built a metaverse platform. Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working. We have a working massively multiplayer server... 

And you’ll be able to hop between worlds without needing to switch clients. It permits a single, shardless, ever-expanding, ever-changing online universe.

I've heard that "hop between worlds" promise many times before, but I've been skeptical that this in itself makes a Metaverse experientially different than, say, Steam. After all, the game worlds in Steam are separate, but you can run them within the same Steam launcher (which also comes with a social network, payment system, etc.) Exit out of Skyrim back to the Steam launcher, see that your Steam friends are playing Among Us, jump in to play with them via the Steam launcher, etc. Isn't all that which we already do in Steam, basically hopping between worlds?

Raph Koster tells me that what Playable Worlds is building is quite different:

"In Steam every [game] world is an install. It's a separate app. Steam is just a a launcher. Not in our case. It's one app for all of the worlds."

Raph says it's different from my example of hopping from Skyrim to About Us on Steam: 

In a Virtual World Economy, User-Generated Content Prices Are Controlled by the Company, Not the Market (Comment of the Week)

Really interesting conversation on the problem of virtual currency in virtual economies last week kicked off by "Kyz", who explained how difficult it was for them to reliably run a successful business in a virtual world. Replying to the idea that the value of their content is decided by the market, Kyz goes deeper into the analysis:

That's true to an extent and there are parallels between virtual and real life markets. But there's more to it than just market demand and pricing.

For instance, my SL experience put an extra layer of cost into the mix. Linden Dollars are a product or were, to Linden Lab. The currency wasn't just added to the company as a convenience for users, it was acquired by Linden Lab from someone that discovered that virtual money was itself a product that could be profitable directly or indirectly.

The last part isn't quite accurate but the full story enhances Kyz's argument: Linden Lab reportedly made an offer to the user-made Gaming Open Market, which circa 2004/2005 was a popular platform for the community, then in late 2005, officially productized the Linden Dollar through the launch of the LindeX.

"I mean, I get it," Kyz goes on. "And if I ran a virtual world, creating an extra revenue stream from currency is something I wouldn't lightly ignore." But for content creators like Kyz trying to monetize on the platform, this led to additional hurdles and regulations: