"There were some limitations as you can clearly see," Novata acknowledges on Reddit , "but we wanted to have Keanu in our Second Life." She created the video to promote the debut of Keanu's avatar at Equal10, an SL fashion event launching next month. And if you want to be breathtaking in the virtual world, Keanu's avatar comes with many options:

Keanu Reeves, as the entire Internet knows, is making an official, digitized appearance in the upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 . And as the entire Second Life community knows, any Internet popcult phenomenon is near-instantly absorbed by and recreated into the metaverse. So watch above: Created by SLer "Novata", a machinima tribute to the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer featuring Keanu Reeves, co-starring quite a few avatars which seem to be arthritic mannequins with horrible speech impediments. (Actually they're victims of Second Life's out-of-date lip sync system.)

"The skin comes with the shape and body applier so, you can make your avatar looks like Keanu," she tells me. "Works with Catwa." (A popular mesh body shape.) The skin itself was created by Antonietta Canucci aka Raohausen. But at press time, it's not clear if, and also not likely that, Keanu's appearance in Second Life is authorized.

"Isn't this like cosplay?" Novato wonders. "[Raohausen] she sometimes makes celebrity skins."

Yes she does: For instance, meet Second Life avatar "Brad", and Second Life avatar "Taylor". Who look like, well, you know.

And far as I know, whether it's OK to avatarize a celebrity without their consent is a gray area, at least when it's used in fair use parody. Then again, like William Gibson himself likes to say, the whole point of cyberpunk is the street making its own uses for things.

Update, 6/28: William Gibson says I misinterpreted that quote from William Gibson: