This is a rug company called Nordic Knots. How did no one gently stop them before they bought this url? https://nordicknots.com/us/
(I'm declaring this on-topic.)
That's just the best url since penisland.
Does "hand-knotted wool" still mean "child slave labor"?
In general, or in the metaverse?
4: I was about to make a snarky joke, but then I remembered my vow to change since LB called me lazy and cynical. I clicked a few links and found this
Goodweave™ Certified.
Nordic Knots is a proud partner of GoodWeave™, ensuring our rugs are made by adult artisans, not children. GoodWeave™ is ending child labor and offering educational opportunities to children in carpet weaving communities around the world.
Learn more at GoodWeave.org
I guess that would explain the price.
Be sure to use goodweave.org, not .com, which is a wig store.
I never did get into online things except here. Second Life had no appeal. I tried playing a MMORPG and was bored. Facebook annoys me because it's both evil and necessary if I want to keep up with people.
I thought the article was good but veered off a bit far into the psychologizing around the "a child's idea of utopia" and CS Lewis part. I think it's a leap from "wishing your friends wouldn't leave" to "wanting continual control over them".
It might be a leap, but it sure does sound like what we know of Zuckerberg.
You want a ring of power to dominate your friends.
Meta's vision of the future is a world where you are forced to go, but never come.
Heh.
Hotel California without the Californication.
Can someone explain how the "Metaverse" is different from other online RPGs? It just seems to me like a particularly lame RPG.
But then, I've never played an RPG, so this is all highly theoretical for me.
Elke helplessly trying to remember LOTR the other day: "Ringstone? Ringleader? Game of Rings? Ringmaster?"
On topic: this might be parody, because what are the odds?
As I've mentioned, I play lots of World of Warcraft. Back in 2014 the new expansion included a quest early on which could basically be used to draw on the ground. Drawing dicks were very, very, very common. Before then it would be very hard to do something like that. Character models have underwear built in. Third-party ways to edit your character were sometimes used for sex stuff, but apparently just as often to get an unfair advantage in the game, and can always get you banned. Sexual roleplay exists but I have a hard time believing anyone takes it seriously with gnomes and bull-people. I suppose in all the multifaceted forms eroticism can take, I guess there must be some people for whom eroticism only takes that form. Even so, it always seems more like this.
Of course when the author started on "has no sharp edges, no dark places, no erotic frisson... soft and Pixar-like, with big, childlike heads..." my mind immediately went to Miis, which that could also describe. But then they covered their bases with "Everything is nauseatingly cute and childlike, and yet it's not meant for children." The Wii is of course pretty relentlessly designed to be child-friendly.
I'm surprised the article didn't call out the Black Mirror episode about a virtual reality ruled by an omnipotent tyrant, one of the queasiest features of which was mandatory sexlessness.
Wii was great. The Xbox is either updating or asking for a password.
I liked the article a lot. It articulates something that's been vaguely bothering me about all this "metaverse" stuff.
Plagiarizing myself from Twitter, the Metaverse in Snow Crash was a highly corporate virtual space that (readers observed) seemed to serve very little practical purpose. Now we know why!
It all just seems so pointless. They're spending billions of dollars to create a virtual world where people can go to work and sit in conference rooms? Everyone has an avatar that just looks like themselves and they use their real names? Isn't this just the world we already live in? The way Gold takes Zuckerberg's stated childhood dream and draws out the implications of needing control makes it click in a way it didn't before. It's still an obviously terrible idea doomed to failure, but at least I think I get why he's doing it.
I wonder what the TTP was for unfogged.
About three years, I think? At least if we're talking about literally sending dick pics.
1: I've still not recovered from learning that a German industrial robotics manufacturer, SICK AG, has the domain name....SICK.COM. seriously that's probably worth more than the company. it's full of robots in fluorescent safety yellow with the SICK logo on them. I am seriously thinking about trying to find a reason to interview them or go to their customer convention, because I'd really like a big fluoro SICK sticker for my laptop.
30 I used to read that but it wasn't as good as Cracked or Mad
Everyone has an avatar that just looks like themselves and they use their real names? Isn't this just the world we already live in?
