Still early in the video, but he makes a claim that feels a little outdated or poorly researched to me - or at least it shouldn't have been presented in such absolute terms: That people ('s inner...
Still early in the video, but he makes a claim that feels a little outdated or poorly researched to me - or at least it shouldn't have been presented in such absolute terms: That people ('s inner ears) can't tolerate moving without moving. This is an issue that affects only a small subset of humans, especially after a few weeks of cautious acclimation. It's much like being on a ship on the high seas. A lot of people have no physical barrier preventing them from enjoying fully immersive VR.
EDIT: Is Lindt bad in the USA?
EDIT2: Half an hour in: Yeah, this is just SecondLife isn't it? It's 20 year old tech. With crypto grafted onto it I imagine.
EDIT3: Oboy, I think I have a bunch of things to say about this. I'll write a longer response later.
Back when I was a kid, I was entranced by ActiveWorlds. Launched in 1995, it was the very first fully 3D online virtual world. It was directly inspired by Snow Crash and allowed people to create...
Exemplary
Back when I was a kid, I was entranced by ActiveWorlds. Launched in 1995, it was the very first fully 3D online virtual world. It was directly inspired by Snow Crash and allowed people to create content and socialize. It was slow and it was janky, but it was definitely magical, the way in which you could move your low poly avatar in the same world as other people, wave at them and see everyone's text chat floating above their heads. Worlds were not unlimited in size, but anyone could use built-in tools to create their homes out of thousands of provided models and textures anywhere vacant on the massive (think a thousand square kilometres) public instances. The worst SDK I've ever used allowed for the creation of "bot" connections that implemented all kinds of high level mechanics (not unlike Discord's current system).
But a few years later the company's management style changed. Suddenly land was scarce; Users were encouraged to spend mind boggling amounts of money on yearly "licenses" for connecting tiny (self-hosted!) worlds to the AW universe. The price of "citizenships" (user accounts) skyrocketed. A vast "dead mall" popped up, listed at the very top of the sidebar, claiming corporate participation, promising virtual storefronts. The software was aggressively marketed to other organizations for even more ridiculous licensing values, even as investment in new features began to lag. Cue the mass exodus of users to other platforms.
See where I'm going with this?
Everything about ActiveWorlds, this nearly 30 year old product, functioned better than what I've seen of Decentraland in this video; it was roomier, less laggy, you didn't necessarily have to share a "grid" with other users, you could jump from day one (I think). You didn't fall through the stairs. But the same kind of greedy, unimaginative, short-sighted decision makers trying to promote Decentraland's "metaverse" narrative are nothing new. They've been with us the whole time, peddling their bullshit wherever they can get away with it.
But I don't think that means there is no value in spatially aware online socialization. Tens of thousands of people engaged with ActiveWorlds in its early years. They worked together on 3D projects. Had conversations. They made friends, some even got married to each other! They played games. I played a lot of chess in there. It was fun! There were also janky, but fully functioning RPGs. I helped make them!
That feeling of a virtual "social frontier" that you can visit over the internet has never gone away. It has simply moved around, keeping ahead of the snake oil salespeople. Currently it resides, I think, in VRChat.
At the time you're reading this there are this many people concurrently online in VRChat. Depending on the time of day and the day of week you might be seeing 30 thousand, 60 thousand, maybe more, it really depends. The value fluctuates. More after christmas and during holidays. Less when there's no global pandemic! Most users aren't online every day. Many are strictly transient. Not all are in a VR headset. But the scale feels familiar, as does the community. You can go to play chess too, or pool. You can fly an airplane. You can solve an escape room, discuss philosophy, watch a video together. You can explore a city or a jungle, dance, drink. You can fall asleep hugging someone else's avatar. Some people spend whole days (and nights) in there.
