It occurred to me that I have opinions on Metaverse and I don't actually have much concrete information about it. The handful of screenshots I've seen look curiously similar to Second Life, so I decided to do a look around Youtube and had a really hard time finding any footage that wasn't snide and snarky commentary or naive news stories that conflate footage of Roblox with Metaverse. I read articles about it but somehow the actual thing itself feels like an imaginary bogeyman that exists purely for internet personalities to dunk on.

What I'm asking is does anyone have a decent unbiased video overview of the platform? Something that shows off its best side? I'd like to be able to see it as more than just a re-launch of Second Life.

In my person experience it is comparable but worse than VRChat, the current de-facto vr social whatever program (that recently pissed off its userbase by pushing EasyAntiCheat on pc). On Horizon there seems to be significantly less user-generated content. In my option it lacks relatively any whimsy or "native" community, it just feels a bit empty and sterile. The people that did use it did so either because it's more tame and pg relative to VRChat or because they didn't know Horizon Worlds had competitors. Honestly there just isn't much there.

The tech itself works fine but I wasn't having as much fun, the atmosphere felt like an airport lobby.

I really like the author's sentiment, but for an article published in 2022 it seems to not really consider the last twenty years or so. Their references to a better, less exploitative internet seem to exist in a 2000-bubble. Today, videogames are right smack dab in the middle of what he perceives as the big grift, and I'm sure books would be too if only publishers had an easy to implement model for doing so.

I'd be more interested if the author gave clear examples of where this works in today's internet, because saying you are part of the Geocities or Neopets forums side of the internet is like the old man yelling on his lawn lamenting how much better things were when he was young.

I haven't seen it happen with novels (yet), but I was a little outraged to buy a weekly planner that featured mindfulness exercises and such to focus on each week…and find it laden with advertisements for the author's website, companion videos, etc.

I have no interest in using the internet for that; I bought a dead tree specifically to avoid my computer for a minute.

Just because they uses old examples doesn't invalidate their point, although yes, following the rise of Gacha games in Japan and Asian markets essentially a lot of games today key in some gacha like elements.

Most of the pages on the internet I visit is non-grifty, non-explitative type. Start from something like hackaday.com, and then subscribe to RSS feeds of the small websites you like.

(Of course adblocker is a must... But living without adblocker on today's web is like walking barefoot in NY)

But what would happen if you combined both? Best skin in the game.

I've been reading Douglas Copeland's 1994 novel "Microserfs" recently and there's a bit where the main character starts reading up on actual highway construction in response to the information superhighway.

Is it as good as Generation X ? Also I'd love Coupland to reiterate and do a 'Generation Z' about zoomers and digital natives.

He did write a sequel of sorts to Generation X called Generation A in 2009. I haven't read it so I can't comment on it, though I suspect it is already 'of it's time' in the way that, say, Microserfs is. It's a fun novel to be sure, for something that emanates a huge "now-ness circa 1994" it's still very enjoyable today, but maybe that's because I can vaguely remember life back then. I'd wonder what a younger reader might think about it?

When a movie has a love story that doesn't involve a love-triangle or infidelity I breath a palpable sigh of relief. Realistic or not, does all romance have to involve competition or deception?

I just watched a romance movie where the plot was one was dying of a terminal disease. I watched it because the protagonist was Feynman, otherwise I'd have turned it off because watching people die is not entertaining to me.

Cinema instead of being a reflection on society is more a mirror of itself. (look at Weinstein/Polanski and people like them in cinema and how they were treated until they could no more --look at their compasses).

Same. Could it be that maybe seeing 'impossible' shapes colliding and passing through each other is common these days, so the brain won't automatically register as "bouncing back an forth"?

I felt pretty smart getting that first question, then proceeded to fall down the stairs.

Look at this guy, not commenting about the name.

I feel like clicking the link and getting hit immediately with four tiers of subscription option from the Financial Times was a strong enough case in point that I scarcely needed to read the article itself.

The prices are awful too. It's clearly not targeted at random people wanting to stay informed.

I had to go check - $40/mo for a digital newspaper?! Surely this is aimed at a different demographic than mine, because I can’t imagine anyone I know paying that for news.

I know many Finance/Wall St and (Financial/Management) academic types who pay for FT.

It's high quality, financial news with a European perspective (vs the WSJ which is very US-centric). I assume they keep the prices high enough to support their operations without having to dilute their coverage for the mass market who will want their celebrity news, daily outrage fodder, censorship etc.

Noam Chomsky called the FT "the only newspaper that tells the truth."

They've had a noticeable increase in almost-clickbait titles in the last few years. So it's not like they've remained unaffected by the decline in news media.

Maybe they've always been there, but it just took you a few years to notice them. By how often you hear this sentiment (X newspaper used to be better, more thoughtful and analytical), you'd expect news articles written a few decades ago to read like dissertations. Except they all read about the same, newsy and for a general audience. My theory is it takes a few years to notice the crap, but the crap was there all the time.

FT articles from 20 years ago are readily available online... You can see for yourself if there's been a change in writing quality.

Probably one of the few places that charges what things actually cost when you remove advertising from the equation.

Bypass paywalls clean is a very good extension to get rid of these subscription annoyances, although, i guess it is a form of piracy.

Replacement could imply more than habitual use of substances. I've found the hardest part of not drinking to be the loss of the sociable activities I engage with while drinking. I've certainly used marijuana as an "intermediary" between drinking and not drinking as it seemed like a way to engage with inebriation without drinking and later would stop using marijuana when I realized I was enjoying my activities more or less the same with or without its use.