New World Notes

Extremely Articulated SL Avatars Now Available for Testing

The Project Bento viewer is available for download here for general user testing -- that's Linden Lab's codename for much-anticipated Second Life skeleton extensions which greatly expand the expressive range of avatars: Wings that actually flutter more or less naturally, fingers that actually grip, and so on. See video above for some early, pretty impressive examples. Much more on this emerging tech soon, as this is sure to get still more impressive soon.

Also, I'm offering special coverage to the first Bento avatar that's literally a bento:

Free Worlds Adrift Island Creator: Design Your Own Floating Isle, Upload It For Others to Play In

The Worlds Adrift Island Creator, as the name suggests, is a free building tool for the upcoming single-sharded, fully simulated MMO. (Brief tutorial above.) The tool not only lets you build your own island, but insert an avatar into the finished mini-world, to explore what you built first-hand (so to speak). Even cooler: You can upload it to Steam Workshop for others to download and play in, and even get a chance to have it added to the official MMO when it launches:

Polygon's "Monster Factory" Hosts Hilariously Insane Party That Captures Second Life At Its Freeform, Anarchic Best

Well this is a pretty excellent treat to come back to after a long weekend: Polygon vidcasters Justin and Griffin McElroy's "Monster Factory" with their best and funniest visit to Second Life -- and for my money, the best "Let's Play SL" video so far. Don't believe me? Watch:

It starts with a party in a giant pizza crashed by a cavalcade of avatars of every possible shape and form, and continues to get increasingly insane, anarchic, and hilarious, to the point where one of the hosts finally enthuses:

"The image I've got right now is two dragons fighting to save a marshmallow man. Second Life is the best game ever made."

I was kinda blah on their previous outings in SL, but with this video, the McElroys finally capture Second Life at its best: 

Top Four New World Notes Posts from Last Week

• Valleywag May Have "Scared Everybody" in Tech, But Second Life Laughed Off Its Attacks
• Linden Dollar Exchange Rate Trending Back to Normal -- But Massive Amounts Still Up for Sale
• MMO Pioneer Raph Koster: Virtual Reality Developers Must Learn from Virtual World History Or Repeat Its Mistakes
• Insider Attributes Massive Linden Dollar Fluctuations to Some Large Second Life Businesses Rapidly Liquidating L$ Holdings (Land Barons, Say?)

Valleywag May Have "Scared Everybody" in Tech, But Second Life Laughed Off Its Attacks

A typical Valleywag hit piece on Second Life back in the day

"Been enjoying your pieces on Second Life," Nick Denton e-mailed me back in 2007. "Very balanced. Not that one can say the same of us." That's for damn sure. I was going through old e-mails today while reading about Denton's very public feud with VC Peter Thiel, the powerful Ayn Rand admirer and Donald Trump delegate who secretly hired a legal team to sue Denton's Gawker publication out of existence, partly for personal reasons, and also, apparently, for Valleywag, Gawker's now-defunct tech industry arm, which Thiel described as a terrible scourge of Silicon Valley:

Mr. Thiel [has called] Valleywag “the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda.”

“It scares everybody,” he said in a 2009 interview with Pe Hub, a private equity publication. “It’s terrible for the Valley, which is supposed to be about people who are willing to think out loud and be different. I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters.”

I had to smile at that description, because back when Denton himself edited Valleywag (2006-2008 or so), one of his prime targets in tech was Second Life:

Linden Dollar Exchange Rate Trending Back to Normal -- But Massive Amounts Still Up for Sale

The Linden Dollar sell rate seems to be trending downward from its record highs at the start of this week, when the top sell order was L$265. As of today (I took this screen capture from the LindeX about a half hour ago), the top rate is L$259, with other top sell orders approaching the more typical rate of around L$250 per US1.00.

"It seems like it wants to settle," observes Juliette Westerburg of Tres Blah, "but people are probably desperate to cash out simply because they need to, that it keeps going back up. But it's not continually going up every morning like it was for a few days ago."

However, there's still a lot of Linden Dollars being sold on the market, with nearly L$116,000,000 being offered for L$250/1. (That's over $450,000 in real cash.)  That's likely not from a single person but an aggregate rate now on sale from many SLers. "Probably all the people who refuse to sell at a higher rate. It just accumulates," as Juliette puts it.

And those sell orders are accumulating quite a lot:

Friday Flickr: Self-Portrait of Whiskey Monday as a Still Life

Here's a new-ish image from the Flickr stream Whiskey Monday, a departure from the flights of metaphorical fancy she's usually known for (such as this recent one), with "As Far as Nowhere" a relatively realistic self-portrait that nicely balances contrasts and shadows, giving her avatar's body vibrancy and texture rare in pics of avatars (SL or otherwise). Click here to embiggen.

Using Virtual Green Screens to Make Great Virtual Images

I love that so many virtual fashion photographers use a virtual green screen backdrop to create an even more virtual (but paradoxically realistic) composite image. Here's one by Daeberethwen Arbenlow with little post-processing (besides the green screen layering). "Just combined some WindLights and added contours," she tells me.

Now here's the final results:

MMO Pioneer Raph Koster: Virtual Reality Developers Must Learn from Virtual World History Or Repeat Its Mistakes

Here's a great recent talk from MMO pioneer Raph Koster who gives a breezy history of virtual worlds, outlines their massive influence on tech culture and the mainstream*, then closes with an ominous warning to the new generation of virtual reality developers: "Heed the lessons of your forebears: From whence you came, so shall you be. The future is still MUD-dy." After watching, I got in touch with Raph, who explained more about that last point of advice:

"VR is just a rendering tool," Raph told me. "It's a window through which we see a virtual space. But virtual spaces, and especially virtual places, and especially the inhabitants and their behaviors, are OLD and well-studied and if you don't go look at that history, you're going to replicate some mistakes on a very large scale."

I'm biased, but I definitely agree. To take just one example, VR developers now are probably underestimating the problem of griefing and harassment, an ongoing challenge with MMOs for decades, which becomes even more problematic in immersive VR. However, most VR developers on the latest platforms seem to assume the key problems are technical, rather than cultural and social -- which only means they're setting themselves up for a rude awakening.

Where Should Polygon's "Monster Factory" Next Visit in SL?

@slhamlet @griffinmcelroy YES, this, if you find some cool places to go please let us know, we are trying I swear to go

— Justin McElroy (@JustinMcElroy) May 23, 2016

Justin McElroy, co-host of Polygon's popular "Monster Factory" smartass tour of Second Life, reached out to me on Twitter in search of new locations. Their videos are good-natured, Obrien-eseque jabes through the metaverse, but it's clear that they're sort of randomly teleporting into noob areas or randomly browsed areas that don't show SL at its most interesting -- or wackiest!

So where should they go? Post SLurls at them on Twitter, or in Comments below. Key recommended components:

• Lots of regular visitors
• Seriously cool visually 
• Gamer/sandbox creator friendly

Post in Comments are Tweet via the link above!