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DATE: Tue 10 Aug 2021 21:10 By: HexDSL@Posteo.net

The most interesting Computer crash I have ever had.

A computer can crash. It happens a lot and takes many forms. Sometimes the application freezes, sometimes the desktop environment freezes. Sometimes its X that freezes and some times its just bloody well locked up.

When this happens the motivated and technically savvy users will try and get a handle of what has crashed, why its crashed and which application was to blame. The more seasoned Linux users doesn't give a scarlet damn and hits restart.

I am in the category of careless re-starter. The same crash has to happen a few times before I bother asking WHY it crashed. That is *usually*. The other night I experienced the most interesting crash ever.

I was playing Outriders via Geforce now. Outriders was running on a GFN server that was, I dare say somewhere in western Europe. Possibly even in England. I don't know. The point is it was a remote server rendering the game and passing the video stream to my PC. My PC was passing my inputs back to the server. Safe, secure and pretty bomb proof way to play a game (lag be dammed!)

So you can imagine my surprise. when my PC crashed. Locked up. Stopped working and froze. I was in a multiplayer game with a friend so rather than dropping out to a TTY and killing things (I never do that, not really) I cycled the power with the big round button on my PC case (as I always do. Don't tell anyone) It was only when I got my browser back open and the GFN service was unable to reconnect me to my gaming session that I realized the series of events and I was astonished.

Here's what ***seems*** to have happened.

The game (Outlanders in this case) crashed pretty hard locking up its virtualised environment (I assume) and the video stream became 'fucked' which caused my web browser to have a panic attack that was so exquisite that it froze my X session.

Now I have had GFN games crash in the past and its been fine. I assume Outlanders crashed REAL hard and caused a lock up on the virtualised hardware of the host. Unusual sure. But the part I find interesting is that a crash on a remote machine locked up my PC via what is at its core a fancy video stream.

That blew my mind and I cant stop thinking about how fucking crazy that is. I assume it was a super rare experience and in he hundreds of hours of games I have enjoyed via GFN this has never happened before. That's one of the reasons I felt the need to share the story. Because honestly I was so incredibly entertained by it.