Category: Editorial

Navigating Grief: Eat. Sleep. Shower. Go Outside. (And Second Life.)

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

One of the advantages of having a blog that is branded with your own name is that anything you write is topical. And today’s topic is grief, and how to navigate it. (Hey, my blog, my rules. This wouldn’t be the first time I got side-tracked, by the way.)

My psychiatrist’s instructions are simple. Focus on four things: sleeping, eating, showering, and going outside. Nothing else matters (however, we did agree to some time spent in Second Life 😉).

I have to give myself the time and space I need to grieve properly for my mother, and I have to respect that process, rather than diving heedlessly and headfirst into one of the many other projects that I have planned (like, say, working on my OER textbook about the metaverse, or decluttering and doing a thorough spring cleaning of my apartment, which currently resembles a Red Cross disaster area).

Eat. Sleep. Shower. And go outside. (And Second Life, which is helping me stay sane because it gives me a sense of control, something which is notably absent from many aspects of my real life). I have been listening to the following song a lot.

I also find myself crying a lot, at inconvenient times, like in the middle of a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at Rainbow Stage (which led to me making a weepy exit at intermission, with an apology text later broadcast to my friend group, who no doubt wondered where the fuck I went). I have been trying to push myself to do “normal” things, like go to friend’s 60th birthday parties and Rainbow Stage musicals, and I land up leaving early because frankly, I am exhausted, and I am a mess. But I know that I won’t be an exhausted mess forever.

Sometimes I put on a list of sad/grieving songs from Apple Music, and listen, and sob. My psychiatrist doesn’t think that this is useful, but it seems to me to be a good way to get some of those trapped feelings out. I, who normally take such great pride in my ability to wordsmith a sentence, or explain a complicated process or idea in a way that is easy to understand, am utterly flummoxed by my inability to articulate what is going on inside my brain right now. I struggle to find the words, and sometimes, all that comes out is tears, and more tears. So I lay down on the sofa, wrap myself in an afghan crocheted by my mother (an orange-and-yellow design that simply screams 1970s), and weep. Here are two of those songs which I weep to (be sure to click the CC to see the subtitles/closed captioning of the lyrics on the first video; the second one already includes the lyrics on screen).

So that’s kind of where I am right now. Sleep. Shower. Eat. Weep. Go outside. Do something in Second Life. Repeat as necessary until I feel like a human being again. Yes, I do have people to talk to (both professionals and friends, including an active listening service which I still use regularly, although we now tend to talk via Discord rather than meet up as avatars in Second Life). And yes, eventually, I will venture out and engage with people again in my social networks, and initiate outings and events.

Not tonight. And not this week. But soon. There will come a day, a day that is better than today.

My blog will still be on hiatus for a while.

Under Pressure

Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning’s storm was the worst I have ever experienced in my life

It was at work Tuesday afternoon around 4:00 p.m. when a coworker came over to my office cubicle to tell me that a Tornado Watch had been issued for Winnipeg. I hurriedly packed up my gear, hopped into my car, and drive home just as the skies turned dark grey and the first fat raindrops splashed on my windshield.

That evening, I experienced the worst storm I have lived through in my entire life (and I am 62-1/2 years old now). My cellphone kept going off with multiple Tornado Warning alerts (I lost count after 30). After a too-close-for-comfort, LOUD lightning strike nearby, I grabbed some pillows and blankets and headed for my bathroom, where I sat in my bathtub, following a storm-tracker livestreamer on YouTube which was posted to the r/Winnipeg subreddit on my iPad, and keeping my iPhone handy, which was still blaring alerts on regular intervals, sometimes minutes apart.

I was lucky. While parts of Winnipeg received baseball-sized hailstones, and many streets, underpasses, and home basements were flooded, my car, my apartment, and my neighbourhood escaped relatively unscathed. No hail damage to my car. However, I got zero sleep that night, and the stress exacerbated my pre-existing neck and shoulder pain, so I landed up taking a sick day on Wednesday, and spent almost all of it asleep in bed.

I’m dealing with a lot right now: a family member in rapidly deteriorating health, which might necessitate an emergency trip back to Alberta on short notice; my continuing neck and shoulder pain; and trying desperately to tie up loose ends and pass on information to the two librarians who are taking over my duties when I start my Research and Study leave on July 1st, 2026. I am stressed out and EXHAUSTED.

So, again, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s why. There’s just too much going on in my life right now to write blogposts. Thank you for understanding.

On Pause

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Please note: none of this blogpost was written or edited using GenAI; this is me, Ryan Schultz—and yes, as a matter of fact, I do use em-dashes (see what I just did there? 😉).

You might have noticed a dearth of content on my blog lately.

Due to both personal and professional obligations, I regret that I will be unable to write my blog for the next little while. It’s not due to any shortage of news; in fact, I have had a couple of people reach out, specifically to ask me to comment on Rec Room shutting down, for example. Or that once-mighty Fortnite is losing money. The hardware and software companies powering immersive experiences in general appear to be going through what the Gartner consulting group has politely termed the “trough of disillusionment.”

But, unfortunately, at the moment, I simply don’t have the time, nor the energy, to devote to documenting the latest events happening in what is clearly a “metaverse winter” (or, perhaps even more harshly, a “virtual reality winter,” as many companies do appear to be stalling or even abandoning further iterations on their virtual/augmented reality headsets and associated gear, in an all-out corporate stampede towards more-wearable, but still less-functional, glasses).

Once July 1st, 2026 hits, and I can finally start my Research and Study Leave from the University of Manitoba, I hope to be able to pause, catch my breath, and survey the current landscape as I research and write my Open Educational Resource on the metaverse. The timing seems very auspicious to me. There’s definitely a change in the air, and perhaps I will be lucky enough to be able to document this pivotal moment properly.

But not today, and not for a little while yet. Thank you for your patience while I have to deal with what is in front of me at the moment.

HOUSEKEEPING NOTES: Going Off-Topic on My Blog, and Being Clear About How I Use AI in My Blogposts

EDITORIAL NOTE: No generative AI tools were used in the creation of this blogpost. However, I cannot guarantee that any clip art I used to illustrate this post, found through the image search feature on the Qwant search engine, was not fully or partially generated using generative AI.

One of the advantages about having a blog with your name in the title is that you can write a blogpost about literally anything, and it’s technically not off-topic! 😜 I have been sharing a lot of personal details about my life recently, and I wanted to talk about how I do have a tendency to go off-topic on this blog.

A classic example of this is when I correctly forecast, on January 25th, 2020, that we were going to face a global pandemic, which led to many of my blogposts after that point being about COVID-19. (The financial planner I had at my bank at that time, whom I shared my prediction with when discussing the financial impact of a pandemic, was convinced that I was psychic, but all I was doing was paying close attention to the news that was coming out of China about a mysterious new virus.) Many of my readers at that time were no doubt puzzled as to why I had so suddenly shifted focus, but obviously, everybody started paying attention by March 2020, as the world shut down. (I still cannot wrap my mind about the fact that over a million Americans died from COVID-19, some of them due to the misinformation, disinformation, and crazy conspiracy theories spread widely via social media.)

This is always be, first and foremost, a blog about the metaverse.

So, what I learned from that experience is that, while you can go off-topic from time to time, you probably shouldn’t go completely overboard, like I did during the pandemic. This will, at heart, remain a blog about my passionate hobby and my research interest: virtual worlds, social VR, and the metaverse. The only recent change I have made is to explicitly include, in my blog’s tagline, a mention of artificial intelligence and generative AI (GenAI):

News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse, plus Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI’s Impact on the Metaverse

And, as my tagline states, I will try to keep my writing about AI focused on how this rapidly-evolving technology is now, and will in future, impact the metaverse. There are so many other people writing about AI during this new hype cycle, sparked in 2022 by the startling results being produced by a new crop of generative AI tools. And frankly, those other writers are doing such a good job, that the best I can do is refer you to them, and urge you to follow them! But I will share, as I did recently, my own experience in learning how to use GenAI tools effectively and efficiently.

Whether we like it or not, all of us are going to be interacting with AI in the future.

What I will start to do, is be transparent about how and when I do use GenAI tools in writing a particular blogpost. We are already awash in ChatGPT-generated slop passing for content on the internet, and frankly, I think I owe it to my blog readers to tell them when I use such tools in my writing. Therefore, from now on, you will see a purple box at the top of all my blogposts, which will be:

  • Either a statement, “EDITORIAL NOTE: No generative AI tools were used in the creation of this blogpost,” or
  • A statement “EDITORIAL NOTE: I used the following generative AI tools in creating this blogpost,” followed by a list of all such tools used, where I used them, and how I used them.

You can see an example at the very top of this post. Below is a screenshot of another example of what I’m talking about, from a recent post on my blog:

The last thing I wanted to say, is that this is (as I said up top) a personal blog, and I will, from time to time, talk about off-topic things, such as the TV show Heated Rivalry and how it made me feel. I realize in that blogpost I did try to add a bit about how the concept of “coming out” is different in the metaverse, in order to try and make the post fit the tagline of my blog. However, in reading it afterwards, I felt that I kind of shoehorned that part in, and not terribly successfully at that. So from now on, when I do go off-topic, I won’t twist myself into a pretzel to try to make it about the metaverse!! Like I said up top, it’s a blog with name in the title, so whatever pops into my mind when I sit down in front of the WordPress editor window, could become an off-topic blogpost. Fair warning!

For example, I just finished binge watching all three seasons of TV series Heartstopper, so you can definitely expect an off-topic blogpost about that sometime soon!! 🏳️‍🌈
I get nowhere near the kind of traffic I got circa 2019-2022, but I still get enough traffic (and feedback) for me to keep writing my blog.

While I get nowhere near the traffic I did during the heady heydays of the 2019-2022 metaverse hype cycle, I still do get enough traffic to indicate that it’s worthwhile to keep blogging. I find I enjoy writing!

Thank you to those of you who post comments on my blogposts, and leave messages on my Contact Me page. However, I am very bad at getting back to people who leave messages via the Contact Me page, so I have a huge, huuuge backlog to dig through!!

That’s it for now. Take care!