Dion Starfire

Funny thing is, a real life Metaverse has existed for over 20 years. The term Metaverse comes from a book called Snow Crash. The game Second Life was designed explicitly to be the Metaverse envisioned in Snow Crash, complete with it’s own economy tied to real life money (as in, if you made enough money in-game, you could cash it out for real-world USD). Companies used to build headquarters in the game world similar to how some do in Fortnite now, even going so far as to hold actual real world business meetings in-game as a form of teleconferencing. After a few high-profile events where live TV broadcasts of in-game events got swarmed by flying dicks, the media lost interest in the game, and companies abandoned the game and moved on to more business-oriented solutions.

I know several people in the kink community who would congratulate and be enthusiastically happy for someone who said the first, but would only politely say “congrats” to the second.

I saw one of these at Target the other day in the $5-and-below section. Except it wasn’t a full phone, it was a nostalgia grab designed to be a wired “headset” for a cell phone with a headphone jack.

This is clearly humor, but for anyone wondering what the actual connection is, it’s that Mark Shuttleworth, the billionaire founder and CEO of Canonical (the company that maintains Ubuntu), is from South Africa. He liked the word, and decided to name his new Debian fork after it.

I was thinking something similar. I use Arch because it’s easy and user friendly for me. I also come from a history of using Slackware in the mid-90s, to Gentoo in the mid-00s, to Arch in the mid-teens. So whenever anyone asks how I got to where I am with Linux, I generally recommend that they don’t follow the same path of pain, and start on something that’s actually user-friendly like Mint or Ubuntu.