I’ve had a good run, but it’s time for me to close this blog after a little over seven years and three months. It’s time.
Please know that it has been an honour, a joy, and a privilege to write about a subject that I loved: virtual worlds, social VR, and the metaverse, plus virtual and augmented reality in general. This blog has opened many doors for me, and I am truly grateful for the experiences I have had.
Thank you for your comments, suggestions, encouragement, and feedback throughout the years. I have made many friends and acquaintances in many virtual worlds, and I hope that our paths cross again soon, either via the metaverse or in real life.
I will be offline for a while, but I hope to be back soon. I doubt it will be a blog, though. Perhaps something different; I don’t know what yet.
Be well. Keep each other warm in a cold world. I love you all.
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!
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.
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:
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:
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.
