i have really struggled to churn this out. i've had this floating in my drafts for like a week, during which i've had a crack at the first segment like five times and none of it starts out good. i usually began it by saying i don't know what to say because i eventually get to actually saying something if i force myself to shit out a whole lot of nothing, but recently, this hasn't gotten me very far. i believe in discipline over inspiration, but i haven't really been living up to that. whatever, really. i'll just keep trying. i know now that i absolutely have to. i will spit until i learn how to speak.
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i playedVRChat today. it bothered me for whatever reason, or maybe i was just bothered to begin with, i can't tell. i've heard so much about it. M-- put it best when he said it reminded him of the early Internet, akin to the Something Awfuls and Futabas of the dot-com bubble: perhaps intended to be anarchic, but horribly libertine in practice - a digital Woodstock '69. my friends have told me many stories about how weird it gets, how it quickly descends into fetish play involving teeth and apples, how it serves as an island of misfit toys for many the overclocked and techno-isolated, one which is rising out from our ocean of computational spontaneous order into a land bridge for the rest of us, soon to make misfits and toys of us all. it goes without saying that this is the kind of thing i want to get to the very bottom of.
when i jacked in today, i planned on going easy. i know i'll have to do some digging to get into any sort of underworld, so i'm taking it easy. you have to go through one of the Earth's poles to get to the kingdom of Agartha, so all i can do now is make my way north or south, metaphorically speaking. i didn't read up on anything before going in, i just went straight for it. i learned the controls by fooling around and going about on impulse. i threw shit at the walls and waited for something to stick. i felt that was the best plan of attack, meeting entropy with entropy, as this whole thing was really just about random bullshit.
obviously, i hit up the furry worlds first. on paper, it seems like a surefire way to catch some weird ass shit, but i didn't find much of note. all i got to watch were a couple of kids hanging out, which was kind of cool in its own right. it reminded me of walking in on a group drinking at the lake, but surprisingly less annoying. they wouldn't talk to you unless you talked to them first, and wouldn't give you much by way of something to say beyond whatever your question absolutely necessarily allowed for. they weren't assholes about it though. they weren't even really standoffish, either. they were just very non-confrontational (or my mic wasn't loud enough). they mostly talked about how all the furry worlds they've been on over the past night had "crashers" used in them (which i took as being some tool that crashed the game, though i wasn't sure and i never asked), meaning there were possible raids going on against them. M-- chimed in, not caring at all how the others felt(1), saying "that sounds so fucking funny". i doubt anyone heard him though. nobody said anything about it. i quickly lost interest, so i left the circle and a Titan from Attack on Titan appeared over me and i pretended that it farted on me. not long later, somebody used one of those crashers and crashed the game. i then took the headset off and had a glass of water, feeling drunk.
this didn't happen until i had been in VR for a couple of hours and i decided to call it quits, but being out of it felt strange. it was more than just being tired and hot. after a while, it almost felt like derealization (or at least how i imagine it to be, not being entirely sure if i've ever actually felt it before). i think my brain almost got used to interacting with an environment with virtual hands and maybe on some primal level accepted it as reality, so when i finally got to move my real-life hands in the same way i got to move my Zaz(2) hands, i felt they were unreal like there was a splinter in my mind murmuring that the world is flat and hollow. it only lasted for a couple of seconds in between ten minutes of looking at the walls of the basement, and really only whenever i looked at another screen, but it unnerved me nonetheless.
