Metaquette #Metaverse #SecondLife #VirtualWorld #Avatar #TOUR #MetaverseExplorers

Tips & Tricks for negotiating The Metaverse with.............Pooky Amsterdam 

Roll up for the Magical Second Life Tour!

Dear peoples of The Metaverse, no matter your degree of interest, Second Life should not have escaped your notice.  Here are 18 Facts of Second Life you might want to know, including that the Second Life GDP is now around $600million. Daniel Van Der Waals the dashing head of the Metaverse Explorers group has asked me to lead the tour into Second Life. 

Second Life is a user created world in many respects, and it is that which makes it so sticky. The residents of Second Life have a stake in this game, we build in this game, we literally and figuratively have skin in this game. Second Life is huge, it has everything, people do everything and anything there, it has tremendous User Generated Content in its marketplace and awesome UGC for a variety of activities and destinations.  Did I say Destinations? This guide has almost 50 separate categories, including something like 10 separate genres for music alone.  This weekend is the 16th Virtual World Best Practice in Education conference with educators from across the globe presenting their insights, methods and how to teach in the Metaverse, programs.  Sweet 16! Worth a look to see the wide variety of topics that are covered!

Second Life has its own currency, the Linden and exchange (Thank you to Tilla) which works incredibly well as people buy and sell in a marketplace with clarity as to the revenue they receive, and which they can easily withdraw too.

There is no one blog that could sum up everything Second Life has to offer, and if you ask the residents of SL, as it is called,  what is the best thing about it, most would say the people we have met, and the great friendships which transcend all platforms.

Q: Second Life will celebrate its 20th Birthday this June, is it still relevant as a Metaverse?

Yes, it is, it is the grand daddy of the Metaverse! Most Metaverses offer the same kind of things, but Second Life due to its longevity, has the experts and the expertise on what really works over time. You can stream movies into SL, you can stream your SL experience out to the rest of the world too. You can buy, rent and sell land, or build a community around your particular interests and you can dance if you want to, there are tons of mocap dancing animations to buy. 

Yes the learning curve is a bit steep, many residents tend to be interested in technology yet unlike Roblox, Minecraft or Fortnite  where most users are tweens and teens, the demographic skews to adults. Second Life is a grown up kind of place where you will meet other grown - ups, even if some of them take on a younger persona, or even a furry one. The many skins  we wear in Second Life are merely soul wrappings to who we are inside, much as our outside skin wraps our own souls. 

By the way, if you are a performer - and want to be part of the Big Birthday party, applications are now open for this! 

The learning curve is something to master though. And there are many many tutorials on how to do that.

Here is one which also includes how to download the preferred viewer for Second Life which is called Firestorm.  And here is a direct link to Firestorm, where you can click on which of the operating systems you use. In the video above, an avatar named Lux takes us through the various windows we click in a Second day. In Second Life you can communicate with the person next to you so no one else hears in whisper, or send text to the amassed audience and even shout across a Sim if needed. You can text, or talk to someone privately in the instant message box and you can use voice too. The communications capabilities are truly awesome and really set a standard for how in-world contact should be.

In a world where Metaverses will come and go, Second Life has that here - to - stay quality where investing in your inventory feels secure.  A few years back PookyMedia was asked to create a video for new users, it still has its charm though the new landing destination has changed: A Year In The Life of Second Life  One's Second Life, like one's physical life is an evolution, we evolve in our Second Lives through the skills we learn on our own and from each other. In Second Life we have the ability to do anything, but more often than not we will help n00bies with learning, no matter how old we are, we were all new once. 

Please join me on a tour of Second Life that will take in a large variety of stunning locations, impressive builds, fabulous shopping and fun activities!

If you want to ahead of the tour friend request me, please do. I am Pooky Amsterdam!

If you have a question please put Metaquette in the subject and send to info@pookymedia.com and it will be answered!

METAQUETTE #Metaverse #Musical #Mambo #Motel #Reallusion #Iclone #unrealengine #ChatGPT #Culture Q35

Tips & Tricks for negotiating The Metaverse with............Pooky Amsterdam 

The Metaverse is where the next best stories will take place, maybe even with you as a leading character starring in your own cartoon movie. The Metaverse has been front and center recently but in my own first person journey, massive multiplayer platforms have inspired me in all ways. Actually my years of virtual existence distilled itself into a Major Musical, which once produced onstage, will be streamed live into The Metaverse itself.  The vision is an uber-meta cultural configuration, moving forward onto bigger stages.  

The basis of inspiration behind my two-act 17 original song musical, whose characters are iconic both as the Players behind the denizens of Mambo Motel, and the characters they chose to represent, have roots in personal experiences. With action that occur simultaneously "behind the screen" and onstage, there are many recognizable themes, concerning relationships online we can all find familiarity with.  

I was compelled to write this play as a celebration of The Metaverse, and it's freedoms. Yet I also needed to show the pathos we leave behind in the physical world but also encounter in the virtual ones.

Tammy, who maintains her husbands avatar, TJMoney

-Trading Card-

One of the more poignant characters of Mambo Motel is the widow Tammy, who has not been able to remove her husband's account, even though he's passed away, his avatar was TJMoney. She has a small child. Isolated, worried about money and missing him greatly, she used his stored password to inhabit his Mambo, now on a daily basis. She's behind TJMoney in Mambo Motel now, running his Royal Trade & Casino empire with great skill and panache, as he sings big songs about big trades.

 In The Metaverse she has respect, opportunity to make money, friends and have fun without the responsibilities of the physical world, without the pressures of single motherhood. Tammy has her backstory moment when she has to take a call from her mother, and the audience overhears the conversation. If you have ever tried to explain a virtual obsession to someone who has no idea what you are talking about, you can relate to this video.

TJMoney mentors the show's protagonist, a n00bie named Pretender, in reality, a Prince that longs to find a place where he can escape from the ghastly media glare of his life. A place where he can just be....himself. The Prince finds the anonymity he seeks in Mambo Motel, where we all log in equally.

Q: What modern cultural works are about The Metaverse?

The Metaverse was inspired itself by a landmark cultural work.  The incredibly seminal and exciting work of fiction, Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash" has been said to have inspired Mr. Philip Rosedale to create Second Life.  So a cultural work inspired The Metaverse, which continues to inspire, ex. Neal Stephenson is behind Lamina1 an up and coming much anticipated Metaverse. 

Mambo Motel portrays the seamlessness between who we are as physical beings on Earth and whom we wish to become in our digital presence. The Metaverse allows us to believe in our lives fantastic, as we see and speak for ourselves within this "new" being of the avatar.

AI also seems to know us well.... ChatGPT, with a few prompts was able to generate the text you will hear sent through an audiofile on Studio-Id to generate a talking character from a picture of Tammy. Here is more information about the character, yet I think you can see that the auto-generate graphics are no match for the skill and craft of an artist like Benjamin Tuttle, who is our technical director. He is using a program like Reallusion's iClone Character creator and Unreal Engine to create the video. Linked here again.  The final image is of The Royal Trade & Casino, with its spinning wheels and prizes; that set and the others were created in Second Life.

As Mambo Motel ~ The Metaverse Musical is the project closest to my heart, I want to, and will write about the characters, and scenarios while spreading some of the joyous music too in weeks to come. This work is mixed media, and multi-platform incorporating the virtual with the physical, yet contains a significant switch to underscore the seamlessness of virtual identity.  

The Players are portrayed as synthetically created while human actors portray the Mambos onstage. All of these competing aspects of our personalities, what drives us, where we find our bliss, and where we can freely express ourselves, comes to life within the virtual environment of the musical. What we can not be in the physical world, can become second nature to us behind the mask of our avatar.

The background film will also show who is playing each of the 6 lead Characters, and show us their lives behind their Mambo, with a good example seen in the video of Tammy. That scene ends with the Casino Set,  which TJMoney will stand in front of onstage during his scenes. This stage screen will also run bright digital sets, loading screens and toolbars so the audience feels they have logged into The Metaverse itself. 

TJMoney in Mambo Motel

When the lights go on center stage, we enter Mambo Motel. This is the first musical to take place in The Metaverse. Would love to hear any feedback and comments are welcome!

If you have a question, please email info@pookymedia.com with Metaquette in the subject and it will be answered.