Tag: Blogging

EDITORIAL: Exhausted, Overwhelmed, and Worn Out

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 am EXHAUSTED, folks.

Taking a Moment to Catch My Breath and Figure Out Where I’m Going Next

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.

It can be difficult to choose the next direction in which to go (Image by Rama Krishna Karumanchi from Pixabay)

NEW! The RyanSchultz.com Blog Joins the Fediverse

The various platforms of the fediverse, as well as other federated networks, visualised as a tree (image by Per Axbom, source)

Today, I am happy to announce that my blog has finally joined the fediverse! I have installed a brand-new ActivityPub plug-in that was just made available today for hosted, WordPress.com blogs like this one (it’s been available for self-hosted, WordPress.org blogs for a while now).

I’m going to let the developer, Matthias Pfefferle, do the explaining (here’s his full post):

Exciting times are here for all WordPress.com users! The revolutionary ActivityPub feature is now available across all WordPress.com plans, unlocking a world of engagement and interaction for your blog. Your blogs can now be part of the rapidly expanding fediverse, which enables you to connect with a broader audience and attract more followers.

Let’s dive into what this means for all WordPress.com blogs.

The fediverse consists of federated platforms like Mastodon, which are networks of independent websites or servers that can communicate with each other while still operating individually. It’s much like email; you can send emails to users with accounts on different services (like Gmail, Yahoo, etc.), yet all of them can interact seamlessly. Similarly, federated platforms enable users to follow, share, and interact with content across different services in a unified network.

ActivityPub is a WordPress plugin that facilitates seamless integration between your blog and a host of federated platforms, including Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, and more [see the diagram at the top of this blogpost]. This plugin empowers your readers to follow your blog posts on these platforms. 

In addition, replies to your posts from these platforms are automatically turned into comments on your WordPress blog, creating a more interactive and dynamic conversation around your content. Synchronicity for the win!

So, if you (like me) are on Mastodon, you can now choose to follow my blog in exactly the same way that you would follow any other Mastodon user! My blog’s username is:

@ryanschultz@ryanschultz.com

And the URL to my blog’s profile is:

https://ryanschultz.com/@ryanschultz

Matthias goes on to say:

Your WordPress blog can now become a profile for the fediverse. This means your readers can follow you and receive all the latest posts from your blog directly on their preferred platform. More so, they can engage in enriching conversations by replying to your posts, with their replies reflecting as comments on your blog post, creating a synchronized and interactive experience.

Now, this is all very new to me, so I’m probably still going to have to work out a few kinks in the system, but I’m actually pretty excited! For now, I have decided to keep the older WordPress plugin that I was using to automatically post my blogposts to my personal Mastodon account, which is:

@ryanschultz@mastodon.social

or, if you prefer the URL to my personal profile:

https://mastodon.social/@ryanschultz

You may notice that I have also upgraded my social media icons in the left-hand menu of the RyanSchultz.com blog (under the option to subscribe via email to my blog), adding a much better-looking Mastodon icon, which links directly to my personal Mastodon profile above. I still have to figure out the best way to integrate what are now two Mastodon profiles—one for my personal account, and one for my blog! For the moment, I will continue with both.

This wonderful, whimsical image is by DoodlebrinksArt, and you can purchase it here.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds: My Blogging Drought

Ever go through a creative dry patch? (Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash)

I admit it: I’m having a dry spell. (Oh, like you haven’t noticed.)

Or, to be more accurate, a dry year. At the moment, I have no less than 31 draft blogposts in various stages, which are waiting for me to finish and publish (see image, right, from my WordPress blogging software). I keep waiting for inspiration to strike, and it just never seems to come lately. And, as somebody who used to push out as many as 6 or 7 blogposts in a day, this creative desert I am experiencing is something new and unexpected.

Frankly, I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed in my life these past six months, which is part of the reason why I am just not feeling that spark. I come home from my job as an academic librarian, and most evenings, the last thing I want to do is blog.

And it’s not like there is any shortage of news in virtual worlds, social VR, and the metaverse to report on or editorialize over, either. If anything—even though last year’s metaverse craze has clearly been traded in for this year’s artificial intelligence hype cycle—the number of things happening out there for me to react to, or pontificate on, is still quite a steady stream. Zero shortage of news and events.

I feel tired and burned out, and more than a little overwhelmed by it all, to be honest.

The virtual reality lab project my university library system is working on (an initiative I am involved with) is moving ahead, slowly but surely, but I’m having trouble feeling excited about it. (Or perhaps, it’s more accurate to say that I am 50% excited and 50% terrified!) Even though I have been working with virtual reality since December 2016/January 2017, I am struggling with a massive case of imposter syndrome. I remind myself that there’s literally nobody else in the University of Manitoba Libraries system who has the right kind of background and experience to work on this, but some days are a struggle nonetheless. Perhaps it’s the late summer doldrums; I don’t know.

I know that part of the problem is that I’m just not feeling that sense of wonder and magic that I used to, when I slipped on a VR headset. Perhaps what I really need to do is to go seek out that magic again, actively look for it. I know that there are some truly wonderful projects out there that people are working on, projects that I have started to write about, and then somehow they still sit in my WordPress drafts folder, unfinished.

It’s a mystery to me. Maybe it was inevitable after five years of break-neck blogging, that there would be a dry spell, a pause.

I’m not sure when I will be back. I find myself escaping into Second Life a lot lately, my first love and my first introduction to the power and potential of virtual worlds. I do feel a bit guilty that so much of my recent coverage has been about Second Life and its 20th anniversary celebrations, but I do consider it a significant milestone that was worthy of the attention. But it bothers me that I have not paid nearly as much attention to VRChat where, for example, I have recently had some wonderful experiences exploring the delightfully bizarre worlds of DrMorro, a talented Russian world-builder with a vivid imagination.

Perhaps the problem is one of format. I know a lot of people don’t follow blogs that much anymore; some consider them an outdated form of communication (which I disagree with). But maybe a blog just isn’t the best way to cover everything that’s happening in the metaverse. Maybe a switch to a newsletter, or a podcast, or perhaps a resurrection of the moribund Metaverse Newscast, is in order?

But I digress; I am rambling. I will end this post here.

See you on the other side of my dry spell!

Tumblin’ tumbleweeds… (Photo by Luismi Sánchez on Unsplash)