BBBC.4

Today's topic: Is your avatar more or less your current biological age? Do you portray a younger avatar, or older? Why is this?

My male alt is much older than RL-me, he looks to be pushing 70. He's short, fat, bald and stumpy; nonetheless, or therefore, everyone who comments on his appearance loves it. I noticed during my first hours in Second Life how monotonous the default avatars were (at the time I didn't know that they were just defaults, I thought everyone looked like that). I was first bored, then annoyed, at how relentlessly young and healthy and beautiful everyone was — and such a blandly artificial beauty too, like animated life-insurance ads. I decided during my first hour in SL that I would be different, and started making myself (him) short and fat. It took me nearly a year to make a satisfactory shape and then pull the other pieces together: the old-man skin, the marvellous bald-vain-and-selfdeluding combover hair, the half-framed glasses. I'm very pleased with his real-life-like appearance.

Wol is much younger than RL-me, in certain hairstyles she looks to be just out of her teens. She too has a definitely-imperfect real-life body which once again I started working on while still on Orientation Island. She has definite "problem zones:" her butt and thighs are larger than SL average (though still slim enough in RL terms), her boobs are quite small, and she has a bit of a belly. (I was furious at well-meaning body fascists who offered to help me "fix her shape to look right," but now that I think about it this hasn't happened in quite a while.) I have to modify prims in every outfit she buys. I didn't intend to make her so young-looking, that was an unexpected consequence of various design decisions; but I'm not displeased.

My other alts are in-between, middle thirties to early forties, which makes them younger than me but not by much. They don't get significant amounts of time in-world.