New World Notes

Celebrating the Drag Queen Community in Second Life

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

Lady Arsenika Satanis’ shot this fab pop art self-portrait. I love her style -- and love to see that drag queens are active in Second Life. Her picture, “Pop Art Fantasy” is the apotheosis of drag queen glamor. It seems appropriate to amplify and honor the beauty and courage of drag queens after this weekend’s tragedy. 

Club Q’s drag show in Colorado Springs had just ended and the DJ had started playing when he was wounded, shot in the back, by a man radicalized and incited by political hate rhetoric. It is painfully ironic that the shooting was at midnight as the Day of Trans Remembrance began. While drag queens are not trans women, they are targeted along with people who are trans by a political party that centers itself on hate. The political strategist behind the current moral panic over drag queens and trans women advocates conflating the two because that makes them sound more frightening. 

As someone who has gone to countless drag shows, lurid is not the word I would use. Fun, glamorous, exciting, hilarious, friendly, warm, and welcoming are more apt descriptions. See for yourself at CLAT Drag Club [To teleport, click here.] The acronym stands for Club Legends Art Theater. Or you could try out the London club Madam Lala’s [To teleport, click here.]

For more Second Life drag artistry, click here:

Monday Memory: Greenies Showed How to Do Metaverse Marketing Right -- With Community Creator Participation & Genuine Delight (2007)

I recently mentioned how IBM's presence in Second Life led to an unexpected backlash, so here's a classic example of metaverse-based marketing done right -- "Greenies", an SL sim rendered in a giant-sized apartment users could explore like tiny ants:

[Greenies is] from a small British development company called Rezzable, which plans to use it for retail and events.  But where SL sites for large corporations like Dell, Sun, and Reebok attract but a few hundred visitors, Greenies is, with little official promotion, already bringing in several thousand visits per week. 

To make it a true Second Life experience, you need to bring your own sense of manic fun: explore the place with two Transformers, say, then a dancing fly and a silent crow on a WWII fighter plane, then maybe later on a flying hotdog, with reggae music streaming around you all the while.

But make no mistake, Greenies is still part of a company project-- just a rare one where the company's marketing demands don't choke out any possibility of genuine delight. 

Greenies was the site of a successful L'Oreal campaign, with giant-sized renditions of the real life product situated in the apartment. (Pictured at right.)

Two other things that made Greenies notable as a case study:

It hired creators from within the Second Life community, people who knew the tools best and how to make experiences that were maximally delightful.

And it also incorporated other real life brands into the experience in an organic way: 

Top Posts Last Week Including: Meta Employees Surveyed Post-Meta Era, How to Avatarize Yourself in Midjourney & Play SL Flickr Cliché Bingo

Wagner James Au author photo + "hipster starfleet commander" in Midjourney

• Visit In VRChat: 5 Impressive Worlds Inspired By Levels From Final Fantasy VII, Dark Souls, Legend Of Zelda, Sonic The Hedgehog & Team Fortress 2
• SL Flickr Always Showing You The Same Tired Tropes? Play Cliché Bingo!
• Midjourney Can Turn Your IRL Photo Into A Supercool Avatar - Here's How
• New World Notes Seeking Experienced Advertising/Bizdev Partners
• Meta Employee Survey: 82% Of Staffers Believe More Could Have Been Done To Prevent Current Layoffs
• Do You Prefer Green Screen Or "Documentary" Machinima?

Visit in VRChat: 5 Impressive Worlds Inspired by Levels from Final Fantasy VII, Dark Souls, Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog & Team Fortress 2

As a fun way of exploring VRChat and checking out the creative power of the platform this weekend, here's five VRChat worlds inspired on famous video game environments. (The above of course is City 17 from the Half-Life franchise, though it's currently defunct.)

Here's five more recommended and documented by Bradlee101, one of my favorite VRChat explorers on VRChat, based on spaces from Final Fantasy VII, Dark Souls, Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Team Fortress 2:

Friday Fashion: Fun & Fanciful Styles from SL Blogger Karalee Aeon

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

Nobody Does It Like Karalee is a fun and fanciful blog, but I may never forgive Karalee Aeon for suggesting it be expressed as the Saralee jingle and introducing a vicious earworm that is going to trouble me for hours. Her post “Amantha” features a delightful woodland sprite, a dragonfly fairy perhaps. She does a marvelous job of making pieces from different creators look like they were made for each other. 

