"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!'"

I'm reading "Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland" by Paul Murray (NY Magazine).

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....