The gray, gray. Alas, the soul-crushing gray of it all!

So first of all, my continued apologies to the growing amount of people who have contacted me in the last couple of weeks about their upcoming projects, and who are now sitting around waiting patiently for me to highlight them or interview the people involved. And the reason for the continued delays unfortunately won't come as any surprise to most residents; that I too am a victim of the grid's unending technical problems and bandwidth brownouts, problems that in this case have been happening for nine straight days now and with no end in sight. Today, for example, I made my fifth attempt to do my first photo essay about the steampunk community Caledon; to try to make things smoother, I logged in specifically at the time of day when SL sees its least amount of traffic (9am to noon SLT), twirled down my total view distance to its minimum, turned off all abilities to render shiny and bumpy objects, and even ran around in RL and did errands for ten minutes after logging in, just to give the game engine plenty of time to rez in the environment around me. And yet, when I came back to my computer ten minutes after first arriving at Caledon, the shots above were still what greeted me. Argh! A curse on you, damnable ill-firing silicon synapses!

Now, I'll be the first to admit, that a big part of the problem lies with the computer I use here in RL Chicago to log into SL; a pretty sucky little Mac Mini, not to put too fine a point on it, which is suited for immersive 3D graphics-intensive online environments kind of like your grandma is suited for immersive 3D graphics-intensive online environments. In fact, in my opinion anyway, this is the one singlemost important issue about joining Second Life that no one ever talks about beforehand: that your experience there is profoundly affected by what type of home computer you have. The whole reason I bought my Mini last spring, after all, was to get into SL, with the SL website saying that the low-end Intel Mac would have no problems running the software; what no one bothered to mention to me before my purchase, however, was that "yes, it will run the game client, but you'll also have to wait ten to fifteen minutes for your entire view to load, each time you visit a new location, plus endure 30-second freezes in crowded areas each time you try to turn or move. Oh yeah, and by the way, your Mini is guaranteed to completely crash at least once for every hour you spend in the grid."

I wish someone had told me this before I bought my Mini, which is why I'm now telling you -- that getting a computer to run the SL software is a far different thing than having an enjoyable experience in SL. If you want to guarantee yourself the best time you can possibly have there, then don't hold back; go out and get you one of those ridiculous neon-covered computers that the 16-year-olds love, with the alien head on the front and the racing stripes and all the other crap you see at LAN parties. Now, granted, all my fellow middle-agers, I feel your pain -- you will feel like a tool when using a PC designed for a teenager, and there's no getting around that. If you want the best experience in the grid you can have, though, it's important that you get one that was designed specifically for videogames.

Regular readers know that I don't do very much Linden-bashing here; I've been involved with internet startups myself in the past, after all, and know what an unbelievable nightmare they can be even on their best days, so I tend to cut developers a lot of slack when things go wrong at other startups. I will, however, issue this little open warning to the hardworking folks down at Linden Lab, based on the personal frustration I'm feeling these days -- that they are on the brink of a company-killing backlash, if they don't start getting the infrastructure problems of the grid fixed soon. And by 'company-killing,' I mean exactly that -- I mean that all the wonderful little fluff articles about SL that the mainstream media is writing these days can easily turn into never-ending scorn and derision, based on nothing else than X amount of residents getting bitchy about bandwidth and server issues, which could easily turn into a situation where Linden Lab is literally closing their doors for good. Now, I don't know what number that X has to be for all this to happen; but based on the things I've been reading in the SLogophere this week, this latest round of problems certainly isn't helping matters (nor is banning people from the official SL blog for making critical comments...but that's a whole other issue for a whole other time).

Whew, okay, finally feeling better! So anyway, I hope all of you will continue exercising patience with this blog, as I continue exercising patience with Second Life; and for all of you who have written in with story ideas now, please be aware that they are all documented and that I will eventually be getting around to featuring them all here. As always, here's hoping that things with the grid will start getting better soon, or at the very least not get any worse than they currently are.