New World Notes

Philip Rosedale Proposes Blockchain Technology to Create Online User Identities That Are Anonymous But Still Trustable

Metaverse Identity on the Blockchain is a good long weekend read from Philip Rosedale, and while he's talking about avatar identities, I think the solution he's proposing could also become scalable to all kinds of online identities which get us beyond the real name-based IDs of Facebook, which are intrinsically full of flaws and subject to varieties of abuse. As I've said before, while Bitcoin is useless as a virtual currency, the blockchain code it uses to transparently track and register transactions is definitely valuable. Philip's idea is to use it in tracking and validating identities without tracing the blockchain-based identity with the actual person it's associated with:

Real 2D Portraits of 3D Avatars by Nylon Pinkney

You could put in a whole weekend perusing these real portraits of Second Life avatars by "Nylon Pinkney", SL name of supremely talented East Coast-based artist Elleinadart. I love how she manages to convey personality and character in her portraits, paradoxically bringing out more life from her 2D lines and colors than the original,  3D digital avatar. (Compare her drawing above left with the screenshot she created it from, above right.) By the way, she creates these portraits by commission.

Here's one of her more recent works, a portrait of famed SL blogger Strawberry Singh:

Avatars Against Trump: Michael Flynn Edition

Subtle, Kimika Ying -- very, very subtle.

Go here to submit your own image to the Avatars Against Trump Flickr group.

Second Life's Reported Monthly Active Users Drop to 800,000, Down 200K Since 2014 -- "Paying SL Users Has Held Steady", Says Linden Lab

Linden Lab is now reporting Second Life monthly active users as just 800,000 - a figure first mentioned in Kristen French's Wired/Backchannel article last week. That's a significant drop from the last few years: In 2013, Linden Lab reported 1 million monthly actives in SL, it remained that rate in 2014, and then in 2015, Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg put the figure at 900,000 monthly actives. Now they're saying it's 800,000.

Why the drop?

"We've made a number of optimizations to our user acquisition efforts to get more qualified traffic," Linden Lab spokesman Peter Gray tells me. "As a result, though the total number of monthly actives has come down, the number of paying SL users has held steady."

Translating that from online marketing jargon, he means roughly this:

Metaverse ProTips: My First Impressions of Space, the New Virtual World

Someone uploaded the International Space Station, check it out, if only to get a sense of how friggin’ huge it is! 

Brookston Holiday has been building in Second Life for 10 years. You can view his work on the SL Marketplace here and his ProMaterials brand.  

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure and frustration of exploring a new virtual world. Space, by Sine Wave Entertainment, is a cross platform virtual world. [Full disclosure: An NWN sponsor. - ed] If you’re at all interested in checking it out, go ahead, it’s about one hundred times easier to get into than Second Life. You can signup and login without ever leaving your browser; and enter without downloading a viewer.

If you plan to stay for a while, you can go ahead and download a viewer, just like in Second Life. The viewer brings you into the same virtual world but with improved graphics and performance. Eventually, you’ll be able to log in with a tablet or phone as well, without creating other accounts, or paying a third party.

Here's my first impressions as a longtime SL content creator:

Michael Linden, Long-Lasting Employee Now Leaving Linden Lab, Had the Best Idea for a New Linden Lab Office EVER (Updated)

Michael Blum, known for a well over a decade by Second Life users by his avatar name "Michael Linden", left Linden Lab last week. Word of this is starting to matriculate to the shocked and saddened SL community, because Michael has been a customer-facing employee for nearly 14 years - starting in tech support and going on to become manager of the Linden Department of Public Works -- busy creators of virtual civic spaces, whose avatars (like his own) often looked like moles. (SL blogger Daniel Voyager has a good career summary here.)

Reasons for his departure haven't been disclosed, but Michael tells me he plans to remain a member of the Second Life community: "Oh, I'll be busier in SL on my alt account," as he put it. "Be nice to the Moles!"

Michael joined Linden Lab shortly after I started my 3 year stint as official embedded journalist in 2003 -- a sweet, gentle giant of a man with a basso profundo voice that would boom through the office just about any time he talked, with a habit of coming to work dressed in 19th century, steampunk-inflected finery. (As Yoz Linden's photo here will attest.)

Among fellow Linden Lab alumni, Michael is particularly famous for his incredible proposal a new office for the company, when the startup was looking for a larger space. SLers who know Michael for his public works projects will love this:

Survey: Does Linden Lab's Stand Against Trump's Muslim Refugee Ban Change Your Opinion of Linden Lab?

Virtual Reality Can't Teach Empathy to Those Who Don't Want It

Sample of negative user reviews of Project Syria on Steam

We talked about the problems with calling VR an "empathy machine", and here's a perfect if depressing case study of that:

Project Syria, a virtual reality experience created by immersive journalism progenitor Nonny de la Pena about child refugees, went live on Steam this week to mostly racist and politically vitriolic reviews.

That was a few months ago, and the negative reviews, mostly by people who clearly haven't even bothered to try out the free experience, have only increased since then. This is part of a larger trend, where many will reject any journalism which doesn't agree with their ideology as "fake news". Thing is, most of the population still absorbs at least some news they may hate from their periphery: From the headlines of newspapers and electronic billboards they pass on the street, to the news channels they flip past, on their TVs, to the news items their friends they disagree with on social media share. 

YouTube Video Directory of Beautiful/Interesting Second Life Places

Where to go in the virtual world? Visit Marcus VanDouser's YouTube page, which features dozens of well-shot videography of beautiful and/or interesting Second Life sims, with the map/teleport link thoughtfully added in the info box of each. Such as this one, which seems like somewhere in Montana but is actually a sim named Burger: Click to visit here.

A Valentine's Day Story That Spans Across Three Worlds

Once upon a time, two shy but talented artists met each other in Second Life, bonding over their skills at making digital sculptures of strange and crystalline beauty -- and also, of course, a talking brain. Then logging off one day, the woman flew across the ocean to meet him. And so they did, and married, and built a happy life together. Until tragedy broke them apart (as it inevitably always does), but she nonetheless kept his memory alive -- as did his colleagues, who some ten years later, built him a quiet memorial in his honor in another world. Where it silently stood in a park clearing at the top of a virtual mountain -- until some virtual explorers discovered it, and discovered who the memorial was for. And in their way, also found the woman who still kept him in her heart -- and in their searching, found this photo of them in their happiest times. And learning about all this, she felt glad these virtual world explorers now knew who her husband was -- and that she now had a new way to remember him.