New World Notes

This Sunday in SL: Music Benefit for Norway's Terror Victims

This Sunday July 31st from 3-9pm SLT/Pacific, there will be a huge music/club benefit for the victims of the recent terrorist attack in Norway. Kara Trapdoor has all the details. Any L$ raised during the event will be converted to cash that'll be sent to families of the victims via the Norwegian Embassy in Sweden. While researching the event, she met SLer Cleopatra Carfield, who says several victims are family: "She herself has lost five loved ones in the tragedy and has a goddaughter fighting for her life." My deepest condolences to her, and all other Norwegian impacted by the atrocity. [Click here for a direct teleport to the Norway benefit event]

SL Bloggers Blog About SL's New Web Profiles Social Network

Second Life's new Twitter-esque web profiles are a good idea, but with Google+, may be a social network too far. Here's some SL blogger's blogging their reactions to it:

• Alicia Chenaux has a tutorial on adjusting your profile notifications.
• Strawberry Singh has a well-thought out Profile features wish list.
• Penny Patton has a very good analysis/design document for improving profiles. Hey, beer-drinking Lindens reading this blog: Be sure to read this. Excerpt:

I would turn Avatar Profiles into a cross between a Facebook/Google+ profile and a personal website, with the focus on SL community more than offline identity. You'd have the About tab which included a brief profile, interests tags, a website link, a marketplace link and a "home" spot where you could place a "pick" for your home or other significant SL location like a favourite hangout spot.

Tutorial: How to See SL From a Human Perspective

This is a long but helpful tutorial for adjusting for Second Life camera from Nalates Urriah, a response to the influential post by SL designer Penny Patton on scaling SL to a more realistic size. This can be done through the debug menu by adjusting settings in Rear View. (Heh heh he said "rear view".) There's advantages and some disadvantages, explains Ms. Urriah, to doing this:

When you bring your Rear View to a setting that keeps you camera low the world starts to look really big. You can see that much of Second Life is not to a realistic scale. My little cottage has a very high ceiling. That is needed for the default camera settings. I can have a smaller house and not feel crowded if I use alternate camera settings. Walking in tight spaces and shopping in malls is much nicer too. However, in some forests it can be a disadvantage.

Read much more here.

A Lovely SL Tribute to the Artist Audrey Kawasaki

I love Stacia Villota's SL screenshot-based tribute to the art of Audrey Kawasaki, whose Klimt and anime-esque paintings on wood you can read about on Wikipedia or see on her official site. Stacia gives her tribute an SL-twist of neko cat ears, of course. See and read more of her tribute here.

15 SL Places to Explore Outer Space in Virtual Space

Daniel Voyager has 15 places in Second Life which realistically simulate outer space, from Spaceport Alpha created by a group of real life rocket scientists, to NASA's official SL site, to a site that simulates a space shuttle launch (which alas is maybe the last place to see the shuttle launch in any variation.)

SL Secret: Like PostSecret, But the Hidden Darkness, Joys, Dramas of Virtual Life

If you haven't read SLSecret lately, you really should. A regular feature of the SL fashion blog Shopping Cart Disco, it was inspired by Frank Warren's hugely popular PostSecret, and operates on a similar premise of anonymously sent deep and dark secrets, except with SLSecret, what's revealed are the joys and dramas of virtual life. And the pain as well: I wonder how many in SL feel as the anonymous sender above does. (From the latest post.)

Suri Yangtz Makes SL Fashion Seem Like a Waking Dream

Suri Yangtz is a Second Life fashion blogger whose photos are so vivid and mysterious and tinged with silent contemplation, they remind me of a waking dream. See more here, and more here, and yet again more here. In this link I am indebted to Ms. Strawberry, who is herself no slouch in SL fashion photos.

Coming Soon: 3D Plugin for OpenSim in Facebook with Dynamic Content Creation, Internal Economy, Virtual Land

What you’re looking at above is a screenshot of SpotON3D, an OpenSim-based web plugin running in Facebook. Now in closed testing, SpotON3D is, as company Co-Founder Tessa Kinney-Johnson tells me, “A fully functional web plugin experience that can run in your Facebook page. In other words, just like FarmVille or any other Facebook app working with their API. Everything works as expected, minus the bugs we’re working on, of course.”

As the above screenshot suggests, you’ll be able to make prim-based content in SpotON3D in Facebook. “Of course you can create dynamic content. This is not Unity, where you have to basically know C# to make even the most basic environments. This is our flavor of the OpenSim platform, fully functional right down to content creation and deliveries, classified ads, offline messaging, full group support and much more.” (The company plans to roll out mesh next year as well, too.)

SpotON3D’s focus, she says, is “NOT on recreating the SL experience. It's about taking the Web 3.0 vision to reality and going where no other platform like this has been able to before.” Using proprietary technology, Kinney-Johnson declines to go into specifics on how the plugin works, except to say how it does not: “We are NOT server side rendering... [w]e are NOT a Unity based bridge system... We are NOT a trigger for a pre-installed client to pop up a simple login screen.”

SpotON3D will also come with an internal economy, and a basic form of land ownership/usage -- read on:

New World Gaming: Brooklyn Politician Too Busy Running Virtual City to Help Care for Actual City

Today's milestone in virtual world activity infecting the real: A Brooklyn assemblyman has become so focused on caring for his virtual city in the Facebook game CityVille, he's been lax on helping care for, you know, Brooklyn:

A comparison of Boyland’s Facebook activity with a record of Assembly sessions shows the scandal-scarred pol logging on when he is supposed to be doing the people’s business... He logged on to CityVille at least seven times that day, while the Assembly was still in session. He missed the Assembly’s sessions on March 23 and 24, but appears to have spent the entire night between them playing CityVille, posting game updates seven times between midnight and 8 a.m.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

SL Issue Update: Adam and Eve Avatar Folder Not a Virus

Linden Lab's Grid Status just reported that a database issue which caused a folder called "Adam N Eve Avatars_OLD" to appear in users' Lost & Found inventory has been resolved. Earlier today, many users reported this, some openly worrying that it was a malicious virus. (A rumor that reportedly gained some traction throughout SL's various social media/in-world chat channels.) It wasn't a virus, Linden Lab claims, has been addressed, and if you still see that folder in your inventory, clearing you cache should fix it. Hat tip: Disa Marnesdottr, sachi Vixen.