In Memoriam: Alastair Whybrow

Received very sad news last night - Mr Alastair Whybrow's RL self is no longer with us.  He had been fighting cancer and absent from SL for some time now... my good wishes went out to him, of course, but there is so little that good wishes can do.

Mr Whybrow's name has featured in this blog before... in SL, he was one of the niche creators who only seem to exist in this oddball medium we inhabit.  His speciality was jewelry, crafted in the most exact, delicate and painstaking manner, wielding prims with the same exactitude as a real-world jeweller.  I have, of course, some examples of his work - not, I regret to say, the most gigantically impressive creations, involving well over a thousand prims - but enough, I hope, to remember him by.

He was a presence, too, in Caledon, ready in chat with opinions and witticisms; his shop "Sparkle of Sound" was a landmark in Caledon Southend... and he encouraged and advised me on my own minor commercial ventures.

In RL, he was close enough, geographically, to my typist that we shared reminiscences of local characters and local events, over many a long conversation.  We shared ideas, and stories... and I regret very deeply that we won't be doing that any more.

Godspeed, Mr Whybrow.  You are missed... a gentleman, and a creator, and one of the good people in SL.  I will close with a quotation which, I think, he might have found apt: "He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom."  And I will treasure my memories of him.

Fantasy Faire: sim the third

Didn't get terribly far with Fantasy Faire last night, as SL was being very iffy - for everyone, I think, not just me.  Lots of messages were flashing back between Tali and myself, along the lines of "are you offline?"  "no, I thought you were offline"  "I was offline, but now I'm not, but it says you are" and so on and so forth.  It's all very trying if you're wandering round sims

Anyway.  Mourningvale Thicket is sponsored by Roawenwood, who do all sorts of detailed Gorean and fantasy stuff, and it is shrouded in mists and has lots of ruins and dead trees.

 

 Atmospheric.  Not a hundred per cent cheerful, but atmospheric.  That round thing you can see in the middle distance in the last picture is the entrance to the next sim.  I was going to go there, but I turned around, and when I turned back the next sim wasn't visible any more, and then I crashed.  Iffy.  It's all very iffy.

 

Sadly, I can't blame SL for today's misadventures, which involved the Great Race around Caledon.  Tali had said she was thinking of trying it this year, but decided not to in the end.  So, in a fit of enthusiasm, I turned up instead, paid the (very reasonable) 50L$ to RFL to join in... and set out.

 

Well, dear readers, you know about me and SL viewers, so you can guess how well it turned out.  The race started out on foot, and I dropped significantly behind when I got tangled up in the first sim crossing, lagwalking appropriately across Tanglewood... and things just went on from there.  Making my way at last to the start of the next stage, the ground vehicles one, I rezzed the Steampunk Giro-Cycle - a hunt prize from L+N Signature designs, a picture of which appeared on this blog many moons ago.  It looks great.  If you're lagging, though, it oversteers dramatically, as I demonstrated by crashing into every building in Victoria City....  By the time I made it to the water stage at Port Caledon, the expert racers were already approaching the finish line.  So I took things easy, first in a Dragonfly Boat (one of many 7Seas gadgets I acquired over time) and then in the Weka Air Ferry that was a prize from the last Steam Hunt.  And, apart from getting a bit caught in the rotors at Steam SkyCity - oh, and being savaged by an air kraken in Middlesea - I managed the flying part reasonably all right!

 

I finished dead last, of course, and about half an hour after everyone else.  But I finished!  The honour of Caledon Burroughs was upheld!  Sort of.

 

Anyway.  It is an Event, the Great Race is, and one's thanks are extended to the organizers (principally the estimable Miss Solace Fairlady).  But oh my, either I will practice with vehicles a lot, or I will cheer from the sidelines next year!

Moonlighting?

Are times hard in Caledon?  Are they really so hard that the Guvnah has to get a part-time job in a Buckinghamshire pharmacy, just to make ends meet?

Work in progress...

Things continue to develop, even when I'm not part of them.  It's almost as if I wasn't completely indispensable.

Anyway.  Among other things, a seismic shift has taken place in Caledon Steam SkyCity, my home in Caledon for much of my career.

The economy has been no kinder to that sim than to any other, and with parcels falling long-term vacant, our esteemed Guvnah was forced to downgrade it to a homestead.  This meant, of course, a substantial reduction in the complexity and number of holdings there... Some people bailed out; others, myself included, announced a willingness to stay on after the redevelopment.  So, one weekend, I packed up all my prims, threw my tentacle monsters into the proverbial red spotted hanky on a stick, and withdrew to await developments.

The developments concluded... sadly, not entirely to my taste.

The new Steam SkyCity is a visually impressive build, from the outside; a huge floating metal spheroid, supported by the requisite rotors (I for one argued, apparently persuasively, against replacing the rotors with a simple airship gasbag), hovering on high over the waters beneath.

Unfortunately - from my point of view - this is achieved by what's essentially a set of massive enclosing prims (the bottom bowl, the deck, and the dome and girders overhead) which severely restrict the physical space available for building on the city.  Furthermore, in response to commercial pressure (people like leafy suburbs, apparently), the Guv has made that deck a single big lawn, and planted trees all the way around.  In short, rather than the urban-industrial setting of the Steam SkyCity I knew and loved, this is something much more like an enclosed, suburban, gated community.  (There's no conventional way in or out except by the CAT lift.... and the structure of the build means there isn't even a view from the main deck, it's all shut away behind a wall.)

It's all just virtual anyway, yes?  Just pixels in a video game?  ... yeah, right.  This honestly, really, upset me.  So I messaged the Guvnah to that effect.

Well, never let it be said that the Guv refuses to listen to people's concerns.  Some people would have been annoyed by receiving a message to the effect that "your brilliant new build sux and I'm not going to live in it"... but the Guv took it on the chin, and we thrashed out a compromise, which involved him carving out a separate parcel, away from the city itself, where I can build, unencumbered, and in the sort of idiom I feel appropriate to Caledon STEAM SkyCITY, dammit.

Of course, now, I am honour bound to actually build something.  Which means, I suppose (since life and other realities keep on intruding on my not-so-copious free time) that this blog may get even more neglected as I bolt prims together inworld.  But I will be back, and building.  Watch this space.  Something may happen here yet.

Blingons on the starboard bow!

One thing I missed, apparently, at SL9B was the sign at the Bay City exhibit telling its denizenscitizens to beware of the "Steam Menace".  An absurd suggestion!  As if the genteel and urbane inhabitants of Caledon presented any sort of menace to anyone.

But, of course, this means the people of Bay City are bound to be on their guard.  It would be almost impossible, then, to - as a random example - sneak steam grenades into the Bay City Municipal Airport.

Not much sneaking going on, in fact



And, what with the rigorous security checks in place, it'd be almost impossible for a Caledonian agent to infiltrate undetected.

Harmless though that would be - I mean, could anyone see any malign intent in this?

Indeed, you would need to be particularly subtle, sneaky, and generally non-obvious to penetrate the elaborate layers of Bay City security.

Almost undetectable

Yes, the people of Bay City can certainly rest easy in their beds, knowing how vigilantly their municipal authorities protect them from the "Steam Menace"!



Sunset

So it's still not the world's best picture, but I cranked my draw distance up to suicidal levels to get it.... Me and Tali standing on top of the tower in Burroughs, watching air krakens playing in the setting sun, while the Iron Cloud hovers over everything.  (If you look close, you can see Dear Ophelia, the white CAT airship, coming in to dock at the Cloud.)

It was, as Tali pointed out, a very Caledonian moment.

Well, except for that mini-skirt, which is not Caledonian at all.

Towering inferno

Work is continuing on the tower in Caledon Burroughs, believe it or not.  Currently, the construction is around ninety meters high, and the lower levels are reasonably well-equipped with Stuff To Fiddle With, although there is yet room for more.  The last few shots of the build that I have are these:-

(I've cleaned the icky plywood off the top floor now, don't worry!)

The last interesting thing I've done is add a gallery of "portraits" of my "illustrious ancestors" (or, in other words, me in a variety of historical costumes).  Meanwhile, Tali is using her programming skills, and harpo Jedburgh his expertise as a musician, to provide the area with an ambient sound system of quite staggering awesomeness.  Sometimes I wonder why talented people like that let me hang out with them.

Wacky Races

The tower in Caledon Burroughs was sort of in use today, as a staging point for the Great Race across Caledon... regrettably, RL got in the way of me seeing half of it!  But I picked up the fray in Port Caledon, and was around for the Burroughs stage and the finish aboard the mighty Iron Cloud in Caledon Middlesea.

