Now playing in New World Notes!

ALL TOMORROW'S POLITICAL PARTIES

... Quality-wise, I'd say it easily ranks up there with a Terra Nova entry. But since it's by bad girl fashionista Aimee Weber, terms like "assless pants" are regularly employed, and the author's photo is considerably hotter than anything you'd come across in, say, Public Affairs Quarterly.

So, you know, a two-fer...

LOSING THE DETAILS

A farewell to Second Life's first virtual sweatshop worker...

THE SOUND OF ONE MIND CLAPPING

A koan is a parable of paradox that clears away conscious thought in order to elevate one's mind to a higher plane. Build up a big enough body of them, and you got the basis for a new spirituality.

Torley Torgeson has invented Second Life Koans...

KILLING PRIMMIES

Primmies, winner of the 2005 Second Life Game Developer Contest, is the delightful strategy/puzzle/action game that resembles a multiplayer, three-dimensional Lemmings, challenging you to navigate your adorable tribes of Primmies across treacherous terrain, while preventing them from marching suicidally off the edge of the randomly generated maps which appear from a whirling vortex. In naming it the overall winner, veteran game developer and contest judge Doug Church praised it as "a focused and self-contained game... a game sandbox to play in," full of nice details that provide "a fun closure to it."

There's really just one problem with Primmies. Primmies is dead.

SUBDIVISIONS

Sheltered and peaceful community for emigres who want a secluded home space from which to explore the wilder nation outside-- or sterile track homes in a suburb that fails to deliver on the ideal of neighborhood?

BIG EASY REBUILT

A statue of Louis Armstrong greets you at the entrance, as do saxophone and trumpet sculptures standing 50 feet high. There's a French Quarter to stroll through, and a Jackson Square to stand in, eerily resembling the New Orleans location where President Bush delivered his Katrina relief speech. While reconstruction of the great city has only just begun, the virtual Big Easy is more or less complete now, construction stopped only because the region has redlined its object allowance capacity...

GAME OF DIPLOMACY: FIRST MOVES

So we sat there by the side of the river, the ape, the chimp, the horus and the rest of us, and talked about the games we'd create to make the world a better place...

THE WORLDS INSIDE THE WORLD INSIDE

Pierce Portocarrero is using Second Life machinima as a tool to create a feature-length documentary; now the irrepressible Aimee Weber has used SL machinima to create an educational film-- specifically, a pretty extraordinary virtual planetarium tour of the solar system, created entirely within Second Life...

PLYWOOD CAMEO

For that matter, I'm not exactly sure why an army of super-intelligent teddy bears is bent on gridwide domination, and a gender-obsessed superhero in tights is bent on stopping them...

POINT TO POINT: POINT, COUNTERPOINT

Shortly after launching commercially, however, Linden Lab introduced "telehubs", scattered throughout the grid. From then on, when you teleported from point A to point B, you were actually sent to the telehub nearest to point B-- usually a few hundred meters away, meaning you had to travel the remaining distance on your own power (fly, walk, vehicle.) In the same way, in the offline world, that a public transit system tends to create a civic gathering place and neighborhood around each of its stops, telehubs were a way to mitigate the urban sprawl of a constantly expanding world. A place to meet folks, and a chance to look around, wherever you were going. Smart urban metaverse planning, in other words.

All that's about to change...

Hey, Hamlet. I like the survey but there's one question I think would be an interesting addition. Ask how long we've been reading New World notes. While most readers may be relatively new, I bet there are still a few of us who have been reading pretty much daily since the beginning. Would be interesting to see...
Cheers!

Persig

I'm gonna take this shortly... I love this question:

11. Reading NWN inspired me to...

Altho for #10, I discovered NWN through a search engine and that's not on the choices?

Those are both great ideas! Unfortunately, now that the survey is locked up and running I can't scroo with it without bunging up the results. Tips for a future survey, fo sure.

Good survey, but what's with the 'time spent in Second Life?' only going up to 10+ hours per week, where's the 10 hours a DAY option? (subtle glancing about)

Heh!

IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE

So when you're trying to run an honest sex club on a pleasant foothill off the highway, you probably want the clientele in the lobby to enjoy the view outside, while waiting to enjoy the services provided within. The mini-mall across the way, for example, or the mansions up the slope. Though maybe not the giant, multi-color sign floating right outside, the one emblazoned with the words "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS - End the Illegal War in Iraq - Restore US credibility - IMPEACH BUSH". Because even if the clientele happened to agree with the sentiment, it's probably not something that gets people in the mood.

Especially if it's a sign they've already seen in Second Life, in so many places-- floating above mountains, along roads next to castles and fine suburbs, next to shopping centers and casinos, looming over nightclubs and lakes...