New World Notes

Top 4 Posts Including The Role of Remote Work At Metaverse Companies & Borges' Infinitely Impossible Library of Babel Created in VRChat

• The Nightmarishly Infinite Library Of Babel Has Haunted People For Decades. Now Borges' Impossible Vision Exists In VRChat.
• Roblox Staff Can't Work Remotely -- But VRChat & Linden Lab Personnel Mostly Do
• Scary Screenshots Of Witherwood Thicket, A Perfect Place For SL Halloween
• How Second Life's "Broadly Uncanny" Avatars Hurt New User Retention

Halloween & Fall-Themed Fashion Ideas from SL Blgger Luna Morineaux!

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

Luna Morineaux has a self-named blog. This post, The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper, despite the magical items, feels so real. It’s messy, realistically messy. I love it.

My mom had a desk like this. It didn’t have a skull or anything magical, but I remember sitting there and picking up a hinge and wonder “why is this here?” The rest of the house was neat as a pin,, but that desk was the vortex where all the mess collected. Don’t know where to put something? Put it on the desk.

This particular desk features the materials for a magical psychic:

 Psychic Set at Shop & Hop until November 5th and later at Mainstore:

..::thor::.. psychic bookstand

..::thor::.. psychic chair

..::thor::.. psychic sphere

..::thor::.. tarot deck - bonus

..::thor::.. psychic table 

Cursed Cabinet at Access until November 8th and later at Mainstore:

..::thor::.. cursed book - psychic

..::thor::.. cursed cabinet - filled

..::thor::.. cursed cauldron stand

..::thor::.. cursed pentagram

..::thor::.. cursed potions

For more from Luna , click here:

The Nightmarishly Infinite Library of Babel Has Haunted People for Decades. Now Borges' Impossible Vision Exists In VRChat.

For years, a programmer kept having a recurring dream -- more a nightmare, maybe -- where they were lost in an endless library containing all the knowledge of the universe ever written, but where the seeker never finds the answers they are searching for. The dream was inspired, of course, by Jorge Luis Borges’ legendary short story “The Library of Babel”, which has been haunting readers, mathematicians, and artists since 1941:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors…

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

And for the programmer, who goes by the name “Mahu”, these words were the source of that dream they kept having for some 7 to 8 years. 

“I'd say that a big part of the way I experience the world is through my spatial perception of my surroundings,” they explain. “It tends to be one of the only things I remember about a dream if I remember anything at all.” 

But rather than just keep letting the concept remain a nightmare, Mahu did an unexpected thing:

Today's Flickr Pick: Birdy Explores Beautiful Second Life Sims Both Living & Gone

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

Birdy’s “Cloud Edge” captures sky lanterns floating above the mountain mists at Echo Mountain. This makes me think of one of those art postcards you can buy at a museum gift shop. I would sign the card, “wish I was there.”

I wanted to go, but sadly the sim has changed to a rugged coastline with a lighthouse. Not a mountain in sight. Birdy is an SL traveler and she provides us with her landmarks in her marvelous landscapes but many of the sims she has visited are gone. 

For more of her travels, click here:

Roblox Staff Can't Work Remotely -- But VRChat & Linden Lab Personnel Mostly Do

Above: The home office of full-time VRChat employee (and former community member) "Merlin"

Interesting new work policy from leading metaverse platform company Roblox, as reported by Vox's Jay Peters:

Roblox — a company that builds a hugely popular virtual experiences platform, recently introduced its own spin on video chat, and even created an in-Roblox career center — is “transitioning away” from remote work and will be asking “a number of our remote employees to begin working from our headquarters in San Mateo by next summer,” CEO David Baszucki wrote in an email to staff shared publicly on Tuesday...

Baszucki also says that virtual working environments just aren’t as good as in-person ones: “While I’m confident we will get to a point where virtual workspaces are as engaging, collaborative, and productive as physical spaces, we aren’t there yet.” Seems like the company has some work to do to meet its own goal of having Roblox employees “spend more time using Roblox for remote meetings than with video” within the next five years.

Bad news for Roblox employees who hate the work commute to San Mateo. (Even though it's near a bomb ass ramen joint.)

At the same time, I wouldn't interpret this as suggesting metaverse platform companies in general aren't ready to work within the virtual world platforms they create, at least on a part-time basis:

Did Philip Rosedale Just Solve Fermi's Paradox? "Too Much Energy is Required To Go Exploring" on an Interstellar Level

Sorry Matt, but the math says we can't actually go... interstellar.

Philip Rosedale, who actually started out studying Physics in college, has a fun post that throws water on the popular notion (at least among technophiles) that we'll soon be traveling to the stars. Philip says the math doesn't add up:

Consider the very closest star to earth - Proxima Centauri. It is 4.4 light years away, which is about 100,000 times farther away than Mars. To send a spaceship of the size of the SpaceX Starship there in two years would require… wait for it… around 200 years of our current global energy production. In different units, it would require around 1,700 times the energy contained in all the nuclear weapons in existence. And that’s to make one trip to the closest star. Going farther - lets say across our galaxy - would require 8.5 Million years of energy production to fill up the gas tanks.

I thought solar sails might solve the energy problem, but that's way above my pay grade. [SEE UPDATE BELOW FROM PHILIP]*

He goes on to suggest this is the answer to Fermi's Paradox, i.e. if there's thousands of aliens civilizations out there, where the fuck are they? With his math, their absence is actually common sense:

Scary Screenshots of Witherwood Thicket, a Perfect Place for SL Halloween

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

Gabriel Chamberlain’s “Road to Witherwood Keep” is delightfully balanced on the highwire between cozy and creepy. The path is clear and well-lit, the houses are occupied with welcoming lights in the windows, but the clouds are heavy and close with a misty brume obscuring the Keep in the distance. It will be dark before you get there and who knows what lurks in the dark? 

Witherwood Thicket looks and sounds like a likely place for some Halloween pictures. [Click here to visit]

The Thicket is part of the Frogmore Region so I did a search within the Frogmore Flickr Group which has nearly 1300 members and 5,000 photos. I was eager to see what folks got up to at Witherwood. 

For more from Witherwood Thicket, click here:

Will The Sphere Become How the Mass Market Experiences VR/Virtual Worlds?

The Sphere in Vegas isn't what we usually define as VR, except that it's a massive wraparound LED display in a giant concert dome, effectively putting up to 18,000 people inside virtual reality. Lately I've been wondering if the Sphere and technology like it will become VR for the mass market -- that is, the roughly 75% of people who aren't particularly interested in immersive 3D virtual worlds or HMDs, or even get nauseous when trying to use them. (I.E., the reason why sales of the Quest remain steadfastly slow.) 

Postcards from Earth, an immersive feature film for the Sphere directed by Darren Aronofsky, debuted last week, and veteran virtual world developer Keith Morris was there in the audience to experience it first-hand:

"The opening scene starts off in standard movie dimensions. And then there's a scene where we're approaching the Earth. But as the earth grows in our view, it expands outside of the bounds of this screen. And then suddenly it feels like we're collectively descending onto the planet. The seats begin to rumble and then just as it feels like we're about to burn up in the atmosphere, the scene cuts to flying over a snowy mountain range, and the audience feels a gust of wind. There was a collective gasp."

And yes, he tells me the experience rivals anything he's experienced in traditional VR/virtual worlds:

Philip Rosedale Added as GamesBeat Next Speaker! Get The 40% Discount Code, Join Him, Cory Ondrejka, Raph Koster & Me There!

Just got word that Philip has been added as a keynote speaker to GamesBeat Next in San Francisco next week Monday and Tuesday (October 23-24) -- use this discount code for 40% off at sign-up: GBN23SPEAKER

That's on top of me moderating a panel with Second Life co-founder/Google VP Cory Ondrejka; as I discuss in the book, Cory later went on to become a top VP at Facebook, where he led the acquisition of Oculus VR. We're joined by MMO game god Raph Koster, who's furiously and secretly at work creating his next platform, Playable Worlds.  

Here's the title/description of our talk:

That's on top of me moderating a panel with Second Life co-founder/Google VP Cory Ondrejka; as I discuss in the book, Cory later went on to become a top VP at Facebook, where he led the acquisition of Oculus VR. We're joined by MMO game god Raph Koster, who's furiously and secretly at work creating his next platform, Playable Worlds.  

Here's the title/description of our talk:

Today's SL Flickr Pick: Halloween-Friendly Headshots by Giachetta

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

Giachetta’s headshots make me eager for Halloween. “Two-faced” is just so wild with the monstrous mouth on the dark side and the black teas on the light side with that touch-me-not neckpiece. I love it.  

For more eerie headshots, click here: