Monday, August 16, 2010

The Place of Lost Prims

Written 16 August, 2010

The Place of Lost Prims

Every sim in Second Life has one-- a place where prims, and yes, even avatars go when they're lost. So if you've misplaced that special something, or if you just heard the rez sound and no prims showed up, before you fly up to 4096 meters to look, head to the sim corner.

The coordinates of this region are 0,0,0. Prims accumulate just below this spot, in the region below the floor of Second Life.

I've long known about this spot, for back in the early days Leaf Shermer found a megaprim I had misplaced; it wound up the Southwest corner of her property at, yes, you guessed it, 0,0,0.

Because after long practice I can recognize Whimsy's place of lost prims, I know that's where I sometimes go when I get momentarily blue-zoned when I teleport.

Last night, standing more than 40 meters above the ocean at Pele's summit, I rezzed a HUD of my own devising because it refused to attach. I heard the rez sound, but it never showed. I pulled out my prim finder, and it didn't show on the sim. So I flew down to 0,0,0-- and there I found not only the recently misplaced HUD, but another, and one of my hairdos, and assorted single prims. I deleted them all and took one last look around. And there it was. Bling.

It's not easy to zoom the camera below the surface, but I managed to get close, With transparent highlighted, I selected the tiny prim.

It turned out to be sparkle for prim eyes; it must have been there for more than a year, silently mini-blinging since the day I bought prim eyeballs, thought them horrible, and threw them away.

Before today, my most bizarre 0,0,0 experience was finding myself in the sim corner, standing on a black-and-white Holstein cow. And that happened on not one, not two, but THREE different sims.

Today topped that, for in my within-sim teleporting, I wound up momentarily at three zeroes-- and there was an avatar in a seated position!

After I told Sweetie what I had seen, I flew immediately to the zero corner-- and, a good three minutes after I first spotted her, the avatar was still there.

I maneuvered my camera into position, prepared to take a photo, and-- damn the broken snapshot shortcut-- she vanished before I could hit the button.

I hate when that happens.

After that, I noticed, the Statistics window was showing one more avatar on Whimsy than indicated on the map or in Mysitool sim scans. I restarted Whimsy and the counter went back to normal.

Occasionally an avatar becomes ghosted-- the Second Life viewer closes after a crash, but the avi is still visible to others at its last location. People so ghosted are unable to log on and may remain visible until the sim is restarted-- which is why I restarted Whimsy.

No doubt about it, this is the strangest Second Life I've ever lived...

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