A Platonist, I see.
It all just seems so pointless. They're spending billions of dollars to create a virtual world where people can go to work and sit in conference rooms?
Virtual reality seemed fun when it meant we could all be cyberpunk badasses with katanas and pink mohawks and stuff. But it turns out that there's more money in using it for videoconferences (maybe that wasn't always inevitable, but covid makes it look that way at the moment), so that's where the development effort is going, I guess.
Five Guys just put my pickles and onions on my son's burger, leaving me with nothing but mustard. Bring on the virtual reality dystopia so I don't have to experience this disappointment again.
No pickles in the metaverse, for sure.
there's more money in using it for videoconferences
Is there any advantage to a virtual reality conference room over a plain-old videoconference? Maybe Zuckerberg can sell the wall space in the conference room to advertisers?
Five Guys just put my pickles and onions on my son's burger, leaving me with nothing but mustard.
That's what happens when you give a job to 5 guys, that ought to be done by a sponge.
Is there any advantage to a virtual reality conference room over a plain-old videoconference? Maybe Zuckerberg can sell the wall space in the conference room to advertisers?
Yeah, I'm unconvinced that this is actually a profitable business model. Who wants this? What's the demand?
More basically, what's the appeal? I think the OP article does a great job demonstrating how empty this vision is.
I think it is going to crash and burn, but it is sort of consistent with Facebook making its money from people more or less being forced to use them through network effects. They don't have to like it if it's Big and inescapable enough. (I don't think it will be though.)
Maybe they can do like Tik Tok and teach people how to steal cars.
Right, I think part of it is Zuckerberg looking at FB's history and assuming he can make the same thing work with this, which is both a total misreading of the history and completely consistent with what we know about him.
He has no clue how lucky he got with Facebook.
Here's my improved version of that passage.
W]hat Zuckerberg is trying to build is a child's idea of utopia, a world without internal boundaries, where his friends can't ever leave and go home, where you don't have your own space, where everyone has to stay around and play in his world, designed by his rules.
I never did get into online things except here.
Pikachu, I choose you.
Right, that too. But they had to reward me before I got friends.
Also, I'm only level 43, so I can't be very dedicated.
36
Is there any advantage to a virtual reality conference room over a plain-old videoconference? Maybe Zuckerberg can sell the wall space in the conference room to advertisers?
If the interface is smooth and user-friendly, if it's a one-stop-shop for videoconferencing instead of kludging together 5 different services, and if it has features to prevent all the "sorry, I was muted" stuff, I'd be fucking thrilled. Somehow I doubt it. The problem with talking to other people online is the other people.
Putting aside the no sex thing, the Zuckerbergian vision is that everyone should see our whole selves -- so your family and coworkers should know about your friends and your politics and your hobbies and so forth.
This is not appealing to me at all. I like being able to hide aspects of myself from my family and coworkers.
36 can't get your cock out and stroke it claiming you forgot you were on camera. That's all I can think of.
The problem is like half of people don't even have a penis.
55: But they almost certainly don't want to see the inadvertent penis, so it's in their interest too. Also they might pull out a dildo.
That was just an excuse to bring up my other favorite part of the article -- "teledildonics".
I think you have the theory backward.
56.2: Turns out that term first appeared in Unfogged in 2005 -- http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_08_28.html#003953
I am so out of the loop.
56.2: Turns out that term first appeared in Unfogged in 2005 -- http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_08_28.html#003953
I am so out of the loop.
||
Hey, was anyone a big fan of that "everyone makes at least $70K" tech CEO? He's a creep.
|>
I had seen maybe one followup on his company after he did that thing, but never realized he had become a public figure such as some people might have been fans of. But apparently he was prominent in Seattle particularly.
(Even after he was charged with misdemeanor sexual assault four months ago.)
62 is news to me. Thanks. I can't say I was ever a fan, but people on antiwork keep putting up his tweets.
In other labor related news that's also related to body functions, apparently an elephant can rip a person in half if the person makes them work when it's too hot.
"teledildonics"
Now there's a word I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
Not as clumsy or random as a blaster.