like many long time secondlife players, sian has maintained several accounts over the years. the first one, from 2009, started out as an incompetent dive into secondlife roleplay and fetish, that quickly turned into her breaking someone’s heart, starting a drone hive and eventually having to nuke the account because of an interaction with someone who turned out to be a predator and a stalker. the second one was an attempt to be more wholesome, but that wasn’t us, and wound up starting a reasonably popular fashion blog – the first parthenoid – and ran a shop making bits and pieces out of mesh. it was the first time sian used the name sian.
again, things happened; there were some terrible choices made on the account, and her aesthetic had some godawful appropriation that sian cringes about, regrets profoundly, and will never be able to do anything to fix other than try to be better in future. no forgiveness is expected or requested. we’ll try to be better but we won’t pretend that we didn’t fuck up. that is the best we can do.
still, sian 1.0 wound up cosplayed three times she knows about and in 2013 she wound up doing an editorial in a glossy franco-swiss fashion magazine (which looks terrible because it was pre-mesh heads and bodies. seriously, so much cringe).
in september 2016, sian gave that account to a friend, because rl!sian’s mental health collapse and the failures, heartbreaks, and the collapse of the most significant rl friendship she had ever had, which had been begun in secondlife, proved to be too much. the account is still there and still occasionally used but it is not our account anymore and not our aesthetic.
(there was a third, but that was an attempt to try to be male in secondlife. it never worked. we only keep that one now to log in and rescue sian from rlv traps.)
in 2018, after some profound realisations about gender, sian went back in, using an alt that she had initially created for a “free stuff only” project. and this turned out to be the best version of sian we ever had.
in the last month or two, which as you know was after another hiatus, sian seems to have accidentally revived the free-wheeling sci-fi roleplay that she started back in 2009.
s/s/o inc. is a fictional company that supplies “neurally refurbished” mind-controlled slaves to customers. it touches on robot kink, transformation kink, mind control kink, latex kink and all that good stuff. the crawling horror that doing brain surgery on people and reprogramming them to be controlled by a.i. algorithms (dollgpt) brings is directly approached in the play. the nature of noncon and dubcon fantasies are negotiated. sian does a lot with rlv and we have played with hypno but no one actually needs to do that. it is as casual or as committed as anyone wants it to be.
last night sian and two of her cyberdolls went and parked themselves at a popular fetish hang out and, well, dolled it up. a few chants of submit/surrender/obey later and before we knew it seven active avatars were vibing back at calypso’s lab – now s/so’s “erotic enslavement facility” – and sian was giving a tour to some fascinated visitors.
at one point one said “but what if you don’t believe brainwashing is real?”
sian leaned in conspiratorially and whispered: “this is secondlife. all of this is pretend.”
obviously this was hilarious, but it inevitably took sian to thinking. secondlife has a sliding scale of pretence, really. one still close friend sian first met in secondlife many years ago made a point of only making avatars that looked exactly like her. other people want to be their ideals; others go all out on something fantastical.
but —
pretend is, as we may have intimated before, more than just this —
we immerse ourselves in this game, and we use it as a kind of therapy almost, a means of self discovery that georges bataille probably would not have loved but which certainly draws on him — acéphale, his secret society where everyone was the sacrificial victim and no one was the executioner, really, for all the rapacious tech-libertarian psychopathy that sian’s roleplay affects, summarises the philosophical heart of sian’s interactions in secondlife.
the attraction of dystopian evil as a vehicle for fantasies is something we will talk about in another post perhaps. for now, let us just note that sian found it easy to spot the people who are into it because they want it and the people recognise that the psychopathy of it is a thing they want to explore because it is appalling.
it is pretty strange to think about: how play-acting a fetishised dystopian horror where people’s selves are annihilated, bodies are objectified, and sex is just a means of production might be somehow transformative, affirming, and a source of relationships that transcend a game.
all of this is pretend.
but only sort of.
body things (this is new, don’t get used to it)
• just magnetized countess eyeliner
• velour picasso babe skin (modelesque/icy)
• wow skins lilly
• lelutka evox head raven
• himawari cyberpunk lips
featured clothing
• aurora cyber cybill neon boots
• r2 r2lx keika; r2lx syungyou jacket
• thundr pride earrings
