Mesh Pieces

So despite my vows not to go to Skin Fair 2016, I did.  Only to discover that almost no vendor creates system avatar skins anymore.  They only skin mesh heads now and mesh parts.

This awful outcome is the result of two things...market exploitation and and ideology.

Market Exploitation

I suppose most avatar creators feel that mesh parts and mesh avatars are the end all and be all.  Little does it matter that Mesh bodies and parts are unalterable by their purchasers. If you buy a mesh body, it will deform a bit in correlation to the system avatar body, but not by much.  Mesh heads cannot be changed at all.  So a customer will look like every other customer who buys the same mesh head.  If they try to alter their look, they can buy the now legion offerings from various skin creators.  But that still doesn't stop them from looking like every other person who purchased the same skin.  I can also see why creators are clamoring to skin mesh avatars and parts, it's easier.  The bodies and heads don't change.  In fact all they really need to create are the heads.  The body skin can be the same across all lines since only the head will change.

Ideology

For many years now, there have been motivated howlers, mainly creators, screeching how the average SL user creates lag.  That all of us ruin SL by making our avatars too tall and many bodies are also out of proportion.  Their opposites would point to the "your world" ethos of SL and stated that people were allowed to design their own looks.  Now I can see both sides of the argument.  Yes, out of proportion avatars can make designing items harder in SL.  However telling people they can't design their own features in VR is just as awful.  Now I see that the Mesh avatar movement has done by stealth what the vocal restriction advocates wanted for years.  It prevents people from designing their own avatars.  We have in  proportion avatars that are cookie cutter boring.

The almost total abandonment of people who do still design their own avatars is heinous.  There are people in SL who do have a sense of proportion and enjoy playing with the body controls to create their look.  Why should these people (I am one) be forced into mesh body pieces?  Not only that why should I have to suffer the fetish peccadilloes of certain creators (Big Asses, Big Lips, Big Hips, Big Boobs etc) when I buy items for my avatar?  Why is it a crime that I want my avatar to share some of my own features?

What is even more disturbing is that the few creators who do still create system avatars put absolutely no enthusiasm into these items.  Almost all the creators at this year's skin fair, the few who did create system skins, used the same skin template.  Hence every system avatar looked the same no matter what creator stall you visited.  Now that is just miserly.  Unless it's a subtle dig at mesh resistors and meant to push them into the standardized clone economy of mesh.

So now it seems that I will be locked mainly into skins created in 2015 and before.

This is what I will be prevented from doing from now on.  I can't look myself with mesh heads:





Nor can I design Portrait Avatars such as these with Mesh heads: