A Date in Space

Ganymede Mojito - with extra sparkles. It was pink and tasted like strawberries. There's probably a metaphor in there*.

Last night, I received a message from sian asking if I wanted a quickie down at the Necronom. No, really, she did - she just didn't mean like that. Get you brain out of the gutter.

Sup, space girl

It was in the bar at Necronom VI that I first met sian. She offered to dance for me, and I pointed out in response, painfully naively, that I was straight. Quite rightly, she replied with "so?", and so our weirdly uncomfortable roleplay relationship began. sian said afterwards that she knew she could push it like that with me because I'd made it blindingly obvious that I wasn't going invite or enjoy any kind of sexual relationship with her. That wasn't what I wanted. She probably phrased it better than that. 

It's been a long time since I have roleplayed in the Necronom bar, and sian's invitation to go back there last night - on a date - was a strangely sweet blast from the past.

We stayed for about an hour, re-writing and re-working the little scene that began it all. It didn't play out exactly the same way it had before, but that's what made it interesting. We weren't there to write something groundbreaking, but the short scene we did create was full of juicy tidbits for our wider role-play story.

We aren't the only ones who have grown up since then - SL has changed, too. Our catsuits were effectively sprayed-on back then, and sian's baldness seemed logical to me because my hair used to fight with my body and stick through my shoulder and do all kinds of unlikely (and unfun) things. Last night, sian was wearing a little anime/sci-fi number that would have been a nightmare to make fit properly were it not made of mesh, and whilst Kitti's leggings were old spray-on favourites, her hair, shirt, hands, boots, necklace, eyelashes and eyes were all made out of new-fangled mesh.

sian

sian 's hips move at identical, precise angles, each step perfectly modulated. She stops, pulls her skirt down, twice, each slight movement exactly as before. "Would you like me to dance for you?"

Kitti flushed pink from the thick, smudged paint of her eyeliner down to the wide band around her throat. "N-no, thank you" she stammered. 

sian moved close, her lithe physicality as precise as her language. "I can supply companionship at all levels, from basic phatic conversation up to and including physical congress."

"Physical what?" 

sian 's tone was matter of fact. She could have been talking about accounts. "Sex." 

Kitti suddenly felt stupid, as well as uncomfortable. "Really," she said, "That's very, eh, kind. but I er." She had no idea what to say. Her discomfort was acute. She'd never had sex, and had never dreamed of having it with a woman. Or a cyborg.

Kitti

I've written quite extensively here already about the role of discomfort in role-playing, and sian possesses a seemingly innate ability to make my characters desperately uncomfortable - across the board. Her comfort-stomping-out boots crumble genre fences. I think it's about time she got a taste of her own medicine. I have fired a warning shot. Watch this space, creepy space girl. I'm coming for you. 

If you'd like to visit Necronom VI, click here - here! That link will take you to a little control-type room, and in front of you will be a map that you can click on to take you to specific places. We were in the shuttle bar.

*I googled "sexual connotations of strawberries" and wish I hadn't, although the results I got genuinely don't fit our little rp scenario at all. A humorous dead-end with that one.

Pretty Damn Queenly

a fun kind of queen

 As a child, playing princess wasn't really my thing. I had dolls and cuddly toys, yes, and I used to make little houses out of my Nana's sofa cushions, but I also had a car mat and a book about dinosaurs and I liked to watch Power Rangers and Batman with my mum. I didn't go through the teenage princess thing, either, but instead threw my lot in with the knights and the soldiers and the rogues, the mages and the necromancers who put the dead back into their graves (not the more traditional other way around).

Queens are where it's at. If I had to occupy any position of power within a monarchy, I'd want to be a queen. My husband would not outrank me, and I wouldn't suffer any of that pea-under-a-mattress or cursed spinning loom nonsense. I'd be the benign dictator I'm starting to think my country needs (did you see any of the Clegg/Farage debate? Kill me now).

The leaves remind me of the Roman laurel wreath. I have no idea if that was even remotely the intention behind this design.

I know it wouldn't be easy, but I'm not sure that ruling should be easy. If it's easy, you're missing something somewhere, you're not engaging with the problems and the nuances of the problems of the people. And I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth and a chair at Eton with my name already written on it - in cursive on a little golden plaque - so I don't waltz with an air of entitlement sniggering behind my hand at in-jokes with my fellow Bullingdon Boy chums. I'm also not afraid of Islam, and have an open mind about the EU. Oh - and I'd consider employing as my allies and advisors any homosexual the kind members of UKIP can identify as having the ability to control the weather (I'd imagine that kind of skill is worth a Nobel Prize, at least).

What does any of this have to do with Second Life, Kitti? I hear you, oh noble and patient subjects, and I will give you the answer you seek. This self-indulgent ramble was inspired by the beautiful items I was asked to blog to help promote the Fit for a Princess Event, which opened in SL on April 1st. I was overwhelmed by the amount of things I received to blog (even more than from FutureWave!). There's no real way I could blog it all, but there seem to be lots of other bloggers on the case, too - so between us, perhaps we'll do it justice.

The fair itself isn't huge, but is packed full of really great and beautifully made items. It's really simply laid out in a circle, and the building itself has palpable textures and a shiny floor that reflects the arches in the roof perfectly (which is a really cool SL effect, I think). I realise that blogging fashion doesn't really fall in with my usual style of blogging, but I do like to take snaps of and record here some of the wonderful things the creators in SL are making, and I think this is one way of doing that. 

My dress in the first picture was made by aemeth. I've been a fan of aemeth since my early days in SL, and the make-up I bought from her store not long after I first started SL has aged magnificently and is still amongst my favourites. This dress is so lovely, but it's fun too - and I think funness is overlooked by the majority when talking about monarchy. What's the point in being a princess (or a queen) if you can't have any fun? I love the folds and the creases as the dress gathers into the cuffs and the hem - so realistically. 

The crown and collar in the second picture are by Evie's Closet and their leafy design seems to invoke a ghost of the old god-emperors of the Ancient Roman Empire. They're much more delicate, of course, than Caesar's laurels, but they are so so pretty.

Royal Blue I

Royal Blue II

The last things I want to show you are this beautiful ballgown and these super sparkly nails. The ballgown was made by Peqe, and it comes in a whole bunch of colour combinations, each named after a Grimm/Disney character. I don't tend to dress Kitti in blue very often, but I thought the softness of this dress in Hades (named after the Hercules' Hades, of course) was too pretty and sweet to miss out on. My glittery Rhinestone nails (appliers - for Slink hands) match perfectly, too. They're courtesy of A:S:S.

All of the items I have mentioned in post are available at the Fit for a Princess event, and there is so, so much more. If you'd like to go and see for yourself, click here - here! Even if you're not really into princessy stuff, like me, there'll most definitely be something there for you. I mean, how queenly do I look in those last pictures!? Pretty damn queenly, even if I do say so myself.

Bathed in Quicklime: a Ramble along the Golden Thread

quicklime

The Golden Thread appears to have been a great success. It sold out, so to speak, with audience members queuing for over an hour to get in and those that couldn't hopped on to the livestream to view it there. Since then, MIAMAI's BlackLabel Golden Thread Collection has appeared all over Flickr, and two trailer-style videos have been made of the event (links at the end). The venue itself is to remain open until the end of the month, so those who didn't manage to make it there in the flesh, so to speak, have chance to see it for the first time, and audience members a second. I promise that it's worth it.

I don't want a write a huge review here: it's already been done, and I find that often, after being in a show, it's difficult to write about it. Not because there's nothing to be said, but because there is so much to be said, and no real way to say it all. To speak only half of it would feel like a betrayal. What I want to do is write a summary here - a conclusion, if you will - that might go some way to explaining what this virtual performance was like to both SL and non-SL users alike.

The Golden Thread: on the floor at the MIAMAI store

The Golden Thread is an avant-garde fashion collection released by MIAMAI under their BlackLabel. Instead of releasing the collection with a 'normal' fashion show, CEO Monica Outlander organised what can only be described, kind of lamely, as an art event. She commissioned work to be produced by four groups - two dance groups, one acting troupe, and then sian and I - and built a vehicle that would transport the audience members from one performance to another. All of four took place on individual stages within a (purpose-built) dark and winding forest. There were lights, music, a very gracious host to explain what was going on, and, of course, the clothes themselves. Everything worn by the performers and the models is being sold in the MIAMAI store, and the forest is also dotted with associated artwork, some of which is now for sale. Information about all of the performers has been put into notecards and made available to those who wander the venue. 

The sheer amount of work and effort that went into the creation of this concept and this production is insane. 

