New World Notes

Here's What a Beautiful Wheat Field in Second Life Looks Like -- Raw Screenshot vs. Artist's Final Image

Walsh County on the Campton sim [click here to teleport]

I was so amazed by Micah Volmaire’s “Timeless - Part I”  featured in a Cajsa post last week that I had to visit myself -- it's a beautiful wheat field dubbed Walsh County. [Click here to teleport]

I also wanted to do a compare and contrast with Volmaire's final image.  Above is what Walsh County looks like taken as a direct screengrab from my laptop using the default SL viewer and most (but not all) the graphics features turned on.

And here's what it looks like through Volmaire's lens:

3 Spectacular Second Life Locations to Visit, Beautifully Shot by Pink Rayne

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

Pink Rayne’s “Fading” is a haunting picture of standing stones taken at Haraiki Bay [to teleport, click here]. I love the sky, the light breaking through the clouds to illuminate the stones and a lone bull. It seems as though it has just rained, with the blur radiating from the center as though we can see clearly now, the rain has gone. 

For a vibrant cityscape, click here:

Open Now: LynchLand, A Whole Second Life Sim Devoted to the Art & Characters of David Lynch. Premiere Party This Weekend!

In heaven, everything is fine. You got yours and I got mine... Click here to visit.

That's right: The David Lynch fan group in Second Life that I wrote about last month has gone ahead and opened up a whole dedicated sim devoted to Lynch's imagination and tributes to scenes and characters from his most memorable works (with a decided Twin Peaks skew). It's open now, and this weekend starting tomorrow at 4pm PT, there's an official opening party. Dress code is "sensual black attire", and an owl mask will be given out upon arrival.

Here's some more glimpses of LynchLand courtesy of group leader Myrdin Sommer, who is financing the sim with a couple other founders: "Cate infinity, SurfSide66 and me, we pay the rent and we hope we get some Lindens in the Land-tip jars at events... the sim is there to have creative events and if people like to hang around in LynchLand that is perfectly fine, all terrain is accessible, so they can stay at the cabins etc. all they want, or just come and take pictures."

So if you're a Lynch fan too -- or David Lynch himself, as he's known to make the occasional metaverse visit -- consider tipping! More images and event details below:

BREAKING: Tempura Restored to Second Life As a Preservation Sim After Belated Outreach by Linden Lab

Just received this fairly excellent message:

Dear Tempura island friends, lovers, visitors:

We would like to inform you, that after our decision to close Tempura, we were contacted by Linden Lab and made the decision to accept maintenance of our region by joining The Second Life Region Preservation Society provided by Linden Lab.

We have received so many messages from SL residents about closing Tempura and we are very happy that it will exist still.

Please enjoy Tempura sim as you have been in all these years. We would like to express our gratitude to Linden Lab who recognized and decided to keep Tempura as part of Second Life existence. Thank you everyone who loves Tempura!

- Kikunosuke Eel/Tempura Island Team 

P.S. Special Thanks to Mr. Wagner James Au for his support

And thank you, Mr. Eel and team! So that said, click here to teleport to Tempura in all its preserved glory.

This restoral happens two weeks after the blog reported its imminent departure, which strongly suggests the Linden team scrambled to save it after its departure. Last week I had suggested this might happen, while warning that there's a flip side to preservation:

Even when Linden Lab takes a sim over, that doesn't mean what's meaningful about it will continue on. An active user community, first and foremost, brings meaning to the virtual world. 

May that community continue on. Here's the official announcement:

Last Chance to Visit Tempura, Beloved Second Life Sim Leaving the Virtual World at the End of This Month After 14 Years & Millions of Visits

Click here this month to teleport into yet another Second Life landmark that's going away: The luminously beautiful island called Tempura, which since its inception 14 years ago, has attracted well over 2 millions visits.

It is, however, leaving the virtual world grid at the end of this month. Owned and lead created by Japanese SLer "Kikunosuke eel", Tempura is a dreamscape of forests, gardens, and ancient buildings. But with his real life work taking up more of his time -- and Tempura costing him well over $2000 a year in landlord server costs to Second Life owner Linden Lab -- Mr. Eel decided it was finally time for Tempura to end.

