MANY THRIVING METAVERSES

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In October 2021, Facebook (FB) announced what was arguably the largest corporate change in its 20-year history. Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team had decided to go all in on “the metaverse.” So much so that the company decided to change its name to Meta (META) and rebrand entirely.

Here’s what the company’s announcement stated…

The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together – and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.

Meta’s timing to focus on “the” metaverse – one it hadn’t created yet – was costly. Meta’s share price collapsed 73% from the time of the announcement through November 2022. The stock then languished there for several months into the new year. It meant that there was no immediate way to monetize this massive multibillion-dollar investment it was making. And the worst part? It diverted its entire corporate focus to its metaverse initiatives at precisely the same time the world of artificial intelligence was absolutely booming with breakthroughs.

It went all in too early on a technology that was not ready to be monetized… and it paid the price. That November (2022), Meta cut its workforce by 11,000 (13%) to reel in costs. By March 2023, it announced more job cuts – another 10,000 positions – and that it would be shifting its focus away from the metaverse and heavily into large language models and generative AI.

Many Thriving Metaverses

What drove Zuckerberg to make the move to Meta? There were already several prominent metaverses thriving with activity, growing exponentially and wildly profitable… and Zuckerberg wanted to be one of them.

Fortnite, a massive multiplayer online social game, is a perfect example. Fortnite has grown into a metaverse with more than 500 million registered players and about 220 million monthly active players.

The Fortnite metaverse has already generated more than $26 billion in revenue through March 2024 and is one of the most popular games in history.

Fortnite has its own currency, V-bucks, and its own developer ecosystem that allows creators to build new games and metaverses within the Fortnite ecosystem. Fortnite is owned by private tech company Epic Games which was last valued at $31.5 billion in 2022.

Equally as impressive as Fortnite, if not more so, is publicly traded Roblox (RBLX) which now has 380 million monthly active users. While Roblox graphics may not be as flashy as Fortnite’s, it is impressive in the scale of its universe with 79.5 million daily active players. And where Roblox excels over Fortnite is in its remarkably vibrant developer community that builds different games and new worlds within the Roblox metaverse. Roblox has about 2.5 million developers working with its metaverse. Those community developers made more than $410 million in the first half of this year alone. The Roblox metaverse is a fully functioning online world with branding, advertising, e-commerce, gaming, and its own currency of course – Robux.

Last week was an exciting week for the company as it had its annual developers conference which gave us a view on the future of metaverse technology… I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that the future of the Metaverse is all about artificial intelligence and generative AI.

Roblox gives its users and developers the ability to apply generative AI in designing a character for the game using simple text prompts. But this is just scratching the surface of what Roblox will be enabling. The company is leaning into multimodal AI that will enable not just image generation, but animation, work in 3D, software programming, and eventually video generation.

Roblox’s AI-powered metaverse strategy is already working extremely well. The company is now valued at $27 billion and will generate about $4.2 billion in revenue this year and more than $500 million in free cash flow. Compare that to Meta’s Reality Labs division which generated only $1.9 billion in revenue last year at a massive multibillion-dollar loss.

Meta would have been better off acquiring Roblox and its AI-powered metaverse from the start instead of spending at least $46.5 billion starting from scratch. Either way, the employment of generative AI is going to be a boom for gaming and metaverse development that will empower not only companies to accelerate development… but also developers and creators to take part in filling these metaverses with interactions, transactions, commerce, and social interactions. 

Is it any wonder that this generation that was taught evolution is true and there is no God would spend their time creating their own world in the metaverse? As there is no meaning or purpose to life on Earth and this world is a mess anyway, we will create our own world where we are in control. Either that or the rising suicide rates for teens indicate they decide to end their lives.

The Bible, God’s Word is a book of prophecy and thankfully God has revealed in detail what will happen in the world before Jesus returns to restore righteousness. What we see happening in the world, particularly with the younger generation is exactly what is prophesied. Also, the nation God established for His purposes, Israel, is the centre of the world’s attention with antisemitism rampant, once again exactly as the Bible prophecies would occur before Jesus second coming to Earth.

‘MEN HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD; THAT’S WHY ALL THIS HAS HAPPENED’

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In 1983 Solzhenitsyn said, “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’

Marxist ideology places no moral constraints on those in power. All those regarded by the ideology as ‘reactionary’ could be arrested, sent to labour camps and worked to death. Families were separated.

There was no recourse to ‘justice’. Anyone judged to be an ‘enemy of the revolution’ was, effectively, dehumanised, but that category was infinitely expandable. One suspect conversation or joke might condemn you. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents. One of the ‘heroes’ of the Soviet Union was Pavlik Morozov, who allegedly informed on his father to the Party in 1932. His father was sent to a work camp and then executed. Pavlik was, in turn, murdered (under disputed circumstances). Four members of the family were accused of his death, rounded up, and shot. A statue was erected in Pavlik’s honour. Children were taken to the statue and shown Pavlik as a hero of the Revolution because he had informed on his father and they must do likewise if necessary for the sake of the Party.

We are in the same situation today but for different reasons. During the twentieth century, first universities, then all the institutions of Western society, were invaded by the ‘virus’ of radical doubt built upon the theory of evolution that argues the Cosmos derived from the Big Bang. Critical theory hijacked certainty about everything. This theory was built on a lie. It began with the false premise that there is no transcendent reality – no Creator God. From that, they concluded that the world of perception is a product of human activity. We make our own reality. According to critical theory, all hierarchies are oppressive. The world is descending into chaos as a result and Christians will experience tribulation even great tribulation just as Biblical prophecy said they would prior to Jesus’ return to first rapture the Saints, pour out His wrath upon unrepentant earth, and then return to earth with glorified Saints to defeat the Antichrist’s army and begin His 1000-year reign on this earth.

“For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.
“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” Matthew 24:7-14

“Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.“ Revelation 20:6

PARENTS DEMONISING THEIR CHILDREN

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Children as young as 8 years old were dressed in drag and Teletubbies danced with a man wearing a skirt at a Los Angeles drag convention this past weekend.

Thousands of people were estimated to attend the DragCon LA event May 12-13 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which featured over 180 drag performers, along with dance performances, wig and sewing workshops and, yes, even the popular children’s TV characters.

Sponsored by Teletubbies, Paramount+, Los Angeles Public Library, Postmates, Cash App and others, DragCon’s organizers described the convention as an “all ages event,” with children ages 8 and younger allowed in for free if accompanied by an adult with a paid ticket.

Videos posted on social media showed several underage drag performers on stage with adults, including one performer whose parent shared a video showing him wearing makeup and dressed in women’s clothing while he danced on stage.

The caption for the video reads in part: “To think ANYONE would say this child is FORCED to perform. ❤️ Your child wants to be an astronaut, mine wants to be an entertainer and she has said that from the moment she could formulate a sentence ❤️ PURE HAPPINESS ❤️ Thank you Drag Con for opening up the stage for a short time, so the kids could show the world their joy!”

Another video from the event included an interview with an independent journalist Right Now Views and a mother and her 8-year-old son dressed as a girl. When asked how he became interested in drag, the boy said “accidentally” before his mother explained, “I was watching drag and she kinda just got into it.”

We live in a world that is increasingly rejecting God and His values and they scoff at any suggestion that God has judged the world previously with the worldwide flood of Noah’s day and that God’s Word clearly spells out for us the judgement in store for the unrighteous.

“For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.” 2 Peter 2:4-10

“Knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.” 2 Peter 3:3-6