It's always bugged me a bit that my SL avatar was a plain-vanilla human. I mean, here's this awesome metaverse, where the rules of physics don't apply, and you can change your appearance at will. And I was walking around, looking much like I do in real life. How creative and interesting.
So, today while watching Stephen work his magic on a panel on SecondLife, in SecondLife (ooh. recursion!) I went shopping for a new avatar. I don't have time to create an avatar at the moment, and for some reason have a few thousand Lindenbucks in my account. So I went hunting for a prefab avatar that I could live with. I was initially wanting to be a disembodied singularity or something entirely Other. But then I stumbled across the Battlestar Galactica Centurion, from the original 1978 classic series. Perfect.
After some help by CogDog (the canine in red pictured here), I was able to "wear" the new avatar (the trick: don't click "wear" in the inventory. Drag the object out of the Inventory onto the ground, right click that, and click "wear" then. very intuitive). I made some modifications to myself after donning my new personna - lost all hair (it was poking out of the helmet) and I now have black metallic skin (not the odd pink flesh sticking out between the gaps in the gloves).
I suppose I might upgrade it if I find something from the current BSG series. A Cylon Raider? How about the Smoke Monster from Lost?