For all these years, he subsidized Tempura at a loss, partly subsidizing it through sales from MANDALA, his virtual jewelry brand. Completely free to visitors, it's been full to near capacity since launching, with thousands visiting and exploring every week.

Mr. Eel subsidized their visits despite the expense as an expression of personal faith:

If You Want to Pay a Pilgrimage, There's an Official Virtual Shrine to Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash in the Pioneering Metaverse of Second Life

Click here to teleport to the location, where I still hold a small parcel of land in Waterhead. And yes, this shrine to Snow Crash was created in 2006 with the approval of Neal Stephenson himself, brought in-world by a metaverse marketing agency at the behest of Penguin, Stephenson's publisher. Many copies were meant to be distributed, but it's possible that I have the only one that's still instantiated in Second Life. It originally contained a readable excerpt of Snowcrash which would appear in a heads-up display when you clicked the shrine, but evidently the scripting which made that possible has been lost to time.

Oh, the giant plant to the left?

Three Visually Fantastic Places to Visit in Second Life Photographed by SuTol

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

SuTol’s picture of the sim “Wo Qui Non Coin” [teleport here] just grabbed me. As beautiful as the bucolic sims are, I am always entranced by sims that capture the frenetic energy of a city. She includes a link to a song of the same name. I love the energy of the city. 

Never fear, SuTol can do bucolic as well, click here:

Visit in SL: Rosemont, a Cyberpunk City Swallowed by the Forest

Click here to visit Rosemont District - Nirvanic Dystopia in Second Life, a cyberpunk city with a fun twist. Created by master builder Kaiden Tray (last seen here turning the Bates Motel from Psycho into a disturbingly beautiful SL experience), it's a fun twist to the usual dystopian metropolis: Basically it's what the city looks like after the people have gone away, and nature returns to consume it. Tray tells me the visuals were inspired by Horizon Zero Dawn, and set to work fashioning the place like it was a cyberpunk bonsai tree:

"I usually modify plants and trees and bushes," as he puts it. "Sometimes I will take sets apart and just use certain pieces from sets. I might resize different things to make a tree a bush or a bush a tree. I’ll also unlink and link different objects together or even retexture roads is I’m going for a certain look. A lot of the landscaping is custom."

Commissioned by longtime SL blogger Whoop C Daisy (gotta love her avatar name) Rosemont is actually a site for fashion shoots for her blog:

Explore in SL: A Group Art Exhibit in a Life-Size Apartment Complex

Click here to teleport to what seems like a six floor apartment complex, but actually houses a pretty ambitious group art project called Ed. Colonia:

The idea behind Ed. Colonia was exploring further the format of group exhibitions, preserving each artist’s individuality as we occupy a common space. No theme has been suggested, since the limitations of the apartments were restraining enough. Each floor, inhabited by a different artist, is an exhibition on its own. The lack of front doors encourages the visitors to walk inside and explore.

It's the latest project of GBTH Project, a Second Life-based arts space, and speaking of ambition, the group's official site is so well-made, I honestly assumed it was a real life gallery's homepage. The installations in Ed. Colonia are impressively varied in their theme and their success as installations, but setting it all in a six floor apartment is a smart touch, something you only occasionally see IRL. 

Hat tip: Artist Huckleberry Hax, who has an extended write-up here. Marina Munte, the founder of GBTH (i.e. "Grab By The Horns"), by the way, was recently featured in a Strawberry Linden interview:

This Week's Featured Banner: An SL Sim Based on Modern Okinawa

This week's banner features a photo from last Thursday's post on Maasya featuring the recent Okinawa SAKURA MATSURI Event, set on a sim made to look like a modern cityscape on that island prefecture of Japan, and impressively detailed at that.  Click here to teleport.

Submit your own favorite virtual world locations for featuring on New World Notes' banner or in Comments below: