Month: September 2020

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Free Subscriber Gifts and a Free Hunt at Mangula

Mangula is a Venezuelan womenswear store in Second Life (SLURL) which is well-known for its detailed, high-quality original mesh clothing and footwear.

Did you know that, at the moment, you can pick up well over 40 different pieces of clothing and footwear for free in their in-store hunt? You are looking for black gift-wrapped packages lying on the floor of the store.

In order to snap up these gifts, you first need to do one thing: click on the subscriber group sign located behind the front desk of the store, opposite the entrance. This action will add you to the Mangula subscriber group. Mangula used to charge L$100 to join their subscriber group (as I wrote before), but recently they have decided to drop the fee, and it is now free to join!

Also, the Mangula subscriber group does not take up one of your limited Second Life group slots. For example, as an avid freebie fashionista with a Premium account, Vanity Fair is constantly having to leave and rejoin fashion groups to stay within her limit of 72 groups. I would gladly pay for an account upgrade which includes a higher number of groups!

Don’t forget that, in addition to all the hunt boxes, there is also a very generous selection of free subscriber gifts you can pick up. In almost all cases, these subscriber gifts are full clothing and footwear fatpacks, not just a single colour! I have noticed that Mangula tends to rotate the items on the Subscriber Gifts wall in-store, so you might want to drop by every couple of months just to see what’s new.

Anyway, here I show you just a few of the gifts I picked up from the hunt. Most gift boxes contain three or four items of apparel which can be combined or layered in various ways to give you several different outfit options. Please note that Magnula apparel only comes in sizes to fit Maitreya Lara, Belleza Freya, Slink Hourglass, and Meshbody Legacy mesh bodies, plus a fit called “Curvy”, which I assume is for the eBody Curvy mesh body (although I could be wrong).

The Olivia dress in red comes in versions with out without sleeves, plus an optional tooled leather belt:

The Paula outfit consists of a gray turtleneck knit dress with a wide leather belt, and a separate, loose denim jacket to wear over it for those cooler days in SL!

This Leila set is a lovely, simple white minidress with a separate black demin jacket (there’s also a longer, mustard-coloured dress in the hunt gift box):

The Zoe set combines a soft pink top (with detachable sleeves), with faded blue denim capri pants:

There are also many, many other hunt gifts, including footwear; in fact, there are several full fatpacks of shoes and boots to be found in the gift boxes!

I am a big fan of Mangula avatar fashion, and I admire their generosity with the large number of freebies they give away to promote their brand. Given the ongoing economic crisis in Venezuela, I’m sure it can’t be easy to make ends meet! So if you can, please consider spending some Linden dollars while you’re already in the store, to support the owner. Second Life might be his or her economic lifeline!

In fact, the only possibly negative thing I can say about Mangula’s beautifully detailed apparel is that is sometimes increases your Avatar Rendering Complexity quite a bit! So, if you want your avatar to be seen by other avatars properly (as opposed to showing up like a “jelly doll” in their viewers), please keep this in mind.

I don’t know how long the Mangula hunt will last (or, for that matter, how long you can join their subscriber group for free!), so hurry down to vacuum up some fabulous freebies for your wardrobe.

Happy freebie shopping! Here’s your taxi to Mangula.

Second Life News: There’s a Flash Sale on Signature Alice, Geralt, and Gianni Mesh Bodies Until September 27th, 2020

I paid a quick visit to the Signature shopping event in Second Life after watching this video by Cat Pink SL (whom you should be following for news on sales such as this):

If you are in the market for a high-quality mesh avatar body, you might be interested to know that Signature is having a flash sale at the Signature Event, selling the Alice female mesh body for less than half its regular retail price, and offering a smaller but still significant discount on both the Gianni and Geralt models of male mesh bodies (here’s a direct SLURL to the vendors at the Signature Event):

The vendors at the Signature Event

Now, the male body panel at the event appears to only sell the Signature Gianni body, but I have checked back at the Signature main store, and you can buy both the Gianni and Geralt bodies there at the same flash sale price, L$2,750 (the regular price is L$4,000). Compare this to the current price of the other two major male mesh bodies: L$2,999 for Belleza Jake, and L$5,000 for the Meshbody Legacy male body.

