If you were to ask most people what they think the visual design of social VR looks like, I think they would say “Cyberpunk”.

The Oasis, the Metaverse, virtual reality as a crowded, public, bazaar.

uh oh, we built a transmetropolitan

“what’s this 9 year gap on your resume?”

“…. uh, work study”

I’m VRChat user #379 , which might surprise folks, the API predates me by some time

User #0 is fusl, but that’s because she changed her sign-up date retroactively to Midnight, January 1, Year 1, which is possible because we did build our servers out of a bunch of logs and some stone plinths

there is more than one place in VRChat’s backend where I set an arbitrary limit to a power-of-two because even though it’s arbitrary, if I set it to that, people will assume it’s for an important technical reason

modern devices basically never actually have a limit of 256 for anything I think it’s mostly just programmer habit at this point

one of the things I like about the fediverse is how weirdly optimistic and naive everybody is about the clout of a distributed social network that’s compelling and fun, but absolutely has less users than the virtual reality video game that I work on for a living

I think that all governmental orgs and offices should be on VRChat, not because that’s practical or a good idea, but because not enough government employees have to deal with caked up foxes on the regular

watching someone try to get the government of Canada to put up a public Mastodon instance is one of those things that’s funny and tragic, like if they spent all of their time trying to get their cats to play Poker

like, here are creatures fundamentally incapable of understanding or caring about what you’re trying to get them to do, and even if they were on board with your plan, they would not be able to do it well because they do not have the dexterity in their little paws to hold the cards right

Anyways, big layoffs at #VRChat this last week: I know it’s a crowded field, but share (or DM) your remote-friendly senior backend engineering or engineering management roles if you’ve gottem.

Also: any other remote-friendly video game roles. I’ll make sure they get to the right places.

my suggestion that, for pride, we simply roll out the NYC world but leave a bunch of interactible bricks lying around

has been rejected out of hand

to be honest “we’re #29” doesn’t have that much of a ring to it but it ain’t nothin'

like, it’s definitely something to have held on to a spot in the top 50 on Steam for so long

I’m not sure what exactly but it’s something

A new super-dangerous and completely made-up exploit has gone viral in the VRChat community about once every 8 months for the past 6 years.

i hear they can make it so that if you die in VR, you die in REAL LIFE

Bengal cats are an unusually intelligent, active, and difficult breed of cat, not recommended for first time cat owners. They require a lot of attention and play, and can be destructive if bored. They are not lap cats and they won’t be as affectionate as more domesticated cats.

That being said, if you do have the massive amount of time to invest into becoming besties with a l’il leopard cat, you get the positive sides of their intelligence and playfulness and chattiness and bossiness.

Also the secret to unlocking leopard snuggles are “finding the blanket with the texture they like”, “Canadian winters” and “a drafty ol townhouse house built in the 70s”

me: 37 years old

secretly, in my head, all the time:

places where cat shouldn’t be:

places where cat should be:

I always wonder how pets conceptualize human abilities, like, these soft magic giants can make it warm and bright… but they can’t do it out THERE?

do it out THERE I want to PEE and it’s COLD

I don’t think that Zapp is necessarily the direct inspiration for VRChat’s VRCat, but he joined our family in September of 2020 just while we were all crunching on VRChat+, I posted a LOT of adorable pictures to the work Slack, and VRChat+ shipped that Christmas, it’s definitely possible that I helped to establish the idea of “cat” firmly in the team’s head.

An instance of the much-vaunted tail-wrap caught in the wild:

Look at this mug

i could swear I’ve heard this somewhere

…

no, this is much better

people who make VRChat worlds are significantly more creative than I will ever be, is the lesson

as a VR developer i could not be more disappointed with what “BONELAB” turned out to be, it’s not even 18+

i’m joking

obviously I’m not a VR developer

I’m a non-VR developer at a VR company

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the open marketplace “economy” monetization model in metaverse spaces is actually a huge anti-feature.

It’s why so many of them feel like abandoned malls. People don’t like being sold to and giving your creators tools to try to nickel and dime people for every interaction with their products creates a bad and unpleasant experience for your users, so they leave, then there’s nobody to sell to so your creators leave.

Your creators would have stuck around to create art for the sake of creating art, but now that their art could theoretically be profitable and isn’t they don’t want to stay any more.

It’s one of the things I actually love about Second Life, you boot it up and it’s this eternal haunted mall, just emptiness and the hull of commerce around you as far as the eye can see. Nobody was enjoying this, they all just thought they could make some money.

A vibrant VR platform lets you play with the bowling balls and drink the beer and you don’t have to pay some idiot $1.75 to do that.

A dead VR platform gives you nothing to do without productizing it, and most real human beings go “fuck this” and bail, because that’s the kind of platform that appeals to speculators and capital and not, y’know, people.

On the other hand, Roblox is printing money right now and Second Life made enough money on a virtual speculative land rush bubble that they created that they could sit on their hands for a decade, so maybe I should shut the hell up.

everyone always describes VRChat like this

Have you seen Quinns talking for 30 full minutes about VRChat? Because it’s very good.

a month ago the Guardian called VRChat a “no-holds-barred neon anime nightmare” that phrase has lived rent-free in my head ever since

it was intended as derogatory but it goes so fucking hard, it’s awesome

I’ve been suggesting that we use it as a pull-quote ever since, but no traction yet