August 15th is a holiday in Italy, so it’s already an important day in itself, but for me it is even more special because it’s the birthday of my blog! It was August 15th, 2016, when I started my blog following the advice of the serial entrepreneur Tommaso Di Bartolo… I started with a horrible article, and then slowly I learned how to improve my writing. And now it’s 9 years since that special day!
As it happens, for every blog birthday, I want to thank each of you for the support throughout this time. Having a blog is hard, and having a blog in a niche like VR means spending a lot of time writing articles and having almost no financial return for it. I would lie if I said that I never thought about giving it up. But during all these years, you showed me love and support, and this was important for me. And it was also important for me to hear the stories of people that this little platform has helped: some people were helped in finding investment thanks to an article of mine, some others learned how to get started with some XR technology in Unity thanks to a tutorial of mine… and all these stories make me realize the impact that I can have and gives me a reason to keep investing my time to write these longs walls of text.
So, thanks for all that you do for me! The thing that I love the most about this side gig of blogging (my main job is to be an XR developer/entrepreneur) is that it lets me meet with many amazing people. In the last couple of years, I traveled a lot and I was able to meet in person a lot of the people of the community, and I have to say that personal connections are the real thing that makes my journey in virtuality special.
To celebrate the awesomeness of you, the XR people around me, every year I want to celebrate the blog’s birthday by giving you some special content, and this year is no exception. That’s why I have prepared for you an amazing interview with “The Reverend” Kyle Riesenbeck, the editor in chief of Upload VR, the most popular XR magazine out there! He’s a guy I’ve admired since the first year I entered XR, and now he works for one of my favorite XR magazines, so I absolutely wanted to speak with him. He was so kind to accept an interview, and we spoke for 50 minutes about virtual reality, journalism, Upload, and the good old days. I’m sure you will LOVE this interview! It won’t be out today, because in August, many people are on vacation, so they would miss it. But I’m happy to give you a sneak peek with a little anecdote Kyle told me about “the good old days of VR” (technically, we are still in the good old days… let’s say the anecdote is from the older days of the good old days). You can listen to it by watching the video below:
Amazing, isn’t it? I’m so excited about this interview, and I’m even more excited because it’s been 9 years since I started this blog! Thank you again for your support… but who is bringing the cake for me? (NOT a durian cake, please…)
(Header image generated with ChatGPT)
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This article was originally published on skarredghost.com
