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I tried.
I mean, I really, really tried, people.
My vow today was to spend the entire day (a vacation day) cleaning up both my spectacularly messy apartment and Vanity Fair’s overstuffed inventory, and assiduously avoiding any social media and any news media for any snippet of U.S. election news, good or bad.
My resolve lasted an hour. First, I peeked at my Twitter, just to see what hashtags were trending. Then, I opened up Google News, just to check the coronavirus headlines. After that, the floodgates were wide open. It looks like I, like so many other people, are going to be glued to their news media today and tomorrow, just to find out what happens.
*sigh* Oh well.
You should know that I do have two projects to work on over my holidays.
First, it is time—far past time—for me to reorganize and categorize my popular Comprehensive List of Social VR Platforms and Virtual Worlds. It’s waaay overdue. (And I’m curious to see what projects and platforms have thrived or folded.)
It’s also time for my annual November update of my Comparison Chart of Popular Social VR Platforms (and yes, I know, “Popular” is subjective). I do plan to draw on the readers of my blog and the 460-plus members of the RyanSchultz.com Discord server to crowdsource a lot of the information contained in the updated comparison chart. (Expect a separate, more detailed blogpost on this topic later this week.)
I will also have to rely on others to help me fill in all the details in the updated comparison chart for Facebook Horizon, as I intend to continue my personal boycott of all Facebook/Oculus products and services (as protest against the company forcing Oculus VR device users to set up accounts on the Facebook social network).
I am not naïve; I full well realize that the Oculus Quest 2 is gonna sell like hotcakes anyway, and no doubt I will continue to feel pressure (both from myself and from my readers) to cave in and buy one, just so I can report directly on the social VR platforms that will inevitably find fertile ground on the headset. I have zero doubt that, much like vibrant communities like Bray’s Place which have sprung up in Second Life over the seventeen years of its existence, healthy communities will spring up within Facebook Horizon (in face, Facebook is counting on that fact).