I took photographs of the outfit, Natural Things, v.01, which Grapho has designed, to upload onto Flickr today. And I noticed something quite bewildering: Grapho looks like my father. Well, not my father, as I knew him, obviously. But, as he was as a young man, to judge by the many photographs of his youth that I have seen over the years.
What is bewildering is that I did not notice this during all these past days where I have been Grapho in SL, sometimes 6-7 hours a day, hammering away at the outfit. Maybe I was too busy working , maybe it is the light in there – but the truth of the matter is that I only noticed it when I opened the photos in photoshop to crop them.
Grapho has been working on his appearance quite a bit of late, so we have been popping open the appearance editor every so often. Another thing is that in order to be able to design garments for women, Grapho also had to create a female shape to try them on. This latest manifestation of his is largely the result of my switching back and forth between the sexes, with that radio button down there, trying to create a truly androgynous avatar for the sole purpose of photographing some of the clothes with that. I thought it might be nice to have that ambiguous look for the unisex outfits, as this latest one has turned out to be. Anyway, at some point in all of that experimentation I sort of liked what happened to Grapho and decided to save the shape as the new Grapho shape.
So, what resistant part of my psyche did not notice that what I had saved was actually a fairly close representation of my own father?
And it is also somehow significant that this all happened while I was switching back and forth between male and female, since the shape that I started out with was the default Alpha shape (who is a more or less plausible lookalike of me in RL). The one that I saved for Grapho was not the immediate mutation that SL gave me of course – that one was rather hideous. I continued to play with that for a very long time, switched back and forth between the sexes with that one as well, even saved some of the interim stages. But, when all is said and done, this male shape is a vastly mutated and transformed regeneration of Alpha. Generations away – but still.
And… my father did look like me. …