New World Notes

Quicktime Exploit Discovered: Disable Video Streaming!

My colleague Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury just passed on his exclusive report about security analysts who recently discovered a way of hacking L$ from a Resident who's located near a Quicktime video stream. It's the apparent source behind this announcement: pending a fix from Apple, the Lindens strongly advise Residents not to stream Quicktime videos from unknown sources in-world.

Kate's Quest: Why So Few Gorgeous Male Avatars?

Kate Amdhal went looking for attractive male avatars, but other than an occasional specimen like this dude (spotted in Robbie Dingo's latest machinima), she's come up short.  In a world abundant with beautiful woman, why so few avatar Adonises? 

Kate suggests some fascinating reasons:

- Scant male fashions on sale.
- Shorter hairstyles (as guys more typically wear) generally less attractive.
- Unlike with women, male attractiveness is more tied up in poise, confidence, and other non-physical attributes that can't be avatarized.
- Second Life better at simulating avatars in their 20s, whereas women usually find men who are older than that more attractive.
- This is my favorite hypothesis:  "[M]y sense is that a lot of the males who are interested in shopping and self-beautification in Second Life find it more fun to do that as Second Life women."

All very plausible-- read Kate's incisive observations here.  I put it to my readers: what do you think?  I disqualify myself from answering here, if only because several women whose taste I trust have insisted that my avatar is in desperate need of a makeover.

The New Grid Insider

Shortly after the editorial team of the late-lamented Second Life Insider left that discontinued blog to help launch Massively, Weblogs' new MMO round-up site, I started noticing The Grid Live, an energetic, oft-updated aggregator of SL news in the SL blogosphere and the outside media.  Written by Stone Culdesac and Aribella Lafleur, it's shaping up to be a must-visit site.

Speaking of Massively, Weblogs' senior editor and cool chick Barb Dybwad recently (and smartly) argued her case for moving the Second Life Insider into the larger MMO blog fold. A flurry of reader replies followed, offering up an illuminating perspective of Second Life by non-SL gamers.

Battlestar Natalia

Now how could I have missed this?  An SL-based Battlestar Galactica roleplaying group with over two hundred members, its own sim (SLURL teleport at this link), even a news service, "A Service of the News Bureau of the Government of the Twelve Colonies", relating the latest in the internal game's narrative.  Credit for this discovery goes to, of all people, a mermaid supermodel named Natalia Zelamanov, who visited BSG47 recently, stopping frequently to take glamor screenshots (like the one on the right.)  It's part of Natalia's ongoing exploration of Second Life in all its diverse locations, now into her 431st day of adventure.  Follow her journey here.

ASCII Hero

Now this is a pretty marvelous mash-up of Net culture from the 80s with today: at a Second Life rock club, a guy throws up devil horns-- as ASCII art via his chat line.  Credit for capturing this textual coolness goes to Virtualities, a nice SL-centric blog by an Estonian-based Resident with an equally cool name: Distant Signals.  More recently, Mr. Signals came back with great pics of a new metaverse-appropriate building on Princeton's SL campus.

Avatar Avant Garde: Metaverse Orchestra Turns Avatars Into Musical Instruments

Last month, Pavig Lok summoned me mid-performance into the opera house of Intempesta Nox (direct SLURL teleport), to attend a live music performance. Not Residents playing real instruments streamed as audio into Second Life, as usually happens-- here, instead, the avatars themselves were the musical instruments, spinning like digital tornadoes around the audience.  This is the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, a loose collaboration of numerous artists-- their blog is here, tracking an impressive number of mixed reality performances around the world.  This video is an excerpt from their hypnotic October show, and hopefully the stereophonics are good enough to convey the sensation of being amid these flying ripples of sound.

"[W]e upload samples and trigger them using HUDs on the screen," AOM member Bingo Onomatopoeia tells me. "In most songs we use a visualization-device worn on the back to make it seen who is playing a note. Using this technique, every orchestra-member becomes a moving instrument.  In the instrument I call 'Onomatophone', there are six flying spheres that are filled with samples, that fly through the audience, creating a ever-changing mix that is unique for each listener."

As with most avant garde efforts, the results are an acquired taste, but there's no disputing their ambition to reshape the boundaries of what's considered music in Second Life and the wider metaverse.  That in mind, I've included some excerpts [after the break] from a text written to accompany a recent AOM performance in Vienna.

Update, 11/30: Caterin Semyorka was also on-hand, and posted an evocative, illustrated report on her blog, Girl Meets Second Life.

New World Tableau: Negko DeVinna presents Viola in Zyba

"I took two photos of the background and the model at two different times," Negko tells me, explaining how he made this breathtaking image, "and I 'melted' them. The decor set is a place called Zyba, a club that was owned by Zoey Witherspoon. I write 'was' because I recently discovered that unfortunately, the club had disappeared. As it is SL and I asked Zoey, it may reappear one day. It was a beautiful club, with a nice Moroccan style."  His model is Viola Bentham, sporting a tattoo that's also of Negko's design.  "I shot her in a photo studio to integrate her in the background... To get the final render, I used Photoshop with several layers of blur and two light sources. It helps to give more depth and realism to the picture."

More of Negko's unique imagery on his blog; details for submitting your own Tableau after the break.

Second Life Events: Rik's Picks for Nov. 30 - December 2

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

HIV/AIDS has affected so many people around the world in deep and personal ways, and the race for a cure continues. December 1st is World AIDS Day, and there are a number of events happening in Second Life drawing attention to the disease and efforts to stop its spread. Notably, HealthInfo Island (click here to teleport) is sponsoring a number of activities starting at 9AM PST, including:

• A Workshop on "Looking for Health: Finding Quality HIV/AIDS Information by Carolina Keat"
• Special displays and newsfeeds on HIV/AIDS
• An AIDS Walk with information about HIV/AIDS Support Groups in SL
• Podcasts on AIDS by the Center for Disease Control in the Podcast Globe
• A guided tour around the Island
• Live coverage of a parallel Teen Grid event

In addition, DenmarkCopenhagen sim (click here to teleport) is hosting a fundraiser party from 2PM PST to raise money for the World AIDS Foundation. Meanwhile, the Nyumba Rafiki Community Center (click here to teleport) is holding a discussion about HIV/AIDS and dance party starting at 10AM.

Also Coming Up This Week: French cowboys on stage, diva fashions on the runway, audition for a classic holiday play, talking about climate change, Argentinian rockers, and Chinese for beginners.  All that and much more after the jump...
 

New World Newsfeed

Recent SL-related dispatches from the outside world...

- CBS News Video - New Life in Cyberspace
Competent and moving mainstream media profile of longtime friend Baccara Rhodes and Wilde Cunningham, profiled in New World Notes here and here, centering on their use of SL as therapy for real life illness/disability, featuring the people behind the avatar. Bonus new world media ethics query: Should the CBS reporters have disclosed that their parent corporation invested in an SL-centric company and has numerous branded locations in-world?  The answer probably depends on whether SL is perceived as an exclusive walled garden, or an open network.

Mere Child's Play

In the second life of Marianne McCann, childhood never ended.  Though in real life a woman well over 30 (by her description), Marianne's avatar stands knee high to a June bug, with pigtails wrapped in pink ribbon.  In Second Life, she mostly plays with avatars who look her age (there are hundreds of them), attends elementary school, goes to summer camp, and returns home to loving parents who tuck her in at night.  She's even turned the trappings of childhood into a business-- her store, You Know For Kids (direct teleport here), is located in a kind of mini-mall built like an elementary school, and there she sells SL versions of Lite Bright(tm), Eazy Bake Oven(tm), and other nostalgic toys from 70s.  ("Stuff dat I wanted as a kid," as she puts it.)  While this recreation of lost innocence is presented without irony, you can still occasionally see the adult behind it peeking out.  (The store's name, after all, is evidently borrowed from the Coen Brothers' Hudsucker Proxy, not exactly the kind of movie a kindergartener watches.)

If you've been half-following Second Life's more recent controversies, this last paragraph will probably seem strange, since the connotations of avatars roleplaying as children have been anything but innocent.  Rather, they've been associated with allegations (by the media and European authorities) of simulated pedophilia, and worse.  And while the Lindens have expressly forbade that kind of behavior in-world, non-sexual roleplaying is still permitted, and persists-- often, Marianne tells me, by people like her who have been abused as children themselves, and yearn to recapture in Second Life an innocence that was so atrociously ripped from them.  So now this subculture of adult Residents roleplaying as children exists in a social purgatory, adamantly protecting itself from occasional pedophiles who'd exploit them, while also enduring the suspicion of Residents who assume the worst-- or just find the whole notion of playacting as kids to be essentially creepy and suspect.  (In a distinct class of strangeness, that is, from roleplaying as a robot, or a magical elf, or even a humanoid furry animal.)

All this came up after Marianne McCann won New World Notes' Uncanny Valley Expo, in which she presented her avatar downcast, and close to tears.  In effect, she'd turned her avatar into a form of protest against the backlash directed at all child-age avatars and the moral panic spurred by totally legitimate concerns over protecting real children.  So after the contest I chatted with her, and Marianne described this community of overage kids, and her reasons for joining it.  Her conversation-- painful, forthright, likely controversial to some-- after the break.