Liminal Fur & Divine Scales

Prairieland Thoughts (Vent)

2026-03-26T18:35:36Z

I don't know if there's anything I can say about the Prairieland outcome that hasn't been said already. The fact that owning literature--specifically owning zines--can net you a terrorism charge and prison sentence of 10 to 60 years is... Unfathomable to me. Terrifying, as a zinester who creates and distributes both fiction and non-fiction. To see zines publicly redefined as insurrectionist materials in connection to terrorism on a government website makes my head spin.

The whole trial was a sham. A mistrial filed on the first day because of a fucking T-shirt? People convicted of terrorism when they weren't even at the protest in question, instead just because they know the people who were, they're against fascism, and they had spooky scary anarchist literature? Claiming anti-ICE protests are terrorism or that anti-fascists are a terrorist organization at all is beyond the pale. "Attempted murder" charges my whole ass, and using black clothing and the use of Signal as proof of a crime doesn't pass the sniff test at all. Our country is worse than a joke, because the incompetence is intentional and part of the design.

I'm wearing my "let's make zines" shirt today. There are zine meetups soon and I want to make something talking about this for them, because people in my community need to know and I'm going to explode if I don't do something, but it's such a huge, ugly pill to swallow. I feel more now than ever that I need to learn Esperanto, given the anti-fascist ideals it represents and the benefits to being able to communicate in a global lang. It's also nice middle finger to the fact that fash tried to stamp Esperantists out once and failed. And honestly? I think not talking in English would make me feel a lot safer tbh. Maybe I'll pick up Toki Pona after, too.

I think this just all goes to show that if the US government wants to lock you away, they'll make up and legitimize any reason to do so. Doesn't matter if you're actually guilty of a crime or not. Which we all already knew, but is still eternally devastating.

comments

Zine Fair

2026-02-23T05:49:59Z

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

comments

New Job!!!! 👀

2025-11-24T19:25:59Z

Finally got a new job!!! YAYYYY!!!! And it only took me... Like two months, rip.

It's with another window & door company local to us, doing what we did before; farther away than my last one, but the pay and environment is better. Everyone here is so sweet! I hope I can stay here a while, but I'm keeping on my toes because recessions historically aren't nice to the construction industry.

We spent more time volunteering last week, but caught something from someone and are now running a fever and sore throat. Shitty timing since we've been at this job for all of two days and family feasting is right around the corner, but we're masking up and have hand sanitizer a-plenty. Just bunkering down at our work desk and getting through it.

Other than that, got a haircut (nice) but broke our glasses' frames and had to pay like, $300 for a new prescription + new lenses + new frames + temp frames for the current lenses just to get them through my Monday shift. I can't see super well through the temp frame because it changes what part of the lenses I'm looking through, and it gives me headaches, but eh. I can see okay enough to read. It's a bit of a coke bottle effect.

Whatever else happens, I'm just glad to have a job again!

comments

Touchin' Grass

2025-11-18T05:01:37Z

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!

comments

You Can't Use Being An Asshole Online As A Replacement For Activism

2025-11-14T19:30:07Z

The alterhuman community has been harping on individuals with police dog theriotypes for months now. Almost all of it has been "if you are a police dog therian, you're despicable and you need to stop!" and of similar nature, predictably, because historically therians love to swing at other therians at any given opportunity they can justify to themselves.

Someone finally had a good take on the subject and re-centered the topic on the ways in which police dogs and military animals are used to harm marginalized communities and individuals, and how people need to be considerate of not glorifying that even if that is their kintype. All-in-all, a good take that centered real-world actions and the ways they can affect others; not nebulous, internal emotions or identity. Which, unfortunately, many people took as the batsignal to unleash the flood of (paraphrased) 'if you have this kintype, you are automatically an evil, evil person!', completely circumventing the post's discussion points and circling right back to where all of the police dog discourse seemingly started.

( Read more... )

comments

Back On The Job Search

2025-11-04T20:40:58Z

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!!!

comments

New Zines & New Job

2025-10-30T03:34:15Z

Life's continuing to be hard, but we managed to secure a temporary gig that pays enough to live. We won't be there for more than a month or two, because the job is fundamentally antithetical to our ADHD, but it should be enough to cover the costs of wrapping up our Bachelor and paying rent. From there, I don't know where we'll go, but stuck in a recession and with the job market as garbage as it is, I can't afford to turn it down. I'm just glad to have something steady that won't make my chronic illnesses worse (hopefully).

Other than that, we've published Dragon On The Court (a free fiction minizine, this one comedy), the HowlCon 2025 Kinsona Zine (another free zine, contains all the kinsonas submitted from participants in our"Let's Build a Kinsona" event), and My Fur Is Not Your Coat (another $2 minizine, this one autobiographical and for people who ask "you endogenic or traumagenic?")

( More on the latter... )

comments

Cave Diving, Books, & Interviews

2025-10-15T06:46:34Z

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.

comments

RUN, WOLF, RUN - A minizine

2025-10-08T15:27:33Z

RUN, DOG, RUN is a printable minizine we submitted to the Alterhuman Minizine Jam hosted by oceaniccourt! Featuring both English writing and Esperanto proverbs, this minizine is a piece of flash fiction about a wolf therian. You can find it for download on our itch.io here or read the individual panels (with image descriptions included) on our Tumblr here or Bluesky here.

comments

Psychopompous - A Personal Zine

2025-10-07T17:59:45Z

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.

comments

Sick Polycule, Study Updates, So Many Interviews

2025-10-02T23:14:09Z

Whatever I came down with earlier this week, my husband has (predictably) caught it and Orion managed to catch a totally different kind of ick. My metamour has been holed up in his bedroom, so no idea if he's also feeling shit or if he's trying to keep the rest of us as far from him as possible right now, which is admittedly super fair.

We've finally started the process of framing and hanging up the huge amount of wall art we have laying around the house / that was already up unframed, and it looks TIGHT. Can't share pictures because the artists are all local folks and I don't wanna dox myself, but picture Buca di Beppo style maximalism with queer, book, animal, and horny art, and you can get what we're going for. I have a gouche triptych of monarch caterpillar / chrysalis / butterfly that I'm sooooo excited to get to put up.

The study is coming along, but I really need a wider table for bookbinding than what we have up there; ideally 3' x 3' at minimum, but ideally 3' x 5'. I've kind of been debating making it myself? I have zero carpentry skills, but I've heard that simple square tables are pretty damn beginner-friendly. I have a drill, a hammer, a handsaw, and the ability to follow basic instructions. I dunno, I'll wait and see. I also pretty desperately need a desk lamp, but when I tried to order one Amazon sent me a tablecloth with weed, pizza, and aliens on it instead. Had my polycule laughing, but definitely not what I need!

Interviews are coming along fast and shitty. Had three this week already, another scheduled for next week so far. I'm resisting the urge to just take up the first job that comes my way, because one of them I was offered so far was a total fucking scam; 50+ hours a week, for less than minimum wage. Fuck right the hell off, dude. If I get desperate I'll go back to being a dishie or line cook if I absolutely have to, because there's always someone looking for one, but I know firsthand how much that wrecks my body and am trying hard to leave it as a last resort. Getting a desk job is so damn hard, but I have to figure it out.

I got the rest of my stuff from my previous work office, thanks to a kind coworker dropping it off while he was in town. We sat and talked for a bit. I pressed him for details, because I was worried I'd specifically done something to warrant getting laid off, but he reassured me that I 100% hadn't, which was a huge relief. Even more shocking, out of all of the many people who got laid off, I'm apparently one of the only ones eligible for rehire. In his words, I was the only one who was professional about the lay-offs; almost everyone else threw a fit when they were being told, tried to wreck shit in the office/the company sites/etc., or went on social media to publicly slam the company or expose company secrets for letting them go. I think the business is in the process of suing at least two of the ex-employees for that.

Been enjoying being off social media. Haven't done art like I planned to because I'm as sick as a dog, but hopefully I'll get there once I shake this nasty cold. Autumn is my favorite time of year and I don't wanna be too sick to enjoy it!

comments

Social Media Hiatus... 2!

2025-09-30T01:47:41Z

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!

comments

Laid Off

2025-09-29T04:08:34Z

Well, I guess it was bound to happen eventually. There was a round of layoffs last Friday that I survived, and then a second round of layoffs this Friday that I didn't. C'est la vie, over 50% of the company got let go so I wasn't surprised-- my husband thinks they're in a death spiral and won't survive the next year, and I think he's right. I'll be applying for unemployment the week after next, since Florida won't let you apply until a week after your last paycheck.

I already have an interview lined up tomorrow. But considering it took me 350 applications to land the job I just lost, I'm not feeling optimistic. Still, quickest turnaround yet. I wish I could just get hired to do data analysis...

In the interim, me and Orion finally cleaned up the bedroom that the ex-housemates wrecked. We dragged two desks and a coffee table up there, plus the recliner that the housemates left. Moved the bookbinding, button, and zine stuff upstairs too but still desperately need more storage space, so I wasted some money on a cheap bookshelf from Amazon. Also ordered frames for some of the art we wanna hang and a wastepaper basket + desk lamp, which is essential for bookbinding. I might vend at a local market if I can make enough shit to justify it and work out a budget, but the study needs to be finished before I can do it.

I'm trying not to feel anxious or like a burden. I've had multiple people telling me that I honestly probably need to take a break rather than hustle harder, but it's hard to conceptualize that.

comments

Mindscape Update

2025-09-02T19:30:34Z

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.

comments

Othercon 2025

2025-08-11T19:04:45Z

Othercon 2025 is over!

With a whopping 708 members in attendance between panelists, artists, attendees, and staff, this was by far the biggest convention to date. This was also the biggest charity success so far, with $1085 USD raised in total: $500 towards the Association of Zoos & Aquariums and $585 towards the Wildlife Conservation Network.There were 15 panels/activities overall and 1 impromptu panel hosted by Poppy and I, plus 6 watch parties and 13 art streams. But even despite how many people there were, panel attendance was shockingly low; while Othercon 2024 had an average panel attendance from 100-150 for almost all panels, most of the panels at Othercon 2025 struggled to break past 100 attendees. The chat in the convention Discord channels were similarly slow-- while convention Discords in the past have had to lean pretty heavily on Discord's slowmode feature to help make it so that discussions in channels didn't blow by too quickly to read, this year it wasn't nearly so necessary. It was quite strange to see!

( Read more about our OtherCon 2025 experience below! )

We also got some commissions this Othercon, as a ✨ treat ✨ Check out this cool piece by Exojaws of me below!

comments

Not AI

2025-08-07T01:21:05Z

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.

comments

Therian Questionnaire Answers

2025-08-05T20:10:39Z

I really liked how LJ alterhumans used to post some/all of their answers to surveys they did, so here's mine for a Therian Questionnaire survey I did on BlueSky. The survey was... well, it's going to suffer horribly from sampling bias, participation bias, and small sample sizes, because I've only seen it advertised on BlueSky, the data isn't anonymized, and you have to message the survey creator to get a link to fill out.

There was also an issue of many of the multiple choice questions being leading questions and loaded questions, in my opinion, with locked in yes/no answers and no option for write-ins. "Is being a therian inherently sexual" is a question that's going to change depending on if you're asking it to people about their personal therianthropy, about general therianthropy, or about outsider perspectives on therianthropy. It's also going to change wildly depending on if the person in question even experiences romantic/sexual attraction at all-- aces/aros exist and make up a sizable portion of the community. Non-ace/aro kinksters also make up a sizable portion of the community, and fictherians who have identities from porn games and similar also exist. For some folks, their nonhumanity is inherently tied into their sexuality or being sexual just by the nature of the beast (ha ha).

The second question, "Does being a therian inherently mean that you’re attracted to real life animals?" is also just earnestly in poor taste, in my opinion. Same pitfalls as the previous question, where it relies on the idea that all therians experience attraction, but it also doesn't specify what type of attraction. Someone outside the zoophile discourse could very, very easily read this and not realize it meant romantic/sexual attraction. In fact... actually, looking at it twice, now I'm wondering if I misunderstood the question and it just means to ask if therians are drawn to and interested in animals more generally! The answer is "no" from me either way, but that might not be the case for everyone who answers it.

And the last multiple question, "Does being a therian inherently mean that you identify as an animal?" is very... squints. It's a very subtle double-barrel question, which sucks. It's functionally asking both if therians identify as nonhumans (they do!) and if therians specifically identify as nonhuman animals (they don't!). See Ponty the were-Pontiac as an example. If you say "no," while meaning the latter rather than the former, it can be flipped by the presenter to then say, "a-ha! see, therians don't REALLY identify as animals, they're just humans who LIKE animals or some such!"

