New World Notes

SL Fashion Friday: Stylish Shopping Tips from Ara Voxel

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Ara Voxel is the rare blogger who does a fair amount of black and white pictures. Most people shoot in color, but sometimes the form of the design is most important and black and white keeps us from being distracted by the color. Black and white is often more dramatic. You can see that in her blog post Look #953.

• BOOD'UPOSES  Bring me Peace bento pack poses ( butterfly included ) @MIIX EVENT
• Sweater, joggers and sneakers by RKKN
• Hair Katy by DOUX
• Scene :  [My Roof Top Life]  by SOY

For another casual look, click here:

Really Useful Aquarium Features Mesh Fish That Feed, Low Land Impact, Multiple Customization & Sizing Options (NWN Partner News)

The Really Useful Aquarium is a cool product from New World Notes media partner Really Useful Scripts Corner -- lead developer Grace7 Ling gracefully demonstrates its many features in the video above. Available in her Really Useful Scripts Corner on the Marketplace and at her SL store (click here to teleport), Grace’s fish tank is fairly unique among other virtual world aquariums:

“Many of the older aquariums are using flat textures of fish that cycle around in a fixed way,” Grace notes. “The Really Useful Aquarium has mesh fish which swim randomly around the tank. The swim speed and turning speed of each fish can actually be customized if you know how. Secondly, if you are not using the display shelf, the tank is actually quite versatile and can be resized to rather surprising dimensions, and the fish will adjust automatically to the new dimensions of the tank.” (Watch below.)

On top of that, aquarium owners or their guests can feed the fish:

Twitter Usage Back Up to 2020 Levels Despite (Because of?) Trump Ban

Twitter usage last month hit 6.42 billion total visits, according to SimilarWeb, with US-based traffic up 4.18% from February. This after traffic had dipped somewhat from January's  6.3 billion visits. March 2021 traffic is about on par to Twitter's traffic in November-December 2020 and actually a touch higher than traffic in October 2020 (6.3B), right before the last US Presidential election.

Which is more or less a definitive answer to the following question that frequently came up, especially after the January 6th insurrection, when Twitter finally banned Donald Trump from the platform for inciting violence: Won't Twitter traffic collapse with Trump and all his roiling, news-grabbing tweets, not to mention all the bots amplifying those tweets, are gone?

So far, looking at the data, that doesn't seem to be the case. 

Second Life Screenshots Cleverly Converted Into Manga Comic Images

At the risk of stepping on Cajsa's Flickr toes, I'm totally in love with these images by Cadwyn Daffyd which turn SL screenshots into frames from a manga comic. Compare above with the original screenshot below:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Vivid Stories Told Through Virtual World Screenshots

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Bambi Foxdale’s “And In Our Hearts There Is a Boat” drew me in with its nostalgic emotional effect. I love how she shows that a picture can move someone so profoundly. 

What is an autumn hug? For the answer, click here:

Second Life Unveils Strange New Homepage Featuring Real Life Model, Other Odd Non-Second Life Marketing

Either this is a belated April Fool's joke, or this is the new official homepage for Second Life. Which is an online virtual world with 3D graphics, but for some reason, now features not an avatar, but a real life model.

Yes, really: The flying elf is from an upcoming promo that Linden Lab teased late last year (watch below), featuring many more non-avatar models pretending to be avatars. Suggesting an implicit marketing pitch on the order of, I guess, "Sign up for Second Life so you can be a flying elf... but not the one here, as she's not 3D graphics, but you'll feel like this in your mind."

The explicit messaging on the new homepage also feels as if it emanated from a marketing company with no actual first-hand knowledge of Second Life, or virtual worlds in general:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Outdoor Images So Lovely, Even a Virtual Outhouse & a Prison Yard Look Picturesque

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Ifollow Rivers makes fabulous pictures of Second Life homes and landscapes such as this charming cottage by a river. They all remind me of the Romantics like Thomas Cole and John Constable. Her pictures represent the pastoral and picturesque aesthetics of Romanticism that include the human element such as this cozy little home. 

To find out how even an outhouse can be picturesque, click here:

"The" Metaverse Isn't Happening (Comment of the Week #2)

Good points from reader "Kyz", reflecting on Core's mission to build a "multiverse" versus Epic's mission to build "the metaverse":

There isn't going to be a metaverse or multiverse in the sense that fiction foretold. That global environment we think of as the metaverse already happened. It's called the Internet. Within it are worlds and nearly endless content.

But one global 3D platform? Not happening. If it was going to happen it would have already. The market doesn't want it any more than it wanted VR on a global scale.

I think this thing with Core is just wordplay. They're close to Epic because they're built on Epic tech, but other than that, they're basically a dumbed down way to create games. If you want better games, you'll use the Unreal Engine itself.

Personally I find Core far too limiting compared to using the Unreal Engine directly and I don't see them overcoming the big problems like delivering the customers and buying power. The more customers, the more games and the more people trying to grab enough foot traffic to make a small bit of money before it becomes so saturated no one is making anything.

At any rate, it's still a good time to be a creator and you go wherever your skill level and determination gravitates you to. But if any entities are the metaverse tools? It's the game engines, few people are writing all this from scratch these days like SL did.

That sounds right. There's multiple popular web browsers and multiple smartphone devices running iOS or Android, so it's hard to see anything like a singular Metaverse dominating. It might not even be a matter of competing game engines (i.e. Unreal vs. Unity), so much as many metaverses for non-competing demographics:

Second Life's World Map Working After 5 Month Outage, CEO Announces

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg announced last weekend on Twitter that Second Life's world map is, after an outage that started last November, finally working.

I'm fairly fascinated that it took so long to update this issue, and how it is (or isn't) related to Project Uplift, moving SL to the Amazon web cloud.  ("Now that Uplift has finished," the incident report read in January, "we are working to restore the map tile functionality.") I've reached out to Linden Lab for an official response and will update this post when/if I get one.

Also notable: Ebbe Altberg announcing something about Second Life on Twitter after a long absence from Twitter -- his last tweet before announcing the world map had been fixed was also from last November.

Hat tip: Gogo, whose tweets get results!

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Thought-Proving Images By Sheldon Bergman

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

I discovered Sheldon Bergman by checking out Roseleiya’s favorites. When I paged down and saw “Losing Their Heads for Love”, I laughed out loud. I love how he made the metaphorical literal. His photostream is not very big. There are 31 photos, but all of them are thought-provoking and thoughtful

More thoughtful pictures are up next, click here: