New World Notes

The Gnome is Home: Helium-Headed YouTuber Soda Gnome Wackily Returns to Second Life

It's a Friday miracle! After an absence of some six years, legendary YouTuber Soda Gnome is back with a new Second Life machinima to utterly wreck some "Take on Me" karaoke. First sighted by Redditor u/GeoffreyLannister, we've been missing his wryly goofy humor, a gnome-shaped light amid the sea of fashion and trolling videos. Though watch now: For whatever reason, his classic SL videos seem to be no longer on YouTube. 

Past Soda Gnome appearances on NWN below, though it's mainly readers and I talking about how funny as fuck he is. I've reached out to Monsieur Gnome so he knows we're watching -- say hello in Comments in hopes he makes more videos!

Actual Recent New World Notes Stories Too True to Be April Fool's

• Avatars without bodies riot in frantic search for new heads
• Academic speculates on appeal of mirrors in virtual worlds, ignores "To look at own boobs" hypothesis
• Milestone in AI achieved: Make Will Ferrell's Steve Butabi seem more human by comparison
• Adorable purple cloud delivers important corporate advice on UX design
• Exiled monarch starts second life with Second Life

Linden Lab Unveils New Soviet Tenement-Themed Homes for Second Life Players -- Visit Now!

In Ebbe Altberg's Second Life, Linden Homes live IN YOU.

Click here to get your piece of the Soviet dream in the highly desired mainland sim of Milbank -- rubles or Linden Dollars accepted. Better hurry, though, avatars are streaming in by the boatload as I write this.

Official (unofficial) announcement below.

I Love These Memes of Bernie Sanders Sitting Around In Second Life

"THIS MAY BE A RELAXING TIME WITH A VIRTUAL SHEEP BUT I AM HERE TO TELL YOU THAT THE MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES HAVING BEEN SHEARING THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS LIKE SHEEP SINCE FDR AND ENOUGH IS ENOUGH"

One great thing to come out of the Biden inauguration yesterday (I mean besides that whole "undermining a violent uprising by crazed white supremacists" thing) are the Bernie memes, photoshopping the cranky senator in mittens into various wacky situations. (Jesse Damiani has a huge, hilarious collection of them here.). Acting quickly, the acclaimed metaverse artist known as Whiskey Monday brought Bernie into several of her Second Life scenes. Here's my favorites.

"Second Life is a Game" Meme Inevitably Outrages Non-Gaming SLers

Antonio Giano recently wrote and posted this SL variation of the famous defenestration meme on a private Facebook group for Second Life users -- and as you probably would have guessed if you read New World Notes on the regular, it provoked a long back and forth of outrage and argument.

Which as Antonio tells me, was what inspired him to make the meme in the first place: "[A]s you can see, people are always fighting a lot on that topic." In fact the post got so heated, he finally disabled his notifications.

As I observed on the Facebook post, the argument inevitably breaks down between longtime gamers who know Second Life has many similarities to many games -- and those for whom SL is the first online game in which they've devoted serious time, energy, and emotional investment. Here's why:

Watch: Carmen King Keeps Streaming Second Life -- And Has Advice for Players of The Sims In Giving SL a Second Chance

In the latest hilariously ribald video from Ms. Carmen King, YouTube gaming doyenne and unofficial queen of Second Life, we find her searching for a mansion to buy in Second Life as only Carmen can. (NSFW of course, unless I guess you work at a tattoo gallery.)

"[My SL] apartment is beautiful," she announces at the start, "but I am grown, and I am ready to have a grown bitch's house." Then actually goes and finds and actual (virtual) real estate agent. (That's a thing in SL? TIL there are actual ass real estate agents in SL.) 

While her videos are gaining popularity among the SL community, I notice that a lot of her endemic subscribers are leery to try Second Life, either because they were overwhelmed by the UX (can't blame them there), or they tried it once and got overwhelmed.