• Wings- [Vaak] Bento Dragonfly Wings
• Outfit- :[P&E]:– Keraves – MEGAPACK @ warehouse
• Umbrella- ~MR~Mushroom Umbrella
• Tattoo 1-+ Abyssal Flower Tattoo FATPACK + {Aii & Ego}
• Tattoo 2- [AERTH]  Saturnalia Body Tattoos @ we love roleplay ends 11/28

For more fantastical fashion, click here:

SL Flickr Always Showing You the Same Tired Tropes? Play Cliché Bingo!

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

Is there a song you used to love but have come to dislike because it is played over and over and over again? I feel the same way about Second Life photo cliches. There’s nothing wrong with them, they might even be excellent, but they aren’t exciting because they have been done too many times. To make it a bit more fun, it’s in the form of a Bingo game. Sadly, I am certain everyone will often hit Bingo before they hit Page Down. 

Some notes on these tropes:

Midjourney Can Turn Your IRL Photo Into a Supercool Avatar - Here's How

Update, 6:35pm PT: I'm having trouble replicating this process with my own photo. If you have advice/tips, please post in Comments! 

Update 2, 11/18: Finally got this to work on my own photo. The original instruction included brackets and quotation marks but those aren't necessary when communicating with Midjourney.

The photo at top left is Nick Yee, founder of gamer market research firm Quantic Foundry; the others are variations of Nick in different genres, as interpreted by Midjourney. 

"It was always possible to do image-based prompts in Midjourney," Nick explained on social media recently, "but they used to be treated very loosely and couldn't be used to replicate faces. The newest version has much stickier image-based prompting."

Here's how you do that: Find a photo of yourself online, and then enter something like this into Midjourney's image prompt:

/imagine <image link> fantasy-hunter-warrior

/imagine <image link> futuristic-cyberpunk-hacker

/imagine <image link> captain-america

(Or instead of Captain America/cyberpunk/etc., whatever evocative genre terms you want to use, of course.)

The results are pretty impressive, especially since AI image readers have a notorious problem with racial bias.

New World Notes Seeking Experienced Advertising/Bizdev Partners

As I plow away on writing Why the Metaverse Matters, I'm also planning to expand New World Notes' reach next year. And I definitely need help doing that.

Are you interested in being New World Notes' advertising executive and/or bizdev partner? Contact me via DM on Twitter  or Discord (WJA #3523) or even actual e-mail (wjamesau at Gmail).

This is an opportunity to partner with brands that New World Notes readers would find valuable, and ideally, would also become an ongoing partnership. (More on that below.)

New World Notes is the longest running and most read metaverse/virtual world blog with a primary focus on Second Life and its many spinoffs, metaverse platforms, and related technologies, often cited by major outlets like the New York Times, the BBC, Bloomberg, Wired, and others. According to Similar Web, we typically attract 150,000 visits a month (sometimes more, sometimes less). It's also the most-read general news/culture blog with a major focus on Second Life.

We Love This SL Tribute to Anastasiya Dobrovolskaya's Viral Fox Photos

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

I always love a photo tribute when someone recreates a photo taken by a real life artist or photographer. It’s much more impressive, though, when the person shows the original so we can all appreciate her effort to honor the original while asserting her own point of view into the picture. With “Ladies” you can see Misaki did not do an exact copy, but instead got her inspiration from the original and then changed it up with the poses, a full body shot, and a more subdued lighting with less contrast. If she had linked to the original, her work would have been even more impressive because how else can we recognize the homage? 

To see her inspiration, click here:

Meta Employee Survey: 82% of Staffers Believe More Could Have Been Done to Prevent Current Layoffs

We saw Twitter employees' opinion of the company in the Elon Musk era last week, now here's a survey of Meta employees taken as the social media giant started laying off thousands of its own staff. Courtesy of Blind, the anonymous messaging app, this survey reflects the opinion of 1,179 verified Meta professionals in the U.S., and was taken between November 10 to 11, with a reported 4% margin of error.

The most striking answer is above: 82% of Meta staffers believe more could have been done last year to avoid the layoffs rolling out now. The way the question is phrased, this probably reflects at least some Meta employees blaming the company for spending many billions on making its metaverse platform. We saw a similar sentiment in anonymous Blind comments by Meta employees recently reported by Business Insider:

"The Metaverse will be our slow death," one user, who called themselves a senior software developer, posted on Wednesday. They added: "Mark Zuckerberg will single-handedly kill a company with the meta-verse." 

Zuckerberg apologized to staff for the need to cut 11,000 jobs, admitting that he "got this wrong".

In fairness, Meta's recent woes are more directly attributable to Apple's recent policy shifts which hurt advertising revenue collected via Facebook's iPhone, but Meta spending some $36 billion on metaverse-related technology is still a massive opportunity cost. 

Related to that, compare and contrast Meta employees' opinion of the company, versus Twitter employees: