March 15, 2023

"Generally speaking, the best you can hope for in Horizon Worlds is the kind of aimless if well-intentioned chat you might get on a smoke break outside the work canteen."

"There’s usually a lot of talk about where people are from, of the 'I used to live in X, but now I live in Y' variety. That said, the unlovable lo-fi graphics and interpersonal randomness can give Horizon Worlds a kind of a perverse, bockety charm. Unlike Twitter or Instagram, there’s no scope to broadcast your brand here; everybody’s just thrown together, like at a ’90s music festival with no music. Plus the metaverse is the one place I don’t look at my phone every five seconds. There’s no option but to be present. I meet some nice people, particularly at A Very British Pub. BusinessAlum has bright-yellow, strawlike hair and speaks in a high, reedy voice, as if he’s just dropped in from Sesame Street. 'I used to live in Quincy! But the commute was so bad! And the snow! Ten feet of snow in a week! I fell and broke my back! Now I live in Florida!'"


Nice to run into that because I was just wondering if anyone was using Metaverse... and I was just trying — 2 posts down — to start a conversation about conversation.

Plus, I learned a new word: "bockety." This is an Irish English word. (Murray grew up in Dublin.) Used to refer to a person, "bockety" means able to walk only with difficulty. Of a thing, such as Horizon Worlds, "bockety" means rickety and ramshackle. I found these definitions in the OED, which points to the words use in this story by Sean O’Faolain, "The Sugawn Chair" (The Atlantic). 
[M]y father went up to the attic and brought down the old sugawn chair. I suppose he had had it sent up to him from his home farm. It was the only thing of its kind in our house, which they had filled in the usual peasant’s idea of what constitutes elegance, with plush chairs, gold-framed pictures of Stags at Bay and exotic tropical birds, pelmets on the mantelpieces, delft shepherdesses, Chinese mandarins with nodding heads, brass bedsteads with mighty knobs and mother-of-pearl escutcheons set with bits of mirror, vast mahogany chiffoniers, and so on. But the plush-bottomed chairs, with their turned legs and their stiff backs, were for show, not for comfort, whereas in the old country sugawn chair my da could tilt and squeak and rock to his behind’s content. 
It had been in the place for years, rockety, bockety, chipped, and well polished, and known simply as “your father’s chair” until the night when, as he was reading the Evening Echo with his legs up on the kitchen range, there was a sudden rending noise, and down he went through the seat of it. There he was then, bending over, with the chair stuck onto him, and my mother and myself in the splits of laughter, pulling it from him while he cursed like a trooper. This was the wreck that he now suddenly brought down from the dusty attic....

20 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

I've also just learned the word "sugawn." It refers to the kind of chair that has straw or twine woven for the seat.

Enigma said...

Horizon Worlds sounds like a narrow, impoverished version of Second Life (circa 2004 to 2008). In Second Life aka SL there were plenty of fantasy pubs, fantasy dancing, cartoon simulated sex, a bothersome vampire game where strangers would ask to suck your blood, old men using voice shifters to pretend to be young females, interactive role playing games "I'm a doctor not an engineer Jim!", and many artists with elaborate interactive 3D exhibitions.

IBM attempted to host virtual business meetings, and many corporations put in costly advertising locations. As a rule these all failed because business and...dirty...Las Vegas-style entertainment don't mix.

Before a big law enforcement purge, SL also had online gambling, banking, and Ponzi schemes. The number of active users shrank as the money evaporated.

So, a good 15 years ago lessons were learned. The metaverse works for gamers. Role players. Fantasy sex. Artists. A proven niche business and not much more yet.

Sean Gleeson said...

That was more words that I had to look up in a single post than I have had to do in years. Sugawn, chiffonier, pelmet... even delft, which I knew was a city, but had no idea was also a lowercase adjective.

Tofu King said...

Ann. I don't know how you decide when to go down these linguistic pathways but I always find it most entertaining.

Lurker21 said...

So it's the "Dead Mall" of the Internet? Give it time. It's early days still. With what the future has in store, we'll all be spending a lot of time in the Holodeck.

I think it would be cool if the Metaverse took us back to GeoCities and the lost "virtual neighborhoods" of the 1990s.

gilbar said...

so, facebook announced laid offs of Another 10,000 people (13% of existing force) this week..
This was After laying of 11,000 people (13% of the Then existing force) back in November..
Which brings it to: Nearly 25% layoffs (actually, about 24.3% laid off in the last quarter (since Nov)
This is THE DEFINITION of a successful company. And MOST of the credit goes to the Metaverse!!

Old and slow said...

The average Irishman has a MUCH larger vocabulary than your typical American or Englishman. That is certainly my experience, and I have read (but cannot now find the source) that the number of words in common use in Ireland is vastly larger than in England. I lived in Dublin for ten years and never heard the word bockety, or perhaps I did and it just went over my head. They have many unusual and entertaining turns of phrase as well. I was working a job in IT and my sidekick and I encountered a sour old woman of an office manager, my turned to me after she left and said "She has a face like a wet Wednesday on Achill"

Known Unknown said...

Just saw a TV spot for the Metaverse that actually shows its promise: Firefighters navigating a virtual blaze, a doctor examining a patient's knee without opening it up, and kids seeing wooly mammoths in a classroom setting. Not as some legless Second Life clone that's as boring as the real world.

Amexpat said...

I learned a new word: "bockety."

Me too. I looked it up before continuing the post. Though I could have guessed the meaning. The word sounds like its meaning.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Sillas de guano. They are popular in my native Dominican Republic.

Randomizer said...

I have a VR headset and plenty of time. Games like Beat Saber and Arizona Sunshine are engaging, but what would I want from Horizon Worlds? Second Life should be a good guide to what people want.

People don't want an online world just like this one, but with the option of being a starfish instead of a person. Mark Zuckerberg is living a fantasy life and wants the approval of the chattering class. He seems like the last guy to have any understanding of what most people would want in a virtual world.

tim maguire said...

"bockety" means rickety and ramshackle.

That's the definition I'm familiar with. When I hear it, I picture an old jalopy with a tendency to backfire. Onomatopoeia.

n.n said...

The Fifth Estate?

madAsHell said...

People walking around with ear buds, and staring at their phones.

Gilbert Pinfold said...

Look up "banjaxed", a great Irish term I use frequently. "Silicon Valley Bank is really banjaxed".

traditionalguy said...

Give me that old time Irish/Welch/Scottish language. It’s good enough for me. My subconscious mind thinks in that language. Romance languages are too hierarchical. The Professor is one of us. A damn good one too.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

“People walking around with ear buds, and staring at their phones.”

I can’t engage in chit chat, conversation starters, with most (UberLyft) passengers because of this.

I’m fine with it, except I’m more likely to go without a $ tip.

Bob said...

In addition to bockety and sugawn, I hadn't previously encountered "pelmet," either (which is related to valance, which I had heard before but couldn't define).

Bob said...

In addition to bockety and sugawn, I hadn't previously encountered "pelmet," either (which is related to valance, which I had heard before but couldn't define).

CapitalistRoader said...

In Frank McCourt Angela's Ashes: A Memoir (1996) Frankie pushes his little brother around in a baby carriage with a bockety wheel.