New World Notes

THAT'S SO HIGH SCHOOL

Marvelously inventive or utterly perplexing, you make the call.  Over at Second Life Insider, occasional NWN contributor Aimee Weber reports on a new roleplaying community: a high school.  With all the trappings:

There is a library, an indoor pool, a football field, a basketball court, and even faculty offices. If you wander off campus you will find a bowling alley, a skating rink, and a cute diner where the kids can hang after school... This active role playing community has sign-up sheets for every activity you can imagine. You can be a cheerleader, a football player, a teacher, a coach, in fact you can even be the lunch lady! (I SO have my eye on that job!)

Read through it in all its adolescent glory here.

THE WORLD FROM MY WINDOW: THE BLOCK (Updated)

Iris Ophelia told me about The Block, a place that had recently become her pinnacle of cool, and since Iris is bound to know these things, I went and saw for myself, and was duly impressed.  So much so, I begged Dragontat "DT" Zagato to tell me about the Block in a "World from My Window" entry, and to our great fortune, he did.  What he describes is a unique and impressive story of social emergence, a community unexpectedly evolving from a shared sense of fashion, culture, and urban space.

Rik's Picks for February 21-25

Game creator Rifkin Habsburg with friends

Rik Riel's weekly round-up of upcoming SL events...

Clever racoon avatar Rifkin Habsburg announces that he is launching a new pattern-matching game called Zingo on Thursday from 5-8PM at Club Zed at Arcadia 2 (140,48).  Previously Rifkin brought to SL the popular games Danger Zone and Frootcake, and his latest offering already has a nice write-up from Onder Skall at The SL Herald.  DJ Buttercup will provide live music to play by and there'll be plenty of free Zingo swag and fabulous cash prizes. 

Also coming up this week: Celtish classics, corsets, night fishing, B-movies, dead marriages, hypnotherapy and Obama-fever hits SL.  All that and more after the jump...

ALL ABOUT MY AVATAR: IVY DARROW

Ivy Darrow was an attractive redhead standing in the upper bleachers of Kula coliseum, and I was struck by how much her avatar resembled the young flame-haired woman in her First Life profile, and so naturally, I had to know more.

Tateru's Monday Reality Mix

Tateru Nino's weekly take on mixed reality...

Broadway comes to Second Life! For more than two decades, resident Persephone Gallindo has been an Equity Stage Manager, both on and off Broadway. Her family environment was also steeped in aspects of the theater. Gallindo is a woman who loves the theater, and has a passion for it-- and a passion for Second Life. Can Gallindo bring tasty theater to Second Life?

Also, we take a wander around Online Uru's island, a microprocessor manufacturer, our mixed reality metrics, and briefly note a grassroots campaign for Senator Barack Obama, all after the fold.

HARPER'S SECOND LIFE

I've admired the magazine for decades, and almost had a piece published in it once, but in the end, it took French extremists and exploding pigs to finally make it happen:  thanks to editor Sam Stark, an excerpt of "Fighting the Front" is featured in the March Readings section of Harper's Magazine.

Harper's readers, the entire story is here, with a brief related follow-up here.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

Prim hog Butcher for the World,   
Script Maker, Stacker of Prims,   
Player with Sim-Crossing Railroads and the Nation’s Load Balancer;
Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders:

Chicago, site of this year's Second Life Community Convention.  August 24-27-- see you there.

SPLASHCASTIC!

A friend with Splashcast, a cool new user-created video/multimedia/etc. service, got me to whip up a compilation of SL videos and commentary to create this demo New World Notes channel.  Thanks to all who let me feature their video in it.

ATTACK OF THE HAMLET

If I understood the crew right (we recorded the segment last Friday), I should be on tonight's "Attack of the Show" from G4TV, debating David Ewalt of Forbes.com on that most perennial of topics, "Is Second Life overhyped?"  Hard to know how I came across, what with my only direct connection to the show an ear bub and a microphone, trying to interject comments into a threeway crosschat, but hopefully I managed to work in a few solid points.  The frustrating thing to me is that I'd welcome a meaningful debate on Second Life's prospects, but so far, it's been largely confined to a poorly-framed argument over user numbers.

TORLEY TALKS!

If you've known Torley Linden (nee Torgeson) these last couple years, you've likely had Torley's voice in your head throughout that time, a voice that's consistent even when Torley has been, at various periods, a large bird, a young man with a keyboard, a squat alien, a teethy watermelon, or a gorgeous woman in love with another.  No matter what the avatar, in chat and on blogs and elsewhere, the uniquely ebullient personality of Torley (like Torley's affinity for neon red and green) remains the same.