if this is to end in fire

Someone explain this to me. The Linden designers invented mesh, and brought it onto the grid, intending it only to be used for avatar parts (hair, eyes) and objects (homes, furnishings, landscaping), but never for clothing?

I guess this is equivalent to the Lindens developing Second Life in the first place and never once contemplating there would be a burgeoning sex industry growing in the game, right? Because that seems a sort of willful blindness, or at the least thumping obliviousness, after everything else the Lindens have seen happen.

So where are we on mesh clothing, after the death of Qarl's mesh deformer? Well, now we have fit bones, which designers are slowly starting to integrate. The down side to the new fit system is that it requires far more work and manipulation to properly align all the new fit points for mesh clothing and avatar items now. But the up side--and it's a significant up side--is that post-fitting extension, it's a lot easier for the end user to find mesh items that fit well and don't clip.

So...that's good, right?

Whatz has moved to a new mainstore, and in the process of hunting them down, I discovered they have a couple gifts under their holiday tree--or at least a random snow-covered pine, for all I know. (I haven't yet tracked them down, this is a SLUrl to a location near the tree, basically.)

(HAH! And I tracked the actual Whatz store down, for anyone who's curious. There you go.)

Now, a bit of RL intruding into our normal grid experience. I've been relatively absent for a while, but anyone who's still paying attention might have noticed I haven't thanked anyone who's sent holiday greetings my way, nor has anyone received any. I'm trying to make time to do at least a quick texture upload, and send it off to friends, but RL has me rather massively distracted at present. Namely: we have an ailing cat.

Our Siamese blend, normally a spitfire who can literally bounce up six feet from a standing stop, is now mostly huddled on a soft chair in the living room, wrapped in various towels. Up until very recently, she'd lost the ability to walk, we were feeding her syringes of turkey broth and dilute amounts of baby food (various pureed meats), and preparing ourselves for her passing.

My cousin's husband, a lovely man in general, but in specific a former vet tech, brought us two tubes of supplements. One's "yummy" (I highly doubt the "yummy", but it's what the tube says) chicken-flavored high-calorie gel, and the other one's a heavy multivitamin and mineral gel. We pry her jaws open about six times a day (she hates this) and pour a dollop of both onto her tongue, so she can lick it off and thus ingest some nutrients so she doesn't starve on us.

We've been doing this for three days. This morning, we woke up to a kitten we had to shower, because she had managed to walk to the litterbox on her unsteady pins, actually use the litterbox, and return (trailing, unfortunately, bits of litter stuck to her fur) to the chair, hopping back into it on her own.

To go from not able to walk under her own power, and suffering incontinence due to loss of muscle control and general weakness (to the point where we were pondering getting some preemie diapers and cutting holes in them for her tail), to walking--even if unsteadily--to the litterbox and back...well, frankly, this is something of a holiday miracle. And even if we still lose her, we're hoping to do so after we've helped her put on a little more weight, and regain some muscle stiffness.

But all of this has distracted our family from many things--sending out holiday cards (RL and SL), interacting with friends both local and long-distance...we barely managed a Yule celebration and most of it was frankly spent ensuring Storm-kitten was warm and clean.

So if you don't hear from me until after the holidays, thank you for the cards, thank you for the gifts, thank you for the art, and I'll ponder something to do in return. But my priority--our entire family's priority right now--is our cat, because she's bluntly the closest thing we're going to have to children, and we'd miss her deeply if she went.

I'll leave you with this instead, and update when I can, and Merry Everything to those of you who celebrate, and happy feasting and bright lights to those of you who don't!