Liminal Fur & Divine Scales

Vended at a zine fair this weekend and somehow no one noticed I had not slept in 2 days or that I skipped dinner-breakfast-lunch into it to get everything done. Got that golden retriever charisma in me babyyyyy

Also we were legit the only people with long-form fiction stuff? If you can even call 1000~ word microfiction "long form," but other people at the fair were. That made me sad when I finally got to scope things out. There was one fiction/nonfiction anthology I found at a table and that was it, nobody else was really doing it. :( A lot of tables barely had any zines or had mostly really professional stuff that wouldn't really count as a typical punk zine and I was like... I think some of the vendors are treating this like an art fair instead which is a lil strange.... The person we were next to had a publishing company that sold all the way up to the Midwest, which was REALLY cool, but iirc none of it was their own work; it was the work of artists in the publishing house. I wasn't sure the artists were necessarily even local to our state? Which ain't a bad thing, but I feel like I went into it expecting a lot more nearby artists at my skill level of "creating everything by hand at home" than there actually were. It was intimidating and made me feel kind of out of place and outclassed! But I've never let that stop me. 

We did get to see some familiar faces that made our day, and I watched an older middle schooler buy and read my horror story Unfair about a mirror demon right at the table and yell in delight at everything that happened, which felt AMAZING. I think I gotta write more horror with kids in mind (so basically, just regular horror with less cursing :P), cuz that was so fun. Someone compared that same story to House of Leaves for the way I did the mirror script, which was swag as fuck. A LOT of people were totally overjoyed and screamed when they picked that zine up from our table and realized what I'd done with formatting, and it was one of the top sellers. Think we did like 10 copies? 15? And everyone wanted to trade for it or Territorial. 

Territorial was, predictably, the best seller. Everyone loves cave diving horror, and everyone loves Florida horror. One person was REALLY excited about the lighthouse horror story I'm working on set at a FL lighthouse, I wish I had finished it in time for the fair. Moon Flower barely sold at all, which sucked, but people were enthusiastic to trade for it when they heard my pitch. I think I didn't go hard enough on the cover, because it's genuinely one of the best-edited pieces and is a ton of fun. Daily Dragonsbane did good, but not as good as last time; I think it held at around 9-ish copies sold. RUN DOG RUN did surprising numbers considering it's a therian story that's partially in Esperanto, while Dragon On The Court didn't sell even once iirc, despite it being a short comedy story entirely in English. They both sold for $1 so it wasn't even the price point: it's just my weakest seller. Aw well. You live and you learn. 

Sometimes people would stand there and just read through an entire zine and I'd internally be like. Hey man. C'mon now. It's literally only 8 or 16 pages long and a few bucks. Please pay me if you're gonna read the whole entire thing. But I've been told that's normal for the event... Alas. Seeing everyone's reactions in real time was still a lot of fun, and people gushing over my work was really genuinely wonderful, even if they didn't buy anything. I'm just happy people like what I make! I got a surprising number of questions about my process and my writing programs that I didn't expect, but it was really lovely to share resources. 

Either way. It really was a total blast. I got a T-shirt and some incredible zines about eels and cicadas, among other goodies. Wahoo! I crashed really hard right after the fair so I'm going to eat some leftover wedding cake and go back to bed now. <3 I have work later today

Holding true to Noel's previous post and frustrations from a few days ago, we're Touching GrassTM and volunteering more in our local community partially because, to roughly translate Noel to English, "If I'm inherently evil and I can still get off my tail to go help real people, what's it say about the people who claim that they're innately better than me and won't go help?" Which, hey, I get the logic. We were already involved in our local community's stuff a little bit, but nothing pisses her off more than pre-determination spiels, so now we're doing it a lot more. And I AM SO EXCITED!!!

I am SO thrilled to get out there and meet new people and actually be doing stuff more regularly. Volunteering is fun! I like helping people! Our job in construction was deeply satisfying because I got to help local folks tackle problems that were outside their knowledge or expertise, and while I know the work we're doing won't capture that exact specialty vibe, it'll still be close. So far our work in the community had been kind of a crapshoot of whenever, but now we're looking at formal weekly schedules, and that'll be really nice. I do have to be careful if Noel goes to the anti-ICE meet-ups, just because a lot of people shouting angrily in a very small space triggered my PTSD pretty badly last time, but as long as I'm not near front I think it would go okay.

We just got done with the info session for a local all-genders queer roller derby league I've been trying to join for a month or so, and we start skating practice tomorrow. Orion came along, and now they'll be joining us for practice as well! My system thinks we might try to join the finance committee for our volunteer work, because it would put our data analytics degree to good use. While I would LOVE to be the hot chunky butch skater in bouts, our arthritis probably won't allow us to full-send into a contact sport. But we can still re-learn to skate (to maybe do some reffing??? 👀) and help out more generally. We've also got some plans to do stuff with Food Not Bombs this week, and some other things besides.

Yay for a slight internet detox through new or extra real life experiences!

The temporary gig was... Unfortunately not sustainable. Walked in for the first day of training to incredibly predatory business practices, mind-boggling unprofessionalism, rampant nepotism and favoritism, and some clear outright lying/obfuscating of information/emotional manipulation going on. It was the most WTF I've ever had on the job. Of the eight hours of training I was scheduled for, exactly 2 hours ended up with me actually learning or doing anything relevant to the position (and one of those hours was.... sketchy, because it was reciting a sales pitch out loud for an hour straight). 

I was stuck in a room with fifteen other people and held as a captive audience while the instructor took us through her life story of being a childhood actor, adventuring teenager, Normal Highschooler, rich Californian actor (with all the details of her amazing luxury condos and bullshit), single mother, Florida-hating transplant, budding pest control technician, to now-saleswoman, among other inane bullshit. I kept sitting there waiting for it to get better, and it was all downhill. She kept bragging about how everyone loves her and about how emotionally intelligent she is, and never before in my life have I wanted to slam my face into a desk harder. She started the whole thing off by threatening to fire people if they fell asleep or went onto their phones. At first I was like, "What do you mean 'if they fall asleep'?" but by hour five I was fucking dozing too, sitting in that same spot in front of a black computer listening to her ramble on and avoid questions actually related to the details of the company. 

So, yeah. No dice.

On the bright side, I finished two weeks' worth of Calculus homework over the weekend. Keep running into the issue where I'm not sure how close the "write in how you found your answers" want me to get to the automatically generated "here's how you're supposed to do it" section. For one I tried hard to imitate its solution pattern from previous questions and got REALLY close, but still fucked it up. Right answer from the paper-solving, but wrote out the process wrong; forgot to fix the fucking denominator to make it look right for the quotient rule process. Facedesk. A part of me is also scared if trying to copy the solution patterns' syntax from the textbook and other questions is like, roundabout plagiarism???? It's different problems, but the same solution processes, so I don't really know how that works... But there's also the issue of I don't really know how to do some of these problems except how the textbook and homework program is showing me! Ughhhh. I love math, but this is stressful and sucks. I'm just extra paranoid because of that one Professor who used ChatGPT and hallucinated sources from it accused me of plagiarism way back when, because I used the school-supplied template for a homework assignment. =_= Like, fuck off, man. That's what I was supposed to do!!!

Job-hunting is going weirdly, where I'm getting a LOT of interviews and call-backs but keep being just-not-enough. Man, if I'm sick of second-best rejection letters now, just imagine how I'm gonna feel in three more months. I had maybe my 9th(?) interview today; it's for a part time position at a tattoo shop, wish me luck.

In the meantime, I've been writing more. I'm on an underwater cave hyperfixation kick, so I published the short horror story TERRITORIAL on itch.io for $2; I've been wanting to write more fiction set in my home state of Florida, so maybe I'll publish a few more short story minizine and compile them into something larger later. I make no promises though, I'm at the mercy of my muse right now. (She's currently decided she only wants to help write between the hours of 7pm - 7am, so needless to say, my sleep schedule is wrecked. Also why I'm writing this at 2:30AM.)

I read Into The Plant: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth, among a lot of other research I've done about "cave country" and what cave diving entails (shoutout especially to the dedicated forums and organizations on the sport tbh). While I know immediately that I am not going to be working towards the sport myself for a multitude of reasons, it feels... really, really weird to see certain things that I experienced in my childhood around the outdoors, caves, and deep water echoed pretty often in the background of cave diver's stories. Almost like looking through the glass at what could've been. It's a very peculiar feeling to have.

Life has been weird lately, but I have a cat snuggling me, so everything is good.

We just published Psychopompous, a 12-page personal zine by the Sol System's favorite canine psychopomp. This angry alterhuman self-portrait features fiction and nonfiction about life, death, dogs, and bookbinding, and uses black and white public domain imagery to better bring the words (and their teeth) off the pages. It includes one poem, two fiction pieces, and an essay. Consider checking it out here.

After my first social media hiatus I'd gotten back to regularly-ish using socmed, though nowhere near as much as I did before. Now that I'm laid off and my anxiety has a hair-trigger thanks to the terror of Being Involuntarily Unemployed, I'm thinking that I'm probably going to be starting my October off with another full-fledged hiatus to keep my brain from doomscrolling and spiraling.

Being unemployed can be seriously isolating, so I've decided to start volunteering around town to keep myself sane. At the local market I touched base with the roller derby league over here and we really clicked. I've emailed them asking for lessons and if I can volunteer; I did a little bit of roller derby back in college (go figure) before my arthritis was so severe, but the exercise is supposed to be low-impact for your joints if you do it for fun and not for sport. I'll have to re-learn it, because it's been like ten years and my body handles moving around a lot different now, but I think it'd be good for me and I really, really enjoyed talking with folks manning the table.

I also got a ton of encouragement from the vendors at that market to give vending a shot myself. The amount of enthusiasm I got from the artists I stop and talk shop with was amazing, and it really made me feel like a part of the community in a way I can't describe. Having the tarot reader we always go to pull me into a hug and tell me that she couldn't wait to have her table next to mine sometime? It really makes me feel like a part of things! And I want to be involved in my community's art scene so, so badly, because it's really queer and awesome. So I might spent the month bookbinding, butterfly pinning, and zine writing to see if I can get enough stuff together to justify vending, although I'll have to figure out logistics on how to do that without a car. Maybe I'll even do Inktober!

We've got a new mindscape! Huzzah! This technically happened a few weeks ago, I've just been lazy about recording it. 

It's a huge fuck-off castle, which is new-- this is the first time we've "spawned in" someplace indoors. The whole place is made of stone, with plenty of bridges, pointy rooftops, very pretty stained glass windows in diamond patterns, and some balconies. Think of something like Hogwarts or Anor Londo and you can conceptualize the specific brand of castle architecture. There's a huge central tower that's hollowed out, with cave-like half-moons lining the sides to rooms and bridges and a big compass-rose shaped gem set at the bottom that you can juuust see through to see stairs and things below. We think this was a place for humans and dragons, or some sort of similar species mix. There's doors with handles, but Noel found out that breathing fire on the ceiling of the cylinder with all the weird cave-like things makes the roof open up like a shutter lens. We've found some embrasures, but they weren't thin lines for arrows, they were diamond or large and circular. Noel thinks they might've been for magic or fire or something. Wild either way. 

The seasons and time of day are mismatched. It's the middle (or end?) of winter in the mindscape, and the sunsets like several hours later in there than it does out here. It's also cold and it snows, something which doesn't seem to bother Noel or Drago, but which makes me-as-a-dragon and Dash totally miserable. The change in season is also affecting our bodies, because I ended up surprise-shedding my antlers just a couple days ago. Not the worst thing in the world, but makes me feel off-balance until they grow back in. The cold is part of why I've been disinclined to explore especially far, instead opting to stay curled up in a great big purple canopy bed in one of the rooms. I seriously can't emphasize enough that it's fucking freezing and the cold stone floor feels like it saps what little heat I manage to retain.

