The Matrix moment.. Ever have one? I did yesterday..
Let me begin by saying this: I recently had a chance to view ‘virtual reality’ in my friend’s headset. It was amazing. I was traveling in a car with Lebron James… I even played basketball with him. The footage inside the headset is unbelievable.. when you take the piece off, your brain so convinced that what it was seeing was real, actually feels a bit bad about being back in the ‘reality’ of this world—you know, the real one?
Yesterday while walking in a hallway at work in the basement level of my building—a location I have seen and traveled to countless times through the years, I had a moment.
A weird moment.. What was floating through my mind was already interesting.. I wondered, as I looked at the monotone colors of the floor and walls, if a retired person I knew came back for a day, how startled she’d be that everything was the same as it was when she left almost a decade ago. And that is when it hit me.. For a brief moment—very brief—the hallway walls became very 3D looking.. the floor looked very, very real. For a moment in time, I felt like I was walking in a virtual reality world, like everything that was “real” was only real virtually..
Yes, indeed. For that brief time—literally seconds of my life—everything was so real and vibrant. Like for the first time in years, my mind noticed I was alive. That things were around me. That or, perhaps, I felt like Truman Burbank from the Truman Show when he discovered that his entire life had been a prop and set for some multiseason television program watched by billions around the world. Of course, I have no delusion of grandeur, I am fully aware that my life has little importance in the big picture scheme of things. But then again, many other reality ‘stars’ lives don’t either but they just don’t realize it.
Anyway, all of that said, it was startling for that time. The Matrix moment, when you finally realize the computer program you’re within … you see the controls, almost. The takeaway, after seeing the virtual reality headset scene, is that the reality of what was in front of me looked so similar and felt the same.
I snapped out of it as quick as I snapped into it. For that moment, that brief time, I was alarmed with how vibrant and almost fake looking the scene in front of me.. And then everything immediatley become dull and flat again. Everything lost that edge, and the portal of awareness I entered in came back to the lifeless walls of depression that office environments to many times exhibit. So now what do I strive for? Another Matrix moment. Perhaps one that lasts longer—the staying power could help me search out more ‘reality’ than what I had just witnessed.
Yes, now, I will be searching for reality. Whatever reality is anyway.
It indeed is a sea change.. Who could have predicted this about 10 years ago.. or heck even five years ago:
U.S. adults spent 10 hours, 39 minutes a day consuming media in the first quarter of 2016. That’s up a full hour from the first quarter of 2015, and it’s thanks to a substantial increase in smartphone and tablet usage, according to Nielsen’s Q1 2016 Total Audience Report.
But for all of these changes, all of this ‘progress,’ are we smarter? More informed? Better off?
You can decide that one.
We just know this: TEEVEEis dead .. long live TEE VEE
Reading this amazing book about autism allied NEOTRIBES by Steve Silberman.. This is my favorite page his far.. I have family with autism who exemplify the descriptions to a tee ..
For those who care or understand, there may soon be an announcement that shreds the old world of information and replaces it with a new one..
“This is by far the most exciting thing that has happened in particle physics over the last three decades. If this hint of new physics is confirmed - something that could happen within just a few weeks, or possibly even within days - it is difficult to state the importance of such a discovery. It would be bigger than the detection of the Higgs boson, which was just confirmation of what was already known. "If the bump is real, we are about to start writing a whole new chapter in the history of fundamental physics. It is impossible to imagine where this could lead.”
The biggest since Higgs? The biggest since Einstein? The biggest ever?
The future is waiting. We are finally catching up.
Love the idea or hate the idea.. We have been talking about it as a future shock possibility for years. A time when robotics have taken over the manufacturing and service economies..
I have a strange and silly notion that the wage floor could actually be quite a positive thing. Maybe that’s the part of me that actually does see glasses half full from time to time..
Imagine a future where your safety net is there.. Where you can produce things you want to? Work where you to? Be who you want to be.. All with a set wage floor.
And where the absence of such a floor wild lead to a revolution, panic on streets, and mass violence and chaos due to an ever changing economic platform that leaves millions (if not more) without work..?
A wage floor vs the ….the possibility .. Which would you prefer?
The park is in my back yard, almost literally..We get there as many times a year as we can. This year, with my son Ayden being 5 and going on 25 in his intelligence, he has finally opened his world up to more there.. The rides. The kfun. The kfanstasy. The kfood? Well he is still a bit picky..
But seriously.. let me just say: Knoebels may be the single happiest, best, and most amazing place on earth.
The little secret 90 years young, tucked away in the mountains of the coal region, is quite possibly the only place on earth where I forget troubles for a bit… where life as it is – out there – is on hold.
You can ride rides. If you want. Play golf. Maybe. Eat food. Whichever.. get soaking wet.. or just drive a slow train into the woods …
Whatever. The floor is yours.
I sort of am half and half… I want to tell the world how amazing Knoebels is. But also , sometimes, just keep it a secret …
But the secret is out.
Knoebels. IT’S THE PLACE TO BE IN THE NEW CENTURY.
There may be a large amount of people who proclaim that Trump cannot win in November. But consider, many of those same people said he would not win the primaries.
In Britain, many voices said that Johnson could not win. And that the Brexit vote would not happen.
See a pattern?
Picture a future state dinner with two men from New York leading their respective nations. Picture them both with intensely bad hair.
The world is going through a monumental sea change in 2016.
James Wan and Peter Safran are producing the ‘Conjuring" spinoff. Miranda Otto has boarded Annabelle 2, New Line’s sequel to its 2014 horror hit.
David Sandberg is directing the spinoff to New Line’s Conjuring franchise that has stewards James Wan and Peter Safran producing.
The script by Gary Dauberman tells of a dollmaker and his wife who, 20 years after the tragic death of their little girl, welcome a nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage into their home. Soon, however, the nun and the girls become the target of the dollmaker’s possessed creation, Annabelle.
The Supreme Court deadlocked Thursday on President Barack Obama’s immigration plan that sought to shield millions living in the U.S. illegally from deportation, effectively killing the plan for the rest of his presidency.
