🥽 Duke Surfs the Metaverse

Multiplayer virtual reality is still a "many years away" from the Spielbergian wet dream you might have seen in Ready Player One. Right now, the graphics sometimes resemble Nintendo 64, the interfaces can be confusing, and you might glitch out if you turn down the wrong alley.

But it is a surreal experience to encounter strangers, and even entire communities, that are beginning to pitch tents on a virtual frontier that might one day be widely known as the “Metaverse.”

What would it be like if Hunter S. Thompson stumbled around VR social networks and wrote delirious stories based on real happenings? That's the goal of this series. Here's what's cooking:

1. Burning Man & the Virtual City
   A stranger in the desert taught me how to fly & time travel
   
2. Hijacking the Audience at an Open Mic Night
   A troll with a portal gun causes havoc at a 50 person event
   
3. Raving to Diplo's Hologram
   Avatars hit on my fiance inside of a 300' tall Pyramid nightclub
   
4. Crashing Facebook Connect
   A robot held me hostage on the way to a technology conference
   
5. Combat Simulators & Presidential Debates
   128 terrorists ambushed me during the Trump-Biden meltdown
   
6. Raccoon Coders in Neos
   A pack of raccoons live-edited the source code of reality
   
7. Crashing the Awards Ceremony
   The cyberpunks compete for a geometrically impossible trophy
   
8. 800 Mile Ping Pong
   A gladiator from Tennessee challenged me to a competitive match
   
9. Zero Gravity Competitive Sports
   Teenagers get violent over a Quidditch, Hockey, Frisbee hybrid
   
10. Typewriter in the Sky
    Wrote 5,000 words from a floating typewriter in a mountain range

If the 1990's were marked by the rise of the Internet, then the 2020's will be defined by the rise of Metaverse. We don’t know exactly how it will play out, but it is already looking to be stranger than fiction. The goal of this project is to report on humanity's plunge into a simulation.