What’s VRChat like your final* year?
*final public year — but that won’t fit in the title without a line break. 🫠
I was going to walk through outgrowing what this blog Knomad has been about since it started:
- What’s VRChat like past your 1st year? — insiders, outsiders, & empathy
- Your 2nd year? — discovery vs. diminishing of stamina (and burnout)
- After 3+ years? — navigating change, when to soft-exit or to hard-exit
Because the goal was to provide people new on the platform with spaces to join and a better first week than I experienced, these subculture dives all tried to stay accessible financially, socially, and parasocially. Focusing on free avatar bases, for example, or steering away from VRChat groups with rough application processes. I also tried to keep disclosures centered on me rather than detailing too much about others in my circles.
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That has gotten more complicated to do as time has gone on:
This draft initially had the usual format: my journey into DJing, new avatar projects, and social turbulence. But the longer those sagas grew, the more it felt like I was just beating around the bush to get to “why you don’t need to read these anymore!” If I can state that outright now, then you don’t really need the week-by-week, question-by-question arrival at “whoops, I guess the parts that interest me most about DJing have the least to do with VRChat.” Likewise for avatars and social spirals — breaching the parasocial line felt justified if making space for other agender and aplatonic people like me. Here, though, analyzing my self-image and my most vulnerable exchanges would only be disclosure for its own sake.
When I joined up for Furality Ultra this past pride month, it served as a sobering “oh” about all of this. I had fun because I didn’t take connections around me for granted, but instead let new and old faces carry me along all the programming hiccups and tech chaos. In the staff and in acquaintances around me, I saw impressive ambition and clear limitations all playing out to their own rhythms — including my own. It took money to get in the door, and I would have never set foot in some of those club sets or personal moments without the excited invitation of some very cool friends. Brought all those secret filters on what I write here into focus as something I feel an insurmountably final separation from: I’m out of things to bridge for the newcomers to VRChat that I have been trying to cater towards. I’m ready to mindfully lean that bandwidth into the fruits of being here so many years.
Alongside all of this, one small experiment has broken through, and that’s what I wish to leave you with as this blog ends. A year ago, I started sending “my week in pictures” to a small circle of friends and family; amusingly, that format only worked for my family. Nonetheless, it’s since expanded into a vlog counterpart others suggested titling “Worldhop with Me.” It’s just me answering some random questions from lists online — surprisingly, ESL resources are a good place for concrete ones that aren’t so deep the answers become a bummer! — between checking out worlds I’ve been meaning to visit through this gadget I’ve assembled within my homeworld:
Does reclaiming social presence by going private mean losing my voice for putting out more good (however small) into the world, I wonder?
Whether that’s a real cost or just pride dressed up as principle, I’m not sure.
Appreciation and curiosity for creativity remain the bedrock principles shaping “Knomad” in all its forms — from lifestyle to faith to favorite media. But maybe working out the answers (at least my answers) in the privacy of an unlisted vlog is where it belongs for now.
