and it's starting to get, you know, a little uncomfortable

Woke up this morning to another anonymous comment saying Google was the best search engine imaginable. What the hell are they on? And Google is now paying spammers to hit blogs? Have they lost their minds??

But on to SL matters. After seven crashes, trying to build, I finally decided okay, that's enough of Snowglobe, and hopped to Emerald. The first two windows I saw scared the hell out of me. First, this message, which, in four years, I have never, ever seen:

Unable to save shape to central asset store.
This is usually a temporary failure. Please customize and save the wearable again in a few minutes.

If this problem persists, please click on the 'Tools > Report Bug' pull down menu and provide details about your network setup.

This was followed by a drop-down menu that said "Failed to find body part in database."

It got worse, though, when I started to click windows closed. Apparently, there was that inability to save anything--eyes, skin, jacket, pants, undershirt, shirt, panties, socks, and shoes--followed by "Failed to find clothing in database" messages.

I went home; logged out; logged back in on Snowglobe. I was ghosted, so I grabbed a quick shape-shift and then set down to the business of actually getting dressed. Which I found I could not do. I tried everything; everything said "cannot find in database". Now I was getting worried. I cleared cache, logged out once more, logged back in under Snowglobe, and changed to my emergency avatar. Still ghosted. I changed my group, my shape, and my bald cap. Still ghosted. I logged out again.

I logged back in under CoolSL, and voila, everything I thought I'd been in previously showed up. Okay, step one: good. Step two: changing into what I want to wear--in two minutes, not the fifteen I thought I had!--and getting over to the Solace sales office. It was a struggle just to get any outfit to rez in, let alone be selected. I ended up in mostly system layers, gritting my teeth.

At which point I opened my time card to record the time I arrived and saw this:

*

I closed it, and opened it again. Now it seemed to say

?*a?

I closed it again.

Fawkes: Evening love. How goes the hell of building?
me: Hellish
It's getting worse
Fawkes: That bad? That doesn't sound very good. What's wrong?
me: First: any time I get near another avatar, I crash
Second: if I port to a sim that has any lag at all, I crash
Third: if I pull my inventory in, I crash
Fourth: It's telling me most of my skins, shapes, eyes, hair, shoes and clothing are missing and cannot be found in the database
Fifth: It won't save notecards
Sixth: if I move, I crash
me: This is the definition of Not Good.

I checked the grid status:

[RESOLVED] Asset Server Issues
Posted by Status Desk on August 6th, 2010 at 07:32 pm PDT

[RESOLVED 06 Aug 2010, 08:49pm PDT] The asset server issues have been resolved at this time.

[Posted 06 Aug 2010, 7:29pm PDT] We are currently experiencing some isolate asset server issues. This may present delays in viewing textures and some teleport failures. We are investigating the cause, please check back here for updates.

Hmm. But that was supposedly yesterday...

Meanwhile, the grid remains very, very unstable and I have at least three more hours in the Solace Beach sales office before I can flee screaming. Pray for me.