Time. And time, again.

I like red. There’s red and then, there’s red, and that latter is the one I like. Warmer, colder, brighter, darker… 0xFF0000 is my red. I didn’t always like red, I must admit. But it’s the color that worked.

Few people notice, but whenever I discuss something actually important, I talk in symbols and quotes, using references as words in a vocabulary that doesn’t fit into human language in hopes to convey meanings that it can never truly hold. Maybe it’s a side-effect of how I learned words, and it’s so easy to say, “that’s how it is”, but if it were that simple, if I could squeeze my worldview into a tiny word, it would distort space with it’s mass and fall through the floor.

That red is special. It is the color of fire that a fire never has, it is the color of blood, that the blood never is, it is the color of hope, that has no color at all.

But when I look at myself on the screen, I remember I still have it, somewhere, somehow, despite everything, that hope that tomorrow will be a new day, and that one day, after one more try, one more push, and one more sharp word, it will all actually work.

And I have the reddest hair in Second Life.

And then I fail.

And then I get up and try again in a different way.

Discrepancy

I have a special relationship with time. ‘Clock’ was the first word I ever said, and since then, they are afraid of me. Wall clocks don’t survive for long around me, generally dying from mechanical failures in about a month, and if I don’t keep my computer’s time synchronized to a time server, it can jump forward three hours in three minutes of real time when I look away.

So I notice these things. And today, I noticed that SL time displayed in the menu bar while in my home sim is approximately 90 seconds behind the real time.

That wouldn’t be all that odd, since everybody knows how borked Second Life can be — though, I must say that time being out of sync can lead to some very interesting kinds of borkage, especially in a system that is supposed to deal with financial transactions — but what caught my attention to it was the chime of my scripted wall clock.

And that happened another 30-50 seconds earlier than even the SL time rolled into an even hour.

While I didn’t write that particular script myself, and cannot look inside, I do suspect that the coder went the easy way and did not account for the time it takes to play the hourly chime sound and just triggered it upon reaching an even hour.

And that means that LSL functions that return system time do not correspond even to the time you see in the menu bar!

The question is, why?!