Cartoon of The Day: Pride Month

 

 Taken at the BBBC. June is Pride Month, and rainbows are considered a show of support of the LGBT movement, even if one isn't lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual but a straight friend. 

 

By Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Free Rabbit Avatar by Jesris

 

Just in time for Easter, there's a free pair of rabbit avatars, or rather the parts for an avatar.

 

Jesris has made available for free the parts for two rabbit avies, the Moon Rabbit and the Chocobunny Moon Rabbit.

 

I am thrilled to announce a very special addition to my store: a 100% free furry avatar!

This initiative is a gesture of kindness and solidarity towards all members of our beloved furry community in Second Life. I understand that not everyone has access to lindens, but I believe everyone deserves to express their creativity and identity in the best possible way. With this in mind, I have created a furry skin using only free parts, allowing anyone to build a complete avatar at no cost. I hope this free skin will help many of you explore new possibilities and connect even more with other furries. 

The avatars are available in the SL Marketplace.

Moon Rabbit : https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/100-FREE-FURRY-Moon-Rabbit/26085931 

 

Chocobunny Moon Rabbit: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/100-FREE-FURRY-Moon-Rabbit-ChocoBunny-Version/23493855

 

You can see them also at a store at the Kore Community Gateway at 

 Kore CommuniFur (220/101/35). Though instead of a buy option, you're given links to the Marketplace. 

 

DeniseUnicorn Toonie would try it out, and give it two carrots up.

 

Bixyl Shuftan (with a little help from Denise)

 

Cartoon of The Day: Sunken Dance

 

 

 Taken at Club Balance. When one steps on things in SL, your avatar's height usually adjusts, but not always, resulting in feet that look like they're sunken in holes or soft ground. But with this guy having a lady friend on his shoulders, it looked less like a glitch and more like his feet really sunk in.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

 

Cartoon of The Day: Call The Doctor

 

 Taken at Club Cutlass. Someone was in a Cyberman avie, one of the antagonists in "Doctor Who." They might not react well if someone calls for a doctor.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan 

 

 

Netflix Buys Avatar Maker For VRChat, Smaller Worlds

 

There's been a development that will likely make it more difficult for people in VRChat and similar virtual worlds to get new avatars. According to an article in Techcrunch, Netflix has purchased the program "Ready Player Me." For those who haven't heard of it, it's an avatar-creation platform for various virtual worlds and games.

 

Ready Player Me was founded in 2014 in Estonia. Over the past decade it has raised over 70 million US dollars from investors.  It has a staff of twenty, who will all be joining Netflix. It's services, including Player Zero, will be going offline on Saturday January 31st. 

 

The Techcrunch article stated Netflix "plans to use the startup’s development tools and infrastructure to build avatars that will allow Netflix subscribers to carry their personas and fandom across different games." 

 

Scott Hayden in "The Road to VR" called the purchase "a blow to one specific group of people, namely VRChat users." Ryan Schultz felt while this would inconvenience users of the popular next-generation virtual world, at least it had a Marketplace for avatars for people to chose from. From his point of view, it would be the users of smaller virtual worlds that would truly be hurt as those platforms, "which wholly rely on Ready Player Me’s services ... are now going to have to scramble to find and implement a replacement in very little time."

 

Hat tip: Ryan Schultz

 

Sources: Techcrunch

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Cartoon of The Day: Not A Red Bull, But ...

 

 Taken at Club Cutlass. I forget why this lady was in a cow head and red underwear, but it was funny.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

Cartoon of The Day: No Bones About It

 

 Taken at Club Cutlass. Riffi came as a skeleton to it's Halloween party, though left her head and tail intact. So what could explain this look? I could think of one way.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Cartoon of The Day: Happy Halloween

 

 

 Taken at Urban Furry. Whiskey demonstrates an animation that takes off an avatars head. But I can think of one thing that would cause many guys to lose their heads.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan 

  

Cartoon of The Day: Dying in SL

 

Taken at Furry Fashion. While your avatar can be sent back to it's home location (or a newbie area if you didn't set one), unless you or the Lindens delete your account, an avatar can't truly die. But some avatars make it look like you did.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan 

  

Cartoon of The Day: Owl Costume

 

 Taken at Club Zero Gravity. One lady came in an owl avatar. So naturally I had to ask "whoooo" was the maker of it.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

Fifty Foot Vixen At The Newser Office

 

 It's not often I see huge avatars other than dragons, also known as macros, going around, especially outside the Fantasy Faire. But after a conversation with Kalista Phoenix on Discord, we met up at the Newser office. Her height was, impressive, close to fifty feet tall.

 

We may meet again at the Fantasy Faire, or perhaps sooner. 

 

And no, she's not interested in attacking, unlike a certain other fifty foot lady (song).  

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Miniature Horse Avatar

 

When going about Second Life, you often see avatars that get your attention. But going about getting pet food, yours truly saw one I haven't seen before, a tiny horse avatar.

 

Messaging the little filly, she was appreciative for the attention, "Breeders Choice gifted them to the first handful of people that bought their brand new mesh horse avatar (back when mesh horses were brand new) so you probably won't see them around really at all. I think they had them in a lucky chair after that for a VERY short period of time. ... This is my favorite avatar to wear to Amaretto auctions."

 

The filly mentioned Amaretto Horses would be having their fifteenth anniversary event on September first and planned to be there. So if you want to see a tiny horse check out there and then. 

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

Cartoon of The Day: Watermellon Girl

 

 Taken at Club Cutlass. Gil Otaared was sporting a watermelon look. I was thinking Torley Linden. But that wasn't the only joke I heard that night.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

 

Cartoon of The Day: "Flat"tery

 

 Taken at the Relay Weekend opening ceremony. Someone was out in one of those cardboard avatars. This time it was a fairy, which I haven't seen among them. It would be deserving of complements, or "flat"tery.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

VR Chat Opens Avatar Marketplace

 

In Second Life, people have been buying avatars for almost all of it's history. In VR Chat in contrast, for most of it's history you could only get those content creators will willing to give away. But last year this started to change when an inworld economy finally came about. And several days ago the process was simplified with the opening of their Avatar Marketplace.

Read the story in Other Grids, MMOs, and Games.

 

RFL Team Sunbeamer Bid Me Results

 

It was a week ago on Saturday May 17 in which the results of the Relay's Team Sunbeamers' last three "Bid Me" fundraisers were announced.

 

Cynthia Farshore
Stay Goat - 100 L
Go Wolf - 14,500 L
 ( Goes Wolf for 4 weeks)
 
 Shockwave Yearch
 Stay wolf - 1000 L
 Go Goat - 14,500 L
 ( Goes Goat for 4 weeks)
 
 Rita Mariner
 Stay Bunny - 0 L
 Go Pink - 3000 L
 ( Goes Pink for 1 week) 

So Team Captain Rita Mariner has been "in the pink" for a week, and Cynthia and Shockwave have pledged to switch species. 

The "Sunnies" still have two Moon Dance events left, then comes the Relay Weekend.

 

Go Sunbeamers! Go Relay!

 

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of The Day: Something Fishy

 

 

 Taken at the Fantasy Faire. Among the avatars I saw was this fish one running around. That just begged for a pun.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

Cartoon of The Day: Gummi Bears

 

 

 Taken at the Fantasy Faire. Longtime users know that if their viewer complexity has a lower limit, some avatars will look "jellied." I wondered how many people who saw these gummi bear avies were checking theirs. 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

 

 

Cartoon of The Day: "Paper Avatars"

 

 

 Taken at the Relaystock

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

More April Fools

 

A couple days ago when we wrote about April Fools in Second Life, Spiffy Voxel would comment there was much more.

 

There were some other good Second Life pranks yesterday. The biggest one was the reveal of the 'revolutionary' new mesh body that Salt & Pepper had been teasing... which turned out to be a flat cardboard avatar. However, the joke appears to be on Salt and the other creators who got involved, as both Cardy and Cardo proved to be rather popular! 🤣 They should definitely be easier to make clothing and accessories for, which is perhaps a commentary on the state of working with all the other mesh bodies and heads out there...

Gorean Whip Radio announced their sale to iHeart Radio — no more DJ interruptions, nothing but Top 40 Big Band songs on repeat. 🤣 Apparently, a few people fell for it, while others (like myself) played along. 🙂

More subtle, however, was the April Fool pulled by Luke Rowley, owner of the Primfeed photo-sharing social network — various menu items were rendered in Comic Sans yesterday. 😉

 

Of the Salt and Pepper avie, someone on Virtualverse would say, "It was a very elaborate April Fool's joke. And folks are either 'That was a good one' or they are very very angry on the interwebz about it. However, it is my new shopping event avatar. It's pretty cool. There are clothes and hair for it as well"

 

In gaming there were a couple April Fools I heard about. One was an "Out Meow" for Ark Survival Ascended, a cat update which showed cats going about whistfuly around, either attacking players or casually destroying things without a care. For World of Warcraft, there was the 11.4.1 Patch Notes, "The More Herein," A play on the latest expansion "The War Within."

If there’s anything we know about WoW players, it’s that you want more. In this patch, we’re adding more of everything. More dungeons, more classes, more races, more pets and more mounts and more flight paths and more words on the screen. Unless you want more empty spaces, in which case—we've cut the words and we’re adding more empty spaces! “More more more” is our motto. Read on for more.

Among the "updates" was the new raid "The Deeper Cave Below The Bottom."

After years of going down into Azeroth, we’re going to go below that! What’s below the deepest depth? Only our friends the Digger Miners know for sure, so we’re accompanying them as they go straight down to The Bottom and then go down from there.

In the Deeper Cave Below the Bottom, there’s no light whatsoever except when you cast spells, and the extreme temperature and pressure means the enemies that live there are in a really bad mood! Defeat the lowest final boss—Ugh the Complainer—and look around on the floor of his chamber. Is that a door that leads downward??

 

On a personal note, one friend of mine commented "We need to cancel April Fools Day until sanity returns to the world." I disagree because when has the world ever been truly sane? There have always been evil men, and women, up to evil schemes, there has always been corruption, and there have always been selfish people out only for themselves. If we took ourselves too seriously all the time, we'd go nuts. So let's all take a little time to laugh.

 

Happy April Fools.

 

Bixyl Shuftan