June 18, 2007

• Grand. Thanks for posting! I'm fascinated by this too. It's fun how some are quite similar, and other's are completely unrealistic. The detail on Ailin Graef's dress was quite surprising. Did the dress make her, or did she make the dress? Also intersting to note their hours in-game per week.
• geektastic!
• Cyberspace sure is slimming!
• Very cool! Coincidentally, I just made my first avatar today. Apparently I still have a lot of work to do.
• The guy in the wheelchair with the respirator and 80 hours per week played reads like a story of mixed emotions. His avatar, behind it's robotic mask is likely the face he meets most of his friends with. All these pictures say so much more than a paragraph or short essay could.
• Cyberspace sure is slimming! However, sitting in this chair is not.
• sugarmilktea - it's my understanding that a lot of people in Second Life use avatars that resemble them pretty closely. (And a lot don't, so I think I just said nothing.) It sounds like Graef's "job" is making digital objects to sell in-game (you can make decent money at this, supposedly), so she probably made her avatar's dress to match her real one. Pixel. By. Pixel. And right there I have just spilled 90% of what I know about Second Life.
• Pixel. By. Pixel Can't you import textures into these things from a scan or photograph? I know nothing about Second Life.
• I can barely cope with First Life. And frankly, I prefer my entertainment living, breathing, and in three dimensions. That said, some of these are astonishing in their verisimilitude (is there such a thing as mental verisimilitude?) and for someone like the kid burdened with multiple life-support machines, it must be wonderfully liberating to have an alter ego to interact through. Great link, es el Queso, and nicely thought-provoking.
• I wanted to play Second Life, but my graphics card wasn't good enough. Elitist bastards!
• "Special Abilities: Godlike powers" teehee
• OK, sorry for threeposting, but what the holy fuck is the green thing next to this woman?
• I've played gmaes with avatars that closely resemble me, and ones that couldn't be more different. I find I get more emotionally invested with the former, but have more fun with the latter.
• Lara, no idea about the weird green thing, but that sure is one cute baby!
• Oh, sure, pick on the green-skinned stepchild. Racist.
• Plegmund wrote: "Can't you import textures into these things from a scan or photograph?" I think she did - look at the photo and the avatar; the dress pattern is a mirror image of the real one. She probably took a picture of herself in a mirror and overlaid it on a model in-game. Also, green thing is apparently another kid, wearing a Princess Fiona mask (from the Shrek movie).
• Why would you go get a portrait and cover up one kid in that thing? It's not even a good likeness of Fiona. What is she covering up that would make that mask look like an appealing alternative? Why the freaky little hands up to the face? What is the dress she's stuffed into. And most of all WHY?!?!?! I NEED CLOSURE on this.
• pleg - yeah, what caution live frogs said. you can. maybe she did! but i still know of dollmakers who do that kind of thing by hand. (er - dollz, the little onscreen figurine things, not actual physical dolls.) I also thought it was a green Fiona mask on the kid. You never wore one of those hideous plastic masks with the plastic apron "costume"? (that was Halloween for me, circa age 5.) the masks have come back, after what seemed like a long absence, but the costumes are mostly a lot better.
• Second Lives by Tim Guest was a Radio 4 Book of the Week recently. I only heard one section - he visited a care home where a group of the patients have set up an avatar - but it sounded interesting.
• Why would you go get a portrait and cover up one kid in that thing? Maybe it's really telling about her character; she's really attached to the mask? I'm sure there are many things about my childhood that are lost on the wind because there was no record.