The forums have been eating too much of my time, and that's unhealthy. Better prioritization has led me to move towards my roots inworld. Where Second Lives are actually being lived.

It should surprise noone searching for "flex" in Second Life's Find > Places now has 157 matches. "flexi" gets 118. In Find > Classifieds, 204 matches for "flex" and 163 for "flexi". Some may dismiss them as eye candy, but a year—or even months from now—looking back, things will make sense. Not because they have to… but they will.

This week, I've been rounding up bugs with the new Inventory changes. It's going to be a real diamond soon when this muck and noise gets cleared away. What's especially funny to me about it is like many calamities, it came, it's still coming… and it's going to go. To date, it was one of the finest examples of aggregated Resident feedback I can think of: it's sort of like when you go to the doctor, you say something hurts—you may not know the technical terms, but you try as best as you can to describe. Exactly what this was like. At times, it felt almost like a warzone triage—

I did have a terrifying dream when I was laying ill in bed. I imagined a horrifying grotesquerie of Stephen King or Robert Heinlein (via Starship Troopers) proportions: Resis going to look for a treasure in their inventories, and instead finding these awful, literal incarnations of bugs—crawling out through the pores, eating through the filters, and all too often, vivisecting avatars in swift (but pain can never happen quickly enough), brutal motions. I watched avatars who began to flee in terror, only to get between "I'm running, I'm flying" and "Now my brains are being poked and scooped out like chopsticks clanking into a humid rice bowl". Some tried to express fear, but they didn't get as far as gesturing it. The realization hadn't even dawned on them.