Second Life mentioned in Doonesbury plus a nice frontpage Business section article in NYTimes about consumerism in the virtual world.

The article talks about how most of the women are spilling out of their tops and the men possess bulging muscles. Or at least the men and women who aren’t otherwise dressed as furries, dragons or robots.

The early days of Second Life saw a very distinct pattern in avatar construction. People would chose to go either representative or fantastic. The former was focused on getting as close to your real life self as possible. The latter again split into two forks: aspirational or extreme.

The aspirational usually hewed close to traditional definitions of beauty. The extreme basically wanted to go to the far end of what you could great – as tall (or short) as possible, as little or much hair, etc. Essentially moving the slider bars to the extreme.