Conifer Dada

Not a bad method at all! Shoes add to your height in SL just the same as they do in RL. I don't wear very high shoes and I don't often do couple dances so those things aren't a problem. Anyway, it's easy for anyone to adjust their hover height when doing a couple dance. In any case a lot of men (and quite a number of women) are unrealistically tall in SL, whichever method of height measurement you use.

This raises another issue - the disparity between height shown on the avatar editor and height measured against a prim. I chose to go with the avatar editor, on which I'm 5ft 5in, but a prim of that height as measured in the 'build' editor only comes up to my eye level. Since much of SL's built environment is on a large scale anyway, like 12ft high doors for example, I decided to go by the height on the avatar editor.

There's always the argument that people can be whatever they like in SL and that's fine - if people want to be giants or elves or whatever. It's quite difficult to create realistic proportions from scratch in SL, regardless of whether you're using a system avatar or a mesh one. I think a lot of people think "oh, I want to have quite a tall avatar" so they set the slider to 7ft 6in, or they think "I want a big butt", so they set the sliders to maximum. Maybe the problem is that people who want to have 'normal' proportions in SL aren't always good at judging what that means. One trend I've noticed is that you see a lot of couples where the male, who is usually mean looking, is quite realistically proportioned but at too large a scale, while the woman is short but excessively voluptuous, usually with thigh tourniquets, tiny waist, very shiny skin and nasty red spank marks. Also I can see why DJs and hosts might want to have larger scale avatars so they have more of a presence on stage. Usually they are not right next to all the partygoers so the scale difference is not obvious - until they step down at the end of their set and mingle!

I used to create things for myself and if I liked them I'd put them for sale on my land, in shops or on SL marketplace. I tried my hand at making mesh things in Blender but I realised that it would need a huge investment of time and effort to become expert so I dropped by the wayside on that. In the very early days I did a bit of land 'flipping' but only for the purpose of trading up until I got a 512m plot, which was the largest you could have tier-free at that time. SL land was very expensive in those days compared to now, I'd say at least ten times as expensive. Then came the great land price crash.

I agree the shapes are pretty similar. I made my own skin and I deliberately kept the highlights low-key so it looks consistent from all angles. I also made a tattoo layer that adds highlights, which is quite effective. but I'm not wearing it in the photo. Thanks for the offer but I think I'll wait and see what the new full-perms LL 'NUX' bodies are like before splashing out L$000's !

Thanks - but I've got a couple of free mesh bodies but whatever I do on the adjustment sliders they are still too curvy for me.

I'm cheating a bit here . . . But I do get people asking which mesh body I'm using. The shoulders (from behind) are the give-away! Not much I can do about that I'll just wait until NUX comes along.

As people were predicting, even tighter thigh bands are beginning to appear. I haven't seen any men wearing them yet but it's only a matter of time, surely!! I think the soft thighs illustrate how SL fashion works. People see a woman of ample proportions (from the waist down) wearing thigh bands that don't squash the flesh and they think "that's sooo 2021!" Even I might think that and I don't have a mesh body, I don't have big thighs and I don't wear thigh bands - apart from that unsuccessful test shown above !!

It's free (almost) and it's a good way to get to learn how to use a BoM mesh body, even if it's not what you're really after. As I said above, it taught me about mesh bodies and so when the NUX bodies arrive I'll be ready to give them a go again!

I have tried the Ruth body, although as I say above, I've stayed with a system avatar. I actually think the Ruth body is quite good, the only problem being you can't get a slim butt whatever you do with the sliders. The Ruth head, on the other hand, is poor and I found it impossible to adjust it to a shape anything close to my system head shape. I also tried the Maitreya Lara (demo) body and that had exactly the same problem as the Ruth body.

I still use a system avatar and I'm happy that way . . . But what I'm about to say applies equally to mesh and system avatars. A lot of skins in SL have high contrast shading, with the front and back highlighted and sides darker, a bit like an unevenly fried sausage. This might be perfect for SL photography but it doesn't work well when in motion, as in clubs, as in "why are the fronts of her/his legs so much lighter than the sides?" I can see why creators did this with system avatars but with it being possible to give a real, dynamic sheen or even a full oiled gloss to the skin of a mesh avatar it seems pointless on those. Also bear in mind the Linden Lab have announced that new full-perms BOM mesh starter avatars are in the pipeline (NUX project). We don't know the timescale or exactly how good they'll be but it's worth remembering this if you're about to spend a lot of L$0000's and many hours on your update.

Despite being quite skinny and still having a system avatar, I thought I'd try out the new look . . .

If the NUX bodies are good, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be, then most people won't feel the need to 'upgrade' to better ones. Then, only those people who want to go beyond the shapes possible with NUX, or to have non-human avatars, would need to look elsewhere.

It would be useful if the NUX avatar bodies and heads correspond closely to whatever 'system' shape you're wearing when you put them on. For those of us who still use classic system avatars it would be great if you could just swap to NUX without having to do a lot of adjusting. Some of the deficiencies of the current system avatars (e.g. the shoulders) don't seem to be that dependent on slider settings unless you go to extremes. I know that current mesh bodies can differ a lot from the underlying system shape but I guess that many people who use mesh bodies and want to try NUX have kept copies of their favourite old system shape somewhere in their inventory. As I said before, the developer kits should be available to all and free, or at least cheap, and able to be purchased with L$. If not free to all, then perhaps included in the Premium package. As the NUX bodies are going to be BOM, it would be great if there could be a way of texturing each arm or foot separately. I know the standard skin template doesn't allow for this but if there could be optional skin or tattoo layers that apply the texture to just one side somehow, that would be a workaround. A few extra sliders for shape editing would be good too. For example being able to adjust knee height on legs, whether toes point in or out, whether neck is upright or craned forwards and the at-rest hanging angle of arms. The latter would mean "people of size" could keep their hands from disappearing into their hips!

Not sure what this means but hopefully by "creators" LL means anyone who wants to have a go at making content. As well as the avatars, a set of full-perm mesh clothing complete with texture templates would be great. If NUX amounts to a "System Avatar 2.0" that works well and looks good, then it'll be game changer for Second Life.

As someone who has stuck with a 'system' avatar body and head up to now (over 15 years) this could be what I'm waiting for.

Twice recently I've been frozen and so relogged to find that I'm logged in twice! I've never seen this before. I do have multiple viewers enabled but I was logged in twice on the same account. The first one, which had frozen, was still frozen but only crashed when I tried to move.

Even the original SL starter avatars from when I joined in 2006 look better than these Meta ones.

Or it could go the other way in SL, where it seems if something is good, then more is better! So I wouldn't be surprised to see more severely squished thighs with tighter bands. It's not a direction I want to go in though!

Except in the case of SL fashion trends 😁 The original question also asked about "secret societies" in SL. If there are any, then we probably wouldn't know about them!

It took a lot of time to get the stripes right on this full-perm Lenka Kanvas T-shirt. Anyway, now it's done I can easily make any combination of stripe colours. I promise not to post them all on this thread😁 The even-ness of the stripes varies with movement but there's nothing I can do about that!

Are tourniquets fashionable in RL now or is it a purely SL thing favoured by those who want to demonstrate that their ample thighs aren't made of hard plastic?

That one takes the biscuit! . . .all the biscuits!!! I like the way the chest strap on the backpack won't do up.

I rarely suffer from spots but I have a few today - I put it down to anxiety about my annual Premium subscription, which was due. Anyway it's gone through fine now so perhaps my spots will disappear soon!