Author: Peter Rubin / Source: WIRED
When I was 17 years old, two things held particular sway over my imagination. One of them was virtual reality. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and the movie Lawnmower Man both came out that year, and while I had never heard of the technology that was bubbling through labs and startups thousands of miles from my Midwestern home, the idea of entering and truly existing inside a digital world became a source of endless fascination.
The other thing was—well, the other thing was weed.
First off, yes, obviously. It’s one of the great vice-based rites of passage. But smoking unlocked something transformative in my brain. It wasn’t necessarily that it rendered aesthetic experiences more vivid (which it did), or that the euphoria that came along with that beat the hell out of most of the other emotions that otherwise define adolescence (which it did). It was that creativity and communication seemed to happen on a different frequency, a range uncluttered by self-consciousness and second guessing.
More than 25 years later, in news that would probably thrill 17-year-old me, both of those things are still part of my life. I’ve written about VR since it first reemerged in the early part of this decade. I’ve used it to meditate, to spend time with friends, to travel through space, and sometimes just to watch Netflix in a place that isn’t my living room. I have no idea how much time I’ve spent inside a headset, but between the exotic and the pedestrian it’s likely enough to qualify for dual citizenship with the metaverse.
As for cannabis: hell, it’s California. In New York, I had a delivery guy who kept his inventory in a fake tennis-ball can.
Here, I can walk into a store, browse a laminated menu, and walk out with any one of dozens of strains, optimized for whatever mood or medium I prefer. You have a glass of wine with dinner, I have a little Gelato with some added terpenes. (Operative term here being “a little.” I’m not 17…The post Why I’ve Never Mixed Weed With Virtual Reality appeared first on FeedBox.