I could use an owl door in my roof!

I use a live catch trap, a metal box with weighted flaps in the entrances that most mice can't figure out how to escape through. One nice thing about this trap is that one mouse can be stuck inside, enjoying bananas and peanut butter, while its old buddy still outside comes along, and it's basically an invitation to join the party. One morning I found three mice in the box. One captured mouse seems to attract more.

Quite the opposite of glue traps and other types I've heard of, where one unfortunate squeaks-no-more decaying serves as a warning to other mice to stay away.

Indeed, find and block the holes, including the ones that look too small. I swear, mice turn sideways into the 4th, 5th and 6th dimensions becoming point particles in the physical world, to go through the tiniest hole. Find those holes!

Blah! Not only do those traps sound dangerous, it's easy to imagine how 'fun' cleaning them would be.

Live catch traps only for me. No ooky corpse to eliminate, let the little bugger run loose, and the eagles and hawks will be pleased to find fresh snacks in the meadow.

"It would be good to get some of the people who have experienced these things together to compare notes"

This has been done. It's old stuff, with plenty of new stuff every day.

For example, "How to Not Waste This Opportunity for Physical Life | Near Death Experience", and several other recent videos, on the Love Covered Life channel on YT. Several NDE experiencers with plenty to say, coherently and in detail, with one aspect or another covered in each video. Fascinating stuff!

So, knowing this now, all anyone needs to do is invent a live-backwards-in-time machine, and become absurdly wealthy.

When I visit someplace, not a place for a meeting or business, but a place to be for enjoyment, delight, inspiration, I want to smell the ocean air or foliage, the sounds near and far, the feel of the ground under my feet, qualities of temperature and moisture in the air. VR has accomplished nothing in those regards. I'll put up with tourists if I must.

Is this the strongest gap ever in any /. poll?

I am not surprised. Just for fun, when I'm on a brain break from my work, I watch YT videos bashing Metaverse. Good points, they make. Who wants to live in a 1990s video game? Reminds me of 1980s 3D graphics, actually, just with somewhat better splines and shading. Not really. Sure, for live interactive stuff, quality loses in the tradeoff with responsiveness. But does it have to be that bad? It could easily be better but then the price of the HW will keep it from mass adoption. At least the cartoony avatars that look faker than Barbie dolls now have legs.

But never mind that. I'm a 3D artist, so of course I critique that aspect first. The real lack is what are those "communities"? What do you do in there, in those places in Metaverse? Why would a visitor want to come back again and again? What can I do that I can't do better with email. Zoom, any MMORPG, or hanging out at the beach?

Real life is way ahead of Metaverse, or even the best of the online games. The scent of a flowery meadow, the tilt and bounce of a boat on ocean, the brush of someone's long hair as they turn around next to you, the exertion and joy of motion moving around in the real world.

Perhaps this is a bad time to judge Metaverse. We've gone through a pandemic with all of life lived over webcams, emails, Slack, Discord, cell phones. Show me yours and I'll show you mine means looking at new source code changes pushed up to GitHub. Only groceries and walking the dog were not done over internet. Well, maybe groceries were. Everyone is itching to be out and about, gather, meet, party, compete, in real life, and now that we've mostly gotten back to that, along comes this return to cameras, screens, graphics, earbuds and communication over the net. Not gonna happen for anyone not a VR nut.

But no, the pandemic is no excuse. The weaknesses and foolish optimism described by the Youtube bashers are still good points, and not going to be overcome in just a year or two.

"Grampa, what's a paper map? How did it know where you were and tell you when to turn?"

What the corporations do with AI will be fine after someone comes up with AI to tell me how I can make plenty more money. Many of us are waiting for that!