This was in Altspace VR which unfortunately got axed by Microsoft IIRC, but on there you kinda looked like a less shitty version of one of those Nintendo avatars customized however you wanted.

The craziest anybody looked on there would be to have like rainbow or blue hair or something along those lines. It was pretty tame compared to like the furry anime cat sex doll looking things some people run around in VR Chat with. It also wasn’t overrun with screaming children which I think is VR Chat’s biggest overall problem.

Anyway, that support group thing I think has since moved to another platform, I forget which.

There were no insane avatars, everyone looked pretty normal. Sorry to burst your bubble.

I’ll be honest I think their watch and AirPods both look kinda dumb, but they seem to be quite popular. And I distinctly remember that when both came out people were taking shots at how they looked, myself included.

And IIRC those are all PCVR sets and not standalone.

Some people call VR dystopian, but it’s got great potential too.

During COVID while I was living alone and we were under lockdown…

I used a Quest to watch movies in a virtual theater with a bunch of people from around the world. I remember being in a theater watching an absolutely ridiculous Nicolas Cage movie laughing my ass off with a bunch of dudes from Australia. Another time I watched a cricket game with some people who explained the rules to me and kinda gave me some play by play on what was happening.

I’ve also attended a few support group meetings in VR for coping with loss that had quite a lot of attendants. The meeting was run by a licensed group therapist and we took turns sharing and then reflecting on each others stories. It was frankly amazing.

I also played mini golf with friends of mine as well as had a couple meetings over a round of mini golf with the other guy on my design team during lockdown. Honestly the best virtual meetings I ever had.

All of the above were very social and very positive experience. I didn’t feel far away from people, I felt connected to them.

Same way a smartphone can be a useful tool that enhances your life or a screen you stare at for hours consuming bullshit TikTok videos. You’re in control of what you make of it. You can also stick to a dumb phone and not participate at all.

lol same

I got into scratch/trash building and kit bash modeling crazy mechs and stuff last year and it’s been a blast.

To each their own. I don’t care for the bulk of RAID setups or the transfer and seek time of individual spinning disks.

Lol my regional instance has some interesting upcoming events…

https://i.imgur.com/71tZ7fL.png

Samsung is selling some somewhat affordable 8TB drives but I feel like that’s kind of an odd spot for size where it’ll hold a lot of stuff, but when you get to that level of kinda semi-deranged collector mentality file hoarding, you’re gonna blow past 8 pretty easily. I’m hoping it’ll actually happen in a few years.

I have not seen a consumer SSD of 10 or more TB for sale anywhere and absolutely not 20. So the answer is, I have no idea.

Samsung has started selling 8TB drives for around 500-600 which is really not that bad, but I’m just gonna wait a couple years for larger capacities to hit the market and skip 8. It’s in my opinion kind of a middling size if you’re archiving a lot of video.

For now I’ll just stick with the high capacity HDD setup I’m using.

You can’t really even find a 10+ TB SSD easily right now let alone anything approaching 20, so it’s a moot point for now anyway. All that pricing stuff is cyclical though. There was a big spike in SSD prices a couple years ago prior to that huge price drop we just saw. It’ll come back down again eventually.

We just moved over to a HDD setup recently because I had run out of space on SSD and the amount of space is great, but I forgot how much I hate HDD seek and transfer times and I’m not gonna invest in RAID for now so I guess this is my life.

Might be smart to maybe keep my most active shows on an SSD and the rest of the catalog on the HDD.

Honestly my biggest thing is for affordable 10 or even 20 TB SSDs to hit the market.

It sounds annoying as fuck. I hate when my friends send audio messages in messaging apps.

Funny thing is that the mainstream threads audience would probably do more harm to the mastodon ecosystem by orders of magnitude.

There is a big cultural disconnect. I’m active in both and they are very different communities by and large.

Absolutely spot on teardown of this joke article.

Definitely sucks trying to find good content in other languages. I’m a native english speaker, but live in the EU now and I’d like to watch more content in the local language to help with my learning. It’s just difficult to come by.

Yep I remember this pattern of behavior distinctly from last time.

One of the big ones that sticks out is you start seeing a lot of people claiming to be democrats or left aligned showing up all of a sudden and being big time concern trolls and talking about sitting out the election and/or claiming that there’s no difference between voting democrat or republican, which is demonstrably absolute horse shit.

And just a lot of added vitriol. It seems like even politically unrelated discussions get meaner and more argumentative. I expect it’s just gonna get worse as we get closer to November. It’s only the beginning February. Ugh.

Yeah I’ve encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.

Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???

Meh. I’ve already moved on.