Is this healthy or desirable? I don't know, but I'm not going to judge them. A lot of people who feel unwelcome in other spaces find companionship and acceptance here, of a much more immersive type than they otherwise could, thanks to the sometimes janky, sometimes silly, but otherwise fairly realistic spatial interactions. Many of these people would never be able to have these experiences elsewhere. Maybe they're stuck living somewhere they can't be themselves, due to their gender or sexuality or appearance. Sometimes they are disabled. Sometimes they are neurodivergent. Sometimes they're far away from everyone else. Sometimes they're just profoundly lonely.
(An aside here to mention that there is definitely a boisterous minority of really terrible people - sometimes dangerously so - in any open online commmunity, including this one. The same care should be taken to protect your privacy and that of your loved ones as you would have anywhere else.)
Where I'm getting with this, though, is that there's value in the concept of a Metaverse (NB: Wherever I use this word I will be referring to the general concept, not a Facebook brand). I'm not talking about monetary value. I'm saying a well implemented Metaverse is a positive thing in the lives of a lot of people.
Both ActiveWorlds and VRChat alike - and other social applications that exist or have previously existed in the same space - interface with the greater internet. They use external links to display data, and they load images and videos from the outside. This is fine. A Metaverse should not be fully encapsulated by a software product. There should be no circle around it.
But when I look at how VRChat Inc., the company running VRChat, behaves, I see the red flags and the warning signs. In 2021 they promised a (currently delayed) "creator economy" integration: Built in monetization for content, which is expected to encourage users to gate worlds and avatars behind paid subscriptions. Less than a year ago they have moved to squash modding, despite massive outcry. They also remove users at their own discretion. People creating open source servers were chased away by lawyers. New features are starting to appear that are gated behind the client's own paid subscriptions, others are artificially scarce. Is VRChat the Metaverse? Yes and no. It's "a" Metaverse, for sure, but ultimately I fear it will go down the way of the ActiveWorlds, or the way of the Decentraland, likely because it's run by the same type of asshole.
Sorry if I'm being too unkind. I'm sure there are many decent, competent, rational people working for VRChat. I'm also fairly certain they aren't the ones calling the shots. And while I understand every single one of these products was ultimately devised to make money for its investors, it's still a little depressing to see this story play out yet again, because there is value in the existence of a Metaverse.
It's unfortunate Decentraland (which I knew nothing about) is a whole heap of nonsense, because I don't think a Metaverse will ever live up to its true potential while a single company is calling the shots, no matter which one. A Metaverse has to be, as much as possible, distributed, federated, a Mastodon, a Matrix. I understand the governance issues mocked in the video. I don't think Decentraland's model is any good; I don't think blockchain tokens should be involved at all. I wouldn't mind a Metaverse run by a more traditional consortium, though. Open technologies, international standards. Even governmental participation. What do you think?
I actually saw a video about ActiveWorlds before, which people might like -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md1fFTymGYI I was also instantly reminded of it when seeing decentraland in this video
I actually saw a video about ActiveWorlds before, which people might like -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md1fFTymGYI I was also instantly reminded of it when seeing decentraland in this video
The thing about the metaverse that I find almost funny is how many times people have attempted to create it and how all of them have failed. ActiveWorlds is a good example, but I think the most...
The thing about the metaverse that I find almost funny is how many times people have attempted to create it and how all of them have failed. ActiveWorlds is a good example, but I think the most successful example of all time is probably Linden Labs' Second Life. They were at one time actually attempting to get it working with VR and there may still be a forked client with that function available.
There are many reasons why these metaverses all disappear, but the primary one is rather simple; someone needs to pay to maintain it, and that usually means that the people running things needs to find ways to monetize it, which almost always cause barriers that prevent people from wanting to use it. Second Life is one of the better examples since you don't need to pay anything to visit, but if you want to keep a home up in there you're going to need to spend money to keep the land. But if you don't have land you might not have enough to keep invested in it's world.
