New World Notes

In Praise of "Painterly" Avatars - Stylization & Personality Over Ultra-Realism

Image and avatar by "Father Daddy"

A recent /SecondLife post sent me down the rabbit hole in search of "painterly avatars":

I'm not super into the Extremely Realistic Human Skin style that dominates the [Second Life] market. Don't get me wrong -- this style requires a great deal of skill to execute, and I do think the skins are beautiful, but it's just not "Me"... I'm wondering if anyone knows of any human skin makers who have a more "painterly" or heavily-stylized style? I like styles that are somewhat dramatic, mature, and less-than-pristine -- think the art style from Dishonored or Bloodborne.  - u/Vuhlkansu

Not sure I've seen the term "painterly avatars" in common currency, but it captures a real category worth highlighting. Thanks to excessively detailed mesh bodies, most Second Life avatars tend to creep way too far into ultra-realistic territory for my taste, and paradoxically, feels less believable. (It's like trying to get emotionally engaged by a high-end fashion model in a Vogue or GQ spread.) Whereas painterly avatar stylization evokes more uniqueness, personality, and the implications of a backstory. 

Here's some favorites suggested by SL Redditors, these first two here from an SLer with the intriguing avatar name Father Daddy.

Veteran SLer Nylon Pinkney is probably the most famous creator of painterly avatars, and has proven their appeal on the marketplace -- see below:

Tunneler Indie Game on ROBLOX Gets Nearly 1M Plays in Under 2 Weeks & 30-60K+ Daily Visits, According to RoMonitor Stats

Checking in on Tunnler, the Portal-inspired indie game on ROBLOX I wrote about a couple weeks ago (to play click here), I was impressed to notice it's attracted nearly 1 million plays, attracting 30,000-60,000+ visits per day, with an average session length of over 11 minutes. (Which is quite impressive average, suggesting a large number of players complete much or even most of the entire game.) Very few indie games, even free ones, attract players in the 7 figure range, especially within a month of launch. 

Today's Flickr Pick: The Beautifully Eerie SL Images of Ninae Trallis

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

Ninae Trallis’ pictures are wonderful combinations of creepy and beautiful. You can see this extraordinary beauty with the cyborg arm holding a fragile ball, like she’s holding a world that she could crush with a tap of her cold, metallic fingers. It’s fitting she called it “Cold” though is that because of her cold fingers, her ice-blue eyes, or the cold, wintery tree branch? 

For more extraordinary pics, click here:

What Virtual World Photographers Need to Know About Flickr's New Policy Changes Around Nudity & Sexual Content

Longtime SL blogger Kess Crystal has a good run-down of Flickr's new rules around nudity and sexual content in images. While it's directed at the large Second Life community on Flickr, it applies to most any other virtual world which enables racy avatar images. Short version is, Flickr will no longer be free to anyone who uploads anything other than "Safe" images.

Trouble is, as Kess explains, that's never quite been clearly explained: 

The main issue many Second Life bloggers and photographers have is that that the rules have not been specific enough. For e.g. the description “like bare breasts and bottoms” is vague. What if the breasts have a semi sheer material or lace where if you look closely parts of a nipple can been seen? Most of us have chosen to err on the side of caution after seeing many of our community getting caught out by this rather subjective and vague rule.

Flickr is now withdrawing the option for a free account to use Flickr for anything other than safe photos. While that clarifies the issue for free users of the service it still leaves the difference between a safe, moderate or restricted photo vague for Pro users who can utilise those options.

I feel Kess' pain. New World Notes is regularly hit with notifications from Google, threatening to demonetize posts which  supposedly content nude avatar images, even though they're no more graphic than what you'd see on national television in the US.

In any case, it's looking like the best option for Flickr users is upgrade to a Pro subscriber account. Which brings me to this truly excellent video meme:

Today's Flickr Pick: Ash's Varied Adventures in the Metaverse

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

Ash’s photostream is aptly called Ash’s Adventures since he loves to highlight his adventures in Second Life. This is “once you become fearless, life becomes limitless.” I’m not sure what he is doing, but it looks cyber-venturous. 

For more quotidian adventures, click here:

Anil Dash's Guide to Good Content & Community Management Applies to Metaverse Platforms Too

In the lead-up to my interview in The Atlantic last week, this recent blog post by veteran Internet thinker Anil Dash helped crystallize my thoughts around community and the Metaverse. Because while it's not specifically about the Metaverse, Anil's insights very much apply to metaverse platforms, especially around fostering community and user content creation.

Here's how, he explains, not to do it:

Find the inevitable initial bad actors or harmful content on your platform, and make them the responsibility of the least resourced, most marginalized team in your organization. When that team’s leader suggests structural changes that might prevent future harms, push them out and replace them with someone who had previously only ever been focusing on growth at all costs.

Half-ass all attempts at moderation and building safety into your platform, choosing only to react belatedly and inconsistently when hate and exploitation happen in your community. As a result, only the bad actors will truly thrive as creators on your platform, since everyone else will get hounded off as soon as they gain any traction or audience.

Much more here. The thing is, many metaverse platforms seem to be following Anil's rules on how not to do it... but doing exactly the wrong thing.

His analysis isn't simply theoretical, or based on years of watching platforms fail at community and content management - they also reflect Anil's role as founder and CEO of Glitch, a popular and much-used platform for creating web apps:

Code to Connect Real Life Devices to VRChat Published to GitHub - With a Small Catch

Remember "Dream Drive" (aka "Micchy" in VRChat), the Japanese inventor who is jaw-droppingly creating a robot in the real world that is controllable from within VRChat? Of course you do! We don't fully have a Metaverse along the strictest definition until there's a way to bridge the virtual world with real world devices. So here's some good news:

He just published to his Github the code enabling serial communication between VRChat and the real world. Now other inventors can take his code and start building other mixed reality projects.

Slight drawback: Micchy's Github code is only in Japanese for now, so the next step may be getting a tech-fluent translator to bridge Japanese with English and other languages. If you're interested, connect with him on Twitter directly, or post in Comments below, and I'll nudge him to reply. (Also see his Japanese language tutorial below the break.)

This Artist Makes Second Life Screenshots Seem Like Beautifully Composed Paintings

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

Sue Kass’ photostream is overflowing with beautiful photos. In many of them, she uses a filter to make them look like a painting. I’ve used similar filters myself and they never look this good. I love this picture “Sand.”  The composition is beautiful, using the Rule of Thirds. For some reason, when there is a picture of a body of water, I really love to see it as a painting. 

For more stunning photos, click here:

8 New World Notes Highlights Including: NFT Hype Fades, Blockchain Metaverse Age Limitations, Russian Oligarchs & Crypto, Ukrainian Metaverse Creators Flee Russians, Talking About the Metaverse on the Atlantic

Watch: Inside the Crooked House in Second Life (featured in my interview in The Atlantic)

• Here's Highlights & Reference Links From My Chat On Second Life & The Metaverse With Charlie Warzel For The Atlantic
• Watch: Meta & Linden Lab Veteran Jim Purbrick Explains What New Metaverse Platforms Need To Learn From Virtual Worlds (Before It's Too Late)
• OSMIA Under Occupation: Update From A Ukrainian Second Life Creator Hiding In A City That Russian Soldiers Now Control

Four more highlights below!

Here's Highlights & Reference Links from My Chat on Second Life & the Metaverse With Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic

Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse is a gratifying deep dive interview with me in the Atlantic, for Charlie Warzel's Galaxy Brain free newsletter. Charlie and I plumb into the virtual world/metaverse topics I've felt strongly about in recent years, and it's wonderful to get a chance to have the space to explore them in The Atlantic.

Here's some of my favorite highlights in a much larger article, along with some links to the New World Notes posts I'm referring to.  

I’ve learned that, as humans, we take all of the big challenges of real life and the complex social structures of the physical world and they get re-created in weird ways in a digital, social space. Racism, for example, is an enduring issue and an interesting one in these worlds. There are very basic questions: If you can change your avatar to anything at all, what race would you choose?

What are some good examples of surprising things you’ve seen people do in Second Life?

[I]f you give a user community powerful enough creator tools, what they create in these worlds will be far more interesting than anything a major company can officially create...

One of my favorites is a mathematician who built a house that exists beyond three dimensions—a home shaped like a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube. If you walked through their house it would keep just regenerating in interesting ways and you’d walk through it eternally. It’s mind melting.

Philip Rosedale, one of the creators of Second Life, has mentioned that there are are 1,600 Second Life users who earn $10,000 or more a year selling virtual content. I know a few people on the high end who are making millions. And it’s not just Second Life; this is all happening now in Roblox and Fortnite and other places, too.

I’m still taken aback at just how little [the staff at Meta] seem to have learned from past platform iterations.

Also surprising is that Meta’s metaverse team has some Second Life employees on it, like Linden Labs’ former CTO. Another is the former Linden Lab employee Jim Purbrick. Right before Meta rolled out Horizon, he was warning the Meta team about needing guidelines for harassment on the platform, and it seems like the company kind of ignored him... [It] seems Meta is throwing money at the problem without throwing much wisdom at it.

[This new] metaverse hype wave is so similar to 2008. Everything’s being repeated now—the same news stories, the same assumptions, the same mistakes. During the 2008 hype, the tech was not ready for a mass market. Today, it has become a mass-market phenomenon with Roblox and Fortnite and other platforms. I think there are upwards of half a billion people who are now active users on a broadly defined metaverse platform.

Some more links after the break. First up -- my answer on the mistakes being repeated now: