It’s actually a wildcat avatar since it had more options for moving around and stuff than the cat avatar, but close enough. I’ve been mostly into realistic avatars, and still didn’t want to look like the norm for avatars on Second Life (which is to say, for females anyway, tall, skinny, and conventionally sexy), so I gave this one roughly the same build I have. Then Muskie gave me a cat tree so I sat on it.

For those who haven’t met me, I speak what Anne Bevington calls fluent cat. I’ve always been around cats, they’ve always made a fair bit of sense to me, I’m comfortable with them. When I was a kid I spent quite a long time “being a cat,” including walking around on the back fence keeping neighbor cats out of our territory. (I don’t want to know what they thought of the weird kid doing cat postures on top of the back fence.) I even did somewhat more, uh, embarrassing kinds of territory-marking. I could (and can still) make just about any noise cats can make, and most movements. My main regret was that I didn’t have a tail and swivel-ears.

So I always said if I was going to go for an unrealistic avatar on Second Life, it’d probably be a cat. So there’s my cat avatar. The only thing that bugs me is that it’s an anthropomorphic cat. I don’t totally understand the draw of anthropomorphic-shaped animals (besides humans and such). Aside from the fact that it’s easier to put into Second Life’s avatar structure. It’d be nice to have one that actually moves like a cat instead of like a human in a cat-shaped outfit.