Slink Creator on Closing Her Beloved, Highly Optimized Mesh Body Store — And the Market’s Uncertain Future

The Second Life fashion community was hit by some shocking new year’s news, when Slink creator Siddean Munroe announced she was closing down her line of high quality avatar mesh enhancements for painful real life reasons:

Following two stressful years of pandemic which I am sure we have all been affected by in one way or the other, I suddenly lost my mother in September of 2021, my grandmother in January of 2022 and my cat Cleo in June. I have been unwell and enduring a lot of chronic pain. I have to be very honest, my spark has dimmed a little and I no longer have the energy to pour into this business like I once did.

I’ve done a lot of soul searching over the last 18 months and have come to the very difficult decision that for my own physical and mental wellbeing, I need to move on from Second Life. I am starting something new, and can only hope it will be half as much fun and as fulfilling as my time in Second Life has been.

This is also a blow to the technical performance of the Second Life community: Slink was one of the few leading mesh body brands that are well-optimized. When I last checked, many of the market leaders, by contrast, are grotesquely lag-inducing.

In any case, a mutual friend helped me reach out to Siddean, because I was curious about her future. She sent along these answers:

Would you be willing to sell Slink to another brand or even Linden Lab?

I am not selling Slink. I haven’t yet decided what I will do with the thousands of assets that I created over my time in SL. I still need some time to regroup. The assets are and will always be my intellectual property and I haven’t given anyone permission to sell them in SL post closure of my store.

What do you recommend Slink owners do who need help with their bodies?

I am satisfied that they are feature rich and free of show stopping bugs. The bodies have been around for over 8 years now so I think I can be confident about that. We spent a lot of time and effort over the years to make the user experience as streamlined and optimal as possible given the complexity of the product. They have extensive documentation included, and I will keep the blog, and YouTube tutorials open for anyone who cares to take a look.

If something breaks with the body parts then I recommend what I have always recommended – keep the box, and unpack a fresh copy. It will work fresh out of the box. Unless Linden Lab massively changes something with the scripts, there’s no reason the products won’t keep working for a long time without my presence.

Slink is famous for its highly optimized bodies where the leading bodies are not. Are there alternatives you recommend with Slink gone?

I can’t really give one, I’m sorry. I never really looked in depth at what other body creators were doing, with Slink being as all consuming as it was for so long, and all I can recommend is that people read blogs which care about such things as rendering cost and polygon count and do a little research into their purchase before they make it.

You can see the rendering cost via the advanced menu in the Second Life viewer and it’s something I’ve always felt strongly about and think more people should really consider when making purchasing decisions.

Some writers I like that blog about these things are Nalates, Freyja, Beq Janus and of course your work at New World Notes.

I wish the Siddean the best, and am hopeful she’ll return to the Metaverse in some form. I definitely hope her dedication to optimized mesh is taken up by other creators.

In the meantime, is there another well-optimized mesh brand out there for people to embrace?