New World Notes

Nylon Pinkney Is Online - Visiting Second Life On Second Life's Death Bed

Visit in SL: A Tropical Post-Apocalypse City Called Drune IV - Aftermath

Here's a walkthrough of a quite amazing Second Life sim: Drune IV - Aftermath (SLurl teleport here), a rusted-over city on a small, tropical island, which somehow survived after an unspecified calamity. (Hey, maybe a new kind of twist on cyberpunk: Tropicalypse!)

Your host in this video above is Ayla Pants, a fun and chatty guide accompanied by a friendly drone, who is immediately greeted by an incredible avatar, who compliments Ayla on her fashion choices. The sim comes with great ambient sound (crashing waves and seabird song, to contrast with the rusting skyscrapers), and, Ayla tells me, looks great throughout the day cycle:

Decentraland Looking More & More Like a Virtual World -- But Maybe Less Than What Investors Hoped

Ryan Schultz has an in-depth, in-world look at Decentraland, which in 2017, raised USD $25 million In Ethereum to fund development of the open standards virtual world. In the two years since, many have speculated that Decentraland might be vapor or mere tulip-mania over virtual land that with no actual world. But Ryan's embedded reporting reveals it looking more and more like a thriving virtual world -- though maybe not as full-featured as its many investors expected:

Cajsa’s Flickr Pick: Jarrinea Babii Turns Second Life Screenshots Into Lovely Victorian Greeting Cards

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

Jarrinea Babii’s photostream is often similar to picking up an old Victorian greeting card. This picture from the Storybook sim just needs a ribbon. By feathering the edge of the photo she creates a vignette style of frame.  The soft colors with the full embellishment makes it feel very Victorian. 

Linden Lab Launches New Second Life Ad Campaign Heavy on Fashion, Romance, Exploration... But Little of What Makes SL Unique

Linden Lab recently launched a new video ad campaign for Second Life, a series of 15 second spots they're promoting on YouTube (and presumably across the web), all which you can also watch on their official YouTube channel.  There's roughly a dozen of these :15 spots, highlighting virtual world exploration, community (virtual equestrians and LGBT groups are featured), with the most viewed categories by far being avatar customization and, of course, romance. (As above.)

They're well-made as far as they go, but to be honest, they leave me wondering how familiar the Linden Lab marketing team is with the Second Life feature set -- or maybe more key, all the platforms it's competing against:

Guide: How to Tell Steampunk, Dieselpunk & Cyberpunk from Other Punks

I'm not sure of its original source -- and if you know, please let me know -- but someone recently posted to Reddit this handy visual guide at right to the various "punks" of online/gaming/popular culture we talk about a lot on New World Notes, categorized by features and fictional era. (Click to embiggenate.)

Steampunk is surely the most well-known and practiced at the moment, though thanks to Keanu, cyberpunk is seeing a second (or fourth?) resurgence.

Cyberpunk, arguably, is the godfather of them all, since its leaders drove an ironic revival of old science fiction tropes from many previous era, only now seen from an anarchic post-modern point of view -- first starting perhaps with William Gibson/Bruce Sterling's Difference Engine which popularized  (pioneered?) steampunk.

Perhaps more interesting are the styles in between steampunk and cyberpunk, since they're less popular:

I guess you could argue that the post-cyberpunk Star Wars films are a kind of raypunk, since the original movies jumped off from the old Buck Rogers movies/comics (the OG raygun genre).

Far as Dieselpunk, I'd say Captain America: The First Avenger qualifies, while the Fallout game series has a lot from Atompunk, such as the ironic Pip Boy iconography. (Or as someone pointed out, Fallout is a Dieselpunk apocalypse built on top of an Atompunk past.)

Meanwhile, the Stranger Things series revels in Cassette Futurism.

(Those are all actually pretty obvious off-the-cuff examples -- I'd love someone to out-geek me with better ones.)

Interesting question for longtime NWN readers: What well-known Second Life experiences fit into these categories?

New World Notes' Discord Needs YOU - UPDATE: Fixed Invite Link

Click here to join. We're a friendly little club of some 200 folks or so talking about virtual worlds, VR, gaming, and subjects in between.

Speaking of virtual reality, here's a new server for AR/VR/XR fans called, of course, We Make Reality. (Via founder Eva Hoerth.)

Cajsa’s SL Flickr Pick: The Angular Slice-of-Virtual Life Photos of A. Frith

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

I enjoy A. Frith’s photostream. She shoots lovely slice-of-life photos and recently had an exhibition of her photos at Artful Expression Gallery. One the things I enjoy is how she shifts the angle of her photos. This touches on my pet photo peeve, the completely sideways photo framed to get chosen for a group heading. If I have to turn your photo on its side, I don’t like it. Frith does not do that, she creates angles that can work in a group heading but are still completely sensible from the orientation they are displayed.

This photo i framed at an oblique angle. This suggests movement and ad to the energy in the photo. The use of diagonal lines of the road and railing reiterate the gleam of light on the car. It’s bold, bright, and cheerful.

Watch: Piloting A Drone in Real Life While in Virtual Reality

This latest mixed reality demo from Toronto's mix reality mad scientist Lee Vermeulen is an update from a recent one from June: He is flying a Tello drone with a Unity-based controller that is hooked up to his Vive VR headset and Knuckles hand controllers. So the inset video you see is the stream from the drone's camera. This time, however, the heads-up display which shows what the drone is seeing is transparent -- that way, you can still pilot the drone even when the HUD display used to navigate seems to temporarily block the drone in real life.

Oddly enough, this really feels like a killer app for VR/AR headsets. To the extent that drones have multiple killer apps (and they do), they need a way to be controlled with a high degree of precision. And what better way to do that than being able to see what the drone is seeing (so to speak) while also able to see what the drone pilot is seeing?

Trump’s Own Campaign Helped Radicalize a Violent Video Game Community

With Trump blaming the latest white supremacist terrorist incident on violent video games, it's necessary to re-state the obvious: Trump's own campaign and lead supporters helped radicalize Gamergate, the small but rabid online community of violent gamers, to help support Trump's election in 2016. Since then, this community has been associated with even more violence -- including the very acts that Trump is now claiming to condemn.

And while this happened only a few years ago, few media outlets are now noting this history. So here it is again: