#simmed area

Long time no write-in. Is it just us in Jersey or did that S-Cat event cause a lot more Off the Map events? I've got Cryptocartographer guild members reporting an upswing in lost hikers and other slippage from consensus geography.

Either way, we may need to reach out for support in charting those wrinkles in the map.

M.

P.S. It looks like this is sending both off anon and on anon at the same time? The button seems to be showing both states at the same time.

Hey, M.

Funny you mention it - I’m not sure if it’s related to the recent Schrödinger Cat kerfluffle, but I did just get a report across my desk about a new simmed area in the Delaware Water Gap park zone. This one is apparently pretty bad, the pictures are…hard to parse, but I’m seeing a lot of missing textures. Pink and black checkers, so they’re mostly safe. Preaching to the choir here, but be careful for texture popin. Lots of static though, which is more concerning, and not to overstate things, but we’re worried about another Blue Hell. I’m seeing a lot of #0000FF, which makes me very nervous.

Some of these pictures have been provided by your team, so kudos for that, but a gentle reminder that this sort of public-private partnership works when we get the missing persons reports ASAP. Not that I think you’re lollygaging, but I hadn’t heard of missing hikers until you mentioned it.

OK, I'm sitting now. Cat's curled up on my lap. I've set the SKY INPUT to a staticky neon green for attention and i'm gonna try to pet the cat now because if I don't I'm gonna press more buttons. Please send help, I have this deep urge to find out what VOLUME+ does and see what's behind the battery cover but my gut says I really should not do that

Please don't press that. You've wandered into a simmed area.

Reality isn't a simulation - most of it, anyway. Not that we can tell. But certain areas are. Blue Hell in Michigan, for example. The Backrooms. We don't currently know by whom or for what purpose, or if it's even intentional, but you're going to want to exit calmly but quickly before you get derezzed. It's weird there, operates on its own odd but usually internally consistent rules - we hypothesize it's something to do with the noospheric imprint of digital worlds "bleeding" into realspace.

Put the remote in your pocket, you're gonna want to keep a hold of that. If you--hold on. Checking my files.

Okay, if you see groupings of static, try a different direction. If you see MSpaint blue, move away from it. Nothing in there is sentient, don't be fooled. You're going to see glitches in your vision the longer you stay. You'll start to see text in the lower right of your vision. That's normal. Ignore what it says. Pink and black checker patterns are safe but watch for texture popin.

There was definitely a Bigfoot there, but for some reason he was just walking through the air? Like flying but he was walking. Is this normal for bigfoots to do?

Oh, hm. Uhh, is this....

Okay, yeah. This is near █████ █████, ████████. There's a simmed area near there. For new readers, a simmed area is a place where, for reasons we aren't totally clear on, reality starts to abide by digital rules rather than what we colloquially consider realspace. The animations sort of get messed up, and I think that's what happened here - especially to a Bigfoot. Their natural obfuscation field sort would probably not really be able to be processed by the sim. Just a guess, of course, I've never seen that myself but I can guess it sort of....glitches out.

You mentioned derezzing - I and my friends found admin controls early on, and we only lost a dog (long may Joey live in our memories) to that before we found how to disable it. We've been keeping people out of it since our childhood - we know full well it's dangerous, I lost almost a whole year once when I accidentally locked all my friends out of admin, then set my own local time to be incredibly slow compared to outside. I fixed it in less than a minute of my time, but it certainly taught us all to be much more careful with it.

Anyway, the point is, this area covers the back half of several of our houses backyards. One of us recently passed away, and we don't have enough income between us to keep her house. We've been keeping the veil, as you call it, intact, but we're worried about what will happen when the new family arrives, especially given that the new family doesn't seem to trust us, and their kid seems to be too inquisitive and, to be honest, spoiled, for us to just let them in on the secret. What do you want us to do? If you need to send your people, I put my address in the location field - the area covers houses 35-38 - I'm in 37, and 35 is the one being sold.

This is....an old one. I'm checking my records...I think this is the oldest one we've known about. Wow.

Not to be Norm the Scold again, but we'd really have appreciated knowing about this thirty years ago. These types of things can be dangerous as you are no doubt aware. We've seen a couple of simmed areas that seem to be permanent. Ever seen a pixelated tree in realspace? It's unnerving.

I'm glad it was....broadly harmless, though. Aside from the dog. We'll have AbTech on your location soon to see if we can downsize the sim, or failing that, we may need to figure out something else.

Oooh, a mystery. Love a mystery. Couple things come to mind, and we’ll probably send someone down there regardless.

The first thing that comes to mind is some sort of perceptual block. Something didn’t want you to meet for its own reasons and is either preventing you from seeing each other or immediately deleting the memory of having seen each other. There’s no way of knowing why that would be until we know what it is, but my money is on something harvesting the emotion of confusion.

There’s also the possibility that, for whatever reason, the cafe is what we call a ‘simmed area’, a place where realspace conforms to digital standards. We’re still not sure how that happens, but in some cases a simmed area can ‘shard’, leaving different discrete but identical spaces. That’s a rare one but intriguing when it happens.