Stylecards № 4

The holiday season is upon us and it feels like a great time to celebrate. While many look on this as a season of giving, I also see it as a time for reflection, to consider everything that’s happened in the past year. For Second Life, 2024 saw a few much needed changes, including the PBR rollout, a new mobile client, and a social media platform just for us.

The introduction of Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) to Second Life has been a bit of a double-edged sword. On the plus side, it enables some materials like glass, mirrors, and latex, to look more like their real-life counterparts, but on the downside it requires a bit more computing oomph than ever before. I doubled the RAM in my home PC, but my poor laptop suffers. I’m glad the code is becoming more efficient as PBR is refined, but doubt my laptop will ever be able to handle it well.

The new mobile client finally brings Second Life to smartphones and tablets. While there are other mobile clients, my experience was they were limited in function and barely worth the time and expense. The official Second Life app is a much-needed addition to the virtual world, and will hopefully introduce SL to new audiences.

Though Primfeed only started a few months ago, it’s already making a large impact among Residents who use social media. The idea of a social media platform just for Second Life is a great one. It seems like an obvious idea, but maybe it just required the right confluence of social media landscape and Second Life APIs for someone to put everything together. Will we see anyone become Primfeed Famous (Primfamous?) in 2025.

On a more personal note, this was also the year I launched Stylecards as a magazine. Last January as I thought about putting out a magazine, I outlined out a year’s worth of issues. If I couldn’t figure that out, it wouldn’t be worth it, for me or the readers. I wanted Stylecards to be something like Vogue or GQ, but for Second Life.

Not all residents know there are magazines, books, and calendars available in-world, and of those who do, not all of them are necessarily interested. For those of us who are, the goal is to become more well-known. It’s a slow burn, but will come from continuing to publish magazines worth reading.

On that note, we have another wonderful issue for you. We were privileged to work with KC Couture and Max Magic on Designer Showcases, and we think you’ll appreciate their designs as well as their interviews with Sheristrawberri. Speaking of Sheri, in this issue she also dives into the history of mesh bodies. The introduction of mesh was one of the most significant additions to the virtual world as it allowed the creations of more realistic bodies, and Sheri’s article is a fascinating look into this topic we often take for granted.