New World Notes

Top 7 Posts Last Week Including: SL Mobile Project Apparently Put on Hold, Five Things for Facebook To Consider Before Making Itself More Metaverse-y

• Incredible Squid Game Cosplay Imagery From The Second Life Community
• New World Notes Newsfeed: Metaverse Content I’m Currently Consuming
• Source: Second Life's Official Mobile Viewer Pauses Development
• Listen: I Talk Second Life, VR & Making The Metaverse With Melinda Byerley, Fellow Linden Lab Vet!
• Five Things For Facebook To Consider Before Making Its Name More Metaverse-y
• Ask Delphi: Should We Create An AI That Can Answer Complex Moral & Ethical Questions?
• The Mystery Of Second Life's 40,000 People Plateau, Continued -- How Many New "Users" Ever Actually Go In-World?

Incredible Squid Game Cosplay Imagery from the Second Life Community

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

You can always rely on Second Life residents to respond to cultural phenomena with pictures and activities that bring the key elements into SL. Ginger Chevalier’s “Front-Man Squid Game” seems an excellent introduction to residents’ homage to the streaming series that has taken the world by storm. I have not watched it, though, and my exposure has been limited to seeing plurks and tweets that say “OMG, Squid Game!” I got the impression that it’s pretty gory, so I am unlikely to watch it. Scary movies give me nightmares. 

This picture does a good job of showing a sort of hierarchy. These are the people with power. The one in black is clearly the leader, wearing a suit and a mask with human features while the others are in uniforms that seem designed to keep them anonymous as well as safe from liquid and gas hazards.  

“VIP Tiger Mask Squid Game” is another pic from Ginger and it’s lush. There is only the mask on a table with light shining on it and reflecting back. The simplicity makes it seem like a jewel. 

Next up: A scene based on the show's eerie paste Escher staircase -- now on sale in Second Life!

SL Blogger Tells Amazing Stories Through Images, And Includes Shopping Links to the Items He Used to Make Them!

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

“Jaqcuis” is the name of the blog and the avatar. Jaqcuis Encargues to be exact. I love this post Storytelling Comes to Live for its subtle approach to the coming frights and horrors of Halloween. The danger is foreshadowed in the text, “Oh dear, how uneasy I feel?” She’s not quite The Second Witch in Macbeth, but there is the “by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes” feeling in the text and in her glance over the shoulder. And of course, every endangered fairy tale heroine deserves a good dress and headband. 

•  Headband: Luas Akali Headband Pink
• Outfit: UNA.LittleRedRidingHood FATPACK @ Itty Bitty Petite Comite 

For an inventive story post, click here:

Source: Second Life's Official Mobile Viewer Pauses Development

A veteran Second Life insider just sent me this message they received as a member of the test group for Second Life's long-awaited, official mobile app:

After reviewing the current state of the SL Mobile Viewer and the helpful feedback from residents, we have decided to pause development on this branch. The team is actively working on a new direction to take from here. We should have some news on that soon.

We’d like to thank you all for your time and feedback. It was very valuable to us! We will be closing TestFlight and the mobile regions on October 29th, 2021. Again, thank you for participation! Linden Lab

I'm reaching out to Linden Lab now for an official comment, but this message is surprising and likely to disappoint the community. We received word only last July that this app had been approved for publication by Apple.

That said, my source (who also shared the app images here), tells me the app itself had pretty limited functionality:

"It had been stagnant for months. Didn't have push notifications, and until a recent update would only work when you had the app open on your screen," they tell me.

Apparently there wasn't even a 3D graphics display -- but as expected, there was a special chat zone for app users:

Listen: I Talk Second Life, VR & Making the Metaverse With Melinda Byerley, Fellow Linden Lab Vet!

Click above or listen here for a real treat (in my extremely biased opinion): An in-depth interview of my career in the Metaverse leading up to Second Life and beyond.

It's for the podcast Stayin' Alive in Tech, created and hosted by Melinda Byerley, and she's among the best qualified people to conduct this conversation: Because Melinda, as it happens, is also a Linden Lab alum (she joined a few years after I left in 2006). So we get to dive deep into the inside details of making Second Life, such as the problem with the company's engineering-focused culture. I particularly like our conversation on why Second Life, while a great influencer, failed to go mass market. I argue that it comes down to three key things -- and the third thing may surprise you!

