I finally got around to getting HDTV this week. Ironic, because I don’t watch TV any more. But others do here. It was free; just a swap of the cable box for a newer one. The tangible object of the cable box being a mere detail; an an annoyingly necessary afterthought almost.

Consider television… I pay for it, it’s a cable subscription now, when such a thing would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. Pay for television? Isn’t that what commercials are for?

This same week, I got slapped with a commercial on YouTube.

A plague a’ both your houses!

* * * * *

It’s not the progression or stagnation of technology that causes our metaversal ennui. That’s still chugging away.

It’s the progression of culture.

We are no longer the starry eyed freshmen moving into the dorms for the first time, piling into somebody’s car for a fast food run at midnight and wandering the tunnels under the campus singing loudly, just because we can.

Instead, we are the ones trying to sleep at night, the ones who are now annoyed at all the racket. The ones who no longer slip through windows for romance but rather drive their love to the grocery store, the mall, and the auto repair shop.

We’ve figured out that all the intriguing, mysterious figures behind their peacock~feathered metaversal masks are, in fact, just a few people that we might have just as well met over the vegetables at the produce store.

But there’s the crux of it.

There *is* a wonder hidden in the ordinary; there are twinkles in the eye, there are people with magic and distant worlds within them, even as they linger over the yams.

There are books, and songs, and movies, and yes ~ entire metaverses still to be discovered.

I do this too. I get to where I want no interaction with other humans and I don’t even really want to live anymore. It starts before the flu/cold/whatever hits, and it’s always a relief that that’s all it is, and I haven’t finally lost it for good.

And I agree on the confluence thing. AR and VW’s will converge, the Intel “chip in a brain” controller, and the Kapor “drunken stagger” controller will converge at some point.

I’m not really all that eager to do the chip on the brain stuff, and it does worry me about what kind of bizarre world my daughter will be living in. It’s stuff right out of Beautiful Red, among others. At some point, serious questions about what humanity is and should be will have to be answered, and I’m of the pessimistic opinion that the “we’ll do it because we can” crowd is always going to win. They already are.

As far as SL goes, it just seems to me like a huge change or shakeup would be great. Everyone in SL seems to be afraid and angry of any possible changes, because they are so invested in their own cartoon life and remaining as anonymous as possible so they can continue doing whatever it is they don’t want anyone knowing about that barely anyone is looking at the bigger picture of what a metaverse is or should be. They just know they want adult animations and for LL to leave them alone. It’s kind of depressing sometimes, frankly. In the real world, it’s easy to manipulate people by making them focus on making a daily living, in the virtual world, it’s easy to manipulate people by making them focus on the minutia of a fantasy life based on RL behavior. Either way, the outcome is the same.

Surrogates – OK, really…there’s a movie that REALLY irritates me. Seriously – if you could control a surrogate, a beautiful computerized recreation of an ideal self…why the hell would you go to work where you’d slave away on a COMPUTER?

In this surrogate future haven’t they come up with something better than a PC terminal?

And haven’t they solved the problem of prim hair? No flexi sculpts? Bruce Willis has hair that looks like, well, like YOUR hair now that I think about it. Freaky.

And yes on cycles – what’s a ‘cycle’? I can’t keep up with the ones they have, they seem to pass through every day. So I’m with Cube on this one.

The machine finds this A OK. How bout you?

Linden would choose a blog that one doesn’t need the assistance of two adults, a dictionary, and a clean sober mind to catch in less than three reads were they using a mouthpeace. This is simply someone guarding their mess card lest they miss chow.

It makes one pine for the formalistic Soviet Pact are behind this all blog style written closer to eighth grade level.

Having hijacked this I might as well go on and suggest everyone see “Surrogates”. It made me think of Second Life in 10 – 20 years so much.