So the data will probably be fundamentally unusable. But the write-ins were nice enough pumpkins full of meat for me and it's not my survey, so it's ergo not my problem.

( Read more... )

comments

Bi-annual Mindscape Self-Destruction

2025-07-30T15:54:49Z

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.

comments

Lights, Camera.... Action!

2025-07-17T12:50:54Z

My non-existent job description continues to lengthen by the day. As of yesterday, I was assisting with our commercial and social media broadcasting plans. I brought in my Yeti to help us record voice overs and tape ourselves for editing, because the president of the company had recorded his attempt over an iPhone and it sounded fucking garbage, and I coached my manager a little bit. I also did a lot of recording myself. The VP and my manager were equal parts shocked and delighted to find out I didn't just have the equipment, but that I'm also, well, really good at public speaking and reading scripts. It comes from my experience Twitch streaming and doing lectures, and the acting, improv, and stand-up I did when I was younger. But I already know that my lisp is going to make me unideal for what we need here, while my manager has an excellent voice for it. She just needs to stop hesitating and read her lines confidently. And to not shrink away from the camera. It's not going to bite.

(The VP kept musing if he was just going to make me director of the whole thing and get me a little clapperboard, with the way I was bossing around my poor manager. But I'm so serious, she just needs to aim her gregariousness at the damn camera and this would be a cinch!)

(Really makes me regret not being a part of the guild; my old supervisor was, and he always swore up and down that if our company made him act, he'd make them pay far more than just his standard wage. Oh well.)

I'm also getting to use the abandoned company office in the town I live in for two days a week, because the commute is brutal and not sustainable for me to keep working there and because the VP had just forgotten they were renting the place out. Despite being forgotten by leadership, it's supposed to be a REALLY nice place, like "have the whole floor of a building to yourself" level of nice. Haven't been there yet, but I'll be checking it out next week. We might be doing some further filming there.

So yeah, your boy might be on some commercials. Or, much more likely, have some coworkers who are on commercials while I assist in the background, given the current trajectory of things. And I'm definitely going to be bringing this up at my employee eval at the end of my 90-day new hire probation period when I argue for a raise!

comments

Warming Up To Microblogging

2025-07-15T16:31:59Z

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.

comments

A Wet Dog Shakes Its Fur Next To You

2025-07-14T16:11:20Z

Got to enjoy being an alive-dog in the face of some bad arthritis pain Friday and yesterday, and the phantom fluffiness went strong basically through the entire weekend. I still can't get over how soft I feel compared to my normal shadow-fur phantoms!

I've been writing and drawing more to feed my soul garden. ArtFight has been a blast, though I find myself wishing I had more time for it. Writing on the side is helping me work through my big, complicated feelings about the alterhuman community; sometimes, you just need to scream into the void of a Google Doc with pals. And it's made me realize that I miss fiction writing, a lot. Where else am I going to find an unhinged story about an Octodad-style lion disembowling Matt Walsh live on TV while the lion's ex-metamour is trying and failing to swap the president out with a Donald Trump p-shifter? Definitely not in the newspapers, that's what. I still need to wrap up Fuck Me, I'm A Dragon sometime before this month's end, but the zine is just for fun between friends and I'm trying not to let myself feel rushed.

I've also been reading more. I've been making my way through one of my spouse's favorite book series from when we were both in high school, Abhorsen, as well as another Chuck Tingle horror novel, Bury Your Gays. Both excellent stories, to be honest, although Abhorsen feels like the story goes very slow at times; my spouse tells me that Garth Nix always writes like that and to get used to it, hah. I bought a super cheap used copy of Boys, Beasts, and Men to read next.

Things have been, despite my brain being on fire for no discernible reason and my body being on fire for many discernible reasons, pretty good lately. It's been hard for me to enjoy it as much as I'd like to because my mental health is trying very hard to take a nosedive, but I know from past experience that it's a good sign that I can still cognizantly take a step back from the brain-fire to recognize these facts. Sometimes when our depression and anxiety and etc. spiral hard, it can be difficult or even downright inpossible to be impartial and realistic-- it's hard not to think that everything is going terribly, because all of these health problems center around crashing your emotions and fucking with your thought trains. They revolve around making you feel like everything is going Wrong and it's either your fault directly or just because your life fundamentally is terrible and awful in ways you'll never be able to fix. Shaking them off or stepping back from them can be like trying to shake off gravity. But we've been managing, and I'm optimistic that we'll be out of the mental health whirlpool soon enough. What goes up must come down, and that is both a promise and a threat.

comments

Friday the 13th Flash!

