The first time definitely has a novelty to the experience of getting in the tank, settling, then floating. Then towards the end of the first session you really start to feel comfortable. Second time around you really get the max relaxation. Floating like that really lets your muscles settle in a way that they never have before - usually I carry that relaxation for a week afterwards. I never was much for massage but floating is amazing.
It was like this for me until I muted any word that was remotely political. All of a sudden it was like a toxic fog had been lifted and I could see clearly again. The article really undersells the importance of muting words. It changes everything.
You answered your own question - it's a play for the next generation.
My kids bounce between a multitude of shared digital spaces (games, chat, social, videos etc) and they would be right at home at some kind of metaverse that would bridge them all (if that's even possible).
It's amazing that Marinetti made a cookbook like this almost 100 years ago. It still feels experimental compared to the recipe junk that gets churned out these days. If he were alive today I bet he would make a new Futurist Cookbook of SEO-optimized AI-generated recipes that could never exist, designed to be eaten in a banquet served on an autonomous bus.
"For the extremist banquet, where no one eats, and the only satiety comes from online outrage, the guest may stay at the table only long enough to tweet."
When I did some work on sentiment analysis using tools like Crimson Hexagon, it always felt like the data was skewed since what people post is different from what they say, which itself is different from what they do. Might need to be some kind of corrective filter that includes 'uncounted emotion' as a baseline.
Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.'
The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.
In the art world it's a pretty straightforward formula:
-Buy out the estate of a 3rd tier artist who once drank a beer with a famous artist
-Created slick marketing materials written by an art critic who was paid a lot of money to hold their nose
-Place several key pieces up for auction and an accomplice buys them at inflated prices
-Market is cornered, established prices are high, nothing left to do but sell to buyers who are too lazy to form a critical opinion and who instead rely on the manufactured signals from steps 1, 2 and 3.
-Once all the best pieces are picked through you still have a bunch of inflated junk that you can use as collateral for other nefarious schemes.
Source: worked in a gallery for many years.
A comment on HN the other day referred to this as the 'moral crumple zone:' how responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior of an automated or autonomous system.