My mother recently passed away in her local community hospital, surrounded by her family. She was 87 years old, married to my father for almost 25 years before he suddenly died, and then remarried for another 29 years. She lived a good, long life, long enough to have two of her great-grandchildren sit in her lap. I was able to talk with her before she died, to tell her I loved her. She told me she loved me, and was proud of the man that I have become. We may have had our disagreements but we achieved closure before she passed away.
I have found that navigating through grief can be a very difficult process, one I am still working through.
I have one special Second Life alt (alternate avatar), because she bears my mother’s name, Karin (the German form of the English name Karen). As a little child she became a refugee in the messy aftermath of World War II, and eventually her widowed mother (my grandmother) married a man who brought his new family over to Canada when she was still a young girl, who didn’t speak any English.
I inherited from Karin my creativity (as expressed here in Second Life) as well as her well-honed sense of humour (which I also express here in SL!). I also got from her my distinctive, piercing laugh; you can immediately tell exactly where I am sitting in a crowded (movie or play) theatre, once the first joke lands! As a child, I used to lie in bed and hear her absolutely scream with laughter at a funny television show like Carol Burnett.
So today Karin is an angel, a loose representation of what she would have looked like as a young woman in the 1960s, when I was born. The retro hairstyle is available as a free gift (in the blonde colour HUD only) at the WINGSDS booth at the ACCESS event on now; the style is called ER0526.
The head is GENUS , cobbled together from bits and pieces of the Margo Genus Morph L$88 head and head skin offer from a couple of years ago, and the more recent Limited Edition 2026 female Genus Morph head giveaway. To it, I added the Genus Morph beak nose, the same kind of nose that my mother had, and her grey-blue eyes. The angel dress and halo were gifts from the most recent round of the Doves Dream shopping event, and the wings I picked up for free using past Blueberry store credit. The body is Maitreya LaraX. The handheld candle is the gift from .Viki. booth at the SL23B Shop and Hop event, on now.
So, in a sense, this alt is my memorial to my mom.
I’m going to need to take some more time than I expected to heal; please bear with me. I am grieving, and I am feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Thank you for your patience.
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!!
I am beyond tired; I am EXHAUSTED. Emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted.
Everybody from my psychiatrist to my coworkers is telling me the same thing: there’s a LOT going on in my life at the moment, and I am feeling absolutely overwhelmed and worn out. In fact, I have been feeling so run down that I went to see my family doctor this week, who discovered that my blood pressure is too low, and who promptly sent me to the phlebotomist for a full round of blood work.
I’ve been off work sick for three days, sleeping all night and taking extensive naps in the afternoons, and I’m still feeling exhausted and worn out. Today is the first day of the Remembrance Day long weekend, and I’ve spent a significant chunk of the day in bed.
I also find myself deliberately pulling up my drawbridges and isolating myself, as a way to avoid feeling further overwhelmed. I have largely stayed off all social media and most news media until after the U.S. election circus was over. Now that we know we’re facing another four years of Trump, the news is making me pull back from my social circles at home and work, and want to pull the bedcovers over my head and stay there. Is it depression? Possibly, but I’ve also been assiduous in taking my antidepressants and following through with my talk therapy.
I’m doing my best to stay afloat, but lately even the minor setbacks are sending me into major tailspins. I am utterly exhausted and overwhelmed and worn out, and that means I’m going to have to pay attention to my body and my mind, and make some choices to give myself grace, space, and some peace.
One of those steps is (once again) taking a break from blogging. You might have noticed that my pace of blogging has slowed significantly these past six months, anyway. So, I am taking the rest of this year off completely from blogging, and I will see how I feel in the new year.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. I’m going to be fine, but I do need to safeguard my emotional, mental, and physical health, and I intend to do just that. See you on the rebound!
I have kept only one such channel, #nft-dumpster-fire, and renamed it to #crypt-nft-dumpster-fire, since many people seem to like sharing and bemoaning the latest outrages, rug pulls, and other shenanigans happening regularly in the crypto space. Enjoy the snark and schadenfreude 🙂
Oh, and I finally renamed the #2023-dumpster-fire channel to #2024-dumpster-fire. Have at it 😉