So for all of them them, you're in luck: I reached out to this queen named King and asked for her own personal tips for people thinking of trying out SL now -- especially those coming to it after playing The Sims:

Watch: Celebrity YouTuber Bored With The Sims Quickly Becomes Queen of Second Life, Basically

Ms. Carmen King is a gaming YouTube celebrity with nearly 1 million subscribers, and earlier this month, an amazing thing happened.

"If you've watching my channel lately," she announces, "I've been talking about how bland the Sims 4 has been getting -- that Star Wars pack did not make it any better, bitch."

But rather than switch to a recent game, she reaches all the way back 17 years to launch Second Life:

"I'm not here to troll or make enemies or anything I like that," she begins, in a nod to YouTube's many a-hole SL trolls, "I genuinely want to do stuff in SL like create myself in Second Life, go shopping, find me a man, go to a strip club, get pregnant -- and I'm not even kidding, you can literally get pregnant in Second Life and literally deliver a baby, like straight out your cootchie deliver, I'm not even joking,"

... which should give you a taste of her girl gamer-meets-Cardi B charm and NSFW Rabelaisian patois. What follows is more or less the "WAP" of game streaming, adventures in avatar enhancement, apartment hunting, and later on, road rage in a diamond pink car. Yes:

Grandma Makes Firm But Hilarious Tutorial On the Word "No" to Second Life Dudes Making Unsolicited Offers To Sex Her Face

If you're in need of a laugh (and I definitely think you are), here's the latest video from Granny Magnolia Wrigglesworth, a lovely if occasionally foul-mouth grandmother who regales her audience with her latest Second Life adventures and opinions. In this one, she makes a sadly necessary but still hilarious plea to Second Life dudes unable to grasp that no means no, even when it's virtual:

Do not brag about the size of your mesh, which by the way we know does not represent the true real life size of your willie, because you're probably hung like a squirrel (no offense to squirrels).

Do not tell her what she's missing -- it's no.

And FYI, she knows what she's missing: A fricking migraine.

Words to live by! I love that she ends the video asking for recommendations of horror games to play live on Twitch, which I'd pay good money to watch. (How about the original BioShock, Granny?) 

Below another favorite, a rant against anti-LGBTQ people that gets so ranty, her swears need to be bleeped out:

How YouTube Star Mr. Moon Made His Hilarious Second Life Video

"Ticket to Hell" from popular gaming YouTuber Mr. Moon. like I said last week, is the best and raunchily funniest Second Life "outsider" video in a long while. What’s also amazing, as Moon told me recently, is how he made it. While Mr. Moon has produced epic videos in other online games/MMO like Dayz Z and Ark, this was his first foray into the 17 year old virtual world.

“I always thought [Second Life] would be the perfect place to create some content,” he says. “I had no idea going in what I was going to create, it really all came together in an interesting way.”

I was surprised myself how he created it. Here’s some behind the scenes secrets from Mr. Moon -- spoilers if you haven’t yet seen “Ticket to Hell” (and you should already, it's right up there):

Watch: YouTube Star Mr. Moon Visits Second Life, Makes Hilariously Crude, Occasionally Perceptive Feature Epic

Update, 4/16: Bumped up for weekend viewing!

Got 70 minutes to spare? What am I saying, of course we all do. Fire up some popcorn and your favorite adult beverage and watch "Ticket to Hell" from popular YouTube gaming star Mr. Moon. Content warning: Occasionally veers from hilariously crude to just crude, and is definitely not worksafe viewing if you're actually working in an office, but then again who is. And it is hilarious as hell.

Unlike Second Life trolling videos which were in vogue for awhile (and more lazy than funny), Mr. Moon and VERTiiGO, his collaborator/partner in crime, go all out, creating a feature-length stoner comedy that combines staged sequences with what looks to be actual gameplay footage with random SLers spontaneously reacting to their a-hole roleplay hi-jinx.

Their goal: Earn enough Linden Dollars to afford mesh avatars, so they can then hook up with SL's hottest hotties in the world's best clubs. It does not go as planned.

And notwithstanding Moom's foul-mouthed, cynical film noir narration, he even finds times for some perceptive scenes: