New World Notes

Shopping for SL Male Fashion? Look Inside Taylor Belmont's Dirty Mind

The Dirty Mind blog is by Taker Belmont. I got a kick out of post #41 with the banana swing. The banana outfit is such a clever choice. It has a sort of mod meets camp feeling. The gold pillars are too much which makes them perfectly campy. 

• 055 SumBoss  - [ GUILTY ] Man Cave (exclusive)
• Banana Swing & Tree Light Set - CROWDED ROOM Marketplace

And now for something completely different, click here:

Second Life's Terms of Service Allow Users to Sell Screenshots of Others' SL Creations (I.E., In Theory, As An NFT) - But Would It Hold Up in Court?

Important comment/update to last week's post, when I cautioned against creating NFT from Second Life images. When the EFF lawyer I quoted referred to the "dark interesting mysteries" around IP ownership of user-created content in SL, Linden Lab had not addressed derivative works in its Terms of Service. Since then (in 2017, it looks like), the company has:

2.5 You also grant Linden Lab and other users of the Service a license to use your Content in snapshots and machinima that is displayed in publicly accessible areas of the Service.

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers for display in any publicly accessible area of the Service, you hereby grant other users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to photograph, capture an image of, film, and record a video of the Content, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the resulting photograph, image, film, or video in any current or future media as provided in and subject to the restrictions and requirements of an applicable Product Policy or other policy.  

Reader irihapeti noted this clause, which effectively requires content creators to opt out from people using their content in an SL screenshot for commercial or other purposes:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Sharp Male Fashion Imagery from Alfred Wessex

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

I love “To the Moon” from Alfred Wessex. I love how he shows the avatars’ love for each other in such a simple way, how she leans into him, how he rests his arm on her leg. It shows a couple attuned to each other in an ordinary moment enjoying the night sky. I also like the subtle light that illuminates some of the grass but fades quickly outside their magic circle.

Wessex does great fashion shoots; for more, click here:

Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2021年4月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します。

Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.

 

 

 

Watch: Doggface Video Recreated in VRChat to Promote Upcoming Inline Skating World

Just vibing and grinding in Shibuya Terminal ☺️

Having a little too much fun making the #jsrf world in #vrchat 😆

(tribute to Doggface208's amazing vid last year 😁 ) pic.twitter.com/a31pSnLvat

— Lakuza (@LakuzaVR) April 27, 2021

This is a fun VRChat-based tribute to the beloved Doggface Fleetwood Mac skating video. Which would be great in itself, but VRChat being VRChat, it’s also a video promoting an upcoming VRChat world with physics-enabled skating:

“The world itself is based on Jet Set Radio Future, a game released back in 2002,” explains Lakuza, who created and stars in the video, and is a developer of this world:.

”It’s inline skating with a heavy emphasis on grinding across objects… it'll be the first VRChat world to allow for grinding in this manner.” He’s being modest: It’s probably the first VR-enabled skating game in any virtual world that’s not specifically engineered for skating. Anyway, follow him on Twitter for launch updates.

The skating was developed by @squiddingme, the skating system was created via the Udon Sharp compiler:

“I’m not clever enough to understand how it works,” says Lakuza, “but he's basically created a system of movement options that allows double-jumping, wall-running, grinding as well as being able to control acceleration speed over time.” 

As for bringing the Doggface vibe into VRChat, he’s actually using the platform VR mouth tracking technology:

Here's a Metaverse Protocol Proposal Linking Virtual Worlds - If We Need One?

Metaverse technologist Kim Nevelsteen, who created that quite cool project which seamlessly connects different Minecraft servers to each other, has promoted an epic manifesto from the M3 group proposing Metaverse connectivity between a wide variety of virtual worlds, including WebVR,  VRChat, Minecraft and beyond:

• Part 1 is here.
• Part 2 is here.

"People are searching for a standardized Metaverse protocol," Kim says, summarizing his purpose. "Even if that's achieved, the overhead of updating the integrated systems will impair a Metaverse. An architecture with dynamic evolution is required and currently IPSME is the only one that satisfies all criteria, as far as I know." (That stands for Idempotent Publish/Subscribe Messaging Environment, on which he co-authored this academic paper .)

