Ghastly Ghoulies

A most unpleasant bug has become common in Second Life: the textures that make up one's skin and clothing fail to load, and instead a stark white default texture appears, with the word "Missing" appearing across it in bold black letters:



The result is that our avatars are truly horrifying to behold. But even worse, we ourselves don't know when it's happening; because our avatar textures are stored in cache, we look fine to ourselves. Only our friends see the ghastly ghost look.

(N.B.: You can fix the problem by going to Client > Character > Rebake Textures, and once that is done, go into and cancel right back out of Appearance.)

It is strangely alienating, this bug. When my friend s.c. sent me the picture above, I was shocked that that is what everyone else was seeing. One invests so much in one's appearances that when you discover you look so bad that it's scary, it is a little upsetting. Over the next two days, it happened to me several times (where people asked me to rebake my textures) and it happened to several of my friends. I never thought a software bug (especially someone else's!) could make me feel ashamed of myself!