I think perhaps one of the greatest problems with the concept of a metaverse is the written or unwritten requirement for it to be in 3D. 3D graphics have been in constant flux as we have done more and more to make things look photorealistic; that means that even if you do make a working metaverse, it's only a matter of time before the next big leap happens and your metaverse looks ancient. Second Life was designed to be "future proof" by making it's geometry largely based on primitive shapes so that it can scale up as hardware got more powerful, but if you look at screenshots taken today it still looks like a game from the turn of the century; why go to that metaverse if there are much nicer metaverses to go visit?
On the other hand, if you strip back the definition of metaverse to exclude any particular graphics needs, there are plenty of examples that have been running for decades. Early MUDs and MMORPGs still run because there are people who love the worlds, who have likely spent time building parts of them, and the technology behind them are much simpler, easier to maintain, and require much less resources to keep running. Of all of them, I'm probably the most impressed by Furcadia; while it is centrally owned and maintained, it really is built around the community of it's users and I expect that it will outlast attempts like Horizon Worlds or VRChat.
Second Life made the same mistakes as Decentraland though. From the very beginning it had a built in currency that was tradeable for real dollars. It forced everything into a common grid (single...
Second Life made the same mistakes as Decentraland though. From the very beginning it had a built in currency that was tradeable for real dollars. It forced everything into a common grid (single world), which made it a gigantic, difficult to traverse mess of different access and use permissions. It quickly devolved (at the time) into a weird distributed casino, whose residents were only interested in grifting visitors. I don't think Second Life was ever a very good Metaverse.
someone needs to pay to maintain it, and that usually means that the people running things needs to find ways to monetize it,
I believe the solution really is to allow different systems to federate. Participants should be able to fully self host their piece of the Metaverse - paying for it in whichever way they want. The people running things have this incentive only because they refuse to run an open system that allows people to find their own funding sources (or when they cave, the momentum is long gone).
In all of these metaverses the content is always provided by the community of devoted users. The VRChats of the world (if not owned by a bunch of investment funds with different ideas) should only have had to fund the development of the software itself, which I do believe would not necessarily require turning the whole thing into the inevitable giant mall.
Having a currency is not a metaverse killer, though; virtually every MMORPG effectively has the same thing since they can't stop third-party markets for their digital goods; the main difference is...
Having a currency is not a metaverse killer, though; virtually every MMORPG effectively has the same thing since they can't stop third-party markets for their digital goods; the main difference is that SL's currency explicitly gives a cut to the maintainers. It was also reasonably popular, at least for a few years; it went way further than Decentraland ever did and I would think that at it's best it was probably bigger than VRChat has ever been. And personally speaking, I never saw a Casino when I played with it. That being said, there were plenty of user-created stores selling their custom-made virtual items and signs asking you to donate to the people who designed the land.
Federation is a pretty good thing, and IIRC Furcadia actually does this to an extent; there is a main Furcadia instance that everyone can access, but part of the fun is the user-created "Dreams", which are hosted on users' computers. But if you look at my examples there are many ways to fund these kinds of things. A number of MU*'s are funded either through donations or are simply run out of the maintainer's generosity, while others are funded through the sale of special in-game features. With a few notable exceptions, the ones funded via mandatory subscriptions seem to die the fastest.
I haven't completely finished this yet, but so far at the 1hr marker it is very much up to the high standard I've come to expect from Dan. So far he's hit on a bunch of points that I've been...
I haven't completely finished this yet, but so far at the 1hr marker it is very much up to the high standard I've come to expect from Dan. So far he's hit on a bunch of points that I've been trying to articulate over the last few years as the metaverse hype machine continues to try and Make Fetch a Thing.
I mean that was very well researched and kind of cathartic, but it’s just …. a lot of watch time to just say it’s all a marketing scam, with people falling for it, and corporations feeling FOMO...
I mean that was very well researched and kind of cathartic, but it’s just …. a lot of watch time to just say it’s all a marketing scam, with people falling for it, and corporations feeling FOMO giving it legitimacy.
I feel like he himself kind of realised that this video is a mistake: he says there’s no such thing as bad publicity for them; he says that giving them any attention is a bad idea because they crave it… and makes a 2 hour video about it.
I just finished it - only because I like having stuff on in the background while cross stitching - and I could not agree with you more. This could have been a 5 minute video. He spent 2 hours...
I just finished it - only because I like having stuff on in the background while cross stitching - and I could not agree with you more. This could have been a 5 minute video. He spent 2 hours reiterating the same exact point about a hundred times. Has to be the most boring video essay I've ever seen
It's a problem in a lot of video essays, especially since YouTube changed the algorithm to favor watch time. It makes them feel kind of empty. It's one of the reasons I never got into Breadtube as...
It's a problem in a lot of video essays, especially since YouTube changed the algorithm to favor watch time. It makes them feel kind of empty. It's one of the reasons I never got into Breadtube as a whole.
Books are : Ready Player One - Earnest Cline (2011) Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (1992) Neuromancer - William Gibson (1984) The Lawnmower Man Virtual Reality Role Playing Game - Leading Edge Games...
Books are :
Ready Player One - Earnest Cline (2011)
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (1992)
Neuromancer - William Gibson (1984)
The Lawnmower Man Virtual Reality Role Playing Game - Leading Edge Games (1993)
I've read all but the last one (didn't know it existed until now). Ready Player One is a transparent nostalgia cash-in, and is entertaining but ultimately vapid. Snow Crash and Neuromancer are much higher quality works, and I recommend both of them.
Stephenson specifically is really good at what he does. His speculative technologies are actually fairly believable for them time in which they were written and he's been prescient on multiple...
Stephenson specifically is really good at what he does. His speculative technologies are actually fairly believable for them time in which they were written and he's been prescient on multiple occasions (he also predicted cryptocurrencies among others). I just hope he's wrong about all the catastrophes! I'm not too crazy about:
Digital brain viruses (as mentioned in the video)
The Earth being sterilized by the falling pieces of a shattered Moon
Educated people being imprisoned in monasteries
Geoengineering by wealthy countries destroying all the poorer countries
The world being ruled by corporate fiefdoms
Governments being taken over by time travelling witches.. OK that one might be a little less rooted in reality.
Referring to Anathem ? This might be my favorite one of his actually. I inadvertently made it way harder on myself because I read the entire thing without realizing there was a glossary in the...
Educated people being imprisoned in monasteries
Referring to Anathem ? This might be my favorite one of his actually. I inadvertently made it way harder on myself because I read the entire thing without realizing there was a glossary in the back to define all the unique in-world terminology! It was fun to gradually infer meaning from context though.
I can't believe neuromancer is so old. The Lawnmower Man was awesome for its day. I have to say, it's VR world still looks more appealing to me than anything I can actually use today.
I can't believe neuromancer is so old.
The Lawnmower Man was awesome for its day. I have to say, it's VR world still looks more appealing to me than anything I can actually use today.
It aged incredibly well. Most media from the 80s really feels like it came from there. Neuromancer is so unique, I felt like it could have been written today. And as has been said elsewhere it's...
I can't believe neuromancer is so old.
It aged incredibly well. Most media from the 80s really feels like it came from there. Neuromancer is so unique, I felt like it could have been written today. And as has been said elsewhere it's if anything more familiar as we've lifted terms from it and made them real. (Maybe I just need to read more books from the time...)
Still early in the video, but he makes a claim that feels a little outdated or poorly researched to me - or at least it shouldn't have been presented in such absolute terms: That people ('s inner ears) can't tolerate moving without moving. This is an issue that affects only a small subset of humans, especially after a few weeks of cautious acclimation. It's much like being on a ship on the high seas. A lot of people have no physical barrier preventing them from enjoying fully immersive VR.
EDIT: Is Lindt bad in the USA?
EDIT2: Half an hour in: Yeah, this is just SecondLife isn't it? It's 20 year old tech. With crypto grafted onto it I imagine.
EDIT3: Oboy, I think I have a bunch of things to say about this. I'll write a longer response later.
Back when I was a kid, I was entranced by ActiveWorlds. Launched in 1995, it was the very first fully 3D online virtual world. It was directly inspired by Snow Crash and allowed people to create content and socialize. It was slow and it was janky, but it was definitely magical, the way in which you could move your low poly avatar in the same world as other people, wave at them and see everyone's text chat floating above their heads. Worlds were not unlimited in size, but anyone could use built-in tools to create their homes out of thousands of provided models and textures anywhere vacant on the massive (think a thousand square kilometres) public instances. The worst SDK I've ever used allowed for the creation of "bot" connections that implemented all kinds of high level mechanics (not unlike Discord's current system).
But a few years later the company's management style changed. Suddenly land was scarce; Users were encouraged to spend mind boggling amounts of money on yearly "licenses" for connecting tiny (self-hosted!) worlds to the AW universe. The price of "citizenships" (user accounts) skyrocketed. A vast "dead mall" popped up, listed at the very top of the sidebar, claiming corporate participation, promising virtual storefronts. The software was aggressively marketed to other organizations for even more ridiculous licensing values, even as investment in new features began to lag. Cue the mass exodus of users to other platforms.
See where I'm going with this?
Everything about ActiveWorlds, this nearly 30 year old product, functioned better than what I've seen of Decentraland in this video; it was roomier, less laggy, you didn't necessarily have to share a "grid" with other users, you could jump from day one (I think). You didn't fall through the stairs. But the same kind of greedy, unimaginative, short-sighted decision makers trying to promote Decentraland's "metaverse" narrative are nothing new. They've been with us the whole time, peddling their bullshit wherever they can get away with it.
But I don't think that means there is no value in spatially aware online socialization. Tens of thousands of people engaged with ActiveWorlds in its early years. They worked together on 3D projects. Had conversations. They made friends, some even got married to each other! They played games. I played a lot of chess in there. It was fun! There were also janky, but fully functioning RPGs. I helped make them!
That feeling of a virtual "social frontier" that you can visit over the internet has never gone away. It has simply moved around, keeping ahead of the snake oil salespeople. Currently it resides, I think, in VRChat.
At the time you're reading this there are this many people concurrently online in VRChat. Depending on the time of day and the day of week you might be seeing 30 thousand, 60 thousand, maybe more, it really depends. The value fluctuates. More after christmas and during holidays. Less when there's no global pandemic! Most users aren't online every day. Many are strictly transient. Not all are in a VR headset. But the scale feels familiar, as does the community. You can go to play chess too, or pool. You can fly an airplane. You can solve an escape room, discuss philosophy, watch a video together. You can explore a city or a jungle, dance, drink. You can fall asleep hugging someone else's avatar. Some people spend whole days (and nights) in there.
Is this healthy or desirable? I don't know, but I'm not going to judge them. A lot of people who feel unwelcome in other spaces find companionship and acceptance here, of a much more immersive type than they otherwise could, thanks to the sometimes janky, sometimes silly, but otherwise fairly realistic spatial interactions. Many of these people would never be able to have these experiences elsewhere. Maybe they're stuck living somewhere they can't be themselves, due to their gender or sexuality or appearance. Sometimes they are disabled. Sometimes they are neurodivergent. Sometimes they're far away from everyone else. Sometimes they're just profoundly lonely.
(An aside here to mention that there is definitely a boisterous minority of really terrible people - sometimes dangerously so - in any open online commmunity, including this one. The same care should be taken to protect your privacy and that of your loved ones as you would have anywhere else.)
Where I'm getting with this, though, is that there's value in the concept of a Metaverse (NB: Wherever I use this word I will be referring to the general concept, not a Facebook brand). I'm not talking about monetary value. I'm saying a well implemented Metaverse is a positive thing in the lives of a lot of people.
Both ActiveWorlds and VRChat alike - and other social applications that exist or have previously existed in the same space - interface with the greater internet. They use external links to display data, and they load images and videos from the outside. This is fine. A Metaverse should not be fully encapsulated by a software product. There should be no circle around it.
But when I look at how VRChat Inc., the company running VRChat, behaves, I see the red flags and the warning signs. In 2021 they promised a (currently delayed) "creator economy" integration: Built in monetization for content, which is expected to encourage users to gate worlds and avatars behind paid subscriptions. Less than a year ago they have moved to squash modding, despite massive outcry. They also remove users at their own discretion. People creating open source servers were chased away by lawyers. New features are starting to appear that are gated behind the client's own paid subscriptions, others are artificially scarce. Is VRChat the Metaverse? Yes and no. It's "a" Metaverse, for sure, but ultimately I fear it will go down the way of the ActiveWorlds, or the way of the Decentraland, likely because it's run by the same type of asshole.
Sorry if I'm being too unkind. I'm sure there are many decent, competent, rational people working for VRChat. I'm also fairly certain they aren't the ones calling the shots. And while I understand every single one of these products was ultimately devised to make money for its investors, it's still a little depressing to see this story play out yet again, because there is value in the existence of a Metaverse.
It's unfortunate Decentraland (which I knew nothing about) is a whole heap of nonsense, because I don't think a Metaverse will ever live up to its true potential while a single company is calling the shots, no matter which one. A Metaverse has to be, as much as possible, distributed, federated, a Mastodon, a Matrix. I understand the governance issues mocked in the video. I don't think Decentraland's model is any good; I don't think blockchain tokens should be involved at all. I wouldn't mind a Metaverse run by a more traditional consortium, though. Open technologies, international standards. Even governmental participation. What do you think?
I actually saw a video about ActiveWorlds before, which people might like -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md1fFTymGYI I was also instantly reminded of it when seeing decentraland in this video
The thing about the metaverse that I find almost funny is how many times people have attempted to create it and how all of them have failed. ActiveWorlds is a good example, but I think the most successful example of all time is probably Linden Labs' Second Life. They were at one time actually attempting to get it working with VR and there may still be a forked client with that function available.
There are many reasons why these metaverses all disappear, but the primary one is rather simple; someone needs to pay to maintain it, and that usually means that the people running things needs to find ways to monetize it, which almost always cause barriers that prevent people from wanting to use it. Second Life is one of the better examples since you don't need to pay anything to visit, but if you want to keep a home up in there you're going to need to spend money to keep the land. But if you don't have land you might not have enough to keep invested in it's world.
I think perhaps one of the greatest problems with the concept of a metaverse is the written or unwritten requirement for it to be in 3D. 3D graphics have been in constant flux as we have done more and more to make things look photorealistic; that means that even if you do make a working metaverse, it's only a matter of time before the next big leap happens and your metaverse looks ancient. Second Life was designed to be "future proof" by making it's geometry largely based on primitive shapes so that it can scale up as hardware got more powerful, but if you look at screenshots taken today it still looks like a game from the turn of the century; why go to that metaverse if there are much nicer metaverses to go visit?
On the other hand, if you strip back the definition of metaverse to exclude any particular graphics needs, there are plenty of examples that have been running for decades. Early MUDs and MMORPGs still run because there are people who love the worlds, who have likely spent time building parts of them, and the technology behind them are much simpler, easier to maintain, and require much less resources to keep running. Of all of them, I'm probably the most impressed by Furcadia; while it is centrally owned and maintained, it really is built around the community of it's users and I expect that it will outlast attempts like Horizon Worlds or VRChat.
Second Life made the same mistakes as Decentraland though. From the very beginning it had a built in currency that was tradeable for real dollars. It forced everything into a common grid (single world), which made it a gigantic, difficult to traverse mess of different access and use permissions. It quickly devolved (at the time) into a weird distributed casino, whose residents were only interested in grifting visitors. I don't think Second Life was ever a very good Metaverse.
