busybee fluffy rambles

Back in the day, independent social media enthusiasts were building their own social spaces on RSS/Atom and self-hosted publishing. There was a huge ecosystem of feed readers and publishing software, where anyone could use their own choice of tools to interact with the space, and it was super cool.

Then Google got into it and made Google Reader, which was a really good feed reader, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable and wanted to shove everyone over to Google+, so they shut Google Reader down, and then the tech press breathlessly claimed that RSS was now dead as a result, and because RSS was (in their eyes) dead, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowadays, RSS is seen as an obsolete thing only used by diehards, and corporate social media has become the norm, with a relatively tiny faction of people settling on ActivityPub instead, despite it being a poor match for the kinds of things that people used RSS for.

Amazingly enough, Valve have finally at least made an announcement breaking the “curse of three,” and their third¹ VR headset is actually materializing soon™.

Anyway. Aside from the lack of pricing I’m super optimistic about the Steam Frame. It doesn’t yet hit quite all the marks for me but it’s super close and actually does a lot of stuff that I’d been wanting to see in a headset.

One of the main things I do in VRChat is live performances, mostly doing guitar and vocals. One spot where this has been lacking is that I don’t have a satisfying way of tracking my hands while I play guitar, though. Here’s some things I’ve tried and things I’ve yet to try. At some point I’ll make a YouTube video about these different things.

Hello! It has been a hot minute! I should probably post things here!

Furality is the largest virtual furry convention, which takes place annually in VRChat. This past year (Umbra) was also the most highly-attended furry convention of any kind ever, with a whopping 21,000 attendees!

I’m just a nobody when it comes to furry stuff, especially cons, but I figured I’d share some of my observations, good and bad, especially in comparison to the other two Furality events I attended (Luma Festival and Sylva).

Time to let people know I’m still alive, somewhere other than Mastodon and occasional Tumblr/Cohost.

My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.

Today my SlimeVR trackers finally arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. I bought the 7+3 kit. I’ve got them set up pretty well, I think. Here’s some observations.

Just a few random updates about the stuff going on right now.