Get. Real. · 4:44am Jan 10th, 2022
Sooooo.... uh, y'know how Pony-Me focuses on virtual reality and all that jazz?
And I'm pretty sure at this point that you know that Facebook went Meta and is tryna build a virtual universe fully under their control.
Pony-Me quietly warned against this creepy corporatism. What's happening here in real life is the opposite of what I'd hoped virtual reality would do. I just want to hang out with friends and have fun. None of this awful "shop at a VR walmart" garbage that's been popping up.
At the risk of sounding whiney, lemme just say this right now.
I don't want any of these "metaverse" things that have been popping up like weeds. No NFT shoestores, no "paid with real money" virtual property (because have you ever thought of... y'know, the fact that there's literally infinite property to be had? and I know some of this property is next to the virtual property of celebrities too, but this is virtual reality. you can literally go anywhere last I checked.), none of this stuff.
Yet, funnily enough, to an extent this is almost the same kind of thing that exists in Pony-Me. All of Equestria, down to its creatures, existed in virtual reality.
Do you know what the difference is between Pony-Me and the metaverse that facebook's been pushing?
It was detached from our reality.
There's almost zero overlap between Equestria and the "real" world of Pony-Me. To an extent, such overlap wasn't even allowed according to the things I have written in the lore document I wrote as reference while I'm writing new chapters. Yet, even with these safeguards set in place to prevent a full-out dystopia from taking hold, it was clear that there still existed a sense of creeping corporatism throughout the story. I even pointed it out through Lisa if I remember correctly, when she notes that Samantha was like an entirely different person when talking about company-related business about the simulation.
And it's exactly this that I've drastically slowed down writing for Pony-Me. It's why for a while, I stopped posting anything aside from Ruins.
I wanted to get away from the creepy feeling I kept getting whenever I tried to approach Pony-Me. (I have no excuse for Splintershard tho I was just busy for a while and then was too lazy over winter break to work on it lol)
But you know what?
I am not going to cancel this story. Not after all that its predecessor from 2017 did for me personally.
Instead, considering how this is a rewrite that already started integrating elements from Pony-Me's ill-fated sequel into the mix...
Let's dive headfirst into what I have in store, shall we?
Things are about to get real.
Holy shit things just got REAL.
The future’s going to be exciting, don’t you think?