The “Big Three” of male mesh bodies favoured by fashion designers are Belleza Jake, Signature Gianni, and the Meshbody Legacy male mesh body, with the Slink male body coming in fourth (and frankly, a lot of men in Second Life are still rocking a classic, system avatar!). The Signature Gianni body is very well supported by clothing and footwear designers, so you should have no problems finding apparel that fits.

Fewer SL clothing makers design for the newer, less muscular Signature Geralt body, however, so that might well factor into your purchase decision. (Here’s a handy blogpost from the Virtual Bloke blog, which compares and contrasts the Gianni and Geralt bodies.)

The Signature Alice female mesh body is only L$1,500 (the regular price is L$3,500), which is a real bargain. However, you should be aware that not a lot of fashion designers are making clothing specifically for the Alice body yet, instead focusing on what I like to call the “Big Seven” brands of female bodies: Maitreya Lara (L$2,750), Belleza Freya, Venus, and Isis (L$2,499 each), Slink Physique and Hourglass (L$2,800 each), and the new, popular Meshbody Legacy female body (L$5,000). Signature obviously hopes to grease the wheel a bit by offering such a sizable discount on the Alice body, but you should go into this knowing that you will still have a somewhat harder time finding apparel for it.

All Signature bodies have Bento hands and will work with any Bento animations. The bodies work with both Signature and Omega skin appliers (with the separately available Omega System Kit for Signature), and they also support Bakes on Mesh skins, cosmetics, and tattoos. They should work well with any Bento mesh heads.

This flash sale ends at midnight SL Time/Pacific Time on September 17th, 2020, so if you’re interested, hurry down, try on some demos and decide for yourself if it’s too good a deal to pass up. Happy shopping!

Updated! XANA: A Brief Introduction

XANA is a new social VR platform/virtual world which is (at least, according to its website) “coming very soon!”. It describes itself breathlessly as the “World’s Leading Virtual Social Experience Platform”:

XANA is the next generation virtual social experience platform which allows anyone to access or create open worlds to do anything from virtual events for fun to profitable virtual business, available for universal devices from VR , PC to mobile.

(By the way, none of the links to any of their “supported platforms” works.)

Here’s the three-minute promo video I was able to find on YouTube, which features the Chineses entrepreneur spearheading the project, and a whole ton of stock footage (a homeless man doing a fist pump in front of a notebook computer? Whatever, bro):

This video reminds me of some of the unintentionally hilarious promotional videos shot for other blockchain projects. Dig through all the blather, and note that there are precious few glimpses of what XANA actually looks like, and what little we do see, appears to be footage stitched together from a number of completely disparate virtual worlds and games. (Perhaps my readers could help me identify where some of this footage comes from? Thanks in advance for your help here.)

And yes, apparently XANA will incorporate virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and—wait for it!—blockchain/cryptocurrency. Sigh. All the requisite buzzwords are present and accounted for.

Haven’t I already promised myself that I wouldn’t bother covering any new blockchain-cased virtual worlds unless they were actually shipping product?

Yep, I did:

For example, aside from the three projects that have actually successfully launched (that is, Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, and Somnium Space, each fascinating in their own way), I will no longer be covering any more blockchain-based virtual worlds—unless they actually ship product. It was fun for a while, but more than half the time lately, I find myself writing about projects that are pretty much nothing but a white paper (and an .io website, and a Telegram channel) full of hypotheticals, handwaving, and hot air. Come talk to me when you actually have something concrete.

This is yet another example of a social VR platform/virtual world which appears to be more hype than substance. Like so many other half-baked blockchain projects I have witnessed before it, I’ll be extremely surprised if the project comes to fruition at all.

The XANA website is notably (and predictably) sparse on any actual technical details, including a link to a “Help Center” devoid of any help. If you’re still interested despite all this, you can follow XANA on various social media: Facebook, Twiiter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. As always I caution: do every single scrap of your homework before investing in any blockchain/cryptocurrency project or platform!

UPDATE 3:43 p.m.: Well, that didn’t take long! Sharp-eyed reader Rainwolf tells me that he has spotted various pre-made game assets from the Unity Asset Store: Cyberpunk, Medieval Kingdom, and The Lost Lands. Look familiar?

Rainwolf tells me that what tipped him off was the avatars looked like they were created using the Unity SDK for avatars, so he just started searching on the Unity Asset Store for keywords like “cyberpunk”, and it didn’t take him long to find it. Thanks, Rainwolf!

At this point, it’s pretty clear that there is no XANA—at least, no original content. It’s vapourware, folks. Nothing to see here, move along now…

Pandemic Diary: September 12th, 2020

It is now Day 181 since I started working in isolation from home for my university library system.

One hundred and eighty-one days since I last worked in my office at the University of Manitoba Libraries (although I have popped in once or twice to use the printer and pick up a few reports). One hundred and eighty-one days since I have set foot in a retail establishment of any kind (I order my groceries online at Walmart, and have them load everything into the back of my car, and I get my prescriptions delivered). One hundred and eight-one days since I ate a meal inside a restaurant (although I have dined outside on a restaurant patio five or six times this summer, something I soon will be unable to do with autumn fast approaching).

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

I apologize for the lack of blogposts this week; I just haven’t felt much like writing “news and view about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse” lately.

Yesterday, game designer Jennifer Scheurle tweeted something that I could utterly relate to, as I near the six-month mark of working from home, lacking in external stimulation and close human contact:

She wrote:

Does anybody else feel like the quarantine has influenced their creative prowess negatively? I feel like my creative energy is at an all-time low with so little external stimuli, rarely going outside, seeing people…. It’s making me feel very sad.

Turns out for me, having time is not the main aspect of making creative things happen. If I have time but no external stimuli, travel, good conversations, food, etc… my creative energy takes a HUGE nosedive. Who knew.

In the office, I love doing brainstorming sessions with colleagues, lock ourselves in a room, whiteboard scribble things out, go for lunch to think and so on. I feel like all my creative strategies have lost all meaning.

Her tweet went viral, and was liked by almost 800 other people, dozens of whom commented that they, too, were struggling to find their creativity, zest, and joy in their work. I responded:

I can completely relate to this, and to many of the comments people have made here. The lack of external stimulation has pitched me into full-blown hibernation mode, and I am struggling just to keep my head above water at work, at a time when I have hard deadlines to meet.

And it’s true: I am struggling. I admit it. All of my energy is going towards work, and my productivity and creativity have been significantly impaired. I find myself sleeping 10, 12, even 14 hours at a stretch, and I often feel exhausted, fighting to get out of bed in the morning and face the day. I have gotten up, set the alarm to sleep another two hours, and gone back to bed, unable to face the challenges of the day without a little extra sleep. I am like a grumpy (gay) bear in hibernation mode.

I got myself a subscription to CalmRadio.com, and I find myself listening to soothing music all day, every day. And I keep working away, a vat of black coffee on constant standby. I was hoping that the official start of the academic year this week would help to kick-start my energy and motivation, but I still find myself pushing myself to get things done.

I don’t kid myself; I know that this is the “new normal”, and that things will likely stay this way for at least another six to twelve months, probably well into 2021. Even if good vaccines are found among the first batch that are currently being tested, it will take a long time to manufacture and deliver sufficient quantities to bring society back to some semblance of normality. Canada has already signed major deals with four vaccine producers, and I read in the news that they are close to signing other deals. The pandemic is going to make some people very, very rich and, as usual, the poor (and those without universal healthcare or health insurance) will be screwed.

This week, bowing to public pressure, the provincial health authorities have started breaking down COVID-19 cases by Winnipeg city neighbourhoods:

While the overall numbers are still low compared to many areas in the United States, we have still seen a recent surge in daily cases in Manitoba:

I vacillate between wanting to stay informed on the latest progress in the fight against COVID-19, glued to my newsfeed, and getting so disgusted and demoralized by how some thoughtless, selfish, ignorant people are responding to the crisis that I avoid the news media for days at a stretch. I still don’t have a TV set, but I am spending a lot of time binge watching various Netflix shows on my iPad.

My Valve Index is still on back order, and I don’t expect I will receive my shipment of a complete kit until November at the earliest. I am toying with the idea of throwing out the worn, old sofa in my living room, and completely rearranging the space to set up (for the first time ever) a full-room space devoted to virtual reality. We’ll see.

Stay healthy and stay sane! I will continue to keep you posted on how things are going with me.