In other news

this is my personal reminder to myself that I have got to stop going to the nearest corner store, at least when that one cashier is there.

His conspiracy theories of choice tend to go well past the normal run-of-the-mill stuff, or even the National Enquirer flavor, straight into batshit territory. He thinks there are multiple fake suns in the sky, folks.

However, he's lately moved from amusing batshittery to straight up anti-Semitism, so I will suck it up and walk to the further corner store when I want soda, and even further if I want chips. (The other corner store, with the Mexican sodas, doesn't have onion garlic chips. I don't know, it's weird. And actually, the one with the chandeliers doesn't either. So at this point my choice is either the dollar store or the grocery store.)

No, I don't know who to complain to.

Vivian Vande Velde has a set of books

placed in what I suppose I should call the "Rasmussen universe". The books aren't really connected, but they all involve this game company, Rasmussen, which at some point fairly recently invented this amazing virtual reality set-up. Fully immersive, all the games shown in the books are open-universe RPG types that can host multiple players, one hour in-game seems like one day in your mind, plus the games give you crucial information that you can't play without - like, if you are invited by a NPC to go somewhere at "vespers", the game helpfully inputs the definition of vespers in your mind in a naturalistic way.

The writing is good, they're well worth a read - and as an adult, I have two thoughts. First, once hackers figure this out, there's going to be so much porn. Secondly, this technology is wasted on video games.

Forget the killer AI they apparently have, one hour = one day? So how about we seriously invest in this technology and all the kids middle school and up can knock out their academic classes in 15 minutes, leaving the rest of the day free for the arts, socialization, free study, gym, outdoor studies, and goofing off? Or field trips! You could have the most amazing field trips, at a great low price. And you could do most of it from home.

Have trouble getting all your friends together to watch the new movie? You can *all* find 20 minutes to log in and watch "in the immersive theater", plus the NPC theatergoers don't text through the movie.

Want to catch up on all those books you haven't read, all that TV you haven't watched, all that studying you haven't done? Book a booth, get it done through speedliving.

Of course, office workers would be expected to be ever-so-much more productive, but them's the breaks. And I guess tourism would go into a steep decline if people could visit Paris, Rome, Disneyworld, all without leaving their hometown.

Suffice to say, this technology would be amazingly disruptive. Maybe it's best they just use it for... video games.