Eudeamon

SL is down for maintenance, so I've got some time to blog...

I happened to visit Marine Kelley's blog a couple of days ago, looking for any news about her RestrainedLife Viewer. What she writes about the upcoming version 1.05 sounds great, but there was something else that got my attention...

In a couple of posts, she writes about a Banishment Project, Banes, Custodians and Eudeamons, all things I never heard of before. But the vague references to a novel and the description how she wants to translate it to SL, made me want to know more. So I googled around a little (I hadn't even noticed Marine put a link to the story in her blog!) and almost couldn't stop reading until I finished the story.

Next I couldn't help starting to think about it.

Warning: this post might contain some spoilers

First reason I could think of why I got so triggered by the whole thing, is the isolation and sensory deprivation that it got. While there is no clue in absolute deafness and blindness in SL, the partial sensory deprivation that is suggested, getting worse or better according to you behaviour, is very appealing. Mmmmm, am I hitting a personal fetish here?
This combined with the frustration of not being able to communicate and the absolute lack of an escape -as far as you keep using the RL Viewer of course- must make the proposed Banishment experience a hell of a self test.

After that I started to see some resemblance between parts of Katrina's story and my own SL! I already told it in an earlier post: once I was so bored in SL that I deliberately went for a -by definition- boring experience in the Tesscatraz prison, thinking it couldn't get worse anymore, and I kind of got reborn!
After that, I cannot help but needing very strict and preferably restricting sub sessions now and then. And yes, I am in one of those submissive periods right now, even having denounced all of my Domme rights for a while. Maybe I'll write about that later (or maybe not). So can you imagine my longing for a Eudeamonian Banishment?

Of course there is also my fascination for good written scripts and well made SL toys. It makes me a big fan of great SL scripting wizards and builders like.... no, I'm not gonna put names here, because I will most certainly forget many I don't want to!
Big deal of this fascination of mine is the obsession of discovering how they are doing it. No, I am not hacking into their scripts or whatever, I respect the effort they put in it and might even give them suggestions for free if I encounter flaws. My "hacking" is done by thinking and digging into LSL manuals, and just getting an idea of how to do it if I were to do it myself, satisfies me enough. Oh yes, I'm into scripting too, and I might be able to create similar scripts, if only I were not that lazy as I am...

Finally, my thinking got me further than personal concerns.

The banes experience the world through an interface that is not part of their human body: it's not their eyes, not their ears. Other senses are even cut off or limited even further!
Isn't that exactly the way we experience SL? We all experience the virtual world and commute with it through a very narrow interface that exists of a 2dimensional -for the most of us I guess- screen and a keyboard. Oh yeah, a mouse and some audio stuff too, but that's not much changing my point.

Have you ever thought of how limiting this interface is? Wouldn't you like a RL banesuit with a plug to connect your brain directly to the Internet and the magic world of SecondLife?