Girl Next Door TWO!

There’s a brand new Girl Next Door in town… and she’s worth it… just for the shoes!

VB/CO was founded in April 2009 with our performance VB01 – GIRL NEXT DOOR, where we celebrated what I believed to be the most ubiquitous noob avatar. Last month we celebrated our 1st anniversary and the girl it all started with, in our performance VB16 – AU PAIR NEXT DOOR, where our wardrobe supervisor NightOwl Meridoc updated her “pink” polka-dot dress and artists across the grid, like Graine Macbain created reimaginings of this girl in our world.

If the cast and staff of VB/CO thought we might finally be done with the legendary pink polkadot dress… well… they might be half right…

There’s a NEW GIRL in town!

If you’ve only downloaded Viewer2 and thought that the blinding speed, bulletproof security, ease of use, intuitive UX, efficiency of screen real estate, rock solid commitment to RP in a 3D Virtual World, and beautiful flash-like interface were the whole bounty from Linden Lab… you’d only be half right!

Unlike the poor fools who only downloaded the Viewer, peeps who signed up for new accounts got a state-of-the-art viewer… A-N-D… NEW AVATARS!!!

There’s lots of new looks for every girl and boy, including, for example, CITY GIRL with her to-die-for Red Leather (cruelty free!) Jacket:

GOTH GIRL with her tres chic monochrome pallet:

STUDENT GIRL, ready to storm every university campus across the globe (well, except of course for the poor 17-year-old university students who get stuck on Teen-Grid — ha — a fate worse than RL!)

And… well… they now call her “PARTY GIRL”… but if you know your Ponytails, your Pleats, and your Wedge Heels… there’s no mistaking the official reimagining of our GIRL NEXT DOOR, or GND2 for VIEWER2, if you like!

In the photo at the top of this post I’m modeling the GND1 hair and dress, and one of those SaveMe Clones is graciously modeling the GND2 hair, dress, and plumeria flower! 🙂

Perhaps that’s not a fair comparison though, since I am wearing Eloh Eliot skin, Winter Ventura eyes, and my own ridiculously lanky shape. So below is GND1 vs GND2 with their own out of the box everything. (crazy that GND1 comes new with too-long glitch pants — thank goodness GND2 ends the infuriating No-Mod skirt!)

Even though a lot of peeps today think that Viewer 1.23 is the gold standard, I still use Viewer 1.22.11 because it was the last viewer that had a Shape > Randomize button, that initiation, even if only occasionally, to think about shapes other than “ideal,” other than meticulously crafted. AND now… one can’t help but notice that joining “Randomize” on the scrap heap is GND1’s slightly more Reubenesque figure… GND2 might not quite be Kate Moss, but she’s getting there.

A static t-pose shows off the avatar differences, but sometimes you wanna move… so here’s our girl dancin in a wheatfield. It’s from Fross Maruti’s in-world photo backgrounds… and I’m not sure, but it looks a lot like AM Radio / IDEA wheat…

And who’s this?

Girl Next Door… THREE!

Yes! As you’ve probably heard, Philip Linden himself is working on Viewer3… featuring… AI!

It’s true: first Philip created a world based on a Neal Stephenson novel… then James Cameron made a film based on Philip’s world… and now Philip is reinventing that world based on a Stanley Kubrick/Steven Spielberg film.

With Viewer3 the last performance hurdle will finally be crossed. No, no, no, not that! Get over your obsession with the shitty Linden Lab servers already! This isn’t WoW and it never will be! The real hurdle to a truly compelling in-world experience is… ALL THOSE PESKY TYPISTS!

Now with Viewer3-AI — Gone! Yes, all typists GONE LIKE A PIE-WHEEL! No more of their time-zones, their RL commitments, their refrigerator-breaks, their bathroom-breaks… those typists have been sucking the life out of SL for SEVEN YEARS NOW!!! But consider them history with Viewer3-AI! Now your in-world experience will be complete, seamless, total!

Have you ever sponsored a kid in a developing country? You send some money in… and you get a photo of “your child”… maybe some letters on how they’re doing… maybe a photo of them killing a chicken… well now all that richness will be your fully-immersive SL experience! You’re asleep, but your avatar is in-world: selling real estate, having sex, building the neo Taj Mahal! The productivity you will experience while doing nothing will be truly staggering! And all this doesn’t even scratch the surface of the enormous improvements in actual intelligence over human typists.

Finally… superior beings… with superior brain power… it all adds up to… NO LIMITS.

You didn’t really think I was gonna get thru a whole post without being naked at least once…

… or twice…

Did You???


Ze Moo
Great report V!
Fyi: The Metabolt text ‘viewer’ client for SL, already has A.I.! Great for running dozens of avatars on 1 PC.

about 1 month ago


Vaneeesa Blaylock
Thanks Ze!
BTW – I know you encouraged me to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress…

I guess I’m going to try doing the blog here. I’m not sure AU does the RSS to “count” as a blog in the Digg / Technorati sense… but VB/CO has made the commitment to focus as much as possible on Avatars United as our home base, so I think the more here the better.

As you commented in some VB/CO IM stream a while back… we do live in the network age and there’s no reason not to use lots of w2.0 sites… the wiki still seems best for sign-up lists… (although I leave that decision up to Friday/macar00n/Forceme/Bouncing)

I think I’ll still post big photo sets on Flickr (hmm… ) and I will maintain the 137 posts I’ve previously made on Blogger…

But it’s also true that everytime you ask peeps to go somewhere else, it’s a fork and you lose some… it’s a low threshold, not hard, thing to do… but it still is a fork… so I think we’d really like to try putting as many eggs in the AU basket as we can.

LMK if you have thoughts on that… I think the more we can get peeps to come to this to find a range of info / thoughts / ideas… on our performances / SL / Performance Art / etc… the more energy we can build.

And, of course, most important of all, this will smooth the transition to Viewer3! The knowledge base we create here will be drawn on by our future AI replacements. The more of yourself you type in posts here, the richer database of youfulness your AI will have to faithfully represent your ideology and aesthetics.

Gerry Adams speaks of representing every Irish who ever lived… your v3ai will do that for you when you’re gone… and… so much more…
about 1 month ago


Pennyroyal Calamity
After wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes and now that my stomach has stopped hurting from the strain, I can just say: absolutely great post Vaneeesa. The naked (and lanky) twin photo was a perfect finale lol 🙂 But I didn’t see Rocker Girl or whatever they call her. I used her as a starter for another av, but how on earth did I miss City Girl? I too was glad to see that new users get some decent looking avs these days. And GND2 is a woman of color yay!

Oh (no pun intended) and when I created my SaveMe clone, I chose Student Girl! Of course, the real SaveMe provided all of us with her original shape in the clone starter set along with an outfit.

And Ze, V tells me you are also in OS Grid. Cool! I’m Pennyroyal Skute there but mostly I run around as Monerda Skute.  A friend of mine in OS calls me the queen of alts hahaha. We may know each other already. I think I will try to put together a brief orientation notecard for those who want to come see OS.
about 1 month ago

As a virtual public artist my work invites avatar communities to express their identity, explore their culture, and demand their civil rights.

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