Tag: Editorial

Editorial: Changing Gears, Letting Go, and Embracing Change

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

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.

I will give two quick examples of how GenAI is already impacting the metaverse. First, in my recent write-up of virtual sessions I attended as part of the Berlin-based Immersive X metaverse conference i attended a couple of weeks ago, there was a proof-of-concept working demonstration of a generative-AI-driven virtual diabetes counselor in a virtual world platform called Foretell Reality.

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), this new, 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 Pain in the Neck


Photo by Teslariu Mihai on Unsplash

I have been postponing writing this blogpost, hoping that I would have more positive news to share, but I regret that I do not. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot of good in my life, and I have much to be grateful for. Compared to most of the eight billion people I share this planet with, I am a lucky man.

When I wrote that last sentence, tapping away on my iPad while lying on the sofa, I accidentally wrote, “I am a lucky pain.” Freudian slip? I do feel like one huge walking pain lately.

You see, for the past several months, I was been experiencing neck and shoulder pain. This pain ranges from mild to severe, and when it is severe, it is bad enough that I need to take a sick day from work (usually a half-day, sometimes a full day), go home, and either go to bed or lie on the sofa, my neck propped up on a good pillow. Which is what I am doing right now as I compose this post. I have taken a lot of sick days in September, which is my busiest time of year. THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.

In order to find relief, I have paid several visits to my family doctor. He has suggested a regimen of over-the-counter painkillers, which has needed to be adjusted, and probably will continue to be adjusted in my quest to achieve effective pain management. He also sent me for X-rays, which indicate a deterioration in two of the neck joints in the cervical part of my spine. In other words, my neck is starting to wear out.

My doctor sent me to the physiotherapist with a letter, and I have been going once a week so far for treatment (starting twice a week next week). The physiotherapist has given me several exercises to work out and strengthen my neck and upper back muscles, but I am still sometimes in a lot of pain. As with the painkillers, it’s been a lengthy trial-and-error process these past few months to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what makes things worse and what makes them better. I am exhausted.

My neck and shoulder pain is not only affecting my work; it’s also affecting my off-work hours, too. Yesterday, I posted the following message to Primfeed, which is best and most concisely described as “Twitter for and about Second Life.” (Please note that I have completely given up on all social media in these batshit-crazy times in which we live, except for Primfeed and Reddit. In my opinion, real-life social media platforms have become a toxic cesspool and an utter dumpster fire, and are a major contributing factor to a more uncivil, divisive, and polarized society beset by misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. But I digress from the topic of this post; I will save that particular rant for another day.)

Because my account is private, I’m just going to post a screen capture of the post, along with the actual text:

OMG, I checked my usual lineup of freebie blogs this morning, and I completely forgot about the Halloween Shop and Hop!!! 🤯

Because my neck and shoulder pain still limits how much time I can spend sitting in front of a desktop PC (and, obviously, that limited desktop PC time needs to be devoted to the full-time paying job that keeps a roof over my head, puts food on the table, pays my power, water, sewer, and broadband bills, and sustains my Second Life obsession), I will NOT be doing my usual notecards with gift descriptions, sizes, and exact SLURLs for this event. Please accept my apologies. I need to listen to my body, and my body is telling me to rest.

Instead, I will be relying on the ever-efficient FabFree folks’ spreadsheet, and on Naria Panthar’s fantastic unboxing videos on YouTube! I will direct you to those resources instead; when those links have been posted, I will update this Primfeed post accordingly. UPDATE: Here’s the FabFree spreadsheet: https://fabfree-hopandshop.vercel.app/

No freebie fashionista notes for the Second Life Halloween Shop and Hop this year, folks!

And it’s not only Second Life that I now have to severely cut back on. The last thing I want to do right now is add the weight of a virtual reality headset to my already aching neck and shoulders! So, for now, I am going to have limit my VR usage as well. However, I have read (via the r/AppleVisionPro and r/VisionPro subreddit communities on Reddit) several reports of people with neck and back problems who have successfully used their Apple Vision Pro AR/VR headsets while in a reclining position, either sitting in an armchair with good neck support or lying in bed, so I might look into that.

I have been spending a lot of time lying on the sofa lately, my head propped up on a good pillow, listening to various podcasts. I think I’ve listened to or watched every episode of the excellent Fall of Civilizations podcast, and I’ve started listening to the Literature and History podcast episodes, starting from the very beginning in 2016 (the podcaster, a Classics professor, is working in chronological order, starting with the surviving writings of the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks). Literature and history are subjects which I feel I have neglected in my personal post-high-school education, and now I have an opportunity to learn more about them!

