Blinded by the Light

"Facelight" is a dirty word to many residents of Second Life. It's amazing how many people walk around with a 500 terawatt arc lamp hovering in front of their faces, as if a perpetual Ground Zero accompanies them, washing out all detail in the entire sim, or the entire building they happen to be in.

It's not just facelights, though. I've been in a store where the posters for the clothing on sale were made to glow so brightly one could only see a fuzzy outline of the outfit, and couldn't make out a name or a price. And last night, while exploring and trying to figure out just what circumstances and settings cause SL clients to leak RAM like a sieve with the wire mesh cut out of it, I came upon a region that called to mind Roger Zelazny's greatest work, Lord of Light: "...this general area must have appeared in some quarters as though the Universal Fire did a dance upon the map."

This blinding light supposedly came from a small campfire on the beach. I have no idea why the prim skirt was immune.

I've seen buildings similarly lit. I don't know of anyone who virtually sleeps; what's the point? But some places, which seem to have been filled with hidden halogen lighting, would make it impossible.

No one could possibly intend that beach to look as though it had been teleported to some place inside the sun. There must be some client and configuration that makes those batteries of facial klieg lights and perpetual low-yield nuclear devices look good. I wonder what they are.

UPDATE: Boy, Google is fast. Maybe half an hour after I posted this, I googled "zelazny facelight", and (despite suggesting that maybe I meant "face lift"), this post turned up on page three of the results.