Massively^™

Qarl Linden says that he's finished work on a new Ruth for Second Life. Ruth is the default avatar mesh that is placed by the viewer when it is told that a new avatar has come into range. The viewer then requests specific appearance and texture data that provides the unique avatar visuals for that person.

When this process fails, you often wind up with a rather confusing mixture of the female Ruth model intermixed with some features of the unique avatar. Among Second Life users that's called "being Ruthed."

Now, Qarl says, that the Ruth model has been updated for a potential future release.

"Ruth is now an amorphous cloud," says Qarl, "No longer an ugly dwarf." -- The new Ruth model apparently won't accept display attachments until it is replaced by a non-default shape.

It's not clear quite when the new Ruth is going to roll out, but the pace that changes are coming out of Linden Lab lately, it wouldn't surprise us to see it in the 1.19.2 release candidates (that are no doubt coming up within the next couple of weeks).

Thanks to alert reader, Sean Heying for catching this.