I’m also feeling extremely fortunate that I can visit many clubs and other musical venues in Second Life via the steadily-improving Mobile app on my iPad (I am still in the alpha test program via TestFlite). The music stream is clear and sharp, and I can listen to my favourite deejays and musical performers, even while resting in bed or on the sofa! In the Mobile app, I can even use the performer’s tip jar on stage to send them a tip in Linden dollars, Second Life’s in- world currency, which of course is exchangeable into real-world U.S. dollars!

I’m also spending more time lately off-world, perusing and participating in both the long-running Second Life community forums and the newer, previously-mentioned Primfeed (again, both via my trusty iPad on the sofa). Even if I am not actually logged into the Second Life grid as one of my avatars, I can still keep up-to-date on SL news and events!

Finally, on the advice of my physiotherapist, I’m getting outdoors more and going for walks to the pharmacy, or my local café, or just around the neighbourhood. My plans to walk to and from work are currently on hold, because I don’t want to aggravate my neck and shoulders further with my backpack, even though it was purchased using advice from one physiotherapist, and properly fitted by a second one, last year.

This was after I had experienced numbness and tingling problems in my right arm and hand, due to a pinched nerve, which was caused by a cheap backpack I had bought a couple of years ago. Yes, folks, my sexagenarian body has been complaining for a while now, and now I have ergonomics on my mind for everything! Last weekend, I purchased and assembled a brand-new, high-end office/gaming chair with adjustable lumbar and neck support pillows, for use in front of my Windows desktop PC at home. I have also scheduled an appointment with the ergonomics office at my university, for a professional ergonomics assessment of my workspace.

As I stated in my Primfeed post above, I now have to stop and listen to my body, and my body is telling me that business-as-usual is not gonna cut it. This means that my self-imposed hiatus from blogging is likely to continue, at least for the short term. However, as I have just demonstrated, I can still blog via WordPress via my iPad while reclining on the sofa, which is how I wrote this entire blogpost today (using the handy Jetpack Mobile app).

Everything in my life has been thrown up into the air by my pain in the neck, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get through all this, and how my life is gonna look moving forward. Stay tuned for updates!

Yes, I am also looking into massage therapy, in addition to my regular physiotherapy appointments (Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash)

The Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer: AI, VR, and the Trade Wars

This summer, following my return to full-time work after my six-month, half-time sick leave for job burnout, has been interesting, in both positive and negative ways (remember the ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.”) I’ve already written at length about our unprecedented, climate-change-fuelled wildfire season here in Manitoba, but there have been other things on my mind as well: AI, VR, and the ongoing trade war with the United States.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

I have been learning a lot more about artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular, over the past few months. I am doing this to prepare myself for a couple of events this coming Fall term at my university.

Well, I have somehow talked myself into giving a 15-minute presentation on artificial intelligence and generative AI (GenAI) to the professors at an upcoming Faculty Council meeting in the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences (as I am the liaison librarian serving the faculty). This all came out of a recent addition to my PowerPoint slides last year, where I was warning the students I spoke to about the dangers of relying on GenAI tools like ChatGPT as search engines. I had been telling members of the Agriculture Library Committee about this work, at one of our face-to-face meetings. By the end of the discussion, I had agreed to give a presentation to Faculty Council. (Me and my big mouth!)

However, to my horror, I realized that the field of GenAI was now evolving so quickly, that pretty much everything I had talked about last year was already way out of date! So this necessitated a lot of reading (yes, actual books from the university’s collection), and a lot of web browsing, including taking some online courses, in order to work my way up the learning curve. It turns out that being asked to give an accessible presentation on a topic, to an audience of professors (who are pretty smart people overall), is a very powerful motivator to learn new things!

So I have been spending much of the past couple months learning more about AI. I had already had a subscription to ChatGPT, by OpenAI, being among the first million people to set up an account in 2022. To that, I have added a second subscription to a service called Claude AI, by a company called Anthropic, which was founded by some ex-OpenAI employees who had some ethical concerns about the direction in which their former company was going with its GenAI products.

I’m getting closer to the point that I now feel more comfortable attempting to pull together this 15-minute talk. In addition, I have agreed to team-teach a course to graduate students and student advisors on GenAI this Fall term, along with a lawyer. The lawyer will discuss the legal and copyright issues associated with GenAI, and I will focus on the technical and practical aspects of GenAI tools (leaning heavily on the same content as my talk to the agriculture professors). I am slowly but surely becoming the in-house AI expert at the University of Manitoba Libraries, as well as the virtual reality expert!

Speaking of virtual reality, now that I am no longer officially involved with the ongoing virtual/augmented reality lab project at my university library system, all the VR equipment I had donated to the lab has been returned to me (the people working on the project have decided to purchase brand-new equipment).

