New World Notes

SL10B Memories: Ms. FairChang Meets Her RL Husband

I asked NWN readers about their most important experience in Second Life over its 10 year history, and fittingly, the first memory comes from Pituca FairChang, who's been a member for that entire decade (and then some, since she joined in Beta):

"The memory that has impacted my life is joining The Americana Group back in Beta and meeting Garth Fairlight (later to become Garth FairChang) there." (That's them at their wedding, at left, which many of their SL friends attended.) "He would later immigrate from London to Southern California to marry me. Tragically his life was cut short by pancreatic cancer. I stay on to keep our 38 regions of FairChang Islands alive and running in his memory."

Interested in Virtual Vistas and Carefully-Crafted Character Designs? I Might Have Just The Thing for You...

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

I don't usually like to promote my own little projects on New World Notes, but today I'm making an exception that I hope a fair number of you will enjoy. I recently started a Tumblr called SingleFrameVideoGame, with a very specific purpose in mind: I wanted to finally make use of the thousands of video game screenshots I've accumulated over the past few years.

And no, that number is not an exaggeration.

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week

• OpenSim Still Shows Little Meaningful User Growth
• The Top 10 Innovations That Have Shaped the Face of Second Life Fashion Over 10 Years
• Sorry, US Government Accountability Office: Linden Dollar, Not Bitcoin, Is Most Widely Circulated Virtual Currency
• Oculus VR Gets $15M in VC Funding - Virtual Reality Much More Likely to Go Mass Market
• Otterly Adorable: New SL Mesh Avatars By Anya Ohmai Are Making Waves

On GigaOM: 3 Lessons from SL's First 10 years -- and 3 Ways it Can Still Change the Future

I have a post on GigaOM reflecting on Second Life's first 10 years, and the next years to come. It's difficult to compress so much that's happened over such a long time into 1000 words, but hopefully I've managed to capture where the world is now. Thanks to Iris Ophelia for taking the accompanying pic, which I like so much, I'm including the embiggable version bellow, with an excerpt from the post, perhaps the paragraph most important to me:

Don't Miss These Incredibly Striking Second Life Pics by The Incomparable Vaki Zenovka

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Let's end this week with some drop-dead gorgeous eye-candy in the form of a Second Life pic by Vaki Zenovka, copyright law specialist and uber-stylish virtual fashionista. When she's not helping out with Justitia Island, Vaki's known for sharing her penchant for crisp suits and androgyny-heavy high-fashion on her blog. Although my own style rarely overlaps with Vaki's, she's absolutely one of my top 5 favorite SL fashionistas. Her latest pic, "Smoke lingers round your fingers", should make it very clear why.

Vaki's pictures are always incredibly bold and dramatic, with no detail overlooked. She has an excellent aesthetic sense, and she absolutely knows her way around all the tools necessary for a truly stunning snapshot.

Though I had to crop it to keep it SFW, you can check out both the full B&W version and the full color version on Vaki's Flickr stream here.

Immersive Soundscape of Real Voices Celebrating SL10B

Click here to be immersed in Dizzy Banjoy's SL10B installation, a giant bottle that contains the voices of many SLers reflecting on the world's 10th anniversary. The accomplished metaverse and iOS developer created a similar project for SL's 5th anniversary, and tells me he noticed a discernible change in the recordings SL users sent him:

OpenSim Still Shows Little Meaningful User Growth

In January 2012, HyperGrid Business' Maria Korolov estimated there were 15,700 active OpenSim users. In a new post, Mr. Korolov published active user stats for the 10 most popular OpenSim grids (as at left), and they show very little growth from over the last year and a half: About 18,200 (plus maybe a few hundred more from even smaller grids). So growth of about 3,000 users in 16 months, which is so tiny as to be (as Clay Shirky once put it, describing Second Life growth) a rounding error. Speaking of Second Life, SL still gains about 400,000 new users... a month. This continues a trend of flat growth from Open Sim, for in 2009, an expert insider with the development community confirmed my estimate back then that the userbase was 15,000.

None of this is to be critical of OpenSim developer community, which have come up with some very cool and interesting applications, like sim-on-a-stick. However, this cold water needs to be thrown, and here's why:

The Top 10 Innovations That Have Shaped the Face of Second Life Fashion Over 10 Years

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

With all the talk of Second Life's 10th birthday, I can't help but think about everything that's changed over the past ten years... Especially when it comes to virtual fashion. There have been so many developments that turned SL fashion on its head over and over again, shaping it into what it is today. Flexi prims, tattoo layers, even prim hair... Just thinking about them all (and the kinds of things that used to be considered to absolute height of virtual style) is enough to boggle the mind. We've come pretty far, folks.

So strap yourself into my ultra-chic time machine and let's take a trip back to revisit some of the most influential innovations in the history of Second Life style. oh, and just a heads up: There's loads of absolutely cringe-worthy oldschool Iris Ophelia after the jump, so don't say I didn't warn you!

Sorry, US Government Accountability Office: Linden Dollar, Not Bitcoin, Is Most Widely Circulated Virtual Currency

My pal Andrew Leonard of Salon notes the latest U.S. Government Accountability Office's report to the Senate's Finance committee on the tax implications of virtual currencies, which not only mentions Second Life by name, but lays out an accurate scenario in which an SL content creator would probably have to pay US income taxes (if they're based in the US). Here's the key infographic from the report:

Read the full .pdf of the report right here. As Andrew notes, the real target of the report doesn't seem to be Second Life's Linden Dollars or World of Warcraft's gold coins (also mentioned), but Bitcoin:

The specter of the IRS casting a shadow over Bitcoin, which the GAO concludes is “the most widely circulated virtual currency available,” is the meat of the report. Just the fact that the U.S. government is starting to pay serious attention to the cryptocurrency surely has libertarians getting nervous.

Emphasis mine. Two things: The IRS has already recommended that people pay taxes on virtual currency earnings in Second Life, like four years ago. More key: This report is totally wrong about Bitcoin's circulation:

Scratch Your Dungeon-Crawler Itch With a Free Copy of Torchlight

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

I was this close to posting another article about how amazing Animal Crossing: New Leaf is, but there's been some breaking news of vital importance that I absolutely must share instead. No, I'm not talking about Microsoft's abrupt 180 in regards to some of their most controversial Xbox One policies (but you can read about that here). I'm talking about Torchlight, beloved dual-platform dungeon-crawler, being absolutely free on GOG until noon tomorrow. (Correction: Until 1am, sorry folks.) Knowing how many of our regular readers love a good old-school crawl, I had to put this at the top of my schedule.

But wait, hasn't Torchlight 2 been out since last fall? Why play the first game when you could just get the second? Well I've got a few pretty compelling reasons for you.