J Wisch

Senior Visual Designer & MR/VR Specialist. Father, Photo/Videographer, Living life one day at a time! 🌮🌶️

[J Wisch @wischie]

@NVIDIAGeForce #007FirstLightRTX

[J Wisch @wischie]

@motionpunk1 The only way to live! Push that GPU to the limit and be unable to browse the web while you do it.

[PeterTarka @PeterTarka]

I’ve been thinking a lot about what success really means.

For years I thought it was big brands, awards, numbers going up. I chased that.

But none of it really fixes the doubts. You can work with global companies and still feel behind. You can have a big following and still worry about what’s next.

From the outside it might look solid. Inside, it often feels unstable and empty.

Design industry isn’t linear. Some years you’re on fire. Some years you’re just trying to survive. Things change fast and no one really talks about that part.

Lately I’m trying to care less about chasing and more about building something that actually feels good to make. Slowing down a bit. Exploring physical things. Enjoying the process again.

I love creating.

That’s probably the only thing I’m sure about.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.

None of it was real.

I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off.

I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier."

The frontier closed last week.

It's a mobile app now.

Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me.

I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs.

The avatars didn't have legs.

I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis.

I called myself a "digital land baron."

I put it in my Twitter bio.

I put it in my LinkedIn headline.

I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts.

My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment.

My actual apartment has furniture.

Location, location, location.

My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court.

I held.

Diamond hands.

That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait.

A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users.

He said I didn't understand the technology.

I didn't.

I still bought more.

We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts.

We voted to "acquire strategic parcels."

The vote passed unanimously.

I voted four times.

My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY."

The slide had a rocket emoji.

That was my entire financial model.

In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000.

It's worth $14,000 now.

I don't talk about the Ape.

I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera.

My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was.

I said "digital art on the blockchain."

She asked why it cost more than her car.

I said "you don't understand Web3."

She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment."

She's not in my Discord.

Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million.

It's worth about $90,000 now.

I felt better about mine after I heard that.

That's community.

WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero.

We're all gonna make it.

None of us made it.

But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something.

It doesn't.

But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus.

Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse.

I need to say that again.

$84 billion.

More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines.

They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets.

It lives on as a mobile app.

My beachfront villa is now a mobile app.

Location, location, location.

Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that."

Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025.

That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun.

They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables."

The pivot took four years and $84 billion.

I pivoted too.

I'm an AI real estate investor now.

I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models."

I don't know what that means.

I gave him $40,000.

He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan.

The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank.

Q4 is always blank.

That's where the exit scam goes.

My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.

I said $1.2 million.

He said "current market value."

I said $6,400.

He stared at me for eleven seconds.

I know because I counted.

He asked if I had any other investments.

I showed him my NFTs.

He stared for longer.

I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance."

He asked if I'd considered a 401k.

I told him a 401k was "legacy finance."

He told me to leave his office.

The metaverse is dead.

I don't accept that.

I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car.

Location, location, location.

The location is nowhere.

But I'm early.

I'm always early.

That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

[J Wisch @wischie]

@ARCRaidersNews No, the reason I fell in love with the game in the first place is the risk of losing everything. I didn't even use a custom Loadout until hour 15 or so. The adrenaline of an arc encounter or another raider and potentially dying top side is what makes you feel alive!

[J Wisch @wischie]

@realOrlokkNoxx @DudespostingWs Yes!!! Thank you! I do it every time!

[J Wisch @wischie]

@DudespostingWs I seriously thought I was the only one like this! I feel so validated. I'm 44 years old and thought I was just a clean freak or something.

[Maverick Alexander @MaverickDarby]

"𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘔𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘦"

starring JD Vance, Alex Jones, Sydney Sweeney, and Nicolas Cage

[Rooster @TheRooster]

Why ARC Raiders sounds so damn GOOD?

❌ Use stock sound libraries
✅ Capture raw authentic live recordings

The team took live weapons to an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Stockholm.

They perfectly mimicked the acoustic echo of a dense city.

And when they combined them with dynamic in-game acoustics:

The result is that incredibly realistic, booming echo when a firefight breaks out across the map in ARC Raiders and The Finals 👇

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

This might be the only time you see a goal like this in your entire lifetime @spittinchiclets

[J Wisch @wischie]

@raychiarello Gorgeous photo! Thanks for sharing!

[J Wisch @wischie]

@mattshumer_ Such a well written and thoughtful article. Thank you for writing this!

[Libertarian Party @LPNational]

When Democrats are in power, libertarians get called right-wingers.

When Republicans are in power, libertarians get called liberals.

We're the ones consistently calling out authoritarianism.

They're the ones with blinders on half the time, when their side has control.

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

America is splitting into two groups.

One group wants the appearance of freedom, so long as it’s approved, managed, and granted by a centralized authority.

They still believe government can be the “good guy,” that somewhere inside a system riddled with corruption, coercion, and captured interests, the right people will emerge to save them.

It’s irrational, but powerful. A mix of nationalism, American exceptionalism, faith in institutions, reinforced by the comforting belief that the system is moral, legitimate and ultimately on their side.

It’s not freedom they want. It’s permission.
Statist romanticism masquerading as liberty.

The other group wants something far simpler and far more dangerous to power. To be left alone. To live freely without oversight, surveillance, or control.

They see all government as an infringement, that coercion cannot produce morality, that power never reforms itself, and that systems built on force only grow more abusive over time.

This isn’t emotional. It’s logical. Historical. Evidence-based. It may sound “utopian,” but it’s the only position that aligns with reason and with ethics.

This is EXACTLY why the Minnesota shooting was so divisive: more than a tragedy, it struck a fault line in American discourse that had been quietly building—one that wasn’t fully recognized until now.

The video fueled sharply different narratives because our perception of reality is drastically different.

It became proxy battle over:
-Federal vs. state authority
-Competing narratives and truths
-Justification of police violence
-Power, coercion, and community safety

It didn’t just spark protest, it became a flashpoint in the culture wars, exposing deep disagreements about state power, legitimacy, and who defines reality.

It magnified an underlying battleground people already feel but have yet to identify or discuss.

So, which side of freedom are you on?

[TUPACABRA @tupacabra]

October 31st 2026 and no one understands your costume.

[J Wisch @wischie]

@ArcRaidersNow NO! The reason it's so fun is because there is risk of losing it all!

[J Wisch @wischie]

@ArcRaiderAlerts PC, LET'S GO!

[ARC Raiders Alerts @ArcRaiderAlerts]

ARC Raiders GIVEAWAY

We're giving away 5 Bonecrown Sets in ARC Raiders, it comes with the skin & 2,400 Raider Tokens!

​To enter:
👤 Follow @ArcRaiderAlerts
♻️ Like & Retweet this post
💬 Comment your gaming platform

Giveaway will conclude on January 15th.

[J Wisch @wischie]

Scrappy necesita este outfit. @EmbarkStudios @ARCRaidersGame #ArcRaiders

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

A civilization is built on a set of internalized values. Numerous civilizations have developed radically different visions of how to organize societies, and these have competed in process akin to Darwinian selection in establishing which civilizational ethos permits for maximal flourishing. American exceptionalism is one such system and it has yielded the greatest society that the world has ever known. Suicidal empathy is going to destroy it because Western tolerance is its fatal Achilles tendon. Remember my words.