I have had to drag a second desk into my open-office cubicle area to re-setup my Windows desktop PC and Vive Pro VR headset, and I’ve had to find space to stash away my Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3 wireless headsets when I am not using them! Between work and home, I have no less than five different headsets to deal with (my Valve Index at home sits unused because I need to reinstall its software after the recent hard drive crash of my personal computer, and, of course, my Apple Vision Pro, about which I have written several blog posts over the past twelve months).

However, I must confess that I haven’t really used any of the Windows VR/AR headsets very much since I bought my Apple Vision Pro, which I still use a couple of hours a day at work in the large, clear (and now, ultra widescreen!) Virtual Display, with my MacBook Pro. Often, I lug my Apple Vision Pro home in my backpack, using it there to watch TV and movies, to browse Reddit news posted to the AVP subreddits, and to hang out and chat with folks from all over the world in InSpaze (still one of the killer apps, in my opinion). This device is worth every penny I paid for it, despite its high price tag, and I will be first in line for whatever Apple comes out with next in its line of spatial computing devices. I’m all in.

As many of you already know, I have already completely given up on most corporate-run, algorithm-driven social media platforms, most of which have become toxic cesspools. I left Meta’s Facebook several years ago, and I quit Twitter/X when Apartheid Clyde took over. While I still have nominal accounts on Mastodon (from which I watched the Twitter dumpster fire from afar), and Bluesky (to follow public health experts and, more recently, AI experts), I find that I can now go weeks at a time without bothering to check either site. I have found that my mental and emotional health has greatly improved since I have essentially discarded most social media, and I can recommend it highly.

I have also been going through the long, slow, arduous process of disengaging from Google as well, replacing the Chrome web browser with Firefox, Google search with Qwant, YouTube Music with Apple Music*, and Gmail with the Swiss-owned, privacy-oriented Proton service. In particular, the switch from Gmail to Proton email has been lengthy and ongoing.

Photo by Praveen Kumar Nandagiri on Unsplash

I don’t think that most Americans (as disinterested as they tend to be about anything that goes on outside their borders) really understand just how royally pissed off Canadians are at the United States right now. As I write this, the latest word from Donald Trump is that he is planning to impose a 35% tarriff on Canadian imports, which of course is going to kick off another round of tit-for-tat trade war, which is going to piss Canadians off even more than they are already. Elbows up!

I read an article last week in Maclean’s (the Canadian version of Time or Newsweek) that made that point quite well, so I am quoting it at length below:

Canadians define themselves in opposition to the United States because the country was founded by people who rejected the bloody American Revolution. We’ve kept rejecting it for almost three centuries.

The United States is an unpredictable and increasingly dysfunctional empire, an extended experiment in pushing everything to the extreme. Canadians, on the other hand, have a long but imperfect history of muddling along peaceably. We are not bound together by some intrinsic identity—by language, race, religion or a shared and glorious history of revolution or conquest. We become nationalistic only when it is necessary to protect ourselves against the aggression of the United States.

That negative, defensive definition has always been enough. It is kind of the point of Canada.

…

As Canada settled deeper into the winter of 2025, and Trump kept boorishly insisting that Canadians would be happier in his clutches, we got mad.

Canadians yanked U.S. liquor from store shelves, cancelled trips and hoisted flags, even in downtown Montreal. Pallets of U.S. produce spoiled in the supermarket aisles. Normally bustling American border towns that depended on shopping day trips were suddenly silent. The U.S. departure lounges at Pearson and Trudeau were empty.

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston removed interprovincial trade barriers for any province that would reciprocate and, post-election, Mark Carney went a step further and pledged to dismantle all interprovincial trade barriers by Canada Day. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announced he was planning to let some electricity contracts with the States lapse and use much of that excess power to boost his own province’s energy economy. Quebec Premier François Legault said Quebecers would consider east-west oil pipelines they had previously opposed.

People were soon speculating about a guerrilla war of resistance. The Americans might be able to take Canada, but could they hold it? How could they justify the casualties they would take? At the end of January, one of the most capable men I know texted me, out of the blue, that he had told his wife, the mother of his infant child, that he’d be “willing to die on the end of a rifle to make sure” the Americans could not take Canada.

It became clear how deep the feeling ran on February 1 at Ottawa’s Canadian Tire Centre, where the Senators played the Minnesota Wild. Because Ottawa is a government town, and there are often as many Leafs or Habs fans in attendance as Sens supporters, it can be a dull place to watch a game. But there was nothing sedate about the booing as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. Fans booed it heartily from start to finish, drowning out the unfortunate singer.

—Stephen Maher, “Never for sale.” Maclean’s, July 2025.

I honestly don’t know how all this is going to play out over the next four years, but I have slowly learned to tune out whatever batshit craziness is happening in the United States and its trade war with Canada (and the rest of the world), and to focus on what I can control. So I have been voting both with my feet and my wallet.

