man facebook really wanted "metaverse" but realized neal stephenson thinks they're all bastards so they had to make it store-brand huh
@kat i'm having trouble understanding what this means, did something happen?
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@Felthry facebook renamed to "Meta" because they really want to gentrify VR
@kat who's neal stephenson though and what do they have to do with it
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@Felthry guy who wrote snow crash, coined the term "metaverse," basically defined the version of VR everyone's been trying to build 30 years ago, which is why facebook is calling it "a metaverse"
@kat sorry we just
don't have a whole lot of popular culture and/or current events context because our taste in fiction and music and stuff is Weird and it's been years since we've been able to so much as glance at a newspaper without feeling like we might have a panic attack
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@Felthry i'm not... sure what you want me to do about that haha
@kat nothing in particular just kind of apologizing for asking questions that are probably really basic ones because we're really used to people reacting along the lines of "how do you not know about that" and/or "stop pretending not to know things"
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@kat so i feel the need to apologize even if i guess we probably don't need to
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@kat also i tend to overexplain things when we feel like we did something wrong/awkward
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@Felthry well, snow crash is a book, "metaverse" is a term that got coined in that book, and it basically defined what a lot of people expect VR to be for like... 30 years running now haha
@kat thank you for the explanation and sorry for earlier, we got kind of overwhelmed
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@Felthry snow crash is a book, which is why i said that guy wrote it, it coined the term like i said, which is likely why you haven't heard it since you haven't read the book, and VR has been getting attempted off and on for decades, it just very rarely showed up in consumer electronics until recently apart from stuff like the virtual boy