The Alphaville Herald

Garbage Collectors Run Amok – Create Transgendered Bald Bearded Women

by Pixeleen Mistral on 10/11/06 at 5:03 pm

LL promises one hour lag – for inventory restores

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Bemused Linden Lab technicians warned metaverse residents to avoid garbage collectors with the hiccups today. While Linden developers gathered to suggest home remedies for the embarrassing condition, crazed trash clearing/collecting bots continued to run amok inside the asset server causing loss of body parts and shapes for some Second Life citizens. Unhappy avatars such as Ridem Oxide complained, “Great- have already lost 2 XCITE clits in the past 14 days due to SL “inventory issues”. Tough to earn a living in a game where losing your ass is a real hazard. “. The Herald staff totally agrees – if this problem continues we plan to start a charity drive so that Ridem will have the tools essential to earning a living in SL — perhaps the “Ridem clit fund” is in order?

To treat the symptoms of this annoying problem, LL developer Unverified Linden tried holding his breath – but after a few minutes, hiccup sounds continued to issue from the asset server. As the day wore on more users complained of ominous messages such as “Unable to create requested object. Object is missing from database.” and “Failed to find body part in database”. Stan Pomeray noted the loss of his “hair and body shape” and reported he had turned into a bald, bearded woman”. Draco18s Majestic reported a similar experience, “I lost my main-account’s main av’s body shape. Worst part is SL default my shape to FEMALE, WTF?”

WTF does seems a reasonable comment here, although Kelly Linden suggested patience and asked that those who see the database error messages should “wait 1 hour, and then try again”. Apparently intermittent asset server lag of about an hour should be expected at this point. Residents won’t mind that, will they?

As for treating the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms, the Herald contacted medical experts on hiccups and found out that the problem is basically caused by an irritated diaphragm – sometimes caused by “eating too quickly or too much”. Does this suggest that Linden Labs may have taken on too many citizens too fast? Hard to imagine how something like that might have happened.