Sian heard yesterday that her friend Dreampaint Loon had died.
Inevitably, she heard it from Dream’s best friend, partner in crime and not-quite-platonic soul(less)mate Rei Gynoid, with whom Dream was inseparable for as long as Sian knew either of them — in fact, Sian never saw Dream inworld without Rei. Dream had passed on the first of the month. It had been a long illness, and she was in a coma when she passed. Rei let Sian know some other things, and Sian finally found out a real name and saw a photo. She can’t share that stuff with you. But, quite honestly, these revelations seemed disconnected to her, an embodiment that was in some way irrelevant to a friendship that was warm and collegiate, and not based on one’s situated nation or even a name.
When all you share are secrets, what need do you have of the rest of a person’s life?
Well, that’s the question. There is a sort of Swiss cheese grief that we have when we lose someone in Second Life, especially in circles such as ours, where we use the metaverse to experience life outside the closet while keeping the door shut. We can have deep, even profound connections in the games we play, and never once know who we’re talking to.
Sian of course didn’t really know her all that well. It was for Rei to really know her, and no one in Second Life is grieving for her as deeply as Rei. Sian’s heart truly breaks for Rei.
The person who came inworld as Dreampaint Loon was an artist who had a playful, polymorphously perverse and completely unique imagination. Her images either repulsed you or fascinated you, but they never left you without an impression.
In her worlds, kinks were part of existence, and her always very rubbery ideas have a sort of visceral, sticky feel to them. You can feel them oozing over you, around you, through you. The transformations were sexual, and the eroticism was a very queer eroticism. Sian understood it, and Dream, we think, understood Sian, and drew her more than once, and Sian was always flattered that she and Rei would make use of the items that Sian used to make.
Dream was the original concept designer of the Neuropuppet, a device that Sian created in mesh back in the early days of rigged mesh in Second Life (and which her friend M0908A Doll scripted for RLV). Sian never managed to make it work as well as she wanted and truly, when fitted mesh became a thing, the Neuropuppet just didn’t survive. But the concept — that was a hell of thing.
On a more elemental, fleshly level, in 2023 when RL!Sian’s life fell entirely apart, Sian commissioned Dream to paint a picture of her ideal self. Dream wouldn’t take money for it.
Sian wound up having a print on her wall in Second Life and in the real world too. It is iconic of who Sian wants to be. It matters to her.
In 2016, Dream embarked on a Tarot deck. In the end, there weren’t enough people supporting her Patreon to make it worth her while (although Sian was one, and was avidly collecting the print quality card files in the hopes of having one printed). What did survive was what Sian still thinks is her best art.
There used to be an inworld gallery of Dream’s art. It’s long gone.
So when Sian woke up to that dreadful, crushing news, she entered a deep, purposeful hyperfocus. Rei, understandably, needs a break from going inworld since it’s a virtual world without Dream in it. What it needed was someone close enough to care but not close enough to be too badly hurt to make a thing happen. And so it transpired that Sian, in a perfectionist obsession, had spent the best part of two days building her friend a memorial. She showed it to Rei first. It’s now publicly accessible, and Sian’s friends have directly ordered Sian to stop adding things and fixing things. It has to be finished. But it also has to be perfect.
There is a visitor’s book. We invite you to come and see the art, and leave your tributes there, which will be passed on.
Visit: Dreampaint Loon’s Memorial Gallery
