Day: July 9, 2019

The Happy Train

And this one picture pretty much sums up my day:

It hasn’t helped that I was caught in a torrential downpour of rain today—twice —without an umbrella. Or that my eczema is driving me crazy. Or that I lost my temper on the official Sansar Discord forums, blocked a user, and then apologized for publicly giving him the virtual bitchslap for being rude to me in previous direct messages about my blog. Seriously, I was, like:

(Yes, I’ve been waiting to use that animated GIF for quite some time!) But I do think that particular GIF applies just as much to me as to the person who pissed me off! When I lose my temper, it’s a sure sign I’m under stress (usually, from causes completely unrelated to the actual trigger incident). Unfortunately, I have what I call a Mount Saint Helens approach to anger: peace and quiet for centuries, accompanied by the rare explosion where all hell breaks loose and innocent bystanders are killed:

Trust me, it’s not pretty (and I have been working on not bottling everything up to avoid such explosions). The last time it happened, I took it out on Linden Lab, even though they were the party caught in the middle. And it actually turned out that it was a good thing in the end, as it forced me to rethink the way I blog and what I blog about. Just as this most recent incident has made me rethink how I approach certain situations in online discussion groups, and how I deal with conflict.

Live and learn. Or, in this case, block and move on.

Editorial: Rough Waters

Photo by Dmitry Bayer on Unsplash

I’ve been up since 5:00 a.m. and I can’t sleep. I’ve been thinking about the most recent two blogposts I’ve written about High Fidelity (here and here). I have been harsh and direct, and while some readers have congratulated me for my frankness, others have expressed their dislike of what I have written. I feel somehow as if I am contributing to the general sense of malaise in social VR just by writing those two articles.

It brings me zero joy to watch HiFi struggle to reinvent itself, and it brings me zero joy to watch HiFi’s userbase as they feel confused, upset, angry, and betrayed by a platform they have invested so much into over so many years.

But (as the tagline of my blog states) this blog is about “news and views” (viewpoints). What is going on with High Fidelity is newsworthy, and I do want to continue to share what I really think and feel about what I am reporting on. Otherwise, I am just a corporate shill, a PR parrot. I want to have the freedom to report on news and events in the evolving metaverse, to praise and criticize the various companies as I see fit.

A commenter on my last blogpost said:

Second Life must have been a strange anomaly, that neither its founders nor the current Linden Lab appear able to replicate.

And I would agree. Even the visionary Philip Rosedale is having trouble making lightning strike twice.

I predict that the social VR/virtual worlds/metaverse industry overall is going to go through some pretty rough waters. The initial honeymoon period (if there ever was one) is OVER. The idealism of the many metaverse company builders is coming face-to-face with an ugly, stark reality: that it is going to take more persistence, more creativity, and more innovation to build products which more than a handful of early adopters will use on a regular basis.

All I can do is to continue to cover everything that happens, as best I can.