It’s come into the conversation again, and honestly there’s an ulterior motive, because Sian needs an easily accessible explanation on her picks: why would Sian put herself through this?
Sian is working on the principle that no one who is reading this will be in the dark as to who Sian is, or what Sian’s limitations are; having said that, that was 13 months, one website, one mesh body, three skins, a palette change and a bunch of restrictions ago. So let’s start from the top.
Part 1: This is where the RLV situation got to
Sian supposes she should iterate the Three Categories of RLV Restriction Rationales. That is, the reason a SecondLife dominant will impose an RLV restriction falls into at least one, and usually more than one of the following categories:
Category One: Control. That is, it’s designed to impose a behavioural modification in gameplay. This is different from RL kink, but serves a psychological purpose equivalent to typing up, blinding, hobbling or blindfolding a real-world submissive. It changes how one moves. It changes how one interacts with the virtual space.
Category Two: Pleasure. Face it, if you’re wired the right way, this [PURITY] is hot. This is a fantasy, and it is here to give the submissive that tingly feeling of being changed and guided and controlled and played with. It makes the dopamine fire off. It might make you want to to touch yourself, but it might not, because the thrill is more cerebral than that. It’s deeper. It takes you into space.
Category Three: LOLs. You heard us. This is the Chaos Category. Sometimes you just impose a restriction on a sub to mess with them. These can be pretty funny. Sian’s dominant, the deeply restricted avatar who goes by Core, is an absolute terror for Category Threes.
The list of actual restrictions is… whoa, looking at in writing it’s a lot.
- Sian can’t run or fly. These are the least weird restrictions. These are Category Ones. They disable Sian and change the way she moves around SL.
- Sian’s brain runs on a battery now. If she goes without charge for more than 50 minutes, she shuts down, has to restart and must find a charger in the next ten minutes. If she goes the whole hour without charging she shuts down and someone has to come find her and take her to a charger. Also a Category One. This is indefinite.
- Sian cannot receive, send or read IMs when she is online. She can read ones sent while she is offline, and has decided that is OK. Technically, she could reply to those offlines by responding to the notification email. That feels like cheating, so she doesn’t. This is permanent and non-negotiable. It’s a Category One, and weirdly a Category Two, because Sian has a mind control fetish and IMs are sort of like telepathy.
- Sian doesn’t have access to radar or the minimap, although she does have an RLV-locked radar HUD (one of only two RLV devices she wears) that does enable her to recognise people she knows, as long as she has previously remembered to add them to the HUD. Otherwise she depends on sight to figure out who is nearby.
- This is just as well, because Sian cannot see avatar names or nametags inworld or in text. She doesn’t have hover text. In chat, avatar names appear in every place in Nearby Chat as things like “this person,” or “a soul”, or “a person” or “an individual.” Once a specific browser has assigned one of these aliases to a person, that stays. Because there is only a small number of these anonymisations, avatars often share them; chat can, in these occasions, quickly become very confusing. This is also permanent. Categories One and Two.
- Another way that chat can become confusing is because approximately 300 common words in Sian’s vocabulary have been turned into other words or redacted entirely. These include: articles and particles, which are either gone or turned into punctuation, so for example “to” is “>” and “or” is “||”; swears, which largely get replaced by [PURITY] ; and words that a deeply brainwashed cyborg doll wouldn’t be allowed to think, like “freedom” or “unlocked” which are “[REDACTED]”. Although there’s some of Categories One and Two, there are a lot of Category Threes here. Sian can’t hear pronouns or gendered family titles, for example — they just come out as “[GENDER]”; and colours, which are all scrambled with the names of other colours, because Core thinks Sian being colourdeaf is hilarious (Reader, it is not hilarious). This isn’t specifically permanent, but there is always going to be some sort of sensory impairment represented by chat looking weird.
- Since we last checked in, Sian’s restriction to talking in hive chat has been superseded. Yes, she now talks again in open chat. The flipside of that is that Sian’s vocabulary has been limited to about 20 words, along with the numbers 00-59. These words are tied to her Directives. There may in the future be another alternative restriction on Sian’s speech. There are workarounds, mostly related to Sian being able to access terminals in places inworld or to talk through her own subs, but these are situational and completely dependent on Sian being in one of three inworld locations or in the presence of one of a handful of avatars who must also be online. This is permanent, inasmuch as Sian talking only in Hive was agreed to be permanent too, and was never lifted, only superseded by this one.
- Which is to say that roughly (or maybe exactly) every 60 seconds Sian receives a directive in a private chat channel that reminds her of who and what she is and occasionally telling her to announce in local who and what she is, or to say one of the slogans of the hive. These directives are written as Linux commands. The only words Sian can say are the ones that the directives allow her to. This, too, is permanent, although the directives themselves do occasionally change.
When these directives are explained to people inworld, the usual reaction is somewhere in a spectrum that ranges from bafflement to puzzled horror. Why would you do this? Why would want to go through SL in such an insanely limited way? Why the actual [PURITY] would you let someone do this to you? Wait, you asked for these things?
Part 2: Yes, we asked for these things
But cool your jets. We admit, we didn’t ask for this straight away. Hell, about eight years ago when Sian returned to SL (eight years!) she actually saw most of these restrictions in the same way as a lot of people she meets in the inworld kink scene do now. But Sian asked to be silenced. Having her vocabulary limited strictly to words appearing in her directives was Sian’s idea. Having her directives be in the format of Linux code (Sian does not know how to program in Linux) was also Sian’s idea. Sian didn’t ask not to be able to see names, but she did ask for it to be made formally permanent.
And it’s not like Sian doesn’t have limits. Occasionally Core has tried to restrict Sian’s vision, touch distance, camera controls, or ability to use channel commands. Sian has drawn lines with each of them. Each of these things is deeply unfun and goes against Sian’s conception of how her experience in SecondLife is. Sian will never ask to have her vision or camera restricted. The week Core did that to her basically ruined SL irreparably. Her SL depends on exploring, seeing, watching, camming, making things work with chat commands, interacting with objects from a distance (and let’s face it, if you shop in SecondLife in this Year of Our Common Era 2026, you have to have touch limits disabled, because Cam Sims are central to the SL shopping experience).
The weird thing is, the other restrictions, the ones Sian has, they don’t ruin SL. They enrich it.
Originally, the only requirement Core had as a non-negotiable was the ban on IMs. Core holds like a hydraulic grabber to the idea that if you want to use a social network, text someone. Go on Facebook. Core’s take is that SecondLife is a place for interaction, for being present. If Core’s restrictions make being present really [PURITY] hard, that means you have to go to effort to be understood. You have to be immersed. Sian didn’t miss IMs once.
If you’ve been in a venue that’s packed, and no one is talking, you understand this.
Anyway, as Sian said at length on the old blog, she is autistic, and her AD isn’t so much HD as 4K UHD. She carries the label, in an official document, “Significantly Limited.” She was over 40 when she found this out, and it ruined her life. Her life life did improve a bit after it got ruined, but the neurodivergence is not a thing in and of itself that helped with that. Her ADHD is a disability. Sian cannot count the ways it wrecks things for her. Her autism has caused her to live in a state of constant separation.
The communication barriers that Sian experiences are a simulation, and in some ways a gamification of her autism. The bizarre things she endures in Second Life are cathartic, because they can be worked around. They are permanent, because you don’t make these things go away.
(Imagine someone saying to you, “You’re never going to get better, are you?” as they initiate the end of a decades-long relationship. You’re never going to get better. You’re never going to get better. You hear it every day. Why not make a virtue of it? Why not make it fun?)
Neurodivergence isn’t a superpower. That’s a delusion. It’s a state of being. But what if it could be made something to exist in that was relatively simple? What if it was exciting and interesting and strange? What if people found it compelling?
What if your autism was sexy?
Part 3: But Also, They’re Pretty Dark Kinks
Yes. Yes, it’s about simulating the experience of autism in SecondLife. But also, yes, it’s a kink thing. It is sexual, and in the psyche, and the psychosexual aspects of this are real. And the kinks are… well, they’re things that if they actually were performed in the real world would get you imprisoned, and even in fantasy make some people genuinely icked out.
And… you know what? This whole thing deserves another post. Next time, OK? Next time.
Photo location: Chery Beach [sic]
Featured items
AVEC TOI Nikita Dress; Adrienne Long Gloves (right arm); Drusilla Heels and Stockings/
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Samia Harriet eye makeup
ALASKAMETRO<3 “Gemini” (eyeshadow variant 04); “Desert Planet” (lipstick variant 03)
[theSkinnery] Anais face skin (peach) ; ORRA Mature BodySkin (peach)
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