New World Notes

Three Stunning Second Life Landscapes to Visit This Summer

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

Ellen Saint shoots landscapes that are warm and inviting. Take “So Tangled in the Wild” with the field of Scotch broom brightening the landscape, brighter and bolder than the sky. In an odd way, this picture is enhanced by what you don’t see. Right behind what I hope is a house because it’s lovely and the view is spectacular, we can see a lighthouse, so we know right over the crest of that hill is the ocean. We don’t see it but we know it’s there and so we know that whoever lives in that house is a very lucky person, indeed.

 You can check it out yourself as she provided the teleport SLURL. [Click here to visit]

For more of her landscapes, click here:

Photos from REN, an Island in Second Life Where the Flora Cycles Monthly to Follow the Seasons

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

Noa Cloud is an extraordinary landscape photographer in Second Life. He also runs an art galley featured in the Destination Guide, his equally extraordinary sim, REN, where the flora are cycled monthly to follow the season’s bloom. I always love it when we get some fauna with the flora as in this “Cloven Forest” picture with a bunny casting a come-hither glance over the shoulder at the other bunny. This was taken at a sim that closed June 1st, alas. 

For more picturesque scenes, click here:

Visit TraveLover SL to Find Fun Places to Visit in Second Life

 

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

 

Recently a reader commented that she wished to see a travel blog. I thought that was a great idea and thought of TraveLover SL whose most recent post is Trekking Over the Amazing Amazon. TraveLover SL is an adventure blog by Nesca Fey [Feyonce.Resident.] Her posts are well-imagined travel adventures.

 

The Amazon has twelve sims to move about in. According to Nesca, this is the place to feel like the Tomb Raider. It sounds like great fun, you get a HUD at the beginning if you want to do the adventure but you are free to wander independently and take pictures. Her post is sprinkled with facts about the Amazon, the real place. 

 

Your helicopter dropoff to the Amazon River.

 

For more adventure, click here:

Amazing New Cloud-Covered Mountain Range Appears in Second Life

Cloud Edge is one of the most spectacular Second Life sims I've visited in some time, and I'll tell you why: Not only are its high, cloud-covered mountain surroundings beautifully realized, the ambient audio also immersive puts you into the experience.

"[It's] very much inspired by my surrounding in Scotland," creator Alex Bader tells me. "The sims have been around for maybe 12 years or so and have evolved as I've my design skills and available design software have improved. I use them mainly as a showcase for my landscaping products."

Click here to teleport, to see for yourself. Many already have, like Caitlin Tobias, as word of Cloud Edge has gotten around. There's even a whole Flickr group devoted to it:

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?