Originally posted earlier on my Patreon
Second Life social media has been ablaze with excitement over Salt Peppermint's PROJECT MESH REVOLUTION (pictured), which purports to completely change our perspective on what SL avatars can and should be. And that's no fooling!
"I promise I am releasing two bodies and two heads," she tells me yesterday, when I first ask her if this is some kind of elaborate April Fool. "And we have 27 creators releasing clothings and accessories rigged for it."
Among them is the legendary Gizem Mishi of Kiwi Co. (read my profile of her here), who affirmed her excitement for the project with me yesterday:
"This project is extra special because we're not just sharing our work," as she put it to me. "We're gifting it, providing a generous timeline for everyone to access everything we've lovingly created, free of charge… I am most excited about the accessibility and the content pool that we were able to put together for this incredible initiative by Salt."
PMR seeks to address the many shortcomings of the current Second Life mesh fashion economy.
"With the current state of how mesh bodies work in SL," as Ms. Peppermint explains, "is that you buy an item that is rigged specifically for the body you wear. Maitreya has released only female bodies. and only clothes rigged for their specific bodies will work for them. Same goes for any other current body brand. Legacy Male body needs clothes that are specifically rigged for Legacy Male."
PMR also addresses Second Life mesh's ongoing problem of poor optimization. Most of the top selling mesh bodies in Second Life have so many excessive triangles, and cause so much lag, they are effectively a DDOS on other users (as one former Linden Lab engineer put it to me).
PMR, by contrast, Salt Peppermint promises, are "VERY WELL optimized."
People in her S&P group have already gotten their copies of their two PMR bodies and two PMR heads. So starting this morning, thousands of members found them waiting in their inventory.
They're being avidly shared across social media now.
For instance:
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Yes: Project Mesh Revolution are highly optimized and customizable, because, well, they're cardboard cut-outs.
Which is a hilarious April Fool's troll on one level, but also exposes some important points. (You'll laugh! You'll also learn!)
"The fact that we have TOO many meshbodies and I am tired rigging," Salt tells me laughing, when I ask her for the original inspiration for PMR.
"I thought to myself, I need a flat one. And then I thought well actually, that's a great April Foosl, let's give them a cardboard body instead.
"I made it, then showed it to a friend and she loved it so much that she said, 'I will make a dress for it'. Which had me a bit stunned. Then I showed it to another friend who said, 'That is not a joke, we NEED THIS. I want to make clothes for it'."
" And then I thought for a second and thought, okay, let's do this. Every friend I asked was on board immediately."
And yes, as she promised, PMR is highly optimized and customizable. And the community's avid excitement over PMR has highlighted how genuinely frustrating the mesh economy has become, making them yearn for a solution.
"That hunger always existed, and the people that are upset about this joke, were hoping exactly for that," Ms. Peppermint observes. "While bodies could certainly be better optimized than the current ones, we also do have some limitations. With the current set up we have it's not really possible to have a 'one fits all' , but we all dream of it. Well at least from a creator point of view."
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Perhaps for that very reason, many in the community are not only enjoying PMR as an April Fool's, but actually unironically leaning into it:
"Now people are asking for more! So I think the joke is kinda on us [creators] because we might end up making more things for the paper dolls! Certainly not every release, but here and there! Cause after all, it's fairly easy and fun." Linden Lab even shared about PMR on its socials, increasing the overall interest.
And because PMR is so well-optimized, so you can take them out enjoy them with many other PMR avatars without lag, I can actually see paper doll avatars growing in popularity. (In fact, there was a cool paper doll-based virtual world, Papermint, lead developed by Barbara Lippe, that enjoyed some buzz in the 2010s.)
"A lot of us missed fun, and this brought the community together and we bonded more," as Salt Peppermint puts it to me, "laughed and poured creativity into this."
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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