It looks like there's pine trees or something on the edge of the castle grounds, but I haven't been out there to look. Definitely coniferous, from what I can see here. Not sure what else is out there.

I had someone post a link to one of the resources on my personal website in a comment thread on a Tumblr post, and another person responded that it was AI-generated garbage. People corrected them and I only knew about it because a friend tagged me in their response, but ouch. I don't and will never use generative AI to make my work, and I certainly didn't use it on my website, either. This is the first time that I'm aware of that it's ever been mistaken for AI, though, and I still don't really get why. My friends thought it might be the dispassionate voice that I sometimes lean on in writing or just maybe just that people are having a significantly harder time distinguishing work by real folks from work by artificial intelligence as it sneaks its way into more and more on the web, but there's no saying for certain unless the person clarifies. The last message they responded to mentioned that the pictures on the site looked AI generated especially, but the backgrounds are super simple tile-style and the systemmate icons are my own pixel art, so... It sucks either way. Maybe I should put up a "Alterhuman Made, Never AI-Generated" stamp on the website. Bleh. The whole thing makes me feel gross.

It's time for the Sol System bi-annual Mindscape Self-Destruction! Yaaaay.

For those not in the know, our Mindscape has the weird/cool/frustrating quirk of resetting every 2-3 years, consistently. It just up and yoinks us into a black void for a few days or weeks until we get dumped someplace else, and that's our new Mindscape for the next couple years. We don't get to pick where we go or what it does; it's like riding on the back of a giant animal and all you can do is hold on until it drops down wherever it wants. Or maybe it's like a snake shedding its skin. I dunno, I just live here. 

And thank FUCK it's time for a reset. This past Mindscape we tried to argue with our brain about we wanted it to be, and that went poorly. We wound up stuck in the middle of nowhere in a huge silver Birch forest for our trouble, and what's worse is that this Mindscape dragged on EXTRA long, hedging well into and beyond the 3-year limit. It was boring as hell and sucked not being near any bodies of water or other people and I've been waiting for this reset day for literal years. It feels like such a relief. 

We can't rush the process, so we've conjured up a deck of cards to play games in the void together 'til then. But what a relief! I hope we wind up somewhere cool, but I honestly think anywhere will be better than where we were. 

You know, I never thought I'd say it, but I'm kind of warming up to microblogging. Probably not for the reasons most people do, but still. 

I like the fact that I can pop on once every few days or few weeks, drop a sentence or two about my day or thoughts, and then dip. No commitment. Nothing of significant substance that's going to take a lot of time to write out, or debate with others, or whatever. I'm not there to make content for others, or even to reblog stuff from other people; I'm just there typing out a few characters on my day and vanishing promptly after. In some ways, it almost feels like it helps me keep my longer-form stuff on writing documents.

I also love that it's a much wider and different alterhuman community, and nobody knows me. I haven't seen anything about "community authority" and "big-name responsibility" towards other people on the platform yet, and certainly none towards me. Meanwhile that sort of thing happened again yesterday on Tumblr, according to some friends on Discord who told me about the call-out post in question (which seems to mis-identify me as an OtherCon/nect staff member and spiral based off of that? Idk, I'm not reading and responding to it either way. Let dead dogs lie.) It doesn't matter at the end of the day, because I'm not really on Tumblr anymore anyways, but I'm damn tired of some people on Tumblr acting like my actions are somehow More Important or More Threatening than other people who are doing the exact same things. So, yeah, a new social media space is really refreshing for avoiding that.

I'm still probably not going to use the Bsky platform much overall, because microblogging is still fundamentally pretty boring to me and antithetical to most of what I make. But it can be my little spot for very short and inconsequential things, and to maybe enjoy some peace and quiet. Maybe on the odd occasion I'll reblog something even. 

Honestly, maybe I should get more involved with horny furry spaces/art/writing to help brush off any more unsolicited lionizing from younger Tumblr alterhumans. It's like the digital equivalent of rent-lowering gunshots and it's so, SO much fun, too.