Make it look horrible

Kirn points out the cover of the latest Economist, which has returned to “Climate” Emergency as a brief break between “Virus” Emergencies. The cover is a stalk of wheat with skulls instead of grains. Horrible. (Kirn wasn’t really talking about the art itself, but some of his commenters brought out the connection.)

This crystallized a point that I hit several years ago but didn’t carry forward.

Deepstate’s goal, the goal of all psychopaths, is:

MAKE ALL NATURAL AND GOOD THINGS LOOK HORRIBLE.

MAKE ALL UNNATURAL AND HORRIBLE THINGS LOOK NECESSARY.

Deepstate works toward this goal in many ways. The oldest is false flag “terrorists”, making Islam and Christianity and non-belligerence look horrible.

The “virus” hoaxocaust opened all of life to this tradeoff. Work, school, conversation, sunlight, fresh air, exercise, sleeping, eating, and breathing now look horrible. Imprisonment and torture and needles now look necessary.

The elite courtiers started this tradeoff in art before Deepstate grabbed onto it. Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Atonal and Aleatoric Music, Installations, and everything else that pulls in money from rich fuckheads and museums. Ordinary people look at this grotesque brain-destroying toxin and incautiously think “Art is horrible.” Most of us are able to distinguish Modern Art from Real Art, but when ALL the advertised and fashionable stuff is horrible, the good stuff fades into the background.

Now NFTs are working the same territory from a different angle. NFTs are a different kind of horrible, aimed at a very new kind of rich fuckhead. The net result is the same. We’re told that NFT is Art, and our eyes tell us it’s horrible.

The Economist cover takes the association to a new level. Now we’re instructed to see wheat as poison instead of the Staff of Life. We’re instructed to eat bugs, which are intrinsically horrible.

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Sidenote: Arnade has an especially splendid essay on real art by real people.

Sidenote 2: The only halfway good part is that the NFT/DAO/Bitcoin bubble is collapsing after the central banks stopped pumping counterfeit “money” into it. It’s not going to be a permanent problem.

Metrology day 2022, AI version

Today is Metrology Day, but I’m trying to go for Entertainment and Enjoyment this year, so here’s a gathering of AI-generated nonsense from CookingFlavr.com.

Is A Meter Long?

A meter is a unit of length that is used to measure the distance between two points. The meter is also used as a unit of weight.

Is A Meter Longer Than A Yard?

A meter is about the length of a yard. A yard is about the size of a hand.

What Is Exactly A Meter Long?

A meter long is 1/1,000,000 of a meter.

How Long Is A Meter Visually?

A meter is a unit of measurement used to measure the size of a surface or body. Meters can be in any shape or size, but they are typically about the size of a human hand.

How Long Is A Meter How Long Is A Yard?

A meter is the distance between two points. A yard is the distance between two lines of equal length.

Is A Meter Shorter Than A Foot?

Are meters shorter than feet? It seems like they might be. Many meters are shorter than a foot, making it easier to move around. Plus, meters are often used in place of feet in measurements, like altitude or width.

What’s The Difference Between A Yard And A Meter?

A yard is a unit of measurement of linear distance, typically one hundred meters. A meter is a unit of measurement of time, typically one second.

What Percent Of A Yard Is A Meter?

A yard is a unit of measure in land use. It is equal to 1/12 of a kilometer.

How Do You Convert Yard Times To Meters?

There are many different ways to convert yard times to meters, but one common way is to use a metering device like a meter reader or a garden hose.

How Many Cm Are In A Meter Stick?

A meter stick is about 8.4 inches long and 1.1 inches wide.

Why Is A Second A Second?

A second is a unit of time equal to 1/6 of a day. It is used in English to represent the difference between a day and a week. For example, if someone says, “I’ll be in town for two days,” this means they will be in town for six days. [Precisely true.]

Did The Romans Have Hours And Minutes?

The Roman Empire was a huge and powerful empire that lasted for over two centuries. The empire was divided into two parts, the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire was more powerful than the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire was more powerful than the Western Roman Empire. [AI does Orwell.]

The Roman hours and minutes were created to help people stay on schedule. The hours were divided into ten days, and the minutes were divided into thirty minutes.

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I can’t figure out the PURPOSE. The format closely resembles Quora, especially the Indian questioners. But the answers on Quora were generally meant to be useful, not totally screwed up. If a student uses these answers on a test, he’s guaranteed to flunk. Maybe that’s the point? A bait trap for cheaters?

Some of this crap, not necessarily from CookingFlavr, shows up in Google searches along with real answers, not marked as AI-generated.

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For reference, here’s the first Metrology Day item in 2010, and here’s the deadly serious 2020 item. Nothing has changed or improved since then, I’m just trying to stay in Science As Entertainment mode.

The muddlers are worse than the cancellers 3

Following on earlier item…

The professional anti-cancel forces are at it again, turning a dubious case into a morality play.

Some cancels may be genuinely unjust. When an exec has been following the CURRENT rules all the time, and gets fired for failing to predict TODAY’S craziness 30 years in advance, it’s unjust. But as my father pointed out in the ’60s with Commie firings, there’s usually a personal reason hiding behind the official accusation. Univ president can’t officially fire a prof because he dislikes him, but can fire him for being a Commie.

In this case there’s no presentism at all and no need to read between the lines. Sabatini was running a cult-like lab this year knowing this year’s rules, with happy hours and whisky-tasting sessions leading to the predictable results. He was doing the Steve Jobs thing, just like Elizabeth Holmes, expecting 24-hour obedience on all levels.

The Holmes case should make us suspicious of this type even if we don’t know the full situation. Defending saints who turn out to be monsters is embarrassing. I’ve done it and I don’t like the aftertaste.

WPA spirit is still alive

Living in a Nazi state, I find it hard to imagine that any government can do anything constructive. Absolutely all state and city projects here are totally pointless and utterly destructive, even before the “virus” hoaxocaust.

It’s good to be reminded that the sane Dixie states are carrying on the FDR tradition. Enid is building a pipeline to draw water from Kaw Lake, east of Ponca. The distance is about 80 miles by car, 70 miles by pipe. Enid doesn’t have a river, so it has always relied on artesian wells. Apparently they’re running low, so it was time to tap a real river. The project is properly organized and moving in sync, without any crazy pauses to avoid a few drops of oil or other EPA taboo.

WPA would be proud!

Who invented the Like Button?

I’ve been pointing out that radio, especially shortwave, made it harder to constrain expression. SW always sneaks around borders and walls and jammers.

But radio also made it harder to run a pay-for-value business. Subscriptions and customer service require either printed magazines sent to specific addresses, or a hard-wired communication system. Telegraph and telephone and web are naturally subscriber-based, and are gradually returning to natural after a decade of UNnatural advertising-based business.

Radio has only two ways of making money: advertising and government licenses. Neither is sensitive to listener feedback.

Scramblers and descramblers could have created a one-way subscriber service, but I’m pretty sure they were never tried in a commercial way.

American Radio Library has added some issues of Crosley’s promotional magazine. The April 1924 issue includes a speech by Herbert Hoover, who was Sec of Commerce at the time, setting out regulations to allocate spectrum ‘real estate’. He had a surprising suggestion:

The Godfather of radio, Secretary Herbert C. Hoover, in a recent talk on radio regulations, pointed out the immediate need for a new radio invention which would permit the broadcast speaker to sense the feelings of his invisible audience and get their hisses or applause. “If there was some sort of a negative push button on your sets,” he said, “you could discourage some broadcasters.”

This was NOT technically possible in the ’20s. Hoover knew it was impossible and explained the problem clearly. Each radio would need to be a powerful transceiver with its own private frequency, and there weren’t nearly enough freqs available.

Cellphones are two-way devices now, using a massive infrastructure of local towers and time-sharing.

Two-way communication would have been possible via telephone or telegraph lines in that era. In fact a complete two-way subscription radio system via telephone was tried in a few places.

The AI silliness in previous item told us authoritatively that JFK invented cheddar cheese, and George Washington invented the police speed radar. If it had claimed that Herbert Hoover invented the Like Button I would have laughed….. until now.

Elon notices detemporation

One of the things that Elon wants to fix in Twitter (if he’s serious, which is still a totally open question) is detemporation.

I’ve been pointlessly whining about detemporation for quite a while. Facebook and Twitter aren’t the worst offenders, but they would be the easiest to fix.

FB formerly showed all threads in time order, which made it easy to track things like police chases and storm fronts and power outages. FB was genuinely useful as a local news source, since the “local” TV and radio stations only carry official commands and screeches.

More abstractly, time sequence allows you to see patterns of participation and persuasion. Now that comments are sorted for “importance” as judged by Zuck, the time sequence is completely lost and jumbled.

Did you know?

Janelle at AIweirdness.com pointed to this endless cup of computerized silliness.

CookingFlavr.com is a set of human questions answered by AI. Judging by the language and focus of the questions, it’s probably made in India. The top menu is food-oriented, but if you click on any of the questions you’ll see more categories, which are just as jumbled up as the answers.

Try Cheddar Cheese. Did you know that John F. Kennedy, the president first elected in 1821, was responsible for bringing cheddar cheese to America?

Did you know that George Washington invented the police radar gun in 1876?

Most of the subjects start with a literal and correct answer, then ramble on into a dream world where functions and meanings smoosh together to make a peculiar sort of sense.

Should You Prune Dogwoods?

Dogs have a deep understanding of communication and they can be quite helpful when it comes to yard work. However, they can also be a nuisance if they’re not kept trimmed. In order to keep your dog free of thorns and other dangerous vegetation, it’s important to keep them trimmed regularly.

Can you exercise with DOMS? This one gets deliciously tangled up with the obvious meaning of Doms, plus a dozen wildly different acronyms that happen to share the same four letters.

Related to Cheddar Kennedy: What does Cataumet mean?

Hyannis, MA, got its name from the town of Haverhill, MA. The town was named after Samuel Adams, the founder of the American Revolution. The Wampanoags called Cape Cod “Cape Cod.” The name is derived from the Massachuset word “cape” meaning “to point out.” The Wampanoags used this name to refer to the cape that is located on the eastern end of Cape Cod. Mashpee is an English word meaning “to mix or mingle.” The name was created in the early 1700s by the Mashpee people, who were living in present-day Massachusetts. The word is derived from the MAH-shpee word, which means “to scatter.” The Mashpee people were known for their annual gathering, which was called the “Mashpee Festival.”

AI is like an autist on acid.

Bravo for STRUCTURE.

I’ve been bitching about the 1990s switch from rational organized discourse to random chaotic psychopath discourse.

In the modern torture chamber ordinary people are flayed. We’re accustomed to these rapid whiplashes, and our responses are also chaotic. Mainly we’re just numb, but when the cat-of-infinite-tails bashes one of our raw nerves, we screech and bite.

Here’s a splendid counterexample. David Lat writes a mainly insider-oriented Substack column on law schools and legal institutions. Because he has insider experience he can analyze insider shit better than the rest of us. He uses his experience to understand the Supreme leaker and write the leaker’s manifesto.

I’ve been on both sides of the political divide and ended up beyond them, so I know how each mindset thinks. The overall mindset of the woke leaker is just right. I can’t judge the law clerk insider stuff, but it also sounds right from outside.

Most important: Lat takes EXTREME EXTREME EXTREME PAINS to isolate the manifesto from the rest of his piece, making it EXTREMELY EXTREMELY EXTREMELY CLEAR that this section does not represent his own mind.

Lat also points out that lawyers are supposed to be experts at EMPATHY, experts in isolating the case from their own mind. Lawyers have to take cases they hate and clients they hate if they want to make any money. He’s upset that the woke enforcers in law schools are destroying EMPATHY, training young lawyers to think entirely within the chaos bubble, following the daily DNC message board and the hourly Fauci message board.

Isolating a parody has always been difficult, and is often faked by psychopaths. Orson Welles, a certified monster, gave lip service to isolating his War of the Worlds, but it obviously wasn’t enough and he KNEW it wasn’t enough. He wanted to damage civilization and kill some peasants, and he succeeded.

Fake mode separation has become part of the arsenal of the chaotizers. Rush always maintained that some of his show was parody but never made it clear. When he realized that he had pushed the wrong panic button, he declared that the previous segment was just parody, but what he was saying right now was not parody… until later when it might become parody.

Bravo to Lat for setting up a clear and unswitchable STRUCTURE in his writing. We need more STRUCTURE.

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Irrelevant tech sidenote: Using a different font and different color would aid the isolation. Movies sometimes used colors or lens filters to isolate dreams or backstories, and radio sometimes used added noise or echo filters. Welles knew those techniques but didn’t use them in War of the Worlds.

More recently, fonts and colors were easy to control reliably in Windows EXE form. The web intentionally destroys control and reliance. You can specify a font or color in a DIV tag, but different browsers can and will interpret the command differently. Before it reaches the browser, the platform or publisher can mess up the commands. The web was designed by Welles types working at the universe-obliterating CERN, and it was INTENDED to make structure difficult and unpredictable. Chaos all the way down.

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Relevant empathy sidenote: A lawyer who can only represent fashionable people isn’t going to have much work. The people who need lawyers are unfashionable by definition. Fashionable fuckheads OWN the courts and agencies and legislatures and corporations and NGOs and schools and unions. Fashionable fuckheads do the accusing and punishing and executing, generally without resorting to trivialities like “laws” and “courts”. Poor and black defendants are supposedly fashionable, but their real mindset is the exact opposite of Woke. I learned this lesson in 1969 at Mansfield. As an idiot hippie I came in with the same idiot assumptions as the modern Wokers. I quickly figured out that black criminals are intensely Christian and firmly devoted to traditional gender roles and family structures. A wokie who hates Christians and can’t even traditional genders will be completely unable to hear the clients who need her services.

Harmless hooey

According to the date guide, today is Skeptics Day. Hmm. Is that right?

I looked it up and first found sources saying that the real Skeptics Day is Jan 13. Hmm. Is that right?

Other sources say the real Skeptics Day is Oct 13. Hmm. Is that right?

The fact turns out to be more interesting. (Maybe.) Adrienne Koopersmith considers herself to the Official Day Dayer. She has named several Days for every Day, and some multiple-Day Days. She intended Skeptics Day to be a movable and multiple feast, every Friday the 13th. Her attitude in the above clip is light-hearted, treating life as Entertainment, but other indications show her as the exact opposite of a skeptic. It’s hard to tell without more context, and her own personality doesn’t matter here.

What does matter is the limitations of sources and searching. Each of those sources had automatically picked up one of the Friday the 13th dates and considered it to be the official day.

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Reprint from 2017:

The Enlightenment’s big crime was binary truth tables.

Law of Excluded middle, fact or not fact, true or false, prove or disprove, null hypothesis, guilty or not guilty, honest or fake.

Digital technology and digital training have elevated binariness to a lethal level.

For some reason thinking about Volney’s beneficial hooey pushed me over the line on this question.

Nature doesn’t do honesty. Every smart and surviving critter uses deception, looking or smelling or sounding or moving like something else. Honesty is death.

The dividing line CANNOT BE deception vs honesty because honesty DOES NOT EXIST.

The only meaningful measure is the PURPOSE of the deception. Aggressive or defensive? Helpful or harmful?

When a deception is aggressive or harmful, you need to break it down and observe** the underlying reality so you can defend yourself against the aggression, or at least stop HELPING the aggressor. Stings and false flags by Sorosian governments are lethal and aggressive. We need to observe basic facts. 9/11 was a Saudi + CIA operation. Both “fascists” and “anti-fascists” are organized by the government as traps. Knowing these FACTS can slow down the aggression by depriving it of active support.

When a deception is neutral or helpful, we should quietly realize it’s a deception while still allowing it to function. Good medical practice, good selling, and good religion, all involve a lot of magic and placebo. When we criminalize “alternative” medicine we’re not giving the magic a chance to work. Over the centuries our criminalizing of various therapies has switched back and forth wildly, often depriving entire generations of a therapy that we later “rediscover” as useful. We’d save thousands of lives if we just LOOSENED UP.

[2022: I couldn’t have imagined in 2017 that we would criminalize natural immunity, eating, sleeping, working, talking, thinking, breathing, and living. But we did.]

Smart and surviving cultures were never fooled by the Enlightenment nonsense. Persians and Russians and Chinese understand reality more clearly. Teutons and Anglos and French fell into the binary trap around 1790 and never climbed out. Now it’s killing us.

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** Observe the underlying reality: I’m bumping into language limitations here. Our internal representation of reality, also known as observed reality, is also disconnected from instrumental measurements. If you take the instrumental measurements as the sole standard, you’ll never be able to function in the world. That’s why our decisions and actions need to be based on purpose rather than “finding absolute truth”. Our internal fiction has been experimentally shaped to match our survival needs, so it’s the best available standard. When you see media toxin that clashes with your experiential template, you have to prefer your internal version of reality because you ALSO know from experience that the media toxin is aggressive and lethal. Media toxin, like wasp toxin, is designed to paralyze you for easier enslavement and slaughter.

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Continued here.

Old saying

Wolf has been discussing and expertly graphing the boom and bust cycle. The central banks have finally reversed their boom-machine after 14 fucking years of insanity.

Today he notes that the supply chain is starting to loosen up. It’s just the old saying, High prices are the cure for high prices. … But the saying only works when the central banks are not completely blocking all natural economic feedback with endless counterfeiting of fake numbers.

I must admit that I’m genuinely shocked by the bank turnaround. I didn’t think they would ever stop counterfeiting. Positive feedback loops are hugely addictive and rarely stop before a total explosion.

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Semi-relevant: Blockworks Macro is a pretty good econ channel on Youtube, with the same flavor as Wolf. The name sounds like a pure bitcoin booster, but in fact the channel has a wide range of interviews from a wide range of perspectives. There are a few ‘coiners’ in the mix plus a lot of real experts who speak from real experience and reach real conclusions. The interviewer knows how to bring abstracters back down to earth.

Literal underground communication

Sixth and last in a vaguely defined series on obscure spy tech, after SCR-268 and Tenzor and Peilempfänger and Kleinstpeilempfänger and Keinpeilempfänger.

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Encryption and secrecy are the natural default for language. We communicate with our family or tribe or army, and we DO NOT WANT other families or tribes or armies to understand our meaning.

Electric telegraphy started with the same purpose. Visual semaphores, whether by hand or by machine, were visible to anyone nearby. A watcher might not know the code, but he could determine who was talking and who was listening, which is 80% of the interceptor’s job.

The earliest attempts at sending a signal by electricity were underground or underwater. Electricity promised a return to natural secrecy. This purpose was forgotten as telegraphy became widespread and commercial. Telegraphy moved aboveground in wires, which turned out to be ‘secret enough’ for most purposes.

Telegraphy through the ground continued in special situations like mines. In WW1 the French succeeded in using regular spark-gap wireless transmitters and receivers for tunable underground communication. The US Signal Corps picked up the idea and the name.

Telegraphie Par Sol = TPS.

This French transceiver caught my eye mainly because of the beautiful tubes. Round iodine-colored long-legged tubes were typical of French radios in the 1910’s. (Tubes, unlike other internal components, had distinct national styles.)**

It’s not well documented, so I’m partly guessing. The Morse key at left is obvious. Lower left is the induction coil with breaker points. The DPDT switch at upper right would have been transmit/receive. The rotary switch might have tuned the receiver, which was also purely audio. No detector or demodulator, just three pretty stages of audio onstage.. The four SPST switches at top center have unknown purposes.

The breaker points were adjustable for various frequencies, all in the audio range. There was no output in the usual radio range; the secondary of the coil simply imposed an alternating high voltage across the two sets of ground spikes. The typical freq was 200 cps, G below middle C.

Polistra is sending her usual message to the gods, and HappyStar is indicating the slow alternation of the electric field between the two sets of ground spikes. (Well, not quite that slow, but 200 cycles is glacial compared to even VLF radio freqs.)

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Seen from the top, the waves would gradually spread out through the surface of the soil.

The American version has a good tech manual online, with advice for choosing locations and placing the sending and receiving rigs.

The best soil for this purpose was also the best farmland. Dry or rocky soil doesn’t conduct at all. Swamp (dirty water) has very low resistance, so the current will simply flow between the rods and won’t try to spread out. In good agricultural soil the current takes a much broader path between and around the sets of spikes, so the field has a chance of reaching a location within a mile or so.

Plants use electricity to communicate underground through fungal wires, and plants use electric fields to talk with bees. Plants seem to have the same preferences as TPS. Coincidence?

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** Sidenote on national tubes: British tubes were small and cylindrical. The 1920s Brit tubes look more like the typical ‘miniature’ tubes of the 1950s, and the Brits started using subminis before we did. The first American tubes looked like baseball bats. The more familiar American style was the Coke bottle. Hungarian tubes were squat Coke bottles with totally unique sockets. As far as I can tell, Italy and Germany didn’t have distinctive tubes, though they did have recognizable cabinets and cases.

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For Poserites: Cinched up the set and released it to ShareCG.

Nice graph humor

Here’s a truly funny piece of graphic wisdom. Most graphs violate this rule.

More numbers and more lines DO NOT convey more information. The most common example is polls that show percent approve vs percent disapprove, or percent R vs percent D, as perfectly mirrored lines. Only one of the lines is necessary. The mirror effect confuses the meaning.

No quibble this time

Kirn gets a bit too ethereal at times, but here he’s rigorously and strictly practical:

Free speech is a property right. It is the right to bring to market, in a form that can be valued & used in trade, the products of your own thinking & inner life. To unduly inhibit people’s speech is to deprive them of the potential for value-creation. It is, quite simply, theft.

This is freedom as seen by a professional writer or publisher. The same would apply to inventors or engineers or programmers, though ‘inner life’ probably doesn’t belong there.

Note also the careful and practical ‘unduly’. A writer shouldn’t be free to commit blackmail or incite a war or command a murder, just as a programmer shouldn’t be free to write extortionate malware, or a doctor shouldn’t be free to strangle all her patients.

In the current situation, all constructive value creation is blocked by regulation/litigation or prohibited by explicit law. Creating a real business is practically impossible. Building a factory or nuclear power plant is impossible.

Extortion and torture and war and murder are the ONLY forms of speech and commerce we permit.

Ran across this

THEY KNOW IT’S A HOAX BECAUSE THEY MADE THE HOAX

… has been true for centuries. Machiavelli and Parkinson exposed it, and nothing changed.

While looking for something else I ran across this 1960 letter from Theodore White. He deserves RAW VICIOUS CONTEMPT because he knew the whole thing was a fucking fraud and CONTINUED TO EXPAND THE FUCKING FRAUD. Vile evil bastard.

Practical morality doesn’t require us to heroically expose evil, because heroes don’t make any difference. Practical morality DOES require us to stop assisting evil. If we’re working for an evil company or agency, we should stop. Remove our talents and labor from the evil task.

Heroes strengthen Deepstate’s resolve. Desisters weaken Deepstate’s resources.

Betaverse

Trying to be charitable again…

What’s new about Zuck’s metaverse? The uncharitable answer is that it’s just an advertising slogan, not a real project or activity.

Charitably: Even if it’s a real project it’s neither new nor meaningful. Imagined universes have always been part of human experience. From church to sports to books to radio to movies to TV, we like to spend part of our time in a virtual elsewhere.

And there has always been commerce in the virtual elements of the virtual spaces. It’s just the old gold rush rule.

Church: Indulgences and penitences and prayer cloths. Sports: Betting and ‘fantasy leagues’. Radio (when it was active): quizzes and contests. Movies and TV: Fan magazines and fan websites.

Indulgences are the closest equivalent to the Zuck version. An indulgence buys you a piece of virtual real estate in heaven, or subleases your apartment in Purgatory Towers, or aligns you with the character of a saint.

The biggest metaverse commerce by far is betting on sports. When you make a bet you’re virtually riding the horse or virtually kicking the ball.

Books may be the exception. Why? Books are not an event. All the others involve large groups of people watching or hearing the same imagined universe at the same time. The groups are sometimes physically together, sometimes dispersed, but always simultaneous.

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Later note: Turns out the Church is jumping into the Zuckaverse as well. So far it’s not subleasing Purgatory, it’s only NFT-izing some of the artworks in the Vatican Galleries.

Some pastors are going the full idiotic route:

“The future of the church is the metaverse. It’s not an anti-physical thing. I don’t think the physical gatherings should go away. But in the church of 2030, the main focus is going to be your metaverse campus,” said DJ Soto, a Virginia-based pastor and the founder of VR Church, which exists entirely in the metaverse.

Soto believes that VR Church is no different from a traditional one. Still, as it allows parishioners to see and hear the verses at the same time, he considers the experience to be more meaningful.

Isn’t that pretty much like watching the service on TV? Or listening on radio with the Bible in your hands? The only advantage of the web-connected VR part is surveillance and control. NSA and Apple can watch and hear everything you’re doing, and can edit the sermon in realtime if the pastor Disinforms.