New World Notes

Five of My Favorite Second Life Blogs

Here's five of my favorite SL-oriented blogs to visit this weekend and RSS for future reading:

General SL info/resource: Daniel Voyager does a great job keeping abreast of day-to-day official announcements, and around the metaverse media scape.

Stylish locations: Eve Kazan's Madamemoiselle is a beautiful SL fashion blog, but it's also a great resource for finding beautiful locations in-world.

SL events: Kara Trapdoor consistently has info and links to interesting in-world events.

SL content creation/economics: Prim Perfect is a reliable resource for topics impacting content creators in SL.

Miscellaneous: Emily Orr's Train Wreck Love Life is opinionated, well-written, and wide-ranging. The post titles are based on unrelated song lyrics and the posts themselves usually encompass several unrelated topics, making them somewhat difficult to read in an RSS feed, but often still worth the dig.

Stay bloggy, my friends! Five more of my favorites soon. Do please post your own favorites in Comments.

Lindens Mark Major SL Mesh Fix Request "Someday/Maybe"

A couple weeks ago I mentioned the JIRA feature request that would improve the way SL mesh works with avatars, so that it (as a leading mesh developer puts it) "would eliminate a plethora of unavoidable problems with mesh clothing, reduce workflow considerably, open the market, allow avatars AND clothing to be worn (both mesh), one size would fit all and we could keep our physical (virtual) identities." But as Rowan Derryth reports, Linden Lab has marked that JIRA as a feature for "someday/maybe". So for now, the many mesh developers hoping for it will have to wait -- and curvy avatars like Ms. Derryth, pictured here, will wind up with mesh dresses that by default look like this. She explains why here.

Have You Seen SL's Pink Floyd-Streaming Secret Spheres?

Chestnut Rau explores Secret Spheres, a very cool-looking SL experience which she says "consists of a labyrinth of small scenes built inside a series of spheres, all of which are named for the music of Pink Floyd." Fittingly, music from the epic British band streams through each sphere. In previous generations, Pink Floyd fans would have to make do with playing Dark Side of the Moon in a darkened bedroom while utterly baked, or watching The Wizard of Oz with the sound down. Now you can get your Floyd on in 3D: Direct teleport to the Secret Spheres here.

Photo credit: Carrie Lexington, who has some more great pics here.

Suicide Cabinet Actually Contains SL Fashion Photos of Unique & Dreamlike Beauty

Suicide Cabinet by anne Dakun is a SL fashion blog that does stylized and gorgeous SL photos in a beautifully unique way. I love what Ms. Dakun does, as this screenshot will attest, with depth-of-focus and shadows, matched to evocatively elongated avatars, which perfectly illustrate a point Iris made yesterday: Beautiful SL fashion photos do not have to look photorealistic to look beautiful. Here's another favorite, all shadowy and spidery. Warning: Suicide Cabinet comes with one of those auto-play music stream thingies, but hearing as it includes Angelo Badalamenti tracks, I'm personally willing to let that slide. So see much more of Suicide Cabinet here.

Ophelia's Gaze: 3 Reasons Why I Hate the Weird (and Weirdly Popular) World of SL Avatar Morphs

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

The SL fashion world is infected with a horrible disease: Morphs, in which an SL screenshot and a RL photo are merged together into a grotesque whole. Invented some years ago, Morphs have since become particularly popular with SL's fashion community, as a quick Flickr search reveals. My real life Mom, who has been in Second Life almost as long as I have, recently developed an interest in SL photography and art, and when she came across Morphs, I begged her to stay away from them. I know this will earn me a few enemies, but I find Morphs creepy at best, and deceptive at worst.

Actually, I don't even hesitate to say that I hate them. Why? Here's three simple reasons:

World of Goodcraft: Woman Feeds Real Homeless for Virtual Dollars (Which Helps Her Level Up)

A young woman offered to feed the homeless for virtual dollars, and three people assigned her to do just that. When she had succeeded at that quest, three homeless folks were somewhat less hungry -- and she was even closer to leveling up. This is among the most interesting recent tasks on Coffee & Power, the new start-up from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, in which people offer and accept real world tasks in exchange for virtual dollars. On a visit to the C&P office yesterday, Philip mentioned this mission created by user "CatherinetheGreat", who set the task at 5 Coffee Dollars (equivalent to USD$5) per delivery. As you can see from this screengrab, three people took her up on the offer. She can now convert her Coffee Dollars to cash to cover the cost of the food purchases. And by successfully completing the mission, Catherine is closer to leveling up in the Coffee & Power system, which quantifies user activity into an MMO-like leveling structure. (She's now Level 6 in the C&P network, as you can see.)

