Sinister Lovecraftian Formlessness

First, a little update: Land Baron contacted me last night with an actual apology, so fair play to him for doing that.  He also told me he was winding up his operations, so my "hunkering down" strategy has paid off, or will come the end of next month.  This may leave me as a single island of habitation in a sea of abandoned land... well, we shall see how things go from there.

Anyway.  Last night, the talk at Oxbridge was mostly of the new mesh avatars, which are (as previously noted) not entirely an unmixed blessing - especially from the point of view of the tutors, who will have to explain to baffled new people that their avatars do not actually look like them, they are merely piloting human-shaped skin suits like the Slitheen in Doctor Who.  I foresee confusion arising.

One part of the conversation turned to making more and better (and more ethnically diverse) mesh avatars, and in that context, Tali (who is brilliant and well-informed and I would say that even if she wasn't my girlfriend) brought up the MakeHuman program ( www.makehuman.org ), an OpenSource project for creating human-shaped meshes.  And I sat in the lecture hall in unwonted silence and stillness from then on, because I was downloading this thing and having a go.

And, actually, it is pretty darn nifty... and it includes several features which are meant not only for creating avatar meshes, but for uploading them as wearable rigged objects into Second Life.  My reputation as a mad scientist positively demanded that I try it out...

... and shortly thereafter, I appeared in the Oxbridge plaza as a cloud of shapeless protoplasm the size of a bus, the only distinguishable features being a pair of shoes.  As Tali put it, "a shoggoth in bathroom slippers".

Well, these setbacks will happen.   It may be a problem with the tool - it is still in early stages, officially a Version 1 release, and the Second Life compatibility tools may not yet be proven.  On the other hand, a mesh expert I am not, and it might be somewhat hubristic to expect a perfect result based on one evening's playing around.  So, I may persevere with this.  (If nothing else, I'm sure I can export the mesh product into Blender, and I should be able to rig it from there...)

In fact, the more I think about this, the more I am tempted to utter those words which, spoken by people like me, make sensible people blench and hide their breakable items before running for the hills: "Oh!  I think I see what I did wrong...."

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!

Limbo dancing

Prior to my, umm, sabbatical from the hurly-burly of SL, regular readers may recall, I was having frequent problems with what I called the "blue limbo" problem - this blue limbo being, basically, where I was left when I tried to log in.  The world around me would start to load, and then give it up as a bad job, leaving me hanging around - more or less incompletely loaded myself - unable to move, with my ping time (the time it takes my client to communicate with the server, you can check this out yourself with Advanced>Performance Tools>Statistics Bar) pegged at 10000 milliseconds.  Which is a lot of milliseconds, to be sure.

Well, returning to SL, I was getting this same problem, still, repeatedly.  (It left me in a no-animations default posture at one point - literally crucified upon a login failure.)  So I revived my old support case in as tactful a manner as possible, and much submitting of zipped log files went on, and...

... well, no definite conclusion has been reached, but I'm getting the problem rather less at the moment, and I think I'm beginning to understand why.

Basically, it might be a case of too much rubbish in my inventory.

Well, you know, duh, some might say, and not without due cause.  After all, my inventory is not inconsiderable in size.  And it is rather noticeably over the recommended limits. Let's face it, I have very nearly enough shoes, which is going some.

However - other people with similar building and shopping habits have accumulated even larger inventories than my 50,000 or so items, and still manage without getting limbo'ed.  So, why am I getting this?

I still don't know for sure.  But, the first time I shook myself free of it, it was by deleting my outfits folder, which contained a number of broken links - links to clothing items which the system couldn't resolve, for reasons best known to itself.  And I'm beginning to suspect that the whole problem rests on a more general expression of this.

Basically, what's stitching me up (according to the guys working on my support case) is a timeout, where queries to the database regarding the components of my online self take too long to resolve.  If I'm coming into SL with my inventory empty after a cache clear, I don't get the problem, implying that it lies somewhere in the lengthy process of reconciling the items in my inventory with the records in the database.  Something, somewhere, is taking too long to add up.

So, I've been on - well, you couldn't quite call it an inventory purge exactly - but, at least, a slimming session of conceivably dodgy assets.  Very old freebie items that I haven't worn or used in ages have been zapped - including a pair of boots that persistently threw up those "broken links" in my outfits folder.  A lot of old notecards got the chop - and we know that there's an awful lot of different things can go in a notecard, right?  Calling cards were purged - including some from people I know have had accounts deleted, or have otherwise left SL under a cloud: are those assets which are hard to locate?  A lot of landmarks have been painstakingly removed from shopping folders... including several folders that I got from closing down sales, where in many cases the sims relating to those landmarks don't exist any more.

Now, it may be that I'm barking up the wrong tree completely here.  All this slimming down has brought my inventory down to somewhat under 47,000, and it may be that that's simply a safe size to have, with my particular setup and connection.  But... I have a feeling it may well be worth while removing assets from inventory that I know might be problematical.

Anyway.  We shall, no doubt, see.

I don't have a thing to wear!

Well, no, that's not strictly true.  All my clothes are still there... there have even been some additions to the clothing folders, what with finding some mesh items that (despite the evil that is Standard Sizing) can be made to work.

What I don't have any more is my varied and extensive Outfits folder.  Let me explain....

I have mentioned, in previous posts, what I called the "blue limbo" problem.  Basically, this means that when I log in, it's in a semi-disconnected state - I can't move, can't communicate, my ping time is pegged at the maximum value, and the world around me is partially or (more often) completely unloaded - nothing but blue sky and blue sea.

This happened enough to be annoying, was fixed for a while, but has been back with a vengeance since my return to SL.

So, I went to the lengths of filing a bug report... but, more pertinently, also went to the lengths of examining my log files.

The thing is, when you log into SL, a whole host of things happen behind the scenes to get you inworld (or not).  And these things are recorded, by default (on my Win7 box) in C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Second Life\logs.  (The AppData folder is invisible by default, you may have to Take Steps to see it.)

Studying the text file in there called SecondLife.log... well, it is long and complex, and if you're not intimately familiar with the viewer's source code (and I'm not) it's not all that meaningful.  But, as I scanned the lines of text with my jaded eyes, a few things leapt out at me.

One of them was the fact that errors were being returned relating to outfits - specifically, "broken links" in the outfit folders.

Now, as we know from previous witterings on this blog, outfits are individual folders containing, not actual items, but links to items in the inventory.  However, those links are, themselves, entries in your inventory, and in SL's databases... and, if something has gone agley with them, things can go wrong.

Was it possible, I asked myself, that the system was spending sufficient time and effort chasing its tail, following invalid entries in broken links, that it was timing out on completing other, more important tasks?  Yes, I answered myself, this was certainly a possibility.

So... track down the broken links and remove them?  I thought about that.... I could get which objects they referred to, after all, from the log file.  But I had a lot of outfits.  (How many?  We shall soon see.)  I rather blenched at the idea of trawling through them individually.  Besides, many of them needed updating anyway - they used old skins and old eyes, or something equally naff.  So.  Time, Glorf, I said to myself, to bite the bullet.

So I selected every outfit I wasn't actually wearing at the time, and deleted them all.

I crashed, of course.  But, when I logged back on... some 13,000 items lighter in the inventory... I was logged in properly, straight away, and had a darn sight better performance than usual.  Whether this was down to the elimination of broken links, or simply to the reduction of my inventory by something over 20%, I don't know.

But things worked, for a time, and I was a happy Glorf, though a Glorf who had to trawl through actual inventory folders to find stuff to wear... Then the viewer sent through its automatic update, from 3.5.0 to 3.5.1 - and, next time I logged in, blue limbo again.

So it wasn't that... or it wasn't just that.

Well, I shall persevere.  But all this demonstrates, I think, just how many cans of worms you can open, trying to fix a software problem.

It also raises several other questions, such as why those darn links got broken in the first place.  The items they linked to are still in my inventory, and haven't been moved out of the original folders they came in, nor have they been edited or otherwise fiddled with, by me at least.  So what happened to get them unlinked?  (The main culprits seem to be two pairs of boots - one a freebie set I could happily dispose of entirely, the other a Steam Hunt prize of quite excessive sexiness which I should be sorry to sacrifice.  What's so problematical about them, though?  Answers on a postcard please.)

Plus ça change...

I celebrated the feast of Saint Stephen by getting my foot crushed between a very heavy church door and a similarly solid piece of ecclesiastical architecture.  Various complications, too tedious to record, duly set in, with the result that I haven't been taking much of an interest in anything for the past three months.

I did, however, manage to get back into SL for my third rezday, and was welcomed back by several...

... including SL itself, in its own inimitable way.

I installed, as is oft my wont, the latest dev version, and duly reappeared inside the hallowed halls of Oxbridge.  There followed a quick tour of my properties (still, amazingly enough, all going strong), at the end of which I decided to change outfits.  Bad Idea Glorf.

It seems that there are changes afoot in the world of baking avatar textures; more is being done on the server side, less on the client side.  In theory, this should be all to the good.  In practice, I changed outfits, went to visit Caledon Burroughs and the much-missed Tali Rosca... and found that, though I looked fine in my viewer, to everyone else in SL, the whole baking process had got as far as my underwear and then given up.  There I was, unknowingly parading around wearing nothing but a smile and a thong.

So my triumphant return to the shores of SL took the form of... spending several hours skulking underwater with my boobs out, trying to figure out what was going wrong and how to get it fixed.

(Pictures are not forthcoming, this is still Not That Sort of Blog.)

So.  Welcome back, to and from SL.

Merry Christmas

Last year, I produced a little Christmas gift package to send out to people... this year, alas, I haven't been that organized.

It's been an ... eventful ... few weeks offline, just to round off an eventful year.  I won't go into details, beyond saying: all those travel warnings, around now, about the floods in England?  How you shouldn't go anywhere, basically, in the west of the country unless your journey is strictly necessary?  Well, they ain't kidding.

Anyway.  Back to civilization, or at least Internet access.  Who knows how long it will last?  Not I.  My New Year's resolution, though, is going to have to be to pick up the scattered threads of my SL and stitch them back together.  Still have building to do, things to see, people to - well, do things with.

Basically, I am harassed but yet unbowed.  If anyone's still reading this, Merry Christmas to you all, and do not expect you have seen the last of me quite yet.

Another "not dead yet" post...

Nor is my mother, but there have been more medical alarums and excursions... I really do hope things settle down a bit; one way and another, it has been one hell of a summer.

Anyway.  I'm still around.  With luck, more so, soon.

I am All Grown Up

I had a small and unexpected windfall last week, so I decided to treat myself... specifically, I treated myself to one of Ceri Quixote's "Jotun" mesh avatars. 

Ceri Quixote hasn't been mentioned by name in this blog, but she has appeared before; she was the blue lady wandering around the Fantasy Faire sims... the very tall blue lady... taller than most of the buildings, in fact.  Her "Jotun" and "Titan" mesh avatars are not on the same awe-inspiring scale, but they are quite large enough for most purposes.  About 6.5 meters tall, according to the measuring prim I whipped out in Oxbridge.

Standing by my bomb lab in Caledon Steam SkyCity

On the whole, I rather like it.  The rigged mesh makes it easy to wear, there is a range of makeup and clothing available (I went for the most modest option, because if you are walking around and you are 6.5 meters tall, you want to be darn sure you're wearing underwear), and you can use your own AO and other standard animations with it... which is important to me, because it helps this giant-sized-thing look like a giant-sized me.  The physique is not far off my own - admittedly, the nose and the jawline aren't a match for mine - but, with my usual AO and one of my more commonly chosen hairs blown up to an appropriate size, this looks sufficiently Glorf-like for me to be comfortable walking around in it.  It didn't take me long to get the hang of the controls (which allow things like different make-ups, and render parts of the avatar non-visible so you can wear stuff like digi legs, and offer some hand and face animation settings).  On balance, the whole thing was fun.  I could wish for an even taller version to be available - I wouldn't mind wading up to the tower in Burroughs - and I desperately need a stomping-on-the-ground animation to use with it.  But, well, this thing is fun.  Which is what I do SL for, mainly.

Wandering around Oxbridge

Tali put on her micro fox avi, just to provide a contrast.  (Note that, in that picture, I've worked out how to put the boots on.)



I guess it's progress

In the wake of last week's alarums and excursions, LL have done some further maintenance of their data centre.  They have told people what's happening and why, have issued warnings of the possible effects, and have given an explanation about why it's being done.  I think this constitutes progress - at any rate, it is more communication than we normally see from LL about such matters.

I would rather  not have been kicked off the grid and prevented from logging back on, of course... but at least this time I knew something about what was going on.  So, one step forward, I think.  Or at least a cautious inching of one toe in a generally not-backwards direction.

The Old Glorf and the Sea

Post-Easter holiday holiday yesterday, I settled down into SL while my mother toddled off to visit friends, I got a few things done....

... and then I got one of those Phone Calls You Do Not Want To Get; my mother calling me on her mobile to say she'd fallen at the end of our street, couldn't get up, and would I come and get her?

It was the work of mere moments to get down to where she was sitting on the ground nursing her arm, and even fewer moments to phone for an ambulance.  (I will be berating her for not phoning the emergency services immediately, but I'll be saving that for when she's completely recovered.)  Even with the best efforts of the NHS (not for the first time, I thanked God and Nye Bevan for that institution), though, it took a while for her to be patched up, her dislocated elbow put back into shape, monitored for the sedatives they gave her, and finally discharged.  She returned home, rather in the attitude of Napoleon returning from Elba, shortly after midnight.

And, once she was settled with all her necessities (soft pillows, cocoa, painkillers for emergencies and copy of Mansfield Park), I returned to my computer, planning to leave a short message to people to explain where I'd been... only to find out I was still logged in to SL.

Shortly before I got the phone call, you see, I'd started a session at a fishing spot for the 7Seas game... and I had enabled the "auto-casting" feature which makes you cast your rod for fish automatically, without human intervention... and, it turns out, this is enough to stop you being logged out due to inactivity.  So, while the real me had been phoning ambulances and pacing hospital corridors and talking to a nurse with a bolt through her neck, I had also been engaged in an act of epic fishery rarely seen outside the writings of Ernest Hemingway.  Some time ago, I had stocked up on a quantity of bait equal to "all any person could reasonably need for a long time to come", and I had burned through most of it during the session.  No interruptions, no region restarts, nothing to disturb the even tenor of SL... it was a long and generally successful session; I only wish I'd been there.

I grabbed a very late lunch and ate it one-handed while declining fish and answering IMs with the other... I had to send apologies, after all, to all the people I'd inadvertently snubbed while AFK!  I don't know if I actually got the thing I was fishing for, though, or whether it was just lost in a long succession of unacknowledged inventory offers...  I shall find out soon enough, I suppose!

To Infinity and Beyond!

Back to building on the tower today.  It is to be used tomorrow as a landmark and a waypoint in a race across Caledon, and the racers will be changing over from sea to air transport here, so it seemed important that there should be some way up to the top floor.

My usual tangle of perilous metal walkways would meet the case, of course, but for the benefit of the faint-hearted, I also decided to put in another keyframed-movement lift.  So, having laid out the various stops, I rezzed a cylinder at the lowest level, intending to turn it into the lift platform....

... only for my touchpad to spazz out on me (I apologize for this impenetrable technical jargon) and the cylinder to disappear abruptly from view.

Hmm, I said to myself, this is not good news.  I had been editing its Z (up and down) position at the time, so the possibilities seemed to be three-fold (actually, they are four- or even five-fold, but only three occurred to me, I am blonde after all).  To wit:-

• It had sunk to the lowest possible point.
• It had risen to the highest possible point, i.e. the building limit of 4096 meters.
• It had risen to an impossibly high point, due to me leaving out the decimal point when I typed in the desired height, which would put it somewhere around 57,850 meters up.

(The other possibilities are: it had wound up in that sinkhole of lost items at coordinates 0, 0, 0 on the sim, or its position had got totally scrambled and it had shot off who alone knows where.)

So, I went down to the sea bed to look for it.  No dice.  So, on with the trusty flight assist, and up to 4096 meters height... took a while... no dice there either.  Cue me looking wistfully up into an infinite depth of sky.

Fortunately, there is this peculiarity of flight assists... you wear them to give you a discreet push when you are flying higher than the flight limit (which is soon to be raised or even effectively abolished, anyway, so never mind).  If you wear two of them and fly, they both detect that you are moving upwards and give a push accordingly, thus setting up a sort of feedback loop thingy where they set each other off.  This enables you to reach immense heights without wearing out your finger pressing the PageUp key.

Nonetheless, even with a freebie flight feather and my own Cavorite Personal Levitator (free from all good shops... that I own... which would make it free from one shop, and that open to debate), it takes a long time to reach 57,800 meters.

A bit shy of 53,000 meters up, not that the view changes much up here

How long does it take?  Roughly, an entire compilation album of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's greatest hits' worth of time.  Not, perhaps, the most exact measure of time out there, but what the heck, it works for me.  I passed the time talking to Turley Hallenbook, the actual proper Duchess of Burroughs (I'm just a parvenue, you know), who had various actually helpful ideas about how to look using estate management tools and such.

Of course, SL itself gets iffy when you're up that high.  The top bar in the viewer stopped registering my vertical position properly once I'd passed 4096 meters, so I had to rely on the dead-reckoning feature of my flight feather.  I don't know if it was accurate or not.  All I know is, I never found that missing prim, and I had a devil of a job getting back down.  I turned off the flight aids, fell for a few minutes, suddenly found myself crashing through the tower and into the ground... and then falling, again, from a height of 4096 meters, and being unable to stand once I'd hit the ground a second time.  I teleported out, and - to my surprise - found myself moving normally in the sim I'd aimed for.  I was seriously expecting to get logged out, there, so well done SL, I think.

But I never did find that prim.  On the off chance that anyone happens to be cruising thirty-five miles over Caledon, and spots a plywood cylinder, could they let me know where to find it?  Poor little prim; it is lost, and a long way from home.

The best laid plans...

... of mice and men, yadda yadda.   The typist has picked up food poisoning, the silly moo.  So, today SL activities take a ... back seat ... to thoroughly unwholesome RL ones.

Meh.  Is there some sort of improved RL viewer I can get?  I think the one I have is bugged.

Seconds out, round two!

To be fair to the viewer, it is trying gamely, following my challenge of yesterday.  My paltry few new landmarks burgeoned rapidly, during my last session, with each one being copied no less than five times.

I've done a cache clear and clean reinstall, so we'll have to see what difference that makes.  

I am not letting it get me down - the end of the Steam Hunt is now in sight, and I have finally started construction work on my Tower of Science and Sorcery in Caledon Burroughs.  It is rising out of the Firth of Caledon, causing some perplexity to Callie, the Caledonian Sea Monster, who swings by that location every quarter of an hour or so.  (Meanwhile, my partner in crime sex building continues to place hauntingly beautiful romantic ruins about the islands of Burroughs.  It's a good thing one of us has class.)

There may be photographs and such, later on, as things start to take shape.  Or the viewer may murder me in my sleep.  Could go either way really.

Rezzed to be Wild

Feeling rather out of sorts, for the past couple of days - my typist has a head cold, the silly moo - so, I decided to cheer myself up by dressing inappropriately and going out for a ride across the Mainland.

I didn't get very far, though, before a dodgy sim crossing hurled me, first into the sea, and then off the grid entirely....  What is it with sim crossings at the moment?  I once rode that bike all the way across Bay City with no mishaps (except jumping a couple of hundred meters into the air when I arrived at Moose Beach, but even that wasn't fatal).   But these days, I seem to be fighting invisible treacle every time I cross a region boundary.  Bah, I say, bah.

Embarrassing glows and missed targets

The much-esteemed Guvnah of the fair realm of Caledon issued an annoucement concerning glowing objects.  Apparently, there is no set standard in OpenGL for the rendering of glow, which means that some people see glowy things as nigh-thermonuclear blazes of light, and this puts them off settling nearby.  The Guvnah, therefore, exhorts us all to a seemly moderation in the use of this setting.

"No problem!" I thought, and even announced in Caledon group chat.  "I use point light settings when I want illumination, so there's no likelihood of me using excessive glowiness!"

Then, later on, I thought, "Well, I suppose I'd better make sure..."

Turned out I was one of the worst offenders in this regard.  Can we say "oops"?

Now, I am labouring on antiquated and inadequate equipment - it's a wonder I'm in SL at all, my machine finds Nethack a bit of a challenge - and so I have rather the opposite problem.  I have a vague feeling I used to be able to see glowiness, somewhat, but in the round of updates to drivers and viewers and OpenGL in general, that ability has been denied me, these days.  So, though I went around performing emergency glow-ectomies on various objects on my parcels in Steam SkyCity, at the end of the day, I wasn't sure I'd got the lot.

At which point the redoubtable Miss Tali Rosca enters this sorry tale.  Miss Rosca is a scripter, sculpter, builder and generally all-around-skilled SL person of quite phenomenal ability, and she has a bang-up-to-date viewer and graphics setup, with which it is her wont to take pictures of excessive lighting setups.  So, I begged a favour of her; could she take a brief tour of my parcels and note anything that might still be emitting pyrotechnic glow?  And she was kind enough to say yes.

... and, shortly thereafter, messaged me with a query; did I know that one of the landmarks I had given her was to an area with no floor, causing her to drop fifty meters on materialization and land in the waters beneath the Sky City?

It would be nice to say that I'm above such crude practical jokes, but, let's face it, I'm not.  However, this particular instance of dropping visitors in the drink was not intentional.... So I used the very same landmark, and materialized, as I'd expected to, on the perfectly solid metal deck of my art-deco cafe on the Sky City.  And shortly afterwards, Miss Rosca appeared, using that very same landmark, and hanging in midair above a hole in the floor, about five meters to the north of me.

So, it seemed that this was a consistent problem, and I recalled a previous incident where a visitor had materialized off-target and vanished downwards for an early bath.  Something was amiss here.  But what?

Cue pauses for rumination, cogitation, and experimentation, interrupted occasionally by the sound of one of SL's most accomplished creators falling in the water.

It wasn't until I'd set a new landmark on the floor upstairs, and Miss Rosca was still plummeting, that the penny finally dropped.  For Miss Rosca.  My pennies remained firmly balanced on top of my empty blonde head.

Put simply: when I took over the parcel, I inherited a pre-set landing point that I'd never thought to change.

The parcel used to be the old giant robot head, which was on the side of the Sky City for simply ages, it was something of a landmark, I missed it when it went.  I still have a snapshot of the city which shows it, and here we can see it:-

But it went the way of so many SL landmarks (not landmarks in the LM sense, I mean... oh, you know what I mean!), and when I took over, the parcel was just an empty space, and I built something that looks like this:-

Now, as you can see, the robot head, in plan, is basically square.  And the lower floor of my subsection, in plan, is basically L-shaped.  And the landing point, set in the robot head's heyday?  You guessed it: right in the middle of the cut-out section.

So visitors could use the landmark I gave them, and would be automatically re-routed five metres to the north, and thence re-routed by gravity to the icy waters beneath.  Meanwhile I, as the parcel's owner of record, could ignore the teleport routing and appear where I wished.  And "where I wished" was, obviously enough, somewhere I wouldn't fall in the water.  But it was close enough to the set landing point that I could write off any mis-appearances I saw as some sort of SL glitch.  Because I am, sometimes, one dumb blonde.

So - things I learned, that I should already have known:-

1.  A landing point, once set on a parcel, persists until it's explicitly changed, even through changes of parcel ownership.  (Why this should surprise me, given how assiduously SL preserves state, I really don't know.)

2. The owner of a parcel automatically overrides any set landing point and may appear wherever she (or presumably he) wishes to.

And I should probably add 3. I am extremely lucky to have tolerant and intelligent friends like Miss Rosca, who are prepared to spend time falling repeatedly into the sea in order to get my ideas straightened out!

All in all, not one of my best days.

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.