Lucid Crashing: the unintentional beauty of system failure

I've often described the experience of being in-world as "underwater lucid dreaming", but with that term, I'm referring to the crazy unpredictability  of SL activity from moment to moment.  Less appreciated is how dreamlike the experience of crashing out of the world can be.  Not usually a traditional blue screen of death, where the consensual reality evaporates back to desktop, but more often, an experience that resembles an out-of-body experience, or several cultural traditions of death. 

You seem to still be in the world of the living, but you're frozen there, or see objects and avatars in front of you that can't possibly be there-- or like what happened to me last night, your avatar data goes one way while the world data goes another, and you just drift off, like the ancient texts say, into another realm beyond.

Not a great thing to happen if you're in the middle of something important, of course, but I can't help thinking this: because Second Life still crashes so much, the strange and unpredictable quality of system failure has become an essential part of how we experience it.

Comments

[Cyn Vandeverre]

I almost miss the strange video effects I used to get before I upgraded my system; clashing shards of color, like a shattered kaleidescope, each one a different length and thickness, phasing through colors and textures before it all went grey and black and crashed.

[[email protected]]

Great post !

After I upgraded to 1 GB and an NVidia-thingie, and after a couple of client updates, things are much more stable (for me at least) and i'm not getting the out-of-body experience so often, except in cases of total region meltdown...

This post was food for thought.... What if RL death is just your region's crash on God's (or whatever suits you) simulation ?.... I'm a relative newcomer (3 months) so I guess this question was already discussed somewhere by deep-thinking, egghead SL philosophers...

Best regards,
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Blogging from SL at http://articulos-interesantes.blogspot.com/search/label/Second%20Life

[Caliburn Susanto]

I travel around in SL by airship often -- sometimes zepplins, but more often by balloon.

When I hit a sim border that has aggressive security, or when the sim is overloaded with prims (probably some jerk within is using temp-rezzers to max out the his parcel(s)), I get thrown out of the vehicle and it is returned to my inventory. However ...

I can still see the vehicle off in the distance (even though it is no longer in-world) and I myself am stuck in the same pose I was in while in the vehicle. If I do nothing my frozen unresponsive avatar continues travelling slowly in the same direction indefinitely. However ...

When I get tired of this and use CTRL-SHIFT-H to go home, suddenly the avatar starts revolving around in a circle at an accelerated rate. In a couple of seconds I can hear all the sounds I hear while in my living room (music, birds chirping, the crashing of waves on the beach), but my avatar is still showing as revolving in the sky. As the seconds pass it appears to be buffeted by high pressure, the skin crawls and buckles, the eyeballs bulge way out (even pop out and back in), the mouth is distorted, the hair flashes on and off and many other groteque effects take place, then, suddenly, "POP!" he's back in his living room, calmly waiting for what happens next.

Kind of entertaining, actually.