When Philip first told me about the task, my first snarky reaction was, "This would be a perfect mission for guilty yuppies who want to ignore panhandlers." But really, it's much more interesting for several reasons:

Miss Metaverse Manners: Should You Wear a Mesh Dress to Your Friend's SL Wedding? And Other Mesh Social Concerns

Iris Ophelia's ongoing take on etiquette & ethics in virtual spaces  

With controversial new technology like SL mesh come new social dilemmas for the early adopters and holdouts alike. This week we've got a few that will hopefuly help you navigate your own messy, meshy faux-pas.

I'm going to a friend's SL wedding soon and I really want to wear a mesh dress but I'm worried about ruining the event for people who can't see mesh. Is it even that important?

                    - Party Pooper

In a crowd like a wedding party, it's probably a safe bet that many people there aren't using a mesh viewer. A lot of those people might be taking pictures for the lucky couple, so someone with an invisible body and a blob on their hand would definitely stick out like a sore thumb. Even if it's a fabulous dress, you're there for them, not for yourself. Wear a slightly older piece from your closet and save that little mesh number for next time.

Keep reading for two more questions answered!

Watch My Cull Channel of SL Music Video Machinima!

Click here to watch more than 30 minutes of great music videos shot with SL machinima, and here's the cool thing: You can just watch one video after another without having to fuss with YouTube, even play it in a loop. (So perfect background music/visuals for a party.) That's thanks to Cull TV, the new user-curated music video streaming service just launched by several Linden Lab/Second Life alum. Creating this list was incredibly simple: once you launch Cull, you can find and select any video on YouTube or Vimeo, and add it to your own customized list.

In case your interested, here's the individual videos featured in this channel:

• "Pixelated Truth", track by Giana Factory, machinima by Arbit Delacroix
• "Plant Her", track by Potlatch, machinima by Arbit Delacroix
• "Colored Pencils", track by Mollusk, machinima by Steph Ling
• "You Don't Know Me," track by Apparat, machinima by Lyric Lundquist
• "Stay With Me", track by Moby, machinima by Bryn Oh
• "Idoru", track by Amon Tobin, machinima by Lyric Lundquist
• "Hanging Out to Dry", music by Pepe Deluxe, machinima by BobE Schism
• "Traveling", track and machinima by Pep Lemmon

As you can probably tell, it leans heavy on electronica/ambient/triphop. What other machinima music videos should I add to this channel?

Awesome SL Build for Burn2 - Found on Reddit's /r/secondlife

This is amazing detail on an SL mesh build by artist Claudia222 Jewell, profiled here by Inara Pey of Modem World, a post that's currently ranking at the top of Reddit's Second Life channel, and for good reason. It's part of Rites of Passage, her installation for Burn2, SL's annual tribute to Burning Man. Ms. Jewell tells Inara that she creates her works in Zbrush and Blender. Much more here, including a mesh robin and flying dragon.

Seen any amazing SL content or news lately? Go here to submit it to Reddit's Second Life group /r/secondlife, for upvoting!

"The Watchers": Epic Sci-Fi Machinima is Epic

This sci-fi machinima by Arbit Delacroix makes my mouth drop and the hair on the back of my head stand up (what with all its creeptastically giant spider robots):

"This was really a just an exercise to try to make me focus on sound design," Arbit tells me. He's not totally sure what WindLight setting he used, but likely Verdigris, at least for some shots. It was shot at the SL sims Hangars Liquides, Splintered Rock, and Cloudcroft, and the spider robot is the "Cyber Widow", by Gemini Cybernetics.

Arbit shot the Giana Factory music machinima video I dug so much earlier this year, but "The Watchers" reminds me of "Cargo", an ambitious sci-fi machinima project he started with this beautiful trailer. However, Arbit tells me, "It's not directly related to 'Cargo' or anything like that, but a sci-fi setting lends itself to good sound effect opportunities so I went in that direction. I'm holding off on Cargo for the moment though until I figure out whether or not to reshoot some things that might benefit from mesh." Maybe if this "Watcher" video gets massive views (hint hint), he'll finish "Cargo".