I guess I'll discuss some of my art here, since I do have a website with nothing interesting on here. My original-as-in-not-friend-inspired series that I call TetherLine. Strap in, or skim over as I detail my little world. Semi-Canon if this thing somehow blows up.
TetherLine is an alternate world where Virtual Reality had been innovated to the point that it's practically a pillar in consumer electronics. While in the real world the IoT and Hyperconnected internet may have gone and went, TetherLine has only started to have the internet get everywhere, and it's all done seamlessly in Virtual headsets. Virtuality is the one virtual OS that's sweeping the market with it's cutting edge, yet user-friendly interfacing that has lead people to engage in a tech race. With this innovation comes with it's own set of problems, such as tech monopolization, insecurity, escapism, and the 'double lives' that users of this service come to be. What comes to mind might be .Hack, Ghost in the Shell (but in computer realm), and Matrix minus the machines, but definitely the reality-warping shennanigans.
Now you may be rolling your eyes of this, 'VR being as popular as Windows/Mac/Linux? I thought we went over that nerdcore garbage'. Not denying that, but I never really had the element of 'in game = life' in this. I took an approach as if a video game or internet service had managed to snake into a 'too big to fail' position, to a point where the closest thing I can compare it to is if there was an entire nation that existed only in a virtual sense. We already have no-lifers play WoW for a majority of their basement dweller lives, and whales that play the game like they're shopping in an old-money mall, so my 'twist' to the formula is if it managed to reach the thrills and the dreams of the people endlessly proclaiming that VR would, indeed, become an electronic life sim.
You know how some people get impacted by movies because they're too immersed, and thereby thinking that the actor and settings of the movie are realistic? That's something that Virtuality is facing. You would think they would want more immersion, but the creators of Virtuality aren't comically inept and evil. Tether Lining in Virtuality is the act of having 'fake tells' to remind the User that they're playing Virtuality, none of this 'wake up to another layer of reality stuff'. The amount of conference calls that they had to do in order to try and eliminate the 'poopsocking' behavior is too much to count. Delusion and mental affection is one of the more important topics when it comes to this story. If you could retreat to a program that allows you to do anything, where does the line of dreaming and making your own nightmare go?
It's a story of espionage and action of two Users in Virtuality, Mac and Blake, who somehow come in contact with the secret that Virtuality is built on. The code base is reading and changing it's own code, to a point that the source code is a black box to everyone in the Conglomerate (Yes, that's the creator(s?) of Virtuality's name). The fact that they know is more than enough for them to be condition breakers, which half the journey is on figuring out what to do with it, or how to destroy such a faceless problem.
An idiot would use it to pretty much grant himself admin powers, at the cost of being digitally wiped instantly and maybe getting raided by private authorities. The Viral Rewrite (self explanatory) is what allows Virtuality to run at stupendously low performance cost and storage, and also has enough power to cause a Y2K catastrophe. The Conglomerate has prepared for such things, but it only takes one careless accident to wipe the history of TetherLine's iteration of the internet off the face of the earth without so much as a warning.
Take the roleplay elements of the Matrix Online and the multitude of monetized User Generated Sandboxes (UGS) and you get the equivalent of an MMO with traces of Immersive Sim and User Hangout. You can visit other people, do activities, and even get gear and stat stuff. You play around with something unfamiliar like a unicycle, and you level up that skill to be better. You fulfill a stamina/Play limit amount with an item from the shop, and you have to pay for it, which means having to fumble over change or swiping a card, yes, emulating the struggle of having to keep your virtual pocket stocked is built into Virtuality, but the grind for such is tremendously shortened, so it isn't the 'second work'. The issue is that there's so much to do and play with in Virtuality that some people would quit from the choice paralysis. If you're thinking about the economy, well it doesn't suffer from the usual viddy gaem economy and is actually stable, because this world's fictional. You can do fun reads about people trying to do this same exact idea in the real world and how it fails by the basis of people understanding that living a full on 'second life' is a tremendous waste of time and money. In the world of Virtuality, 5 coins is enough to buy a cheap tall boy of sweet tea from the store, and that economical scale is kept rigid by the Conglomerate. Doesn't stop some from trying to juice out eCurrency to actual money in the Black Market, but I digress.
Jeez, I sound like I'm interviewing myself on G4, if somehow there's one fan that wants to see more TetherLine content, I wouldn't be opposed to it. Better than trying to pander to certain fanbases. The well of tech concerning entertainment, utility, and technology, and a fusing of all that in similar execution to the KenTacoHut is never-ending. If bad comes to worse, I could do some satire on the tech-aesthetics that I find. The idea of someone in a Frutiger Aero building scuffing/breaking/denting the entire place to high heaven is something I wish to see executed. Rule 43 of the internet.
If You managed to make it here, congrats, this is like a third of my lore that I made since December of 2022. This definitely needs to be in it's own little page on my website, but I would have to do some big edits before committing.