This is all admirably ambitious, but with self-described metaverses like ROBLOX and VRChat already quite massive, I'm starting to wonder if we need a single Metaverse protocol connecting them:

This Artist Uses Second Life Wireframe & Layering to Create Amazing Images

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

“The Magician” seems so perfect for a 1970’s roch concept album. I love the psychedelic exuberance of the picture with the mirror-like shards exploding outward from the epicenter where the Magician has materialized from some hole in the stage before some dramatic opening riff during which the rest of the band arrives. This is one of the many creative and exciting pictures by Hermes Kondor. 

Hermes is an experimenter, for more, click here:

Reddit's /SecondLife Gains 10,000 Subscribers; Great Community & Resource

/SecondLife, the largest SL-related subreddit, recently grew past 10,000 subscribers. Over the years (it had only 2,000 subscribers back in 2015), it's evolved into a solid go-to hug for interesting and informative SL/virtual world-related content and conversation. Since it's on Reddit, the participants tend to skews towards SL veterans, especially developers and scripters, and unlike most (all?) social media hangouts for SLers, isn't an unceasing cascade of fashion pics and shopping announcements. (Though there's still a lot of that!)

Some recent stand-out threads:

• Robin (Sojourner) Wood has passed away, after an extended struggle with cancer (phyllodes tumors)
• Through fire, Iron becomes Legend
• Has Second Life improved? 2008/2009 - 2020/2021
• Metaverse - Our Existence, Our Reality, a Second Life Existential Machinima
• Explore 10 tranquil and artistic Second Life destinations!

Much more here. And thanks to u/TrinityDejavu, u/zebragrrl, and u/0xc0ffea for their moderating skills!

This Artist Elevates Virtual World Screenshots With Unexpected Angles

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

I like pictures that confound me. “Snapshot 45” is confounding. She’s standing on a wall for a house that looks like it’s built on a dock and there are fish swimming by. It makes no sense which is perfect because I can imagine the fish are actually taxis swimming from fare to fare or the house is underwater and people have gills. On the side of being underwater, there is the seagrass and the sandy bottom. On the side of being aboveground, there is the electric pole with the isolators. Is it both? In Second Life it can be anything. 

I love her way with angles, for more, click here:

Why Bill Maher's Snarky Takedown of Cryptocurrency Isn't Snarky Enough

Setting aside Bill Maher's usual "Old Man Yells at Woke Millenial Cloud" tone, this is a pretty good and funny takedown of cryptocurrency hype, mostly hitting the right targets, such as its Ponzi scheme nature, for instance, and the absurdity of Tesla CEO Elon Musk promoting Bitcoin despite the fact that its environmental costs utterly undermines any green advantages achieved by Tesla the company.

Maher's rant, however, fails when he notes that major companies like Microsoft, Etsy, and Starbucks accept Bitcoin as a currency... without noting that hardly anyone uses Bitcoin to buy goods and services. As I wrote in 2015:

According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency -- lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 -- is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)

The wild thing is, Bitcoin's daily transaction rates have not grown that much since then, fluctuating between 200,000 and 400,000. In another words, a daily transaction rate of a small city, and still less than Linden Dollar transactions in Second Life.

As usual, fellow HBO comedian John Oliver had a better take on the topic, back in 2018:

According to Linden Lab stats, Second Life has about 1 million monthly users, and about 125K+ hardcore users (i.e. in SL over an hour a day). Insiders tell me about 400,000 users regularly spend Linden Dollars. So with all that activity in mind, it's safe to estimate 100K Linden Dollar individual users a day. (Conducting a lot more total transactions.) Contrast with Bitcoin: The much-hyped currency -- lauded weekly in the tech and mainstream press for the last 4-5 years, with over $400 million invested in Bitcoin-related startups since 2012 -- is still used only about 100K times a day. (Which means unique users are significantly less than 100,000.)