New World Notes

Kaoruco City, Jaw-Dropping Second Life Sim Inspired by Blade Runner and Other Cyberpunk Classic, Opens -- Watch the Trailer!

Watch this machinima trailer directed by master SL creator Eripom Moonwall, premiering Kaoruco City, a new Second Life sim inspired by Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, along with SL-based cities of the past, most especially Insilico and District 18.

Lead developed by Kaoruco Resident and a team of fellow Japanese SLers, it evokes a neo-Tokyo type vibe. Kaoruco and team re-purposed many pre-existing cypberpunk-themed assets for much of it ("Second Life has enough contents to build sci-fi scene," he notes), and were able to assemble them over a week of work. They paid special attention to the small details that make up a living city:

"We focused on making roads, avenues, and small paths," he explains, "Because in many movies, there's attractive scenes like Deckard eating at a noodle bar downtown."

 

You may be surprised it only took five days to build what you're seeing, but Kaoruco says it worked because the team had the same basic vision in their heads:

Cassie's Clips: Exploring the "Absolutely Stunning" Second Life Recreation of The Upside Down from Stranger Things

Monday's post about the Stranger Things fan community build in Second Life was so popular, I sent NWN correspondent Cassie Middles to explore in person, and file her report to YouTube. Is it laggy? Is it worth the L$1000 group admission fee? Is it as detailed as it seems to be? Watch and find out from Cassie. (And don't miss the moment where she wanders into Joyce's house only to find a couple, um, already there.)

Here's the top takeaway from Cassie:

Visit This Weekend in Second Life: Cica Ghost's Giant Music Box

Sunny Day from Pepa Cometa on Vimeo.

Click here to visit a beautiful new experience from metaverse art master Cica Ghost (ably featured in Pepa Cometa's machinima above): A kind of intricate, giant, moving music box that seems to be from the 19th century of an alternate, lovelier universe. I've always admired Cica Ghost's scenes, but wished they had more animation; this new experience manages movement beautifully. And it's huge! Look at my avatar in relationship to Cica's world:

Watch: Fantastic Nine Inch Nails Machinima Music Video Shot in a Beautifully Fallout-esque Second Life Sim Called Cranium Bay

Continuing our recurring theme of "Yes, Second Life nowadays can look about as great as a recent Fallout game (well, at least New Vegas)", here's a smashing machinima music video featuring NiN's "Only" and an SL sim called Cranium Bay. (Direct teleport here.) Created by Jackson Redstar, the roving camerawork is smooth and floaty, the cinematography is crisp and moody.

Cranium Bay, by the way, has a Flickr group with much more to see.

New in Second Life: Visit Rieri, Japanese Town Inspired by First-Person Photos of Tokyo's Arakawa Lock Gate Region

Click here to visit a new experience in Second Life: Rieri, a Japanese town painstakingly modeled from Google Maps and real photos of Tokyo neighborhoods. As regular readers will have guessed, this project is from Eripom Moonwall, SL's master creator of realistic cityscapes and military hardware. She and her team wanted to a post-industrial Japanese city that still evoked nostalgia. "We had much curiosity about what makes nostalgic scene," she tells me, "and found some keywords like 'riverbed', 'bended road', 'ridge' and 'small buildings' etc."

Since they're based in Tokyo, those keywords took them in specific places around the Tokyo megapolis, until they wound up at the Arakawa Lock Gate and town around it. The visit and the place, a vision of modern Japan from decades ago, made them feel that kind of nostalgia they were looking for.  "We took tons of photos," Eripom says, laughing.

 

After the break, compare some photos Eripom and her team took in Japan in real life side-by-side with what they created based on them in Second Life:

Open Now: Fantasy Faire, Celebrating 10 Years Raising Funds for the American Cancer Society With Massive, Amazing SL Installations

It's open now, so click to explore and visit the many wondrously themed regions:

Celebrating its tenth year, Fantasy Faire 2018 is the largest gathering of fantasy designers, enthusiasts, roleplayers and performers in the virtual world. From Thursday, April 19 to Sunday April 29, treat yourself to eleven days of shopping, dance and theater performances, DJ parties, auctions, questing, Literary Festival, fantasy art, events and roleplaying as thousands of Second Life residents and creators bring their own visions together to support the American Cancer Society’s vision of a world without cancer.

Pictured above is the Fairelands Junction (click here to teleport), with much, much more to explore.

Now Open in Second Life: A Complex New Cyberpunk City Created on a Low Prim Homestead

Drune is a new spectacular-looking cyberpunk city in Second Life that's now open on the island of Lyme: Click here to teleport. Created by veteran sim builder Hera (Zee9), it's an exercise in optimization, because it's built on an SL Homestead sim, with far less prims available than a standard sim:

"I have built many sims before over the years but always had 15000 prims to play with," Hera tells me, "Even then I though this was never enough. So with only 5000 on a homestead, which is all I can afford, I was not sure it was even possible." It took four weeks to create, with one false start: "I half built it and then realized to make it work I was going to have to plan it much better so I deleted then and re-started."

Unlike many cyberpunk sims, this one pops with quite a lot of color.  The first inspiration is one you've probably guessed already, but another is more recent:

The Island of the Artist Known as Cica Ghost is Now Full of Cats

Acclaimed Second Life artist Cica Ghost has turned her island into a dreamlike village beneath a darkening sky and has filled that village with cats -- big-eyed, melancholy, adorable. Click here to visit her "50 Cats" exhibit.

How acclaimed is Cica? Here's some previous installation she's created over the years:

There's an Underserved Desire by SLers for #ExploringSecondLife

Strawberry Singh has a new meme challenge for SL bloggers and vloggers:

For this week’s #SecondLifeChallenge, I am bringing back a previous challenge I did in 2013, but adding a bit of a twist: Exploring Second Life. In that post I asked you guys to share your favorite locations in Second Life, which you can do for this challenge, or you can visit some new places and share those throughout the week... 

If you want to share pictures on Twitter for this challenge, try and add the following three hashtags: #SecondLife  #SecondLifeChallenge #ExploringSecondLife

Glad she's reviving this challenge, because there seems to be an underserved desire among SLers to see and visit new sims and themed regions. (Probably because most SL sims rarely seem to be updated, while longtime classics often disappear.) So for instance, my short post on, The Sea of Beckoning, a new desert-themed region, was among the very most read and shared posts last week. 

Bryn Oh's New SL Art Installation is a Parable of Understanding Expressed by Melancholy Robots

Launched in Second Life last month during the holidays, the latest installation by acclaimed metaverse artist Bryn Oh is a parable of understanding expressed by robots:

The story is of a laboratory at night which sees a maintenance robot come out to gather up a tiny robot in a jar.  Robots to me symbolize the mildly flawed or different in our society.  The ignored or obsolete.  Each night she comes out and they connect to each other with a cable and remain this way until just before the scientists, who have created them, return.  In many of my stories such as this one, it is the machines, the outcasts or the overlooked who possess more humanity than those who have created them. 

Click here to visit in person in Immersiva, Bryn's exhibition space in SL. As is usually the case with SL works by the Canadian government-funded artist, Bryn created a strange and gorgeous machinima in the space, this time accompanied by a poem: