New World Notes

Guns and Music: The Second Life Tutorials

If you want to bust a cap in a sucka with style while a good soundtrack's playing, you're in luck:  Alex Burgess of Are We Not Men has a useful guide to both: the SL DJ gives you streaming music tips here, and a couple weeks later, repairs to several gun shops, and shows you what to look for in an SL firearm.  Who knew a guy named Kurosawa was selling a Derringer and an role playing-friendly remake of a 1911 Colt?

The Mean Girls Guide to Blingtards

What's the deal with virtual bling, anyway?  I understand the appeal of glinting jewelry, I just don't get how a large segment of SL society came to demand that it twinkle brightly and steadily enough as to guide Eastern astrologers to baby Jesus.  Guenevere DeCuir from the Mean Girls Guide to SL takes some shocking photos from the scene, and reveals that blingtards come in three flavors of suck.

New World Newsfeed: Is Rapid Trademarking Second Life's Killer App for Corporations?

Recent dispatches from the outside world...

Did a lawsuit over a virtual sex bed inadvertently create a very powerful application of Second Life for real world companies?  That's what I take from this post on Virtual World News, citing an essay in The National Law Journal, which in turn cites Stroker Serpentine's famous copyright infringement suit.  According to the Journal, companies might use this legal precedent for "rapid trademarking":

Still Un-Alive: A Landowner Defends Her Use of Bots (Updated)

Who created the horde of undead Resident bots that now infest Second Life's most Popular Places?  That remains a mystery, but on further investigation, it seems to be more widespread than I originally assumed. After reading last week's New World Notes post on the pervasiveness of bots, Viajero Pugilist went in search of them in B&B Skins, an island fashion emporium that consistently ranks among the top of the Lindens' Popular Places category, a raw listing of total avatar foot traffic.  He found them not buried inside an underwater vault, as Christophe Hugo had, but high overhead, in a cafe four hundred-plus meters in the sky above B&B island.  They sat there staring blankly, and though Viajero invited them to dance, no one took him up on the offer.  Since dancing is such an essential community activity, this was a dead giveaway. (If Second Life had a Voigt-Kampff, the Blade Runner test to discover synthetic humans, Harrison Ford would ask his subjects to get funky to James Brown.) 

Last weekend, I tried to visit B&B's airborne zombie cafe, but was not as lucky; it's set above the limits of natural avatar flight.  However, I did find the owner of the island, standing silently on the balcony of her mansion by the sea.  I asked Bagnaria Wunderle about the dozens of undead above us. 

"I hope your article includes all sims that are using bots," she told me. "There are hundreds. That is all I have to say."

To be fair, there seems to be some truth in that.  At Miss Wunderle's prompting, I randomly visited three other sites listed in Popular Places, baldly asking questions like "Are you a bot?" to large groups I encountered there. I found just one of them full of actual Residents, albeit mostly away from keyboard, while their avatar collected free Linden Dollars in a camping system.  Another site also had a cafe of bots, only situated at sea level, with a few genuine Residents sitting among the undead in camping chairs [See Update below.]  A nightclub called TheHood had lined the bots up along the bar, like wallflowers watching a dance that they could never join:

Last year, the Lindens released an open source version of the Second Life viewer code, as a way of encouraging innovation, and this is that policy's most unintended of consequences: hacked versions of the program that create numerous Potemkin Villages of simulated activity.

"There are different levels of sophistication," Bagnaria tells me. "In any case, bots are not all that different from camping.  It is usually the percentage between bots and campers that differs."

I asked Bagnaria Wunderle how she justified her bots as another form of free money giveaway.  After all, I said, "With camping, at least an actual Resident gets L$, right?"

Second Life Events: Rik's Picks for January 24-28

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

There are a lot of folks who know their way around basic building in Second Life.  But if you want to create the coolest interactive stuff in SL, you will need to learn about scripting, using the Linden Scripting Language (LSL).  Starting on Friday, January 25 at 11AM, there will be a three-day Scripting 101 course taking place at Xfuzz Academy (click here to teleport.)  This free crash course in scripting should get you well along the way towards creating objects that rotate, change color and communicate.

Last night I ran into one of the instructors at Xfuzz Academy, Ms. Jayda Drake, who explained to me that the new school was designed to be analagous to a real school.  They plan to hold regular courses in a semester system, give out degrees, hold a graduation ceremony, even throw a prom!  She said that students will be encouraged to roleplay as a "jock, cheerleader, goth, or geek."  So if you have been meaning to relive your high school days, perhaps in a different clique this time around, here is your chance.

Also Coming Up This Week: sculpted skulls and ballerinas on display, intellectual property law, a caring community for cancer survivors, a weekend geek out, deutscher machinima  made easy, helping friends in crisis, and MacArthur talks about civil liberties in the metaverse.  All that cool stuff and more, after the jump...

2008 Second Life Predictions, Revealed!

Here they are-- thanks to all who voted.  Attracting 44% of survey takers is the prediction "Web pages-on-prim technology introduced", and I have to say, I think that's more a reflection of hope the Lindens will do so.  (And as anyone who waited years for the upgrade of the Havok 1 physics engine will tell you, hope is not a plan.) Ignatius Onomatopoeia's prediction that a major competitor to Second Life would emerge was also popular; while HiPiHi is in Beta and Multiverse is in commercial release, I interpret "major" to mean a large active user base, i.e., several hundred thousand or more.  Trailing in third is Adz Childs' prediction that there'll be "Significant changes to Community Standards"-- though arguably, the Lindens' closing of unlicensed virtual banks this week is already a drastic change to its "Buyer Beware" clause in those Standards, which state, "Linden Lab does not exercise editorial control over the content of Second Life."

What likely predictions did we miss?  And if you took the survey, which votes would you change now?

New World Newsfeed: Second Life at Sundance

Recent dispatches from the outside world...

Molotov Alva may not be going to the Oscars this year, but a portal into the metaverse is currently open at  Robert Redford's annual indy film mecca, the Sundance Film Festival.  Now showing at Sundance's New Frontier showcase is the mixed reality interactive installation, "Invisible Threads: Sweatshop Jean Factory in Second Life", a multi-layered exploration of labor, virtual worlds, post-industrial capitalism, and more.  Two artists created a textile factory in SL, dubbed it Double Happiness Jeans, then invited Residents to become low wage, poorly treated employees working on the line, while a foreman in a top hat oversees them.   Sundance patrons can order up a pair of jeans created to their specifications and-- this is supremely cool-- get their design printed up on a sheet of cotton, so they can be turned into a real pair of jeans.  Salon.com just posted an intriguing video interview of the artists, Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg, showing off their installation.  Crouse mentions that their "sweatshop employees" enjoy the camaraderie of the factory, and who can blame them?  At L$200 an hour, they're actually getting paid better wages to be featured in a Sundance art exhibit, than they would sitting in a camping chair.

Image credits:   Doublehappinessjeans.com, Salon.com.

Please Take my Federated Media Reader Survey!

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The Sound of One Avatar of Pronouncing Tibetan

Here's why I love Second Life: Because it contains a Resident named Wam7c Macchi.  And without fanfare, Wam7c Macchi has built an interactive teaching device.  Which helps you learn to speak another language.  Rather, to pronounce it.  Or to be even more precise, to pronounce Tibetan consonants.

Don't believe me?  Watch Mr. Macchi's video demo, or go in-world to try it out for yourself.  (Direct SLURL teleport to his booth at this link.)  You might even visit his real world website.

And here's the thing that keeps me up at nights: If one Resident in half a million has devoted so much time to such a wonderfully particular task, what are the other 499,999 doing?

Goth in a Box: Roleplay Goes Prefab

Lately I've been impressed by the rising quality of SL builds, not just from individual creators, but in mass-produced, prefab homes sold on Second Life's open market.  Where this was once utterly dominated by generic "McMansions" more fitting to a real world gated community, there seems to be a trend toward mood and roleplay, homes dripping with subculture signifiers.  Fornicola Butuzova recently showed me this pre-fab he sells with Amo Lambeau, for example-- "Castle Gothos" comes with a working gate, sooty fireplace, and trap doors, and was lovingly constructed, the ad copy boasts, with "light-traced contextual texturing".  It sells for L$9999-- a little under $40 for a home you could invite your fellow vampires to with pride.  As a value proposition, it's a bit like wandering into Target and buying a blood-encrusted battle ax designed by Michael Graves.