2025-06-14T03:41:28Z

Happy Friday the 13th! The one and only one of the year, so we kicked it off with a bang; Orion and I had a night out in the town, and it was absolutely fantastic. I stopped at the tattoo shop that I got my first Friday the 13th flash from--a trad tiger head on my right ankle--and ended up getting not one, but two new pieces. A stag beetle on the outside of my left ankle, and what I'm 99% sure is a caucasus beetle on the inside of my left ankle on the opposite side. I'm planning to get a death heads moth in between them in the front of my shin and maybe a zebra swallowtail or owl butterfly between them on the back of my calf. Maybe with ladybugs and love bugs flying around the band. I wanted to be an entomologist when I was a kid, and insects are still important to me.

The stag beetle came out noticably better than the caucasus beetle, which has some visible mistakes on it, but I still love them both. They're so cute. They look hand-drawn in a really endearing way, maybe less polished than my other tattoos, but full of charm and personality. It's a nice change of pace from what I typically get, although the next time I go in to the shop I might still ask for the artist to add in the claws that are missing at the end of some of the legs.

This was my first time getting two tattoos back to back, and it was a doozy! I'm wiped out. Today was so much fun.

Photos of the tats below!

comments

Migraine Melancholy

2025-06-08T10:26:51Z

Haven't really ended the social media hiatus. We hopped onto Tumblr once or twice, but it was either boring or distressing, so it didn't really pull us in; it's just not a great pumpkin full of meat anymore.

I've been having migraines often these past few months, way more than I ever had before. This last one has been cycling between heavy brain fog and obliterating pain for a couple weeks now and it's making me feel downright trash. The 'cule thinks I should see a doctor--and they're probably right, with the type of shit that runs in my family--but it's going to have to wait until August when my new job's health insurance kicks in. It's extra nerve-wracking (pun intended) because I know my words lately haven't been right. I keep forgetting sayings and phrases or words that I know, tripping over basic knowledge that I know that I know. That I've known for decades. I've never struggled with word choice or rememberance like this before, but it's been persistent for the last... Year? Ish? And it affects everyone in the system, even the brain mechanic who can shake off functionally anything through sheer force of will and bullshit understandings about how our hardware and software works, so that's scary. My partners think the issue is just a factor of burn out from my past job and they could be right, but I wonder if it's connected to the migraines somehow. One of the weird side-effects to having been gaslit so severely as a kid is that I know my capabilities when it comes to communication extremely well, because keeping them as crystal clear and commitable to my own memory as possible was very, very important to me, so I notice instantly when something is amiss; I might not've picked up on this otherwise.

On the bright side, in between the days of absolute agony I've been reading a lot more. Partly in an effort to counteract whatever's going on with my words (cuz what better remedy this problem than to just re-do my learning strategy when I was younger, and devour any novel I can get my claws on?), partly because screens/loud noises have been harder for my headaches so YouTube's not much of an option, and partly because there's something inherently comforting about losing ourselves in books and stories for a little while. Despite everything, it's been nice. But I sure am sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

There's a cat attacking my feet, so that's probably my sign to end this post here, lol. No rest for the wicked when it's almost breakfast time.

comments

Collar the Dog

2025-05-26T20:23:38Z

[Small writing piece that we did for Nonhuman Unity Zine: ZineOne.]

( Mini-essay below... )

comments

Schrödinger's Dog

2025-05-25T22:42:44Z

I sometimes take edibles as a form of medication, with a medical card and the whole nine yards. Specifically for my arthritis, because it's one of the best ways to reduce my pain and improve my appetite on my high-pain days, where I mostly feel otherwise inclined to lay in agony on the couch and refuse to eat anything. But something I've noticed--and which I've actually heard of happening second-hand from quite a few other alterhumans who partake--is that it tends to affect my phantom body in unexpected ways.

I have a phantom body 24/7. My phantom limbs are fully integrated, and they never go away. I'm also, colloquially, a dead dog. I'm a wolf skull on a wolf-shaped shadow. For me, my phantoms most often feel like my species' features integrated onto an anthropomorphic frame. When I get high, this changes!

( Read more... )

comments