New World Notes

Cajsa's Choices: Dramatic Second Life Action Images by Mark Walder

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

Mark Walder’s most recent picture “10-65 in Progress” is a glimpse to a completely new side of Second Life, robbers looting an armored car. There isn’t a lot of focus on the criminal side despite the many pics of crime fighters, but when do we get to see the bad guys? This is a fun pic and I am going to keep my eye out for more pics of crimes in progress. If you have a pic I might like, please tag it #SecondLifeDelicto, as in "caught in the act". 

For more action pics, click here:

Top 4 Posts Including ChatGPT's Trouble With Avatars, a Unity-Based Viewer for Second Life & Philip Rosedale's New UBI Project

• Philip Rosedale Launches New Project Using What He Learned Building A Successful Virtual World Economy To Fight Inequality In The Real World
• WATCH: Video Preview Of Crystal Frost, Unity-Based SL Viewer -- Test Client Available In 2 Weeks!
• Bonnie Bots Are Basically The Chinese Gov't Spy Balloons Of Second Life
• ChatGPT Tries To Write Bios Of Second Life Avatars, Mistakes One For A Character In Greek Myth, Another As... Sarah Palin's Daughter

Tips & Tricks for Creating Amazing Images in Midjourney & Other AI Generators -- Excerpt from Evo Heyning's New Book Promptcraft

Promptcraft: Guidebook for Generative Media in Creative Work is a new book by longtime XR creator Evo Heyning and as the title suggests, has copious advice for getting the most out of AI image generators like Midjourney and beyond.

Evo has a starting YouTube tutorial above, and she kindly shared some helpful image generation tips from the book:

Experiment with many different generative media tools

Each tool has its own set of features and capabilities, so it is important to explore different options to find the ones that work best for you. There are over a dozen in this book to try from Scenario.gg to HeyFriday, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

Use generative media tools to create a starting point

Example, you can use a generative media tool to create a random palette, pattern or shape, and then use that as a starting point for your painting or sculpture. This iterative ideation can help to break the creative block and give you a sense of direction for your artwork - use multiple image prompts in Midjourney to try blending your works and ideas.

Much more after the break:

Philip Rosedale Launches New Project Using What He Learned Building a Successful Virtual World Economy to Fight Inequality in the Real World

FairShare is a new project from Philip Rosedale with a snarky tagline that pretty much encapsulates what he has in mind: Eat the Rich, but slowly.

“I want to give people something like the Linden Dollar but just as an iPhone app that they basically can use to buy and sell anything from each other,” as he put it to me in a call last week. 

During the COVID lockdown, Rosedale created complex economic simulations which showed him a frightening thing. As it happens, I wrote about one exactly two years ago:

This new simulation basically models the injection of universal basic income -- a solution to the rich/poor divide recently popularized by Presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But as Philip writes, while UBI helps in the short term, his new simulation suggests that the wealth gap quickly starts growing, even with UBI.

"Even with people in a small community trying to look after each other," as Philip puts it to me now, "you will basically end up with a kind of a natural, almost a thermodynamic problem, where some randomly chosen people will basically just end up getting more and more money.”

He sees that in the state of the real world economy: “If you recognize that the economic system we have is so broken, the only safe assumption is we're going to have a violent revolution, as has been had many times throughout history." He even views current political movements through this lens:

"The whole thing with Biden forgiving student loans, that's called 'Jubilee'. It's one of the things that happens on the way to revolution every time. Because one of the things you can do is you can start forgiving debts once the people that are getting screwed get mad enough."

Some metaverse platforms might help with inequality, he believes, but then again, others will not: “Roblox is a lottery you're not going to win,” as he puts it, echoing concerns we discussed here. “You can't go into Roblox and say, I'm gonna make my living in here. Maybe you can go into Second Life and say that.” 

FairShare aims to solve this seemingly intractable problem by offering people who sign up a universal basic income modeled after one that’s helped keep Second Life’s economy thriving for twenty years: 

WATCH: Video Preview of Crystal Frost, Unity-Based SL Viewer -- Test Client Available in 2 Weeks!

Well this is exciting -- the first video preview of Crystal Frost, the upcoming third party viewer for Second Life that runs in Unity. Created by SLer and longtime developer Berry Bunny (Kallisti#2038 on Discord), the frame rate is a bit slow, but the graphic enhancements are pretty clear. And yes, the wandering cube is the avatar.

"Rendering avatars requires decoding rigging data from meshes," Kallisti tells me, "and I currently have not looked into how to do that just yet."

She tells me a playable version will be available "in a couple of weeks tops", first for people who are members of her Patreon.

Bonnie Bots Are Basically the Chinese Gov't Spy Balloons of Second Life

I am still waiting on an announcement update from the developers of Bonnie Bots, the highly controversial project that collects and publishes publicly accessible Second Life user data on the web. In the meantime, I've been wondering how to quantify all the controversy over Bonnie Bots, when other data collecting bots have garnered far less outrage. 

And then the Chinese Communist Party were caught floating a spy balloon over US soil.

Causing much of the American public to collectively freak out. And that reaction also seemed out of whack, because whatever data the balloon gets is a relatively minor form of surveillance, against far more pervasive and intrusive projects that generate way less outrage. (Hello, TikTok.)

But this exchange between KCRW's Madeline Brand and New York Times security expert David Sanger explained why the reaction is so different:

Madeline Brand
And so the fact that we can see [the balloon], we get all outraged over it. But as you say, this kind of surveillance and scooping up of personal data and all sorts of technological spying has been going on between our two countries and other countries. Of course, Russia comes to mind and. And yet, this balloon story has really had sticking power.

David Sanger
Because you could see it and because it's a physical intrusion on our sovereignty, and people react to a physical intrusion of our sovereignty more than they react to a cyber intrusion on our sovereignty.

Emphasis mine. Because, yes: The Bonnie Bots are basically acting like CCP spy balloons hovering over the virtual world of Second Life.

Bonnie Bots' spokesperson Skyler Pancake agrees with that analogy:

Get Well Soon & Happy Valentine's to Flickr Columnist Cajsa Lilliehook!

Image via Casja's Flickr

Hope readers join me in wishing Happy Valentine's and best wishes for a quick recover to Cajsa Lilliehook, New World Notes' indispensable columnist covering the best of virtual world imagery. She's currently home, resting and recovering* from a successful surgery last week, and hopefully will be back to writing Cajsa's Choices soon.

Meantime, here's some recent-ish romantic imagery posts from Cajsa to enjoy for the holiday:

ChatGPT Tries to Write Bios of Second Life Avatars, Mistakes One for a Character in Greek Myth, Another as... Sarah Palin's Daughter

Over one billion people use a virtual world avatar of some kind. (Factoring in the half a billion+ on a metaverse platform, and the hundreds of millions who play MMOs and various multiplayer games.) Many if not most of them are such avid users, they frequently share content about their avatars (screenshots, video, blog posts, etc.) on social media. However, the people training ChatGPT and other AI text generators apparently did not get that memo.

We challenged readers to ask ChatGPT and AI Writer to write a bio of their avatar, and well, they were special:

Scylla Rhiadra got:

"In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew encountered the two similarly dangerous situations of Scylla Rhiadra and her counterpart Charybdis. Odysseus was so taken by the beautiful Scylla that he wanted to win her affections, so he requested a love potion from the witch Circe."

This it TOTALLY wrong: Odysseus should know that he doesn't need a love potion to win my affection.

Reader Mondy got, well, I don't even know what ChatGPT was going for here, but Sarah Palin somehow came creeping in:

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• How To Make Virtual World Screenshots Look Like Old World Paintings
• Viewfinder, Which Started As A Viral Brain-Melting Game Demo, Finally Coming To Steam & PlayStation 5 With New Features, Story
• These Stunning Images Inspired By Degas' Famed Ballerina Paintings Actually Started As Second Life Screenshots
• Unity For Second Life Project Launches Discord Featuring Live Dev Streams
• Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年1月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
• No, ChatGPT Can't "Write" Code. It Even Makes Up Code That Doesn't Exist.
• AI Weekend Challenge: Ask ChatGPT Or Another AI About Your Avatar

AI Weekend Challenge: Ask ChatGPT or Another AI About Your Avatar

This screencap above is not a biography of Cajsa Lilliehook, New World Notes' longtime, beloved Flickr columnist, but a sophisticated, well-funded AI sure thinks it is. It's the result Cajsa got when she asked AI Writer to create her Second Life avatar's biography, and the results are pretty hilarious and a bit insane. The entertaining part is you can kinda tell what the AI was going for -- and also see how far it went off the rails:

"When you look at the sources," as Cajsa observes, "you can figure out some of the bizarre stuff. Someone used one of my pics to illustrate a blog post." And then AI Writer pulled some information from that blog post. "I wrote an article on Dutchie (two actually) and then there was that Dress Me Up blog challenge from years ago when I challenged someone to dress like a character from Mad Men." (Someone's avatar, that is.)

Dutchie Design is a longtime sponsor of New World Notes, which might have further confused the AI. And Cajsa also documents Republicans who are sexual predators on a major political blog, using her avatar name as a pseudonymous byline.

At any rate, this is likely yet another example of AI like ChatGPT spinning out of control when it's no longer on its pre-set tracks. If the AI hasn't been trained to "understand" that individual people also own virtual world/MMO avatars that they also talk about on social media, hilarity ensues. I bet if the avatar was from the Elder Scrolls Online or another more traditional MMORPG, the AI would get even further confused!

By the way, here's what AI Writer when I asked it for the biography of my own SL avatar, "Hamlet Au":