Frankenbarbies & stuff

You could actually read that?*blinks*

It's part of the requirements for being a 3rd-degree kid-av, extensive study in reading and transliterating improper English.

I hope you don't mind I cut your post down, so those with less concentration could get your message.

Pep (If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. )

Didnt read all the posts..
But my take on it:
We're here in SL for diff. reasons. Some are here to just listen to music, some to live out a dream, some to talk to random people etc. etc.

Bashing or not agreeing to the ways a person 'use' Second Life, is just kinda wrong imo.
There’s no straight guideline as to how the game is played.
As long as people don’t harm/hurt others, you shouldn’t flame the way a person is playing.
If they want to RP a person with large breasts, fur, another gender, race etc. they're in their right to do so. Hell some might argue that playing this game 100% as a RL AV is wrong, since you have RL for this.
One of the keywords is tolerance. Something most people in SL don’t have.
Ironically the person who throws the "That’s so unreal/unnatural" got an AV that looks doesn’t look like them RL 100%.
An example:
Was at a club shaking my pixels. When a girl made a comment about someone who had a devil AV (prim shape, wings, horns, tail etc.).. her comment was, and I quote "I don’t get why people walk around looking like that, as if hes a demon RL LOL"
This was said by someone wearing: Neko ears, neko tail, large pink rave hair, torn pink outfit with matching prim skirt.

I could say something about people living in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks etc.
But to get to my point.
We're all allowed to look the way we want, to RP as we want (as long as it doesn’t harm others).

If someone wants to look like a Barbie, be a furry, a vamp, a neko, a demon, hell even a normal person. let them, it’s not up to you to define what’s normal in SL and what’s not.


- Splixxen

I kind of think of them in terms of Ken Jeremiassen's imagining of Peg Bundy. Any searches on that name combo are likely to come back NSFW, so don't say i didn't warn ya!

(and the whole DQ/Frankenbarbie/Peg bundy look has a following, so I don't agree with whoever said that looking that way counts as a flunk in Av Design 101...)

Giggle-snorts.. Just created the image of Captain Kirk (William Shatner version) with hug prim-boobs struggling to save the Enterprise.

LMFAO

C'mon, Atticus, Tundra just pointed out what is glaringly obvious!!

I counted 6 BTW... one used a Word Processor to throw us off the scent.



Translation: My posse o' alts gonna get you suckas!!

1 User Agreed

That's really where this all starts - most of the newbie shapes are 'frankenbarbie' in look - leaving the rest of us out there to learn shape design if we want to look like anything else.

So this begins with that frustration, and moves into a discussion about making more realistic shapes TO GIVE PEOPLE MORE OPTIONS.

-Then- we get the assorted reverse discrimination claims from a person who is voluntarily a frankenbarbie to an extreme. That person completely missed what was going on here, started with a very insulting post, got called on it and lured a few of us into some impolite responses (self included) and then sent in a crowd of uninvolved people to get their hands into the mess.

Those were not real people. Unless you count separate personalities as people.

I don't doubt that they were real - and my visitor log on my land suggests they were as well.

And I can even understand a certain boobtastic individual's frustration after feeling she was the target of all this. But until she entered into it with a rather hostile comment about us needing help and she being willing to recommend her doctor to us... she wasn't the target. That comment set me off, and probably others as well.

She put us into a firing squad and aimed us all at her, when we were really on a very different angle before that - at least from my read of things and what I thought I was discussing...

On the good side - it made me learn the teleport pads on the private part of my land were broken (teleporting to empty air). But at least the system I use on the public side works, and I'm about half through fixing the ones meant for just me, my alts, and my 'personal' friends.

Need to use my netporter. It automatically adjusts when you move or rotate the pads.

I am as ever here to provide the newbie perspective, since I am relatively freshly hatched. When I signed up for SL, I randomly chose the "Gamer Girl" av. Now, the Gamer Girl is many things, but sexy she is not. She's pretty short, though. I don't think she meets the definition of "Frankenbarbie" by any stretch. There's another beginner av I've seen running around, that girl in the pink dress with the brown hair. Again, not a Frankenbarbie, in fact she couldn't look any more average.

When I walked in the Help People Island freebie shop, I was quite taken aback. I actually had to work to find a simple pair of jeans and a non-revealing top. I almost left the game based on my reaction to that store...I was not interested in some sex-based game. However I stuck with it because I was at home for a week. I was given a new free shape and immediately edited it to reduce the extreme measurements and then set out to create my own style.

Been to one of those big outdoor freebie areas lately? The women's sections look like a Frederick's of Hollywood blew up. The Frankenbarbie look goes well with the clothes that are pushed on the newbie. I have a RL friend who refuses to get into SL because she doesn't feel like weeding through all the ridiculous "sexy clothes."

So my point is twofold. First, that I am evidence that it is possible for a newbie to have a brain and to seek out and build a style that is not a Frankenbarbie look. Second, that the Frankenbarbie is at least in part a result of the hypersexual focus the newbie is presented with from the start, which still mystifies me. I wish that SL was more like walking into a real city, with different areas, and that the sexy stuff was just one area that the newbie could either seek out or avoid. Show a newbie a freebie store that has actual clothing, like non-asscrack jeans and nice tops, and you're going to see more regular looking avs walking around.

This is a real problem, though you gotta realise that most of the stuff in the freebie stores is stuff that *didn't sell*.

Go to Silent Sparrow, turn left, walk to the big blue bird. There's a freebie giver there with all kinds of good stuff in it. Then teleport to Powder Mill, and check out the GNUbie Store there.

And if you think it's tough for females, it's even harder for guys to get clothes that look good and aren't for a rapper or a pimp.

Now see, that advice you just gave about Silent Sparrow and Powder Mill, Argent? This is the first I've heard of those. This information is not given to newbies. And I spent over a week hanging out on Help People Island pestering the helpers. The best I got were some generic links, some of which were not helpful, like a place called Spidey's or whatever it is where all the free junk costs 1L. I have wasted time and money by having so little help. I also had no idea that there are blogs out there to help newbies and this forum, because that info was also not given to me. I just found a helpful newbie blog a couple days ago, about 2.5 weeks too late.

What I did, myself, was I renamed SL "The Shopping Game." I decided that the challenge of finding anything reasonable was a game for me, and having help would make it too easy. I think that's cool, to hunt around, searching through dives and looking for clues. But I'm not going to point fingers at women who just give in to the party line and have the glamazon avs.

Define real...! I'm not saying that they don't all exist in-world.

Yep, it's absolutely a huge problem, I completely agree. The whole "first hour" experience in Second Life is, well, awesomely bad. If you don't happen to end up in some place like Caledon that first hour can take months to get through. Particularly if you're human. I feel so sorry for humans in Second Life.

Love the name "Glamazon".

I recommend you visit the Hangout. We've got sort of a freebie wall with a couple of kits for new players, with stuff like landmarks for clothing, skins, and the like in them. I mean, the Forum Cartel isn't a noob learning group like NCI or The Shelter; that's not its purpose. But we do take care of our fresh vi.....er, members.

I've been reading a bit here and there about how LL is trying to bill themselves as a venue for businesses like IBM to have meetings in SL because it's cheaper than flying people in IRL. I'm trying to imagine a businesswoman who decides to check out SL to assess it. Well first off she's expected to wear a body called, perhaps, "Centerfold" (a recommended one at Free Dove) and totter around in a black lace teddy and stiletto heels. Hmm. I'll bet she's going to get a certain impression from that. I sure did.

Maybe if LL wants to be taken seriously, they should come up with a more helpful newbie welcome area. That area I first started out in, that weird bleak landscape with the concrete walkways, was useless. I don't recall finding any resources there. I remember a group of noobs standing around the center of the concrete walkways asking each other what they were supposed to do from there. I keep finding out about newbie areas that I never knew existed. You might say to me, "Why didn't you do a search for newbie help areas?" and I would answer, "Because I didn't even know enough to do that."

A lot of companies that come in SL, come in as 'mentored'. My group, Virtual Ability regularly hosts and mentors groups. We just hosted a bunch of nurses recently as they learned to deal with people with disabilities in the virtual world; we regularly host grad students doing their thesis or learning about aspects of the virtual world. They come in through our Open Gateway, and one of us is there to meet them and guide them through what they are there to do. They are introduced to people who will help them proceed to their goal. Of course they are free to explore anything they want to, on their own time, but I don't think many companies would just come cluelessly into SL through a Help Island kind of thing with no idea of how to proceed and no one there to assist. They get set up, in advance.

I myself am kinda past the "desperate noob who needs free things" stage and am now in the "where do I get nice things that I'm willing to pay for (within a not-enormous budget) but I don't quite know where to go and what's worth it and what isn't" stage. Don't ask me about my accumulation of bad hair. I see it as a part of the aforementioned "Shopping game."