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!!
NOTICE: Except where explicitly stated in this blogpost, I have not used AI to write this editorial. This is me, Ryan, writing (and yes, I have been using em-dashes long, long before ChatGPT was a thing—and I will continue to do so!). See what I just did there? 😉
While my continuing neck and shoulder pain unfortunately limits the amount of time that I can spend sitting in front of a desktop computer (both at work and at home), I wanted to set aside some of my precious “good neck” time to talk a little bit about this past twelve months, and where I am planning on taking this blog in the future. Because, yes, I do have plans moving forward. (Update: as it turns out, because of my neck and shoulder pain, I had to split up the writing of this post over a couple of days, rather than one hours-long marathon sesssion.)
As many of you know, I took a lengthy hiatus from blogging, starting late last year, up until very recently. Part of the reason was that I was juggling a lot of responsibilities at work, notably being part of a virtual reality lab which was being set up in one of the libraries of the university library system in which I have been working for the past 30-odd years (yes, it’s really been that long; I started in 1992!).
I am happy to report that, although I am no longer involved with that particular project, the virtual reality lab at my university library system has already had a successful soft opening, with a dedicated staff person hired to manage it (not me; as I said, I already have my hands full being a liaison librarian for both the faculty of agricultural and food sciences and the computer science department at my university!). In fact, I have been so busy at work that I haven’t even had time to sit down and use any of the equipment in the new lab, although I have chatted a few times with the new manager. Everything is moving along fine without me.
As part of my responsibilities as agriculture librarian, I had volunteered to give a presentation to an upcoming faculty council meeting about artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular. I have only myself to blame for getting myself into this situation! You see, the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the University of Manitoba still has an active library committee, and at a recent in-person meeting, I was talking about how I have had to add a few slides to the PowerPoint presentation which I give to students about how to use the U of M Libraries, talking about AI. One thing led to another, and lo and behold, yesterday afternoon, I gave a half-hour presentation on artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular, to a room full of agriculture and food science professors!
I spent a significant chunk of my summer reading through books and websites, working through online courses, and essentially getting myself up to speed (it helps that this librarian has an undergraduate degree in computer science!). And I had the good fortune to be able to give a version of my presentation to a class of graduate student advisors, and to a class of graduate students, as part of a series of special courses targeted to U of M grad students, before yesterday afternoon’s talk. Both times it was well received, as it was yesterday. (I have already shared my slides and notes with my fellow librarians and agriculture professors, and I might decide to also share a version of them with you, my faithful blog readers, as I have done in the past with presentations about virtual reality in higher education, and the virtual world of Second Life. But I think I will make that a separate blogpost, perhaps my next one.)
At this point, I will draw your attention to the tagline of my blog in the upper left-hand corner of the screen if you are looking at this page on a desktop computer. You might notice that it has changed.
It used to read, pretty much since I began this blog in 2017:
News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse
As of yesterday, it now says:
News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse, plus Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI’s Impact on the Metaverse
Now, that’s rather a mouthful (and yes, I might need to edit it a bit), but essentially, it’s all a part of the “embracing change” which I mentioned in the title of this blogpost.
As a matter of fact, I was having a bit of a brain fart coming up with a suitable title, so to assist me with the wording of the title of this blog post (and only that), I pulled up Anthropic’s generative AI tool, Claude, for a little chat, asking it:
I need a way of saying “to add something new” to contrast with the opposite idea of “letting go of something.” What are some ways that I could say that?
And here are screen captures of the resulting conversation:
Now, could I have done this without generative AI? Absolutely; thesaurus websites have been around since the earliest days of the World Wide Web (trust me, I was around then!). But I doubt I could have actually had a back-and-forth conversation with a tool that presented the information in such a helpful, tabular way, prior to November 2022, when the first public version of ChapGPT was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. I could pose my question in dozens of different ways, asking for countless ways of expressing the concept of “letting go of something,” and the Claude GenAI (generative AI) tool never gets bored or impatient or irritated with me.