I'd made some of my own preparations earlier for the event:-

By the time the race actually started, night was falling, rendering the tower's maze of walkways even more perilous than usual; at Port Caledon, CorAngelis was taking a commanding lead on her all-terrain horse, hotly pursued by my friend Sauce Sorrowman and Geoffrey Xenobuilder - and the sound of other racers crashing against recalcitrant sim boundaries echoed through the land....

Here's the official race sign in Burroughs:-

I was too paying attention as Sauce headed from the docks to the top of the tower:-

Sauce, in fact, put on a sudden burst of speed to take the race in the final stage, mounted upon a mighty mecha-kraken flying machine.  Tentacle monsters always come through in the end, you know.

And here are several of us gathered at the finish line (CorAngelis flew her horse into second place and Geoffrey finished a creditable third).  In the picture, you will also see Solace Fairlady, Autopilotpatty Poppy, and Darlingmonster Ember, who did all that nifty "organizing" stuff that I can never be bothered with.

All told, a fun event!  Maybe some year I will take part in it... you never know!

Construction continues

... so, not a lot of posting here - remiss of me, I know, but I have time to talk about building or to actually do some, and I know which I'd rather.

Anyway.  Bits of tower in Burroughs continue to go up, and there is now a stairway between water level and the first platform.  I can negotiate it with reasonable safety, so someone with a working laptop and a decent connection should have no trouble.

Admittedly, some visitors might have more trouble with that stairway.

(I'm sure Callie is perplexed by all the goings-on, bless her.)

Construction has begun

I did threaten some pics of the tower in Burroughs under construction... At the moment, it is just a platform supported by four (admittedly, fairly complicated) legs.  Here's how it started out...

And, with a bit more elaboration to hide the joints between those arches and those legs, and the metal mesh platform on top, it currently looks more like this:-

If the landscape behind looks strangely bleak and empty, it's because my lousy computer obliges me to run, most of the time, at a minimum draw distance.... It's only on those rare occasions when I turn it up that I really realize how busy Caledon is.  I tend to think of Burroughs as somewhere isolate, remote; in fact, with Morgaine to the north, the Cay to the south and Mayfair to the east, it's more like a sort of small lake in the middle of a substantial city. 

Building the tower, of course, pretty much obliges me to turn my draw distance up... which means I will have to forgo luxuries such as moving around while I'm working on it.  Oh, well. 

(And, yes, I am dressed for Mainland adventuring in both those shots.  Never mind!)

What's been going on

I said I'd been busy, right?  Since the various i's have been dotted and t's crossed, statuses assigned and groups created and parcels divided, and (mostly importantly) the first tranche of Lindens paid to the Guvnah, I may as well come clean; the lovely and talented Tali Rosca and I have taken on one half of the Caledon Burroughs sim.  It's only half of a half of a homestead, but it's still the largest slice of SL I've had my teeth into (is that a mixed metaphor?  I don't care), and I am excited about the prospects.

We will, of course, be developing Burroughs in consultation with its current Duchess, my dear friend Turley Hallenbook, and our general aim is to make it a sort of steampunk beauty build, not a commercial enterprise.  So, we are both thinking about our own ideas of the steampunk aesthetic.  Tali is talking about building romantic landscapes, with reference to the art of Caspar David Friedrichs, and I am designing an enormous tower full of sparking generators and tentacle monsters.  There's room for both, that's the fun of it.  Working with Tali, I suspect, is going to be enormous fun.

(Assuming SL cooperates... I logged back in today and found myself wearing a sort of combination of the last two outfits I had on last night.  And, indeed, my discussions with Tali on the future of the sim were thrown rather off track, last night, when she experienced a distinctly embarrassing bake failure while trying to change outfits.  Details will not be forthcoming, because this is still Not That Sort Of Blog.  Somebody, though, needs to feed the hamsters that power SL's asset server, I think.)

(And now I shall shake off these parentheses and retire to SL, to import some sculpted structural members and otherwise prepare for Massive Constructions.)

Six years of Caledon

I'm prepping for the Caledon Anniversary Ball this evening - my outfit is chosen, my draw weight and script counts do not too far transgress the bounds of decency and reason, and, barring bake fails, I should be ready to knock 'em dead on the dance floor tonight.  (And it doesn't hurt, either, that I have a particularly scrumptious date to go with, too!)

