SL9B: A Violent End

As I noted yesterday, many exhibitors at Second Life Birthday celebrations like to "blow up" their builds after the public days end by letting physics-enabled prims rain from the sky. The infrastructure staff likes to do that, too, as you see in this photo of me sitting at the Lesbos@SL9B exhibit after having a sidewalk dropped on my head (yes, I crawled out with nary a scratch).

With the fabulous all-mesh stage in the background, I sit at the edge of Lesbos@SL9B and think about the past few weeks, rubbing my head where the 10m² prim hit me as it tried to drive me into the ground.

For the first time ever, though, the main stage was given the same treatment. The fabulous four-sim,  4300-prim Cake Stage created by artist Mikati Slade was lifted up, unlinked, set to Physical, then dropped, the debris scattering in a slow-motion ballet as the Linden Lab servers (they are solid gold, you know) struggled to keep up. I don't think some bits ever came down, but in the half-hour or so that I watched everything seemed like colorful hard candy smashing the ground through a clear molasses. Some prims were extremely fast. Others paused as if undecided. Still more remembered they had rotation scripts and careened wildly in the chaos. It was a fabulous time and Pygar Bu has a wonderful set of pix in his Snapshot Stream here. But the real fun was sharing it with others and now I'm sharing with you:

Stilling with Rails Bailey and awaiting the impending carnage. We had on our frosting-proof suits. Pygar Bu had a fork.

I was too stunned (and too ill from something at supper eight hours earlier) to start taking pictures early

Eventually I left my seat and flew in to the melee.

This shot was taken about a minute after the first so you can image how slowly some pieces were moving.

Eventually I went in to try to jump up and down on some of the more recalcitrant bits to little avail.

As I logged off I watched a mermaid whose name I didn't catch flying over Marianne McCann in her FIC chopper.

I don't know how long it took for all the wreckage to settle though I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of it was still falling when the bosses finally had to clear the sims, much to the delight of some screaming servers. Do you think some alarms might have gone off when the trigger was pulled?

If you had half as much fun at SL9B as I did then you can figure I had twice as much fun as you, but it was still an amazing time in either instance. Check out my Snapshot Feed here to see some of my other memories of an amazing event. See you next year!!