Making a Proper Shape - A Guide to Human Proportions

I am 5'2" in SL and occasionally get asked if I am playing a kid... I ask them how many kids they know have hips and breasts and look like this...

Exactly...

I mean come on. A child AV and an adult AV look pretty different, and height is the least telling indicator.

My 5'2":
http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?ID=379850

You really cannot underestimate how difficult it is for some some folk to read an image properly. Putting all the information together from two dimensions seems to stump their reliance on binocular vision in RL and very often they will make mistakes assessing the content of a photograph or a realistic painting that just wouldn't happen in the usual course of daily life. I am sure it is a visual equivalent of being tone deaf or possibly dyslexia with a more subtle confusion of line and volume instead of letterforms and figures.

I can't think of any other reason why so many use shortness as their benchmark to identify ageplayers in SL. Other than being pig-headed jerks of course.


Nice.

heh thanks Ephraim... and yeah, I am at a loss why so many people do presume because someone is short, they are a kid

heck I have an alt who is a little person (or midget)

she is short, arms and legs short, average torso, and she never gets asked if she is a kid... weird how people perceive others...

yes they do, very different, and 5'2 does not necessarily mean child

and you do not look like a kid to me, maybe an avatar in late teens early twenties but that is because of the clothing and hair look, not the height

It is in a lot of people's head an important part of thre way they define the world around them to draw an imaginary line between the good peoples, (wich usually they are part of) and "the others" wich are bad peoples.

Unfortunately LL gave them a semi reason to create a whole new category for bad peoples, the ageplayers.

It's like saying blacks are rapists or hispanics are thieves.

In sl it's ALMOST linden endorsed to say short peoples are ageplayers/pedophiles some peoples jump the gap and feel warm and fuzzy about themselve that "we protect our group/club/etc from the BAD peoples!"

I wish I was 5'2" in RL. Then I could drive a compact car and fit on a normal futon.

Until I see a clear concise description in the terms of service and the community standards that prevents me from being short and play sexy here I'll continue being my short self here, I have enough of being tall in RL and here I have lots of fun.

And until then if anyone calls us short people 'child' we can call them back 'perverts' they are the ones who have height issues

I DON'T Agree with it, but I have a guess why they use it.

Automation.

I can make something to detect height, and alert me to it or do something in reaction to it, and not have to involve any human brainpower.

But I can't do that for things which would be actual indicators: dress, curve, boobs, package, mannerism, AO, whatever... - All indicators that combined can tell a human in an instant what they are dealing with, accurately; even when some of them are missing (a human can instantly tell a flat-chested adult woman from a girl - but you can't write a script to do the same thing).

There was a plan a decade or so back in California to require people around that height to use 'car seats' when sitting in the front passenger seat...
- Below a certain height airbags become dangerous, but it was still pretty demeaning...

You can't compare conduct with status.

Race is status,
Ageplay is conduct.

Michael Jackson was African American. If he had been in SL, he'd have a child avatar.

He's never once had an accusation of ageplay stick, but that hasn't stopped people from insisting that he was an ageplayer.

This is going with the common defintion of ageplay: pedophile sex.

That's the problem people who use child avatars face - the question of why, in an adult world, and adult insists on living like a child. And that's the only accusation on Jackson that can stick: that he lived RL as if he had a Child Avatar.

It may be an unfair question, but it gets asked. And it is not the same as questions into status.

People cannot change their race, and conduct cannot be inferred from race. But conduct can be inferred from other conduct, and conduct can be changed.

That's weird, given how many cars I literally can not drive without pain because I can't push the seat back far enough. And I'm only 6' tall. Are these cars built for people precisely 5'7 1/2" tall or something?

Great necro, but as an example:
I'm 192 cm in rl. About 6ft2 - 6ft3 for the non-metrical readers. In other words, I'm not exceptionally tall, but I am well above avarage in length in RL.
Adjusting my avi length to this size shows me that I'm at roughly 35% on the sizebar in the appearance modifier. A visit to an establishment on Zindra will attract a couple of AR's about me.

I'm all in favor of more realistic default avatar sizes, simply because they come with a lot of VERY practical benefits. But the truth is, even the default shapes handed out by LL, and that includes good old Ruth, is way taller than that, and that customisation slider being well below 50% gives people the idea that they'd be short if they go below that, even if you'd actually need to go even lower than 35% to get to the really common "natural" sizes.

So in the end, it all started with Ruth being too big. What followed, were huge doors, big seats, immense cars.
It also means people have little space on their land: furniture has to be bigger, walkways have to be wider, etc. The lack of prims issue kinda compensates for this, since people just don't have the prims to put too much more on their land, but still, lack of prims is not only a convenience, but also a bad excuse for this inconcistancy (is that a word?).

Then there's the detail level issue: prims can get really small, but the smaller the avatar, the smaller the details on attachments like jewelry will have to be. And apart from currently being buggy, tiny prims are still limited in their minimal dimensions.

But are you proportionate? Or do you have long legs for your height?

My hubby is the opposite, 6" taller than me but our inseams are about the same. His additional height is torso and neck. To avoid hitting his head, he tilts back his car seat, but keeps the seat bottom close. When I drive his car, I move the seat back, then tilt the back forward.

And don't get me started on dress shirts. I buy quasi-custom from Land's End to get a proper fit.

That's not the common definition. I'm not sure there is anything that could be called a common definition, as it's a neologism. But there does seem to be consensus in this forum that your definition is just plain wrong.

The most accepted definition here is that ageplay means any roleplay as a child avatar, with "sexual ageplay" being the preferred term for sexual activity involving a child avatar. Many people will use "ageplay" for the latter, but it's frowned upon. I've never seen anyone try to justify that usage other than by saying it's nitpicking. However, everyone agrees that it doesn't mean (RL) pedophilia, even if we may disagree about the relationship, if any, between pedophilia and sexual ageplay.


Don't go there. There are too many examples of gay people who've been seriously harmed by failed attempts at conversion therapy. The issue is far too complex for such simplistic statements.

Well, I've always understood this like this:

Ageplay: child AV sex
Child Avatar: Child avatar RP.

- Those are the definitions I see get tossed around all the time. Even in LL policies that say things like 'ageplay' not allowed. I assumed that mean sex, but that having a child Av was ok; ergo, the word for 'child avatar' was -NOT- ageplay.

So I was trying to avoid offense up there - by sticking to the terms as I thought everybody was using them.

Regardless of terms, point was... (see if I can rephrase):

(erg, edit page doesn't leave the thread, saving and rediting in a sec)

Ok, Poster tried to compare race to 'sexual ageplay'. I noted that's not a valid comparison. One is status, the other conduct.

I then tried to note that 'sexual ageplay' is also different from 'child avatar' - with a famous real world example to show that even while different, people don't accept either...

Ie: Michael Jackson. All you can say with accuracy about him is that he wanted to live life as a child avatar. But because of that he spent a lifetime fending off accusations that he was doing 'sexual ageplay' - not once was anyone ever able to verify that, but the accusations never stopped, and still persist; despite that, with his death, even "victims" who were paid off could now freely speak. They know better: they probably never had valid claims anyway (but that last part is just my personal opinion).

Status cannot be changed. Conduct can.

That's how they are defined as different. If you can change something, it is conduct. If you cannot, it is status.

That is in fact why there is such hot debate about gender-preference Sexual Identity - is it status (born with), or Conduct (learned)?

But this is a side-tack of a side-track or a side-track... and maybe should get its own thread if further pursued.

We shouldn't hope legislators to be rational. ESPECIALLY the ones in California...

At this point... I'd take ANY budget from those fools, no matter how bad, over the mess they give us EVERY FREAKING YEAR. Heck, tax me 123% - at least then I'll know what the rules are, so I have a framework for fighting them... But that's a massive side topic.

Don't worry.

Obama is nickle and dime'ing his way there. Ciggie tax, gas tax, capital gains tax, transfat tax, gun owner tax, being a conservative tax, not being black tax, funnel money extreme south american dictators tax...

Oh and Michelles tax exemption for those who are for the fist time proud of their country.

A body hasn't got the nous to tell what they're looking at, I don't think any scripted device is going to make a blind bit of difference to what they think. Folk see 'short' they think 'kid', which is stupid, I know, but SL definitely has issues with proportion and oversized avatars is one of the side effects. Any attempt at a realistic size tends to be out of whack with the consensus of acceptable height as a result.

I know because I'm technically seven foot by SL standards but I'm still a shortass in comparison to the build of my own home - never mind the size-queens cruising most of my favoured hangouts.

Another advantage to having a non-human avatar is that the average size for toons seems to be saner. Perhaps we need a guide to non-human proportions.

this is true.

Apologies, I missed this: what the Hell are you talking about? I don't get the point of him being African-American in this context but when I think about Michael Jackson at all, the first thing comes to mind is the piano line from 'Stranger in Moscow' and the next thing is the obvious way he sublimated an unhappy and overworked childhood into a peculiar fascination for the company of children.

What kind of person would spend untold millions on a playground like Neverland other than eternal boy? That place wasn't about eccentricity and it certainly wasn't about an altruistic fondness for the well-being and happiness of youngsters. That dump is a monument to a deeply troubled individual who never managed to put away childish things and make the transition to adulthood.

And for that matter he had quite a few accusations of sexual ageplay - the fact that he got off the hook is neither here nor there. It is nothing short of naive to ignore the fact that the 'ageplay schtick' was all over that guy like feathers on a chicken.

Here I have to quote the great philosopher of the 90's...
Garfield the cat.

"Why is it that when an adult behaves like a child people lock him up and put a straight jacket on him... and leave the children running around free?"

Status or conduct is beside the point i'm exposing. what i was explaining is that for some peoples they need to be in some kind of inner circle and have enough peoples out of this inner circle so they can feel special.



Being black, white tall small or pretty is a matter of personal choice in SL, it isn't something you are born with and have to deal with and can be changed at a whim.

Ephraim: You clearly were not replying to my actual post, but to something else. But, in so doing, you pointed out the point I was trying to make.

MJ is an example of someone who 'tries to play a child avatar' - and for which he faced a lifetime of being accused of doing more.

Maybe true, and maybe not. But all one can say for fact is that he did the RL version of 'playing a child avatar.' Everything beyond that is accusation.