Six years of Caledon!  Given that Internet-phenomenon years are traditionally like dog years, that's the equivalent of 42 normal years, nearly two generations.  I came late to the party - to SL in general, I sometimes think - and, as a member of the younger generation, I'm very much aware of how much shared past, shared imagination, and shared creativity have gone into the development of Caledon from a single private sim to a veritable virtual nation with a landscape and a history all its own.

I'd heard of Caledon even before I joined SL myself, through some desultory reading in Dame Ordinal Malaprop's blog (linked from my sidebar).  My first direct experience, though, came about three weeks after I joined SL, when I TPed, virtually footsore and weary, with the stench of a thousand Mainland infohubs about me, into the reception area at Caledon Oxbridge.  And there I found, not just strangely familiar architecture (my typist lived in the real Oxford for many years), but also - people!  People who spoke to me!  People who could, and did, hold genuine conversations!  People who didn't try to hit on me, or give me peculiar griefing objects; people who explained how things worked and helped me in my newbie perplexities!  It wasn't long before I was coming back to Oxbridge again and again, as an oasis of calm and civilization amid the whirl of SL in general.

Of course, Oxbridge sets out to be a welcome area... but, still, it is not an exception, within Caledon, in having a high standard of civility.  Civility, Innovation, Tolerance and Cake are the four virtues enshrined in the Caledon motto, and the community does genuinely try to live up to them.  I think this helps make the place an example of what's good about SL - the Victorian/Steampunk design aesthetic, and the overall light-roleplay environment, serve as a framework for creativity without being a constraint, and the emphasis on Civility and Tolerance means that content creators in Caledon don't just create by themselves, but bounce ideas off each other and share information.  The result is a satisfyingly diverse and fascinating landscape with enough of a unifying theme not to be just a mish-mash, and an online community with a strong and vibrant sense of being a community.  To be sure, nothing in this world is perfect, and there are fallings-out and family quarrels from time to time, not to mention the vicissitudes inflicted by RL or the vagaries of the Lab.  But, in the main, Caledon is a delightful place to be, and its inhabitants as fine a set of avatars as ever stood in virtual shoe leather.  I am - I freely confess it - proud to be Caledonian.

All credit is due, of course, to his excellency the Guvnah, Desmond Shang, whose tireless work, boundless generosity and indefatigable optimism have kept this show on the road in spite of hell, high water, griefers and Openspace re-pricing.  And all credit, too, to his helpers, in large and in small; from the Estate Managers and Dukes and Duchesses to the single-plot renters and the itinerant members of the ISC chat group - the people who make this crypto-Victorian online micronation what it is.  My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen, Distinguished Members of Other or Indeterminate Genders - I salute you all.  (You may imagine me, if you will, raising a glass of my favourite Cavorite Cocktail - "Gives You That Extra Little Lift" - at this point.  And raising it is easier than putting it down, let me tell you.)

On the catwalk

It's London Fashion Week or something - or maybe it was last week, I forget.

Anyway, that spurred me to revisit an old project and make some progress on it:-

I know, it's just too sexy for words, isn't it?

Not quite finished yet - I want to script that flashlamp along the left arm so it actually lights up, and some particle bubbles for the air tanks wouldn't go amiss, and I think I need to tidy up the alpha layer around the feet a bit.  But I progress.  Oh yes.

(I tried it in an off-the-peg male shape, too - seemed to work OK, though I don't know how well it might fit the muscly man-mountain avis that are so common.  Oh, well, it'll all be copy-mod if I sell it, so that's not really a problem, is it?)

All very unmilitary

An idea or two is revolving inside what passes for my brain, and part of it involves making a bunch of quasi-military uniforms.

Now, I may have mentioned previously that clothing design is not really my thing... so, to make my life simpler, I have been off trawling inworld stores and Marketplace for some appropriate template images.

And, after some hours doing that, I have reached some conclusions:-

• I am going to have to do the damn things myself from scratch.
• It is one whole heck of a lot easier to find skimpy crop-tops than it is to find complete coverage jackets or tunics.  Either the military is under-represented in SL, or it is under-dressed.
• I will never understand product pricing in SL as long as I live.  There is no discernible link between price and quality... and, presumably, someone must be out there buying the expensive tat.  Who are these people, and how can I persuade them to visit my shop?

The Name Game Blame Game

The naming of avs is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you an av must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES...

To wit, your User Name, Display Name, Full Name and possibly Legacy Name.  Wait, that's four.  I'm confused already, and so are a lot of other people.  And it may be about to get worse.  Let's recap....

Prior to the late-middle of  2010, avatar names were actually quite simple.  You signed up for SL, and you picked yourself a first name, which could be any sequence of ordinary letters, and you then chose from a list of allowable last names supplied by Linden Lab.  This was not popular with everybody, but it worked OK, it created a weird sense of community among people with the same last name (I have wandered over with a cheery "Hello cousin!" to the odd other Bulmer I have encountered, and some of them are very odd, let me tell you), and in general people got by with it.  So, all right, some people picked silly names like, for example, "Glorf" and were then saddled with them, but that wasn't really all that much of an issue....

... well, except for two or three classes of people who wanted some ability to change their names.  The first group consisted of people with a legitimate reason for wanting a permanent name change.  These might be business people who wanted to use their RL names in SL, or it might be people who, for example, had taken SL partners and wanted to change their surnames to reflect their SL family status.  (A third example, of people who just had rubbish names and wanted to upgrade, can safely be ignored; they should have known better than to call themselves "Glorf" in the first place.)

The second group consisted of roleplayers who wanted to be able to shift between multiple personas as whim (or RP need) took them.  After all, if you start off in a Roman RP sim and drift away a bit and get invited to take part in a Star Trek RP, it'd be pretty grim if you had to keep an inappropriate name like "Tiberius".... wait, bad example.  But my point stands.

Now, it may be apparent to you that these two classes of people actually want different things.  One of them wants a permanent name change, one time only (or at least one time for the foreseeable future only).  The second group wants a whole constellation of different setting-appropriate aliases that they can change between at will.  Can you see the difference, there?  Well, that makes you smarter than Linden Lab, then!

In the latter half of 2010, LL announced a completely new and different approach to names, and fur has been flying ever since.  The whole first-name-last-name thing would be gone; you would have a single user name that was just one single string of letters.  But, people said, surely people would soon run out of coherent and sensible things to call themselves, and would be forced to resort to things like "33434434" and suchlike?  (Genuine example, btw, I know the guy.)  That doesn't matter, said LL, because no one will ever see these names.  All they will ever see is the brand-spanking-new Display Name, which can be anything you like, can include all sorts of funky Unicode characters, and can be changed whenever you like!

Astute observers will have noticed that that's not the system we've got now; it was pointed out, with some force, to LL that a setup where anybody can change their name to anything is as close to a full-scale griefers' charter as one could possibly imagine.  And so, after some hemming and hawing, the current system was adopted, whereby:-

• The basic User Name is always visible,
• If you do bother with a Display Name, other people can choose whether or not they see it
• You can change your Display Name only once a week
• There are some protections against impersonation - especially in the case of the Linden last name, for pretty obvious reasons
• Because a whole bunch of existing scripts, and even the login screens of third party viewers, would get broken by the change, a setup was introduced whereby the word "Resident" was used as a placeholder for the last name in the case of a new, single-named avatar.  This is where the idea of "everyone now has the last name of Resident" comes from

Clear as mud?  Right.  But this is where the three different names come from.  I used to be called "Glorf Bulmer", but that is only my Legacy Name now, only it's sometimes also referred to as a Full Name.  My actual User Name is "glorf.bulmer".  I don't bother with a Display Name, normally, though I did once call myself "Brian Spartacus" just to make a point.

I sometimes wonder if the Lab could have come up with anything that so singularly failed to meet anyone's needs or expectations.  You want to change your User Name to reflect your in-world marriage?  You still can't.  You can change your Display Name, of course, but many people won't bother with it, and anyway it isn't the permanent change you were hoping for.  As for the roleplayer communities; well, I just hope you enjoy playing the same role for a minimum of a week at a time.  (Actually, you can change from your Display Name back to your User Name - well, OK, your Full Name - I think - any time you like, but you can't take on another Display Name for another week once you've done that.)

(Are you still mixed up about these Full Names?  So am I.  It might help to think about a newer, single-named avi; if their User Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom" - again, not a made-up example - then their Full Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom", but their Legacy Name is "affordablecustompcsdotcom Resident".  Clear as mud, I know.)

Ancillary problems have, of course, developed.  Gibberish User Names very quickly became the norm, as new users discovered the names they wanted were already taken, couldn't think of an acceptable alternative, and settled for adding on random strings of numbers and letters until they found something that worked.  The option to include Unicode characters in Display Names allowed many non-English users to have names in their own alphabets, a triumph! - except for English-speaking users who had no idea how to type in those new names.  (And if someone's Display Name is in Chinese ideograms, and their User Name is something like "ituweds7533dkfteq", one's conversational options are pretty much limited to "Hey, you over there with the face".)  The whole "Resident" marker became synonymous with "newbie" in people's minds, leading to discrimination and distrust, leading to resentment and further distrust.

And let us not even talk about the problems for scripters, or for merchants (LL made the boneheaded decision to use Display Names in transaction logs, the one place where you absolutely have to have a clear record of who you've been dealing with), or people with obscene or otherwise unacceptable Display Names and even User Names (like "affordablecustompcsdotcom" and his wife "mrsaffordablecustompcsdotcom", lovely couple that they were)....

Now, it would be fair to say that this state of affairs has attracted adverse comment.  Granted, pretty much everything LL does from breathing upwards attracts adverse comment, but in this case it was fairly well deserved.  A change request (SVC-7125 ) was officially made, and it has attracted thousands of votes and a comment trail a mile long.

And, now, Linden Lab is moving on this.  And I just hope they're moving in something like the right direction.

Granted, I am more confident about LL these days; under the direction of its new CEO, things seem brighter and happier than they were.  Rodvik Linden has not been afraid to listen to SL residents and introduce improvements (the new V3 viewer answers pretty much all the genuine criticisms levelled at Viewer 2, for instance) and even to reverse his own mistakes (the much-touted and thoroughly horrible "Basic Mode" was quietly dropped once its Bad Idea-ness was amply demonstrated).  So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some effective change on this issue.

Except... the latest messages we've had on the topic indicate all sorts of odd things being considered, "user-community-granted titles" being among them.  And I am dreadfully worried that this might mean they are thinking of some new system of Byzantine and wonderful complexity - and that this might prove to be even more of a dog's breakfast than the current system.

So... all I can say is: please, Lindens, don't eff this one up again.

Vindictive Geology in Caledon Wellsian

So, I caught the Guvnah's announcement of geological upheavals in northern Caledon, including lava flows and Cavorite eruptions in Wellsian.  "Aha!" I thought to myself; for Cavorite, that mineral so essential for the powering of anti-gravitational devices, and which also makes a piquant cocktail with notably uplifting effect, is dashed hard to come by, sometimes, what with my usual Tanzanian suppliers being increasingly unreliable, and the Cavorite Mines taking a dim view of tourists who come out with suspiciously floaty backpacks.  So, I packed up my collecting sacks and my trusty lead insoles, and went forth to scavenge, I mean to lend humanitarian assistance during the disaster.

There was a fair amount of upheaval at the arrival point:-

But things really got nasty further on down:-

I wound up taking refuge on the cliff side, looking down on the chaos below:-

Now, it's possible I might have got a bit too close to the lava flows at some stage:-

Fortunately, the RCAF were on hand to deal with any medical emergencies:-



(You can see they were needed!)

Unfortunately, about this time I was overcome by the fumes:-

And, after receiving field treatment from the redoubtable Miss Wendyslippers Charisma, and a reviving cup of coffee from Miss Erehwon Yoshikama, I was medevaced, as I believe the word is, to the RCAF hospital in Caledon Cape Wrath:-





Where I received expert medical attention, although the combination of Cavorite vapours, Mondrago coffee, Miss Wendyslippers's injection, truth gas, and laughing gas had an... interesting... effect:-

It was sometime around then that the cumulative effect became too much for my computer to handle, and I was forced into an extended convalescence in RL.  But I've recovered, now, and am back to normal, or as normal as I can manage, anyway.  My thanks go out to Miss Wendyslippers Charisma, Miss Erehwon Yoshikawa, and Miss Solace Fairlady for their prompt assistance!

And you can bet I've learned my lesson, and won't be going out raiding hot Cavorite again...

... without proper breathing gear, at least.