Future of Reality and ThinkerCon Trip! (Patreon)

I have returned, good humans! After a trip that ended up being 17 days, which is a lot of days.

First was the Future of Reality summit at UNCSA, which was my first dip back into the world of VR in a while. 

The event itself was great and ran without a hitch, but my favourite part was talking to different folks at the school, especially the students. I love seeing how people think about future technology from an education perspective, which tends to be more forward thinking than at tech events where folks are incentivized to worry about short-term products and profits.

And because I've been avoiding events for a year, this was my first event since #metoo became a thing, and it was refreshing how much the conversation has changed... at least in the right groups of people! At least, at a film school I can see a shift. Tech has yet to have its reckoning.

After the event, I took a few days to meet with various people, including a couple different libraries and museums folks. 

I am a huge fan of libraries and have found librarians generally know what's up. The library mission goes so far beyond just providing access to books, information, and technology. Great librarians are really on top of how to serve the needs of a diverse public, and when you're used to hearing the weird alienating pronouncements of the same tech CEOs in the news over and over, it is very refreshing and grounding to talk to librarians about technology.

I'm going to quote (or possibly misquote) Brigitte Blanton who is the director of libraries in Greensboro NC: "Libraries are conduits to destiny."

Yes!

Ok, so now on to ThinkerCon!

The big public ThinkerCon event was one giant fancy evening at the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I didn't advertise too much that I'd be there, because I was pretty sure that after weeks of travel I was going to be a giant mushbrain too tired to actually talk to humans. But I ended up doing a short talk, two panels, and then spending some time meeting folks, and everyone was so cool and interesting that I spent a good amount of time out there! I'm glad I did because I got to meet some awesome people, and even got presents :D

And we invented some human geometry games, making cubes and octahedra out of our arms, and then an entire human hexaflexagon that we flexed like a weird math dance. I love groups of humans where everyone's up to experiment and throw caution to the wind and math themselves together!

Ooh ooh ooh and as part of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd I did an audience-participation fizzbuzz, which I am counting as my 51st fizzbuzz. It was super fun. Best audience!

And then I hit a wall and got the most tired human brain ever and slept for three days.

Before that, though, was the non-public ThinkerCon, where before the big public event we spent some time meeting and talking business. I got to see some folks I haven't seen in a long time, and meet some folks whose work I've admired for a long time, and meet some folks I didn't know about but are doing amazing work.

The whole thing was very impressive and well put together, and I wish I'd gone into it fresh instead of already travel-exhausted so I could have done it justice. But thoughtfully included was a room where you could just sit and paint rocks, so I did that for a bit while my brain unraveled.

Oh, cover photo is one of my rocks. Here's another that thinks it is a mountain:

There's a thing I've been thinking about with regards to education, jobs, and finding out the thing you're good at, which may not exist yet. 

During my Future of Reality talk I tried to give some perspective and make a point of the fact that when I was applying to university, YouTube didn't exist. Consumer VR only just came out a couple years ago. In the context of a film school, of preparing students for future work, it's important to recognize how different things will be by the time they graduate.

Then, at ThinkerCon, I did a panel moderated by Robert Krulwich where he asked many questions related to creative fear and freedom. Things related to our definitions of success, and how many times have we switched careers?

Nicky Case was also on this panel, and it was in thinking about them, and after all these other conversations, that something crystalized for me. Because Nicky is, like, a genius at a medium that didn't exist before (and I think maybe they're still getting warmed up for a medium that is yet to exist, maybe that they are creating), so of course traditional measures of success don't apply because there's no award for best uncategorizable.

But for me, too, it's not really that I keep switching careers. YouTubing wasn't an option when I went to school, but it turned out that music composition taught me some valuable skills that carried over. And math youtubing taught me valuable lessons regarding technology, systems, and communication. VR research taught me about the entire history of computing, how throwaway choices can stick around forever, and about people and visions of the future and oh so much more. And now I'm seeing AI as the next thing to learn deeply about.

But none of these are really career switches, because the career I'm working on doesn't exist yet. The measures of success I care about don't exist yet. I've become comfortable with not knowing what I'm doing with my life, because the thing I want to do is currently unknown to humans, and someone's got to find it! 

I can't say for sure I'm on the right path, but if I knew where the path were going then I'd know for sure it isn't the right one. I don't even know if my current path has a destination, but the journey sure is interesting, and I'm happy to be here.

I want to write more about this whole thing sometime, and of course update y'all on what I'm working on next, but for now I'm off to celebrate some Thanksgiving. 

Thank you all for sticking with me on this journey to who knows where!

Vi