I believe the solution really is to allow different systems to federate. Participants should be able to fully self host their piece of the Metaverse - paying for it in whichever way they want. The people running things have this incentive only because they refuse to run an open system that allows people to find their own funding sources (or when they cave, the momentum is long gone).
In all of these metaverses the content is always provided by the community of devoted users. The VRChats of the world (if not owned by a bunch of investment funds with different ideas) should only have had to fund the development of the software itself, which I do believe would not necessarily require turning the whole thing into the inevitable giant mall.
Having a currency is not a metaverse killer, though; virtually every MMORPG effectively has the same thing since they can't stop third-party markets for their digital goods; the main difference is that SL's currency explicitly gives a cut to the maintainers. It was also reasonably popular, at least for a few years; it went way further than Decentraland ever did and I would think that at it's best it was probably bigger than VRChat has ever been. And personally speaking, I never saw a Casino when I played with it. That being said, there were plenty of user-created stores selling their custom-made virtual items and signs asking you to donate to the people who designed the land.
Federation is a pretty good thing, and IIRC Furcadia actually does this to an extent; there is a main Furcadia instance that everyone can access, but part of the fun is the user-created "Dreams", which are hosted on users' computers. But if you look at my examples there are many ways to fund these kinds of things. A number of MU*'s are funded either through donations or are simply run out of the maintainer's generosity, while others are funded through the sale of special in-game features. With a few notable exceptions, the ones funded via mandatory subscriptions seem to die the fastest.
I haven't completely finished this yet, but so far at the 1hr marker it is very much up to the high standard I've come to expect from Dan. So far he's hit on a bunch of points that I've been trying to articulate over the last few years as the metaverse hype machine continues to try and Make Fetch a Thing.
I mean that was very well researched and kind of cathartic, but it’s just …. a lot of watch time to just say it’s all a marketing scam, with people falling for it, and corporations feeling FOMO giving it legitimacy.
I feel like he himself kind of realised that this video is a mistake: he says there’s no such thing as bad publicity for them; he says that giving them any attention is a bad idea because they crave it… and makes a 2 hour video about it.
I just finished it - only because I like having stuff on in the background while cross stitching - and I could not agree with you more. This could have been a 5 minute video. He spent 2 hours reiterating the same exact point about a hundred times. Has to be the most boring video essay I've ever seen
It was very fun, but not very "smart", I'd say. Great way to waste 2 hours. Mostly just laughing at a trainwreck, while also somehow enabling it...
It's a problem in a lot of video essays, especially since YouTube changed the algorithm to favor watch time. It makes them feel kind of empty. It's one of the reasons I never got into Breadtube as a whole.
I can't see the titles to the bottom two books on his table, anyone recognize them?
Books are :
I've read all but the last one (didn't know it existed until now). Ready Player One is a transparent nostalgia cash-in, and is entertaining but ultimately vapid. Snow Crash and Neuromancer are much higher quality works, and I recommend both of them.
Stephenson specifically is really good at what he does. His speculative technologies are actually fairly believable for them time in which they were written and he's been prescient on multiple occasions (he also predicted cryptocurrencies among others). I just hope he's wrong about all the catastrophes! I'm not too crazy about:
Referring to Anathem ? This might be my favorite one of his actually. I inadvertently made it way harder on myself because I read the entire thing without realizing there was a glossary in the back to define all the unique in-world terminology! It was fun to gradually infer meaning from context though.
It's my favorite for sure. Seveneves a close second.
I can't believe neuromancer is so old.
The Lawnmower Man was awesome for its day. I have to say, it's VR world still looks more appealing to me than anything I can actually use today.
There was a pretty decent adventure game based on it for the 8-bit computers of the day. That dates it pretty quick.
It aged incredibly well. Most media from the 80s really feels like it came from there. Neuromancer is so unique, I felt like it could have been written today. And as has been said elsewhere it's if anything more familiar as we've lifted terms from it and made them real. (Maybe I just need to read more books from the time...)