who needs First Life when you've got

Oh, yeah. You can upload your own mesh and textures to SL, for a small price in the game's currency... 10 L for any image, and a variable price (11+ L) for mesh, depending on how complex the mesh is. I work pretty low poly, so I rarely pay more than 20 L to upload anything, but that's absolutely not the norm on SL; there's a bit of a weird and very common mindset that stuff being higher poly makes it automatically better, without considering how it affects computer performance.

ANYWAY

before I get too caught up, for reference: 10 L is about .04 USD.
I actually bought my avatars, but like... almost everything you'll see in SL is user-made? so someone else, who isn't an official dev on the SL team, made the avatars I'm wearing. Eventually I want to make avatars to sell too, but I have a very incomplete knowledge of how rigging skeletons to mesh works, so at the moment, I just make... furniture, and textures for avatars that already exist.

Also, SL is free to play. You don't have to buy the currency to go around exploring places other people made, except some places have entrance/group fees I guess.

Oh, neat, thanks dude!