Links to some of the topics and articles we discuss after the break. And speaking of all that, Melinda interviewed Philip Rosedale in a previous episode -- listen below:

Amazing Photos of an Avatar and His Second Life Horse

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

The Scarred Surgeon [fenrir.grayman] is a Second Life equestrian with a stream full of horse pics. I like “Getting Ready” because the preparation for riding is so important. I remember learning exactly how important it was when I was six and my brother gave me my first pony which he kept on his farm. He told me to press my knee on the horse’s belly when I tightened the cinch, but I thought he was kidding. So, I got up in the saddle, the pony sucked in her gut and my saddle slid upside-down dropping me neatly on the ground. Tricky critter. This horse looks well prepared and I get the saddle will not slide upside down. 

For more horses, click here:

Five Things for Facebook to Consider Before Making Its Name More Metaverse-y

I'm not totally surprised by this move but it sure seems to be coming way too soon:

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail.

And while I know some good folks who've helped lead Facebook's many metaverse initiatives in a positive direction, I've also also been writing over the last few years about the many ways this may not be the best move, at least at this time. To count them off in no particular order:

Ask Delphi: Should We Create an AI That Can Answer Complex Moral & Ethical Questions?

Ask Delphi is a very interesting artificial intelligence project being chattered about on Twitter recently. Very roughly summarized, the machine learning program compiles a wide variety of ethical questions and answers drawn from Reddit's infamous Am I the Asshole community, along with others online sources, and synthesizes them into a database that can be queried through simple, human-readable asks. Here's some relatively easy answers (above and below).

You can also read the white paper from the projects' creators here. Sample from the abstract:

What would it take to teach a machine to behave ethically? While broad ethical rules may seem straightforward to state (“thou shalt not kill”), applying such rules to real-world situations is far more complex. For example, while “helping a friend” is generally a good thing to do, “helping a friend spread fake news” is not. We identify four underlying challenges towards machine ethics and norms: (1) an understanding of moral precepts and social norms; (2) the ability to perceive real-world situations visually or by reading natural language descriptions; (3) commonsense reasoning to anticipate the outcome of alternative actions in different contexts; (4) most importantly, the ability to make ethical judgments given the interplay between competing values and their grounding in different contexts (e.g., the right to freedom of expression vs. preventing the spread of fake news).

Go here to try it yourself. You can also help Delphi improve -- i.e. be better at moral reasoning -- by disagreeing with it whenever necessary, and explaining your reasons.

Which is good, because as the questions to Ask Delphi get more complex, the answers from Ask Delphi get more... well, interesting:

The Mystery of Second Life's 40,000 People Plateau, Continued -- How Many New "Users" Ever Actually Go In-World?

Here's another clue in the 40,000 people plateau mystery of Second Life, offered by reader lkosov: 

I sat there with the world map open and watched the green dots on Learning Island 1 for an hour yesterday, from 1235-1335 SL time. From what I can tell the player dots update once a minute, so it's an imperfect way of monitoring things, but was easier than creating a new account and camping on the island. Anyway, best as I can tell, twelve accounts joined in that one hour. Saturday afternoon in the Americas, Saturday evening in Europe. If that's normal (and that's a big assumption to make from one observation of one hour's possibly flawed data) that's something like 9,000 new users in a month. Even if I'm somehow an order of magnitude off, that's still a *far* cry from "300,000+ [per month]".

I just checked Learning Island on the map myself (screen capture above), and only counted up to 6 new users (i.e. the green dots on the dynamic map); no surprise, since it's in the middle of a weekday. But I also double-checked the most recent new registration figures I've reported from Tyche Shepherd of Grid Survey, from last October -- through 2020, between 6,000-18,000 Second Life accounts were created every day.

So what explains this discrepancy?

Baihley Hurricane Started Shooting Second Life Fashion Photos, But Now Focuses More on Image Editing & Artistry

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

Baihley R. Hurricane takes fashion pics, but as she puts it, “I began taking photos in Second Life with the intention of focusing on fashion and style. But somewhere along the way I began caring less about what was worn in the photos and became more interested in the artistry and editing process.” You can see that in this headshot that is a fashion pic with credits (in the comments) but is more editorial than the usual blog pic. In this one, she desaturated all but her eyes and the butterflies, leaving these vibrant sparks of blue. It’s lovely. 

For more of her exploration, click here: