Hello gorgeous friends, it’s a week of glorious weather here in London, which helps to keep the spirits where they need to be. For even if nice days are currently passing by underused, they are at least reminders that nice days do exist. And as I’m sure many of you are finding, a day is as nice as you make it.
💌 Kindness by Post is a national kindness exchange, where you sign up to post a card or letter with a message of encouragement to someone else in the UK, and have someone allocated to send some encouragement to you. I love this.
📖 This Word Does Not Exist offers words invented, defined and used by a machine learning algorithm.
🎖 Personal Values Test: Personal values are what people consider important in life. They are always present in life and become visible in our attitude to the world around us and behaviour in the face of various everyday situations. If you live in accordance with your core values, you feel fulfilment and satisfaction. You experience the exact life you really want. See also: Theory of Basic Human Values.
🏢 The Office (Slack): every episode of The (US) Office reinacted in Slack!
🏋️♂️ On compulsion: Super interesting post, this. Ever promise yourself you wouldn’t eat any more brownies, and then find yourself grabbing a little bite (or a big one)? Ever find yourself checking your social media, even though you really need to get that report or presentation done? That’s everyday, bread-and-butter, salt-of-the-earth compulsion. No, you’re not in a dark alley in tattered clothing. Yes, you are behaving compulsively.
📬 Postcards from isolation is an ongoing series of interactive experiences on how our lives changes since locked down at home.
🩺 Apple and Google are building a virus-tracking system. Health officials say it will be practically useless: The tech giants have refused officials’ pleas to allow the collection of location data and to help contact-tracing teams learn where new infections have spread.
🌱 Qualities of Earth: Pondering nature from the vantage point of an allotment. The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of our comparatively conservative ideas of the natural.
Losing grip on virtual reality
Perhaps in subconscious reaction to spending most of the time in one room, I picked up a virtual reality headset for peanuts on eBay. Not a fancy one, just one of those things that comfortably straps a smartphone to your face. To my surprise I’m totally hooked, just in time to watch VR drop back out of fashion again.
See, I’m late to the VR party. Generally you could probably describe me as an early adopter, but I’ve never managed to see the appeal of a virtual reality when the real thing is already bewildering enough. All it took was for the virtual to become sufficiently cheap and the real sufficiently restricted. So now, to stave off the strange sensation of lockdown, I’m embracing the stranger sensation of watching 3D IMAX movies while lying on my own bed.
But this VR platform was discontinued last year, hence why it was so cheap to get into, and support for apps is starting to dwindle. While utilising expensive hardware you already own seems efficient, the act of strapping it to your face deprives you of its regular functionality. Not to mention your own ability to interact with the real world.
Ultimately what’s killing VR this time is it doesn’t live up to the immense hype of five years back. Rather than becoming the next computing platform, as Zuckerborg predicted, it is instead slipping into what technology analyst Benedict Evans calls the VR winter. Sure, it’ll find niche uses, but more generally the masses are put off by having to buy expensive, cumbersome hardware. And/or seasickness.
All of which is a shame, because right now it could’ve made for an incredible home-working environment. Even without that it’s a great distraction: I’m stumbling around virtual galleries and even my old holiday photos in the most immersive way permissible.