Knowing I wouldn't have too much to do during the performance itself, I set myself up to take lots of photos of the event. However, it didn't end up being that way, and as a result, I only managed to snap one quick picture of Kitti before the show began. For no reason I can fathom, Monica asked me if I could mind operating the vehicle the audience travelled about on (doesn't she know I am still having driving lessons?! :P) and that took all of my concentration. All of the pictures used in this post where taken after the event, at the venue.

MIAMAI is, I think it's fair to say, a fashion giant if such a thing exists in SL. Mesh has come such a long way since I first blogged about it - and I was slow to the mesh party - but the new collection is just something else. The cut and texture of everything Monica has made are just incredible. You can genuinely almost reach out and feel them with your fingertips. My photos here don't do them justice. I can assure you that more will follow because I don't think I'm going to be wearing anything but the BlackLabel for a long time yet. This collection is a game-changer, I think, and it will be interesting to see if and how other fashion designers respond.

shadow cousins; Kitti and sian in costume

What was so remarkably unremarkable was that, come the day of the performance, working on this show in SL became exactly like working on a show in the real world - in my experience, anyway. The day began with panic as someone was sick and a script needed finishing. Then nobody turned up to the dress rehearsal, and not everybody received the message containing the time we were requested to arrive at the venue to set up. During the final show (we performed three consecutive shows), we had technology troubles and our wonderful host was forced to improvise off-script and keep the audience happy for a full ten minutes at least whilst we got it up and running again. I was interested to see how performing in Second Life might differ from performing in real life, and honestly, I think it's pretty similar.

Obviously, it was also completely different in a million ways, too. I could argue about physicality, and I didn't get the same kind of nervous shakes that I get every time I go on stage in real life. I could also talk about language barriers, and how this performance had much more of a global reach than anything IRL is likely to have without a physical tour. There is, too, the fact that I could leave my body standing on the stage beside sian, costumed and ready to perform, but have my screen focusing on the vehicle moving the audience around. I couldn't have been in two places at once IRL, although such a feat is often called for back-stage at a show on opening night. Let's not forget the danger with so many people occupying one small space that any one of us could have crashed at any time, effectively vanishing from the performance space and the entire world at any given point during the show. 

But for all intents and purposes, what happened and what went wrong and what went right and the general atmosphere was a very similar to my experiences of putting on a show in real life.

And, as I have said, it appears to have been a great success. It was really fantastic to meet Monica, and then to meet so many of the MIAMAI staff and models, and meeting other performers, particularly those who are professional SL dancers - doesn't that raise a lot of questions?! -, is always interesting. 

And I only swore at someone once. That's probably a record for me...so maybe performing online isn't like performing IRL after all ;).

Promised and related links: a video by Thalia Heckroth / a video by Forren Ashford / MIAMAI Pool on Flickr / the MIAMAI store (SL viewer required) / the MIAMAI performance venue (SL viewer required) / see all the photos from this post, with more to come, on my Flickr here /

Unobviously Obvious

Ha-rumph

A conversation with Norah Vespers in-world yesterday made me realise something unobviously obvious. No, I don't care if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now - it will by the end of the post. I hope, anyway.

When I wrote about the effect SL could have on RL for my essay two years ago, I didn't realise that I had not taken into account a whole vague and difficult-to-fathom relationship between the two worlds and those of us that skip between them. This relationship, as I have said, is vague and difficult-to-fathom, and is based mainly on discontentment. 

An awful lot of time and energy goes into the creation of an avatar, and in my experience, one of the most deterring things about SL to new users is the enormity of such a task. The controls for customising your avatar are not the most intuitive, and though it becomes incredibly simple once you have got the hang of it, I have no doubt that had I not received help from various mentors and friends along the way, I'd have given up trying to make Kitti look good, and would have left SL a long time ago. Your avatar, and the time and energy put into it, represents a kind of stake in the virtual world, especially early-on when you might not have a strong base of friends or a long list of sims you enjoy spending time in.

The problem with this - one amongst many, I'm sure - is that avatar customisation never really stops. I know I have had particularly bad influences in this department since I was effective brought up by fashion bloggers, but I think it's true across the board. Fairs selling new hair styles, new skins, new shapes, new clothes, new furniture in SL remain immensely popular to the point of stupidity, and there are Flickr streams and blogs and in-world groups designed with the specific purpose of informing fanbases when the latest items are going to be on sale. Clothing in the virtual world falls prey to fashion seasons just as it does in the real world - it is a perfectly replicated copy of the capitalist system. And why shouldn't it be? But what it represents is the continual desire to better ourselves physically even in the face of the expanded choices available to us in Second Life. 

Like I said, unobviously obvious.

So were am I going with this? Here: our relationship and continual renewal of time and energy and thus our stake with/in SL is predicated on our continual discontentment. If we feel like we have seen and done everything, as if there is nothing about our avatars we can improve, what would we do? We'd probably log out.  When we begin to feel the malaise written about in my blog post, 'Sick and Tired', the 'cure' is often a partial, if not total, revamp of our avatars. 

Told you Kitti was going to be barefoot forever...except when she's wearing roller skates...

The cynicism of this is not lost on me, nor do I really think that the only reason anybody logs into SL is to buy new things to make their avatar prettier. That doesn't always mean buying new things - sometimes, finding things we had forgotten about in our inevitably extensive inventories can breathe life back into an avatar, too. For example, I'd completely forgotten about my roller skates from the Secret Store. And although I logged in yesterday with the expressed purpose of going to Glam Affair and buying the new 'Lucy' skin in the palest shade, then hung around in-world to decorate my largely-empty skybox, what I got the most enjoyment out of was finding that Norah had logged in and talking with her for a while. Then, when she logged out, I proceeded to roller skate around said skybox (which is shaped like a rectangular doughnut) as fast as I could make Kitti go until she spontaneously tripped up over nothing and went somersaulting through the air and into a wall. Hilarious.

Norah has since inadvertently suggested that my skybox could be used for a roller derby, and I reckon that could be really cool! Anybody want to join us? I'm deadly serious. IM me. But that's beside the point.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that whilst I enjoy dressing Kitti and making her look good, that is only a portion of what I enjoy about SL. But it is still a portion.

Terminal

Am I terminal?

The bubble of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival popped last week, and when it did, the world came crashing back with a certain brutality. My body clock is shattered (my show was on at 1:15am every morning for two weeks), I've no energy, and every time I log into Second Life, I find the virtual world deserted.

And I've been wondering...and I've come to think that maybe I'm getting old. That's right, ladies and gentlemen - I think I might be in my virtual old age.  Virtual old age can come at any time, and I don't think it has much to do with how long you've actually been active in SL. However, I have now been in SL long enough to have made friends who have since left the virtual world. I've gotten to know people that I genuinely love and, on the flip-side of that, I've burned a couple of bridges. Most of my favourite landmarks have vanished or sneakily changed their places without me realising, and although I know there is a whole virtual world out there, I'm not sure how to find it anymore.

That must sound stupid; however, the Destination Guide refuses to load most of the time, and SL's in-world search function appears to have a permanently seedy agenda. That's fine, if you also have a seedy agenda - but I don't. I'm not interested in SLex and SLovers. I'm interested in making friends and exploring interesting sims and, more recently, finding art in SL. I've a new skybox to furnish and walls to fill with SLart (too far?), and I just don't know where to begin finding that artwork to put there.

A combination of lacking reading material and my month-out at the Fringe Festival seems to have killed my streak of live readings. I enjoy reading at both the Library and at Commune Utopia, and have met some great people through those events, but they were bound to come to a grinding halt (please excuse the pun) since the material required for those events is erotica and I don't, actually, ahem, well, read very much erotica. Anne Rice is about my limit. I - I hold my hands up - am actually a fantasy lover. Magic, swords, rituals, spooky books, alternate worlds, daemons, dragons...I don't know...pixies, elves, dwarves, werewolves, vampires, etc etc etc; I've got plenty of material about those. If either the Library or the Commune, or anybody else, want readings about those things, I can be there like a shot. 

Not everything is heading south; as I have said, I am now in the position of having some really good friends in SL, and I have reached a place with my SL photography where I think I am producing decent work and my pictures are getting a stream of favourites on Flickr. I enjoy taking photos in SL, and that I'm getting feedback and positive responses is really encouraging. Thank you! If you'd like to check out my Flickr, you can click the button in the right-hand column labelled 'Flickr' :).

I'm also in love with mesh. I love Kitti's new mesh hands and feet. I love her mesh hair - and how much hair Kitti owns! There are so many beautiful things being made for SL, and that kind of thing excites me.

But you see...I sound like an old person. A really old person! And I'm not sure how to get young and hip again. 

Am I terminal?

A Handful

Also in love with this skybox from Scarlet Creative, created by/for William Weaver as a gallery space

That's right - I did it. I gave up. I gave in. I gave - sigh - all my money to SLink (no, the prices are very good) and bought a pair of their mesh hands. They match my mesh feet perfectly, which I also have on in this shot, you just, obviously, can't see that far down. I'd been putting it off and putting it off, and then my friends went and bought them and I wondered why it was that I'd been putting it off. Perhaps it was out of loyalty to my lovely nail add-ons from Izzie's, but that isn't really fair because Izzie's makes nail varnishes for the SLink hands, too, so I don't have to give all those lovely nail colours up. And now I'm just babbling.

To the point: mesh hands. Kitti has mesh hands, and they're beautiful. There isn't too much more to it than that. 

I've been waiting for an excuse to use this pose for literally months

There is a teeny bit more, though. The mesh hands work by using an alpha layer to hide your system hands, then the hands themselves go on top. That reminds me of the hands the inventor makes in Edward Scissorhands, and, I suppose, it is a little like that. But when I put the hand-alpha on this morning, Kitti's breasts suddenly burst out the front of her shirt. Confused, I went into the shirt folder and put the alpha that was supposed to be keeping her chest hidden behind her shirt back on - and her system hands reappeared again. I am a magician, ladies and gentlemen, with a handful of alphas and alphas that are a handful.

When I'd finished scowling (and reluctantly giggling), I remembered that there's a limit on the number of alphas an avatar can be wearing in one go, and Kitti was already wearing four to begin with. A fifth was too many, so was knocking the others off. Her shirt, trousers, hair and feet only attach to her body and appear to lie neatly against her skin because an alpha has hidden the limbs beneath. If I kept going, chasing fallen-off alphas through my inventory, perhaps I could make all Kitti's different body parts appear and disappear like a macabre kind of circus side-show...

But enough. I'm starting to sound hysterical. Who knew a pair of hands could cause such (trivial) trouble.

A New Fetish?

This, I realise, is not a revelation. I am just slow. But look! - Kitti has proper feet! Mesh feet have been around for a while now, but I have held off picking them up because, in truth, they seemed like a lot of effort, and I wasn't sure how much I'd actually use them. But more and more, I'm wanting to throw Kitti's shoes out the window - it's not like she needs them, really - and so when I heard yesterday that the lovely lady at Glam Affair had released an applier pack that made colour-matching the feet super easy, I gave in.

For non-SL users, or those who have missed the whole mesh-feet thing, mesh feet are worn as attachments over your avatar's real system feet. System feet are strange and all your toes are smushed together like you've been wearing stilettos since you were three. They're really not good. But the mesh feet are much better, and once you have them on, you have to use a heads-up display menu to change the colour of them to match your skin tone. That's not half as easy as it sounds when you've given the colour palette from Microsoft Paint to work with (you know the kind I mean). But lots of skin makers, catching on to the trend, have begun to bring out their own HUD menus that allow you to change the feet to match their skin tones with just the push of one button.

I've made it sound much easier than I believed it was, and when I opened all of the little boxes (there were so many!), I did have a little tantrum because I could not make the applier work. Norah explained it to me, however, and...I was basically just being a plonker. Thank you, Norah.

So now I'm going to be barefoot forever. All I have to fear are lego bricks.

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?

The Boob Job - Follow Up

In my previous post, The Boob Job, I didn't include any pictures of how mesh looks when it doesn't fit an avatar. Whilst SL-users might be familiar with this problem, my non-SL user readers will not, and anyway - it's kind of funny to see when it's not your avatar, right?!

So here they are. In the first picture is Kitti with her original body shape, and in the second, Kitti's body modified to fit within the mesh clothes. 

naughty mesh!

(more) modest

As I said, I believe, in my previous post, I have compromised: I have modified the shape of Kitti's torso slightly to fit into the mesh, but I have not kept the downsized measures for her legs needed to fit into this skirt. Somehow, her thighs seemed too skinny, more from the side than the front, and changing their muscle and width levels made me feel uncomfortable. The mesh trousers I bought, pictured in the previous post, fit just fine without any leg modifications needed, and that makes me happy.

They are not, you might think, the most drastic of changes, but to me, they feel like it. I like Kitti's shape the way it is, and her body shape, combined with her ginger hair, are the only two constants that make Kitti Kitti, so to speak, so any compromise feels like cheating on her.

Should I just let it go? How much should we be willing to compromise on our avatar shape? Could standard sizing really begin to make us all look the same?

I would just like to state, as a disclaimer, that whilst the clothes in these pictures come from the same shop, it is a shop that uses standard sizing, so these problems are across the board. I also have a lot of love for the shop these clothes came from, and I am not blaming that shop for the inadequacies of mesh. I like mesh. I like this shop.

The Boob Job

I like mesh. I like mesh quite a lot. Mesh - for non-SL users - is the stuff that avatars are made out of, a literal kind of wire mesh, and previously, clothes had to be made of what were essentially cardboard boxes, textured and coloured and cut-out to hang from the avatar's body. But now clothes can be made out of mesh, too, and they can bend and move with the avatar's body in a way that a cardboard box cannot. 

(If you're an SL user, you might want to skip this bit.  Jump ahead to "Sort of". It'll be on a line of its own, you won't be able to miss it.)

This is great. Prims - the cardboard boxes - would often fight with the mesh and stick through the avatar's body awkwardly. The worse items for this, in my experience, were long hair. You must have noticed, on more than one occasion, Kitti's hair sticking through her arm or something where it shouldn't be. Mesh doesn't solve this completely, and mesh can still fight with other pieces of mesh, but it is much better than it was, and the quality of the texturing of clothing and hair has gone through the roof with mesh. There are some really beautiful clothes out there in the virtual world now - like Kitti's jeans in the image above, for example. They look pretty damn realistic to me. 

The main problem with mesh is that it doesn't exactly cling to the avatar's skin - it replaces it. To wear a pair of mesh trousers, you must first make your legs beneath invisible. If I took a picture of Kitti without those trousers on, there would be nothingness between the top of her hips and her ankles. This is achieved with what we call an alpha layer. 

A sizing system had to be created to market mesh, since it does not just snap to an avatar's shape - a sizing system that works exactly the same way sizing systems work in real life, only the clothes don't have the tiniest bit of elastic in, so you can't squeeze into this shirt, or cinch those trousers in with a belt. If they're too long (a common problem for the 5ft2 writer of this blog), you can't turn them up at the hem. You have to find mesh that fits your avatar shape, so that the hips the mesh trousers give Kitti, for example, follow neatly up to the tops of her real hips and her waist, without massive gaps or leaving a massive, shorn-off shelf of skin above them - that wouldn't look natural.

There are alternatives to standard sizing and I find, despite the system, that what one shop calls a medium is not necessarily what another shop calls a medium, even when both claim to use standard sizing. Finding mesh to fit Kitti has been difficult, but then I stumbled on a shop called coldLogic, and bam! They are beautiful clothes and they fit my avatar.

Sort of. 

To get some of the shirts to fit, Kitti had to have a breast reduction. She had to have a boob job. The alpha layer only makes invisible what it really has to, i.e. the main part of the body where the mesh is going to go, but where there are collars of open shirts or whatever, the avatar's flesh needs to be visible at the opening. These are the bits - around these collars, for example - where Kitti's body fights with the clothes, and where I find myself resizing Kitti's chest to make sure that it doesn't poke through the fabric of the shirt or the dress. 

And I have messed around with all of the shape sliders. Not only have I shaved ten points off her breast size, I've also lowered them - why were they so high, anyway?! - and pulled them a little closer together. From the front, Kitti looks great, but her profile seems to have lost what little curve it had. Kitti doesn't have a particularly curvy shape to begin with. You might note that Kitti isn't wearing a mesh top with her mesh trousers in the above picture. I decided she needed a break there. Poor, poor avatar.

This makes me sad. I don't want to reach a point where Kitti's shape is a factory-line reproduction. Nobody in SL really wants that. And I am a little offended, when I try mesh on from just about everywhere, and even the smaller sizes require a shrinking of her breasts, or the thinning of her arms. The worst offenders here are skirts, and as a result, I refuse to dress Kitti in them. Even in the bigger sizes, the sizes that leave great gaping holes between their edges and Kitti's hips, the skirts cut into Kitti's legs. To where them, I'd be forced to slim down her thighs, and that seems like the final straw to me.

The boob conversation is an old one. It isn't nice, but I kind of expect it in a dull way. Kitti's chest is hardly huge, and I have to shave half of it off to fit her into these mesh clothes. OK. I don't like that, but I'm used to that idea. I'm used to the idea of being too small or too big to fit into clothes. But I am not used to the idea of having fat thighs.

Kitti does not have fat thighs. I will not shrink them down to fit into itsy bitsy mesh skirts. I'm drawing the line. But how long will I hold out?