In particular, like many of my fellow Canadians, I refuse to visit the United States until Trump is out of office. No conferences, no vacations. Nothing. And I have already cancelled my subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and most recently I added both Disney+ and Hayu (Bravo reality TV) to that list. I’m probably not done yet. I am pissed.

During the pandemic, I got into the habit of ordering my groceries online through the Walmart website, and then using their Pickup service early Saturday morning. Not any more! I have used my librarian skill set to extensively research Canadian-made alternatives to American brands (Buh-bye, Campbell’s Chunky Soup! Hello, Tim Horton’s Soup!). I have swapped the Walmart website for the Real Canadian Superstore, still picking up my online-ordered (but now overwhelmingly Canadian-produced) groceries bright and early Sunday morning. Works just as well for me!

Finally, I have gone and joined the Red River Co-Op, a locally-owned co-operative grocery store and gas station that has been active here in Winnipeg since the 1930s. And I do plan to regularly shop at the St. Norbert farmers’ market, just south of where I live in Winnipeg, to support local farmers and artisans (it’s quite literally across the street from the Red River Co-Op store I now shop at!).

So, that’s my report from my lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer! Stay cool and stay sane in these trying times.

*I fully realize that Apple is an American company, but I associate Apple with California, and I am not averse to supporting liberal-leaning, Democratic-voting California! 😜

Doing a Reboot

Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash

So, I am back. Well, kind of back. A different kind of “back.”

First, a week and a half ago, my gaming-level Windows 11 home PC crashed, hard, and wouldn’t reboot. I landed up having to take it in to the computer repair store, and they landed up having to reinstall Windows. Unfortunately, that also means that I now have to reinstall all of my software—Valve Index, Steam, etc.—all of it. So that is going to take me a while, before I’m back to where I was before. All I have installed right now is Firefox (web browser), Firestorm (SL viewer), and Discord. You know, the essentials (yes, access to Second Life is an essential).

Second, I have recently returned to regular, full-time hours at my job as an academic librarian. For the past six months I had been on half-time sick leave, dealing with a bad case of job burnout, but I have had a chance to rest a bit, and recharge a bit. One significant change from before is that I am no longer tasked with trying to get a virtual reality lab at my university library system up and running. This was an executive decision made by my new supervisor in order to bring my workload (and stress load!) back to a manageable level, and a decision that I agree with.

Especially now that my Valve Index is out of commission, and with all the VR equipment I purchased over the past four years at work moving to the VR lab project that I am no longer a part of, the only VR headset that I wear on a regular basis is my Apple Vision Pro, which I still love to use. I am making good use of my Apple Vision Pro (AVP for short), both at work (using the big, beautiful Virtual Display feature with my MacBook Pro), and at home (where I mainly use it to consume TV and movies, and to use various apps such as InSpaze, the social VR app for the Apple Vision Pro which I have written about before).

It’s now late spring/early summer up here in Winnipeg, and I have begun walking to and from work, a 6-kilometre round trip. While I can technically fit my AVP in my trusty Black Hole backpack from Patagonia, I find it’s still a bit heavy for my 6-kilometre hike, so I usually shuttle it back and forth when I know that I will be driving. 😉 I have now lost approximately 40 pounds, and hiking back and forth from work is the easiest way for me to incorporate some physical exercise into my day. On days when I don’t feel like walking the whole distance, I have a deal worked out with a friend who lives halfway between my home and my work, where I can drive halfway, park my car in her driveway, and walk the other half! And then do the same in reverse at the end of the workday. One way or another, I will get my steps in!

I’ve also been a good Canadian, participating in the countrywide boycott of the United States since Trump got re-elected, declared a trade war, and started openly musing about making Canada the 51st state. I have cancelled both my Netflix and Amazon Prime memberships, and I have switched from shopping for my groceries at Walmart to my local farmer’s market, my local Red River Co-Op, and the Great Canadian Superstore. The only exceptions to my boycott-American mindset are Apple and Second Life (both of which I associate more with California than the U.S.A.!). Like many Canadians, I refuse to travel to the United States while Trump is in office.

So, in a way, much like my Windows PC, I’m doing a reboot. I’m feeling good, enjoying being back at work, and feeling grateful for the support that I have had around me while I was healing these past six months. I’m feeling rested, relaxed, and recharged, and I am looking forward to the next chapter of my life.

As for the blog, well, I still have reserved my decision on what to do with that. I’m not sure when—or if—I will return to full-time blogging. We’ll see, is all I can say for now. Where I go from here is entirely up to me—and that’s a pretty good feeling!

Photo by Shawn Sim on Unsplash