Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

I logged on to the grid for the first time in ages last week, only to find that my entire inventory had been rendered inaccessible for some reason. This included all my shapes and skins, with the result that my avatar took on an elemental form:

I thought this looked pretty cool, like William Hurt when he has spent too much time tripping in the flotation tank in Altered States.

Two things had changed since my last visit; the adult content filtering regulations had gone into effect, and I had finally got around to upgrading my viewer from the Linux alpha build that I’d been using for the last couple of years. I figured that one or other, or perhaps both, of these had nixed my content – not, I hasten to add, because it was particularly risqué, but because it was all old stuff, and I thought it was maybe unverified or something. This turned out to be an unnecessarily paranoid interpretation of events, since when I looked today everything was back to normal, there having been some sort of “Asset Server Issue”, according to the grid status report.

Anyway, I was glad to be reminded of Altered States, one of my all-time favourite stoner movies. John Lilly, on whose experiences the film is loosely based, is a hero of sorts to me – his work on altered states of consciousness during sensory isolation (he invented the flotation tank for this purpose) is very interesting, his later fascination with talking to dolphins perhaps less so.

Thus inspired I hit Xstreet to see if I could pick up a flotation tank for my apartment, but the closest I could find was this sci-fi style healing tank (L$200 from A’den Technologies):

There wasn’t any sensory deprivation, but it was restful to bob up and down, listening to some suitable mood music.