I was losing my mind. No. I was losing my grip on reality. Closer. I was losing my video card. Bingo. For a span of several days a couple of weeks ago, I was forced to watch the slow but inevitable degradation of my connection to the world of second life.
Denial. It started simply enough: on Sunday evening, textures on spheres stopped rendering properly. It annoyed me, but like so many small symptoms of something likely to get bigger, I tried to ignore it, hoping it would go away.
It didn't.
Fear. Soon enough, other textures started distorting, slipping away, going blank. Or worse, going garishly wrong. On Monday evening, some of the world would seem normal, but trees would suddenly reverse colors, or vanish. The sky would become a grid of parallel, orange lines (reflected dutifully in the sea; my dementia skewing my perceptions but retaining an odd sort of logic to it).
My own tasteful black trousers were replaced by a golf-outfit-loud red and black checked pants. My face went a featureless black, which I actually kind of liked, may try to recreate deliberately, at some point.
And right around that time, second life started crashing on me, taxing beyond endurance the capabilities of my crippled PC.
A sort of screen slipped down between me and the world, my perception of things growing more fragmented and abstract with each reboot of my laptop.
Anger. I blamed Windows, or Active X (Microsoft always easy prey for blame). I blamed ATI. I tinkered and hacked. I swore a bit. I did everything I could to halt the downward spiral of my perceptions. Things that have no analog in the real world, short of self-inflicted brain surgery. I reinstalled video drivers twice, praying it was a software issue. Rolled back the OS to before the problem started. Finally, in desperation, I did the PC equivalent of shoving a knitting needle into my eye socket, and completely wiped and reformatted the hard drive. At last, the view was clear…for a few minutes. Then, once again, the dementia set in, and the world grew distorted and strange.
Acceptance. By Tuesday, it sank in that this was beyond my capabilities to repair. So I aksed myself, If I can't fix this problem, can I live with it? Countless people make do with sensory distortions or deprivations of some sort, perhaps, for a time at least, I could do so in second life as well.
I looked at the world with my new eyes, and, truth be told, I found it rather beautiful. Fragmented into small squares of bright, simple color, refracted and reflected in the texture maps around me…Second Life was transformed into a pointillist masterpiece, a virtual world as envisioned by Seurat. I became enthralled by the strange beauty of it all. Perhaps this was less a disease than a good acid trip (public safety message: don’t do drugs!), a skewing of perceptions that was the path not to doom, but to a new sort of consciousness.
The grid of parallel orange bars in the sky, now sometimes appearing in the ground as well, started to suggest to me not a distortion, but a clearer view of something hidden, something always there but missed in day to day life. Was I staring at the framework of the world itself? Perhaps.
This was starting to become fun. But with the continued distortion of my senses, I was losing my grip on the world as well. Creating even a simple object taxed the card so much I'd freeze, unable to move or speak, locked out by my inability to process my own actions. The crashes grew worse.
I called Fujitsu. I swapped the laptop (an N Series Lifebook, very nice machine) over the weekend. And was quickly back to normal, well "normal," anyway.
But I made one last cool discovery about my affliction. In the real world, people with sensory deprivations are reduced to words like these to share their perceptions with others. But in second life, my problem showed up in snapshots. So I snapped the attached photo to capture my perspective.
I got to wondering, have other diseases or disabilities have afflicted Second Lifers? Keyboard-induced speech impediments might be something that folks have to deal with… And you can maybe view lag as a sort of mind-body disconnect as well. Has anyone else experienced something as strange as progressive graphics card failure?
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