Saturday 31 March 2012

My Abs


Oh hallo!
That's right, ladies and gentlemen. You are indeed looking at my - MY - abs. My virtual abs. My grey virtual washboard abs. Would you like some cheese on that marvellous Italian dinner I just cooked for you? You would? Let me just take my shirt off and grate you some on MY AMAZING ABS.

Okay, I'm done now.

As you might have guessed, I ought to be doing university work right now. However, due to a combination of factors, my brain is running around the inside of my head with its fingers in its ears yelling "Nooooooooooooo!" at the top of its voice (yes, my brain has legs, fingers, ears and vocal chords), so I decided to try some reverse psychology. Ya'no...who the Hell wants to do work today, anyway? Sod that. Who wants to graduate? Pfft, not me! Committing the ultimate act of reverse psychology flippancy, I logged into Second Life. 

And decided to try looking like a man for a while. 

Changing gender in Second Life is actually incredibly easy. You need some different clothes, maybe, and certainly a different shape and skin, but there are no operations, no form-filling out, no hormone treatments. And it is completely reverseable. I don't intend to be/look like a man in SL all the time, but I did think it would be fun to try. After all...why not?!

I had some male skins hidden away in the bottom of my inventory, and Sian was kind enough to share with me a male avatar shape of hers as a basis to build my own. I started tinkering with the facial features - I haven't started on the height yet! - and trying to make this avatar look like he could be Kitti's brother or something. I thought I might be able to do this by noting down Kitti's facial dimensions - head size, height of cheekbones, eye width, that kind of thing - apply them to the male shape, and then just adjust the sizings slightly. 

Let me tell you now, loud and clear, that that does not work. Just in case you need some more convincing:

I just...I don't know what to say about this...

...I mean, do I need to say anything?

In my defence, the skin in those last two pictures is a free one from Tableaux Vivant, and it is slightly inhuman and perhaps slightly feminised. That's fine, but it doesn't really help when trying to construct a male face. One perhaps needs to be secure in one's face before one attempts to wear that skin. That goes no way into excusing how absolutely hilarious this process was. Or how infuriatingly difficult it was. Or how much I wanted to cry. Or how many tantrums I threw. The Nightbringer skins from Plastik that I have ended up using are just more simple facially.

I have also never messed with Kitti's facial features. Kitti's shape is a pretty cheap one from a shop called Bird Next Door, and combined with the Aleria skin from Plastik, it does everything I need it to. I toyed with her height dimensions, yes, and her arm length, but that was it. Faces are much, much more tricky to deal with. 

However, I think I am starting to get somewhere. I give you Man-Kitti 1.0:

I'm a man!

With a Michael Stipe stripe!
And without
I think he still needs a little adjusting, but I was quite proud of my efforts, and very impressed with the "my hero abs" tattoo that I found in the Nightbringer Skin folder, as shown in the top screenshot. Nobody was around to tell me to take it off, so Man-Kitti is, in fact, still letting women wash their clothes on his stomach as I write this. 

Once I am more satisfied with my efforts and have done a little adventuring, there will undoubtedly be a discussion about gender construction to be had. In the meantime...what do you think?

If/when I get a non-grey skin, you just know there will be hair. Hopefully in Kitti's 'trademark' ginger. I'm working on it.

2 comments:

  1. Win! It seems well worth the effort.

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  2. Why, thank you! I think he still looks a bit like you. Couldn't find the more human-coloured skin at Heartsick, but fret not ^^

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