However, unfortunately, I have now reached the point where I am completely and utterly overwhelmed by what life is throwing at me, and I am throwing in the towel. In addition to everything I wrote about previously, I have managed, through a combination of circumstance and stupidity, to blow up a 23-year friendship, at a time when I could ill afford to lose what few real-life friends remained to me after three years of pandemic-induced isolation.
Frankly, people, I am a mess right now, and feeling completely overwhelmed. And everything else is going to have to be put on hold (including this blog) while I try to piece my life back together. Don’t worry about me; I have gotten quite good at reaching out for support and good counsel as needed to help me get through. But I don’t have any extra energy left at the end of the day for anything else, other than to try to get a good night’s sleep to face whatever life is going to throw at me tomorrow.
So this will be my last blogpost for a while. How long, I don’t know. But you’ll all be the first to know when I do decide to come back. When, not if.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn and face the strange) Ch-ch-changes, oh, look out you rock ‘n rollers Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn and face the strange) Ch-ch-changes, pretty soon now you’re gonna get older Time may change me But I can’t trace time I said that time may change me But I can’t trace time
—Changes, by David Bowie
You may have noticed that my pace of blogging has slowed markedly over the past few months, well, actually, for far longer than that. More like half a year, or almost a full year.
Life has been throwing changes fast and furiously at me lately. Big changes and small ones. Changes that I deliberately started, and changes that kinda just happened to me, when I wasn’t looking. There have been so many changes in my life, that I am feeling a bit overwhelmed at times. Sometimes, a lot overwhelmed. Some days I feel that I am doing well, rolling with the punches, and other days, I feel depressed and hopeless, barely able to get out of bed and face the day.
I have, rather deliberately, made a decision to cut back on my consumption of mainstream news media, as well as my formerly heavy use of social media. I was spending too much time learning about whatever the latest outrage was in the world, and getting upset over it, when in most cases, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it (particularly if it was happening in another state, province, or country nowhere near me).
I was also spending a lot of time—too much time—on the snark subreddits, a habit I am slowly weaning myself from (more on that here, in a blogpost I wrote in February). I did delete my Reddit account, and I also switched from the web version of Reddit to a mobile app, Apollo, using it without bothering to set up a new account, which makes it easier to avoid seeing news stories which might trigger me in some way. And I stay off the news and politics subreddits now!
I also learned that I had simply swapped my former Facebook and Twitter addictions with a Mastodon addiction (different platform, but the same problems), and I have therefore decided to cut back significantly on the time I spend on Mastodon, and use a mobile app (Toot!) that, again, allows me to avoid seeing news stories about whatever political outrage is currently trending in the U.S. or somewhere else, that I can’t do a damn thing about, and which only lands up enraging or depressing me.
The result of these changes is that I am feeling less depressed—at the cost of being a little more ignorant about what’s going on in the real world!
I have also decided to incorporate more physical activity into my life. The easiest way for me to do that is to replace my 10-minute car drive to and from work with a 40-to-50-minute walk (depending on how often I stop and sit down on a nearby park bench!). I’m still working my way up to walking both ways, both to and from work, and my legs and feet are often sore lately, but it feels good. I feel like this is a positive step (or, literally, steps!).
Speaking of transportation, I finally went and purchased a new vehicle after driving my old car for twenty years, until it was literally falling apart! In fact, it was an expensive throttle problem with my old car that forced me to start shopping for a new car a few months earlier than I had planned, and then I had to wait several months for my new vehicle to be delivered. I love my new car!
Also, three weeks ago my family helped pack up and move my octogenarian mother and nonagenarian stepfather from their condo in Winnipeg to Alberta, to live with my brother and his wife. This was a major, MAJOR undertaking, and I am still working through all the emotions relating to this change, including dealing with the new reality that I no longer have any immediate family in my home city (although I do have my friends, and some more distant relatives, here). That’s a big change.
So, as you can see, I have been dealing with a lot of changes in my life recently (including a few that I don’t wish to talk about here). What does that mean for the blog? Well, I do plan to continue blogging, but I’m not sure when I will return to my formerly blistering pace of blog posting! This is yet another change, this one the result of the other changes I have enumerated here (plus the few that I haven’t talked about, ones that involve other people whose privacy I wish to respect).
David Bowie’s song, which I quoted up top, is all about the impermanence of life and the difficulty of adjusting to the changes that come with it. I find myself identifying with this song a lot lately, and more often than not, turning to face the strange.
The Second Life Destination Guide has had an overhaul!
People whose introduction to the concept of the metaverse started with VRChat, Horizon Worlds, and other social VR platforms may question why I choose to write so often and so fondly about Second Life, a virtual world which was launched in 2003, well before the advent of consumer-grade virtual reality headsets. My answer is always the same: Second Life is the perfect model of a mature, fully-evolved virtual world, with a vibrant ecosystem and a still-thriving community, which many newer metaverse companies would be wise to study, learn lessons from, and (in some cases) emulate.
The latest version of the Destination Guide offers a modern design refresh (the first since 2010!), while also adding some useful new features that enable easier discovery of Second Life events and experiences. Web visitors may welcome the addition of a much-requested Search bar so that you can better seek and find the places that interest you, while category and search result pages now also have a “Sort by” option in the upper-right corner that allows users to filter the directory by “Newest” entries and alphabetically (A-Z or Z-A). Mobile users will notice that the Destination Guide is now much easier to browse and explore while on the go – which may come in handy to accompany our forthcoming Mobile Viewer.
The new Second Life Destination Guide features keyword searching and results sorting
Of course, there’s not just an external directory on the Second Life website; there’s also in-world search tools as well. (They need a bit of improvement too, but that’s the subject for another blogpost!)
Which brings me to the topic of today’s editorial: the vital importance of discoverability in the metaverse. I believe that this is something which many metaverse-building companies tend to neglect, or treat as an afterthought, to the detriment of their platforms’ communities—and to their corporate bottom line.
Let’s take VRChat as an example. In February 2021, I blogged:
Since I have upgraded my Oculus Rift to a Valve Index, I have been spending more and more time in VRChat lately. VRChat in 2021 reminds me of nothing so much as Second Life circa 2007, when I first joined: the wonderful sense of exploration and adventure, never quite knowing where you were going to land up and who you would encounter!
However, there is still one problem that I encounter in VRChat, and that is the topic for today’s blogpost: the need to set up a better in-world directory of worlds to explore. I have written about this topic before, but the need has now become acute. Finding cool worlds in VRChat has become something of a crapshoot, a time-consuming, trial-and-error process.
And since then, the problem has only gotten worse! It is an exercise in frustration to try and find worlds by topic, or by searching for keywords which might (or more often, might not!) appear in the world’s name. VRChat badly needs an official, external directory website of created worlds which is better curated and has more than just the broadest of categories.
VRChat’s Discover Worlds features basically mimics the in-headset directory, with its unhelpful, overly broad categorization
There is a keyword search feature, but it lumps in user profiles, meaning you have to scroll down to the worlds whose titles and/or tags match what you typed in:
There is a desperate need for some sort of directory of VRChat worlds which offers the ability for people to describe their worlds in much more detail, and allows them to browse with more nuance (for example, sleep worlds). The closest thing to the utility of the Second Life Destination Guide is the volunteer-run Worlds on VRChat website, which seems to be mainly focused on Japanese-language worlds.
Why is this important? It’s vital, because social VR is, by its very nature, all about the community. A metaverse platform fails or succeeds by its ability to attract an audience, and making it easier for like-minded people to find each other, form communities, and build things together. It is a factor in whether a user visits your metaverse once, wanders around lost, gives up and logs out—or finds a friendly space catering to her interests, and comes back again and again!
For example, I just love visiting 1029Chris’ delightful bird sanctuary in VRChat. Now, let’s assume that I am a user is a newbie, who has heard through the grapevine that there’s this cool place in VRChat where you can feel bread to geese, but doesn’t know how to find it. She doesn’t know the name of the place. Even worse, she doesn’t know the username of the person who created it.
She puts on her headset and goes to the in-headset Worlds directory, or perhaps instead she goes to the VRChat Discover Worlds page on the VRChat website, and starts hunting. She enters “geese”, and finds three worlds, none of which are what she is looking for (while Chris has helpfully added the word “ducks” as a tag to her bird sanctuary, “geese” or “goose” are neither in the world’s title, nor its tags).
The poor newbie doesn’t know Chris’ username (1029chris), so she can’t search by the name of the world’s creator, to find it via Chris’ profile. After a frustrating couple of minutes, she gives up. She loses out on an experience that would have engaged her, and perhaps brought her back time and again, and perhaps would have led to further good word-of-mouth among other people, including other people new to social VR and virtual reality—leading to potentially more business for VRChat!
And that’s a simple example. How about this one: you want to find this cool place that you heard about in VRChat, where all you know is that you can change the backgrounds to all kinds of cool animated patterns—but you don’t know that it was created by 1001, or that the name of the world is Treehouse in the Shade, or any of the keywords used to describe it? It’s like finding a needle in a haystack!
You could argue that it’s too expensive for a company like VRChat to devote resources to build and maintain such a detailed and helpful directory of worlds for its user base. I would argue that it is a cost of doing business, a cost of investing in your community. At the very least, VRChat should be working with its community to enhance the discoverability of the insanely creative spaces its users are creating!
OK, end of rant. I am now getting down off my soapbox!
Executive summary: discoverability is a key factor in the success of any metaverse. Build it into your product. Make it easy for people to find cool worlds that match their interests, find each other, and build communities.
UPDATE 12:42 p.m.: I just had an experience that underscores the importance of discoverability! My Second Life avatar was exploring the cafés listed under the Cafés and Hangouts subsection of the new Destination Guide:
She teleported into Little Whiskeria, and while she was looking around the café/bar, the owner Lizzy showed up, and we got to talking. Lizzy invited me to an event that is taking place at 11:00 a.m. SLT/Pacific Time, so I am now making plans to catch a live performance (singing/guitar/piano) at Little Whiskeria!
That’s exactly why discoverability is so important: it took me from my interest (coffee houses) and immediately met that need in a very satisfying way, which will probably lead me to tell my friends about this place and come back for return visits!
UPDATE 1:13 p.m.: Here’s a snapshot of the live show at Little Whiskeria, a really good German/English band is on stage and the summer folk music café ambiance is wonderful, just what I needed on a wintry Winnipeg day!
Live show at the Little Whiskeria café/bar
UPDATE April 8th, 2023: My friend Rainwolf told me about another website directory of VRChat worlds, called VRC List, which has a variety of search and sort options:
HOUSEKEEPING NOTICE: There has been a lot of chatter about artificial intelligence (AI) this year. If metaverse was the buzzword of 2022, AI is definitely the buzzword of 2023! I have been marshalling my thoughts, doing research, and beavering away on an editorial blogpost about AI for quite some time, and I hope to publish it as my next post on this blog.
And I do apologize to those of you who wish I would get back to writing more about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse! I have been quite busy with various projects at my paying job as an academic librarian, and when I get home, I am often too tired to blog. But I promise that I will soon return you to your regularly scheduled programming… 😉
On Wednesday evening, I was test-driving a new web browser I had downloaded on a whim from the Apple Apps Store, called Orion. For years now, I had automatically selected Google as my default search engine while using Chrome and Firefox, but I noticed that there were two ad-free search engine options in Orion’s setup, which I had never heard of before: Kagi (created by the same company that makes Orion), and something called Neeva.
Curious, I went down the rabbit hole, and did a few test searches on both Kagi and Neeva. I must confess that my search results from Kagi left me feeling meh, but I was so impressed with what I got back from the Neeva search engine, that I actually decided to pony up for a premium subscription! (Please note that you can use Neeva for free, but it limits the number of searches you can do in a month.)
One rather interesting feature of Neeva is that it includes an AI-generated “summary” of information on your search topic (something that both the Google and Bing search engines are also tinkering with). In Neeva’s case, the AI-generated summary paragraph includes numbered citations to the sources from which it pulled the information. For example, here’s what I got back after searching Neeva for the meaning of the phrase “pony up for” (a phrase which I used in the previous paragraph):
See the red arrow in the image above? You set up a personal account to use Neeva, and you can actually tell it which information sources you prefer, so that over time, it tailors your search results to your preferences (you can also select which sources you wish to see less of in your search results next time). Here’s a summary of Neeva’s other features.
This AI-generated summary is a beta feature, and frankly I was curious (and dubious) that it would work. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes it fails spectacularly! However, I do like the fact that you can actually click on the numbered citations below the AI-generated text to go to the source material, which this reference librarian always believes you should do! Remember, treat any AI-generated text with a good deal of skepticism and suspicion. Don’t trust; verify.
But I didn’t decide to subscribe to Neeva based on its AI, which I see as a frill (as I said up top, expect a longer, separate blogpost with my thoughts on the whole AI hoo-ha). I signed up for a premium membership because I wanted to kick the tires on an ad-free, privacy-oriented search replacement for Google Search, in much the same way that I recently opted for Proton as an ad-free, privacy-oriented alternative to Google Mail and Google Drive. I just finally decided, after leaving Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and especially after Elon Musk’s dumpster-fire takeover of Twitter, that I had had enough of Big Tech’s strip-mining my personal data by using their “free” services (where, of course, you are the product they sell to advertisers).
So, as I often like to say, I am off on yet another adventure—wish me luck! I signed up for one year of unlimited Neeva searching, and I will be comparing search results between Google and Neeva throughout the next twelve months, and I’ll report back that I find.
If you want to learn more about Neeva, you can learn more from their website, which includes a FAQ. You can also learn more about the Kagi search engine and the Orion web browser, if you’re interested (which I how I landed up going down this rabbit-hole in the first place!).
After so many years of Google’s hegemony in online search, things are starting to get interesting! I will also give You.com a whirl, and I’ll tell you what I think of it.