Simply put, I will now be writing about artificial intelligence in general, and the new wave of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude in particular, as part of the RyanSchultz.com blog. In particular, I will talk about how these fast-developing and evolving tools will inevitably impact the metaverse.
Second, were you aware that there is already a website called MeshZEUS, which will create a three-dimensional object for you from a text description, in a format ready to be uploaded to Second Life and sold on the SL Marketplace or an in-world store?
The MeshZEUS website
Yes, that’s right! You may choose, if you wish, to no longer work your way up the rather steep learning curve of Blender or Maya or 3Ds Max to painstakingly create an object from scratch; instead, all you have to do is describe your desired 3D object in enough detail, and hey presto, it gets delivered to you! (Provided you buy enough credits, and have enough patience to go through multiple iterations of text prompting, that is. But we’ll also leave that discussion, plus the whole enchilada of issues that using a GenAI tool like this raises, for another day, shall we? Trust, there’s lots to talk about.)
It’s now pretty obvious to me that the current hype cycle of artificial intelligence, which was ignited by startling new leaps forward in the capabilities of AI tools since 2022, is going to have an impact on the metaverse. And, unlike the previous short-lived hype cycle of the metaverse itself (which, hello, I was around for—beginning, middle, and end!— documented on this very blog), thisnew, AI-powered hype cycle might actually have a more direct impact on society than the still-somewhat-nebulous concept of the metaverse, sooner than any of us might have expected. Buckle up, folks, I predict that things are about to get deeply, deeply weird.
So, I have talked about changing gears for the RyanSchultz.com blog, returning to blogging, and also about embracing change, i.e., adding the topic of AI and GenAI to the subjects I will write about. Now I come to the part where I talk about letting something go.
Unfortunately, because of my neck and shoulder pain, I regret that I must conserve the time that I can spend productively sitting in front of a desktop PC. Obviously, first priority goes to the paying job, which keeps the lights on, the internet bill paid, and puts food in my belly and gas in my car. Second priority will likely be writing this blog, now that I have decided to keep blogging. Between these two, that probably is the limit of what I can reasonably accomplish.
What I am choosing to let go of is writing aboutt the virtual world of Second Life on this blog (in particular, reporting on fashionista freebies and bargains). I have made a similar announcement on Primfeed, which over the past year is where I have usually posted my freebie fashionista finds rather than on my blog. Because my Primfeed account is deliberately set to private (i.e., you need to have a Second Life account to join Primfeed, follow me, and read what I post there), I have done a screen capture of that particular post, plus a transcription:
Every December, I try to juggle four tasks (not very successfully, mind you):
1, Drag my small army of alts through a curated selection of Advent and 12 Days of Christmas calendars to vacuum up some fabulous gifts, every day from December 1st to December 25th;
2. Do the same thing at the annual Holiday Shop and Hop event;
3. Pick up free heads and skins during the LeLutka December event; and
4. Navigate real-life Christmas events, shopping, and other obligations. (My family, God bless them, finds #1-3 above to be very amusing, and last Christmas, they all chipped in to give me a cash-filled envelope marked “L$”, since they couldn’t actually buy me a gift card to buy Linden dollars. (Second Life, you need to look into this! There’s an untapped market here.)
I’m sure some of you here on Primfeed can relate to this! Often I ask myself: why am I doing this? But I still do get a great deal of personal satisfaction and fulfillment from designing a complete avatar look from head to toe, looking great while doing it as inexpensively as possible. And in order to do that, you need to acquire the knowledge and expertise to sniff out freebies and bargains (which I have often shared with you, either here on Primfeed or via my blog). I’ve loved doing it for years!
But, as I said, something has to give. I can no longer spend extended hours sitting in front of a desktop PC without significant, and sometimes severe, neck and shoulder pain. Therefore, in addition to NOT doing as much of numbers 1 through 3 as in previous years, I have made the difficult decision to cut back on telling all of you about the great deals I find. It’s not a decision I take lightly, but I do need to listen to my body, and my body is telling me to rest. And I need to pay attention.
So if you don’t see me post as often here, that’s why. ❤️ I’m just trying to rebalance my life a little better, that’s all. I’ll still be around, reading, scrolling, liking posts, following people and stores, but not posting so much. Thanks for understanding.
Don’t get me wrong; I am not leaving Second Life! In fact, I need SL as a sort of counter-balance to deal with all the batshit-craziness happening in my real life. Second Life is my temporary escape from the hamster-wheel of worry, anxiety, and despair inside my head, where I can reliably get into a pleasant flow state for an hour or two, and escape from the real world (where I have little to no control over what is happening).
In fact, one of the reasons I love SL so much is that it is such a vast, three-dimensional creative canvas over which I have so much control over what happens, where I choose to go, who I choose to interact with, and even what I look like to others! I still derive an inordinate amount of personal satisfaction from styling a complete avatar look from head to toe, as inexpensively as possible while still looking fabulous, darling! I call it “digital drag” 💅 (and yes, I do have a drag queen alt, whom I have written about numerous times on my blog, and who is about to embark on various antics, drama, and misadventures in a roleplaying region based on the U.S. Deep South). To my friends and acquiantances in Second Life: I am not going anywhere. I’m just not going to write about it here any more, that’s all. (I’m also cutting back on my Primfeed posting, but I’ll still be there, too.)
So, to sum up:
Yes, I am back.
Yes I will be blogging about the metaverse in all its forms and manifestations again, but with the added wrinkle of AI/GenAI and its potential impact.
No, I will no longer be writing about Second Life, although yes, I still will be playing it.
Stick around, folks, this should be both entertaining and educational! As RuPaul herself said:
A sampling of today’s news headlines from Google News. Shit is gettin’ WILD, y’all.
Today, I wrote the following post on the new Second Life social media platform, Primfeed (which you can currently only read if you already have an account on Primfeed, as I have not yet chosen to make my Primfeed profile and posts publicly viewable):
With all the batshit-crazy political news coming out of the U.S. today making me feel anxious and depressed, I have decided that, in order to preserve my mental health, I now have to abandon the very last traditional social media platform I used daily: Reddit. This means that, from now on, I am only going to be using Primfeed, and NOTHING ELSE: No Reddit, no Mastodon, no Twitter/X, no Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok.
Corporate-run social media platforms are all becoming a toxic cesspool and dumpster fire, with negative effects on my mental health. I quit Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter years ago, and I have never bothered with TikTok. I haven’t bothered checking into Mastodon in well over half a year now. Reddit was my last refuge, but alas, no longer. I am OUT. (I announced late last year that I was shutting down my blog, but in light of me now leaving Reddit, I will have to take some time to reflect a bit more on that decision. I also need to think about whether or not I want to make my Primfeed profile public.)
It looks like 2025 is shaping up to be an even crazier and more chaotic year than 2024, and I might need to escape to my beloved Second Life now more than ever!
A quick update: last November, my doctor stepped in and put me on full-time sick leave for a couple of weeks. I then went back to work on half-time sick leave, and at the moment, that arrangement will continue until the end of April, 2025. My supervisor at work has also stepped in to address my current workload, and I am no longer working on the project of setting up the virtual reality lab at my university library system. I am just feeling incredibly burned out and utterly exhausted, still, and it is probably going to take me quite some time to rest and recover.
In light of my decision today to quit Reddit (the last traditional social media platform I was still using, albeit without setting up an account, i.e. read-only and anonymously), I do now need to re-evaluate my decision late last year to stop blogging completely. The truth is that I am still feeling tired and burned out, and I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to blog. So I honestly don’t know where things stand for the blog right now.
My blog will remain up; I do not plan to take it down. I will also keep my associated Discord server running, as it is still being used by a good number of people. I have zero plans to take the RyanSchultz.com Discord server down. However, I have, as of January 1st, 2025, suspended charging my existing Patreon patrons (and a very big thank you to those of you who have chosen to support me financially via Patreon these past five-six years; it has been, and is still, greatly appreciated).
Right now, I need to focus on my physical, mental and emotional health, and I need to focus on returning to my paying job, full-time (minus the VR lab project). Those are my priorities at the moment. In order to help achieve that focus, I am avoiding all social media (except Primfeed), and all metaverse platforms (except InSpaze on the Apple Vision Pro, and my beloved Second Life, which reliably puts me in a comfortable flow state during the creative process, and which consistently brings me happiness, especially with so much bad news happening in my real life).
Everything else must wait, including this blog. I will not make a final decision about my blog until much later this year, once I am in a better place. Thank you for your support over the past 7+ years.
UPDATE Jan. 8th, 2025: Meanwhile, over on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter):
So, as I have mentioned, I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I have been so busy with my full-time paying job as an academic librarian at my employer, the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Now that the annual rush of training hundreds of students on how to use the university libraries effectively and efficiently has ended, my attention turns to my other big project: specifying hardware and software for a virtual reality lab, which we are calling the XR Lab (the XR stands for eXtended Reality, a sort of umbrella term used for virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and what Apple is now calling spatial computing).
The purpose of this lab is to provide virtual reality and augmented reality hardware and software (both VR/AR experiences and content creation tools) to University of Manitoba faculty, staff, and students to support their teaching, learning and research. I have been working on this project for the past two and half years, and it is a weird feeling to finally see the computers removed from the room which we have designated as the future home of the XR Lab, in preparation for the necessary room renovations (which are to start soon, and are supposed to be completed by spring next year):
The former computer lab which will be renovated to create the XR Lab
In the meantime, I have been cross-training another Libraries staff member on the hardware and software which I am proposing for the XR Lab. In other words, if (God forbid!) I should get run over by a bus, the idea is that somebody will be able to give VR/AR demos in my place. There is a lot of information which has to be shared! For example, our last training session included a section on how to set the correct interpupillary distance (IPD) on both the Vive Pro 2 and Meta Quest 3 headsets (thankfully, the Apple Vision Pro automatically scans your eyes and sets the IPD automatically!).
Just another day in the office: the Vive Pro 2 VR headset is sitting on the Windows desktop PC it is tethered to on the right, the Meta Quest 3 is to the left near the back of the table, and the Apple Vision Pro is sitting at the centre, near the front of the table.
There’s a lot of balls to juggle, and I must confess that I often feel exhausted and even overwhelmed at times. When I come home from work, the last thing I want to do is write a blog post! So my formerly feverish blogging pace has unfortunately slowed to a crawl. Also, my blogpost viewing stats are way, waaay down. Where I used to get 1,500 views a day, now I’m lucky to reach even one third of that:
Partly it’s because the metaverse hype cycle has crested and crashed (and everyone has jumped on the artificial intelligence bandwagon), and partly it’s because longform blogs seem to be an increasingly outdated—even quaint—means of communication in the current short-attention-span era of Instagram pictures and TikTok videos.
Which means I seriously need to pause and think about what direction in which I want to take this blog, and who I want my audience to be. One of the things that I have always said is that, in a blog that literally has my name in the URL, anything I want to talk about here is on topic! However, I am wondering if perhaps I have cast my net a little too broadly, and it might be time to narrow the focus of the RyanSchultz.com blog somewhat.
I don’t think that I will cease blogging completely; I still feel the need to write, but I need to reflect a bit on what I want to write about, and why. I still do get a sense of accomplishment when I craft a well-written blog post on a topic that I care about and, as always, I read and appreciate all the comments and feedback I receive on my blogposts!
So please bear with me as I figure out where I am going next with (gestures broadly) all this.
