Dummy = Dirt

When dressing Kitti the other day, I realised just how complicated she has become. My little avatar not only has nice skin and hair, and clothes made out of mesh, but now she has mesh shoes, which mesh feet included, and mesh toenails that I can change the colour of. She has fingernails that aren't just painted onto her skin. Outfits aren't complete without jewellery, or eyelashes (although she isn't so advanced that her eyelashes aren't painted on). 

A Complicated Sort of Cat

Kitti rents a patch of sky in-world in which she has a house. She owns furniture - sofas and beds and coffee tables and easels and wooden chairs and even a television set. She has a whole folder of poses - static animations to hold her in place while I whack the graphics settings up to take screenshots. She has a(n admittedly small) set of windlight settings (lighting settings, basically) that I have created for her.

This is what it means to "not be a noob" in SL - and why people can tell when you are new. Sometimes, it feels like such a hassle to remember everything, and I wonder if people are going to call me out for being a fraud if I have forgotten to put my fingernails on, or if I let Kitti walk around barefoot with what are, admittedly, very hideous basic SL feet. The basic avatar doesn't even have proper toes.

But at the same time, I really like how Kitti is looking. I'm proud of her, and I think I'm getting better at photographing her, and the prospect of making my own lighting settings seemed so daunting but was actually really easy. Have I grown up in SL now? How much further have I got to go before I get so old that I really do throw my dummy in the dirt and start using only Linden Labs' library-provided materials? Do people ever do that, just for the Hell of it?