#coterminity

[neopronouns]

flag id: two images of the same flag with a dark silver background. in the center of the flag are 6 slightly wavy stripes, which dip down near their left edges and go up near their left edges, forming the shape of a waving flag within the flag itself. they are medium light purple, light turquoise, very light yellow-green, cream, soft golden yellow, and tan. in the center of the left flag is a simple, stylized, dark silver symbol of a pencil, which is angled to the right, writing on a piece of paper with its edges rolled like a scroll. end id.

banner id: a 1600x200 teal banner with the words ‘please read my dni before interacting. those on my / dni may still use my terms, so do not recoin them.’ in large white text in the center. the text takes up two lines, split at the slash. end id.

comuniterm: a neogender umbrella for terms conceptually related to participating in mogai/liom community

[pt: comuniterm: a neogender umbrella for terms conceptually related to participating in mogai/liom community. end pt]

concepts included under comuniterm:

coining terms

creating flags

archiving terms

requesting terms

collecting/hoarding terms

using neopronouns, identifying as neolabels, etc.

making edits of flags, masterlists of terms/pronouns, etc. (basically any other types of mogai/liom posts not listed above)

helping others find terms that fit them, either through locating existing terms or coining new ones

knowledge and preservation of liom/mogai history

neolabel, subtliden, and liom inclusionism

running mogai/liom blogs

feeling connection with other members of the community

the joy, community, and creativity found in mogai/liom spaces

and more!

derived terms:

niol: a comuniterm person. plural is niolae.

comut: a comuniterm gender. plural is comuts.

ctin: comuniterm-in-nature (ex: ctingender)

cotermine: having comuniterm qualities. noun form is coterminity.

transcotermine: transitioning towards coterminity/a comuniterm identity. can be shortened to transcoter.

termaic: gender alignment to comuniterm/coterminity.

comu, comut, muni, munit, iterm, term, coter: optional/potential prefixes and suffixes for comuniterm genders.

the term is 'comunité' (old french for 'community') + 'term'! most of the derived terms are just various permutations of 'comuniterm', but 'niol' comes from 'neolabel' and 'liom'!

i've been thinking recently about just how the liomogai community has affected my identity over the years and how those effects feel like aspects of my gender in themselves, so... here's a neogender umbrella!

i took inspiration from the coinergender, requestgender, archivigender, and flagmakergender flags, so i went with cool colors, warm light neutrals, and golden yellow. the flag is meant to look like a flag in an editing software, post editor (as a new post or reblog), or other site/software (ex: being put into a rentry or carrd)!

here's the template if anyone wants to coin comuts!

the symbol is a pencil and paper, inspired by both the flag creation and writing (definitions, tags, lists, etc.) aspects of the community! i made the pencil myself and the paper is edited from scroll (2) in this folder. here's the symbol by itself:

[image id: a simple, stylized, dark silver symbol of a pencil, which is angled to the right, writing on a piece of paper with its edges rolled like a scroll. a blank image is next to the image so that it doesn't take up the whole width of the post. end id.]

tags: @radiomogai, @liom-archive, @macchiane, @genderstarbucks, @sugar-and-vice-mogai

tags cont: @freezingnarc, @skrimbliest, @seraphtrix, @en8y, @spadescrewcoining

tags cont: @mogai-sunflowers

dni link

[finelythreadedsky]

i do think a muppet version of a greek tragedy would get at something deep and essential about the way a character is created and understood on the ancient stage as a construct of costume rendered voiced by a concealed body, something that is perhaps impossible to capture within modern unmasked theatrical traditions

[barrymccaulkinem]

i do really like the idea of Half-Life 3 ending with you back on the tram in Black Mesa. I think the cost of employment with the G-man is that you have to do it again and again, forever. and if you stopped, the outcome you earned would cease to be

[aroace-polyshow]

i hate mathhhh fuckkkkk

[captainkingsley]

dropping the m9 into Eberron and just doing loredumps while I write because I just really love Eberron

[scholarhect]

np is so funny btw. it’s like “if we could do a infinite things at exactly the same time then this problem would be really easy!” like. sure. i guess!

[postoctobrist]

My 1 year E anniversary will be the Ides of March. I'm going to throw a party for it, themed on authentic self expression. (Last time I used that theme the result included a lot of lingerie, harneses, and tails)

My housemate was already planning a Roman assassination themed party for that day. The theme is togas and knives I guess.

Our first idea was to have one combined party with clashing aesthetics.

My new idea is that guests have to choose one party. They will both occur simultaneously, coterminous, and intermingled, but conceptually separate. The City and The City parties.

this fucking rules

[the-littlest-goblin]

this started as a reblog comment on this post but it got tangential so it gets own post instead. still, credit and thanks to @utilitycaster for reigniting a brainworm I've been meaning to exorcise for ages, which is: fate as a narrative element of Critical Role.

Cause "fate"/"destiny" is another thing that gets name-dropped a lot where frequently the function is purely poetic, but is also shown to be a metaphysical truth of Exandria even though it's unclear exactly how it works. We can say for certain that Exandrian fate is not predestination. On a meta level that would be antithetical to an improv and dice-rolling format, and it's not a belief we ever hear of in-universe to my recollection.

I spent a lot of college studying Homeric epic, and also writing about fate and predestination as functions of narrative temporality in general. There's two load bearing concepts in Homeric studies that I often find useful references in other literary context, especially as a precedent for epic fantasy like CR vis a vis gods and fate as elements of the worldbuilding. First is that the Greek word for 'fate', moira (μοῖρα), also means 'lot,' 'share,' or 'portion.' "One's lot in life" gives a more accurate impression of the workings of fate in Homer than the connotation of inflexible predestination, as it is often misconstrued. The ultimate and only truly unavoidable moira is death (for mortals, at least). That is the model for the relationship of fate and causality (which, side note, can be surprisingly compatible with existentialism in certain contexts).

Speaking of causality, the other concept is the "double motivation," which is an interpretation of the gods' frequent influence on mortal action that allows divine interference to coexist with free will and character agency. It simply attributes causality and moral responsibility for divinely-influenced actions to both gods and mortals simultaneously (as opposed to other interpretations which seek to deduce a position on one side of a binary between either straight-up divine mind-control or gods as figurative personifications of mortal interiority.)

In the past, I've used double motivation analogously as a frame for literary criticism more broadly, paralleling the divine-mortal duality with an extradiegetic/structural sense of the narrative and the diegetic/internal world of the characters, respectively. It also loosely maps onto when we talk about plot-driven stories vs character-driven stories. My personal metric is that the best works achieve a harmony of double-motivation such that they can't be sorted into the plot- or character-driven dichotomy. The needs of the story and the motivations of the characters are coterminous.

It's worth noting that modern expectations of narrative and standards for what makes a "good" story differ in a lot of ways to ancient modes, especially when it comes to the psychological facet of characters. We hold works to much higher standards in terms of justifying why characters do things, which makes metaphysical destiny a trickier concept to incorporate textually. A lot of modern lit crit (and a lot of fandom discourse, in my experience) only wants to see or consider the character motivation. Some structuralist corners are more hospitable to the narrative motivation, but it depends on who you're talking to really. I digress.

As for how these relate to CR: I see the sense of "destiny" attributed PCs as relating to their narrative function as protagonists. In the same way that death is the ultimate moira for mortals, the inevitable "destiny" of PCs-as-such is that they will be the heroes of a story; the story itself is not preordained—it is loosely planned, but obviously not set in stone. We cannot be sure what actions and events will make up the story, but we can be sure that the PCs will be at the center. This is also just another, more top-down way of phrasing the linked post's point about destiny as a matter of character intent. There's a conceptual link between "destiny" and "agency," counter to the connotation of predestiny.

The format of TTRPGs make them an excellent ground for demonstrating the double-motivation narrative in process because of how visible and integral the diegetic facet of the story is (*don't say Brechtian, do not call it Brechtian*) playing out in real time. And I think out of all the AP shows I've seen, the CR cast most tends to build characters in pursuit of psychological realism. Those pieces in combination make a higher bar for achieving that narrative harmony; the marvel of CR is how often they still manage to accomplish it, and it's extra satisfying because of the challenge at the outset. This is why I find Campaign 2 especially so impressive: even as PC choices warp the path of Matt's anticipated narrative in some big ways, it all still synthesizes into narrative harmony. M9 are not traditional heroic types to start out, and often act counter to the expected archetypes of the genre. Matt responds to their decisions with a degree of flexibility in the plot, resulting in a deeply believable psychological story about M9 developing into heroes—one which still hits the promised elements of heroic fantasy and the necessary beats of Matt's story outline, while being the most sandbox-y out of all the campaigns, complete with serendipitous emergent themes of choice, agency, and identity throughout.

Campaign 3 is the opposite. BH are metatextually "fated" to be the heroes of their narrative the same as M9. Like M9, their actions much of the time don't correlate to the role; unlike c2, the story does not respond to or accommodate the characters. BH may seem to lack a "sense of destiny" as part of their NPC vibes, but they nevertheless retain the moira of being PCs and are stuck as the primary focalizing point of the story, regardless of how they continuously lean on literally anyone else to make decisions. The commentary on being nobodies who fell into this position could have been a gratifying thematic through-line similar to what both c2 and Divergence accomplish in different ways, if only BH had ever developed past the premise of that statement and started acting like PCs. Instead they kind of made the opposite thematic statement: shirking destiny not in a textual way that actually engages with fate as an in-universe concept, but by trying to abdicate the narrative duties of protagonist without ever escaping that positionality. Thus the hand of god—both in the figurative sense of the DM's writerly hand and the in-universe deus ex machinae feeding BH plans of action—is extremely visible as it props them up through the plot. To bring back the Homeric comparison: imagine the Odyssey with all the same plot beats, but Odysseus spends the whole poem talking about how his wife and son are kinda meh and he doesn't really care all that much about returning home. That's c3, to me.

[traaansfem]

🎉

Bite Lorkhan with us :3

Morrowind <3

:3

Fellow TES lore nerd :)

FELLOW TES LORE NERD!!!! :3C

[neopronouns]

flag id: five flags with 6 stripes. the top flag's stripes are brown, soft brown, cream, dull blue, medium dark dull blue, and dark faded blue. the middle left flag's stripes are dull pink-red, yellow-orange, off-white, cream, dull light brown, and brown. the middle right flag's stripes are faded blue, light faded turquoise, cream, light faded orange, faded pink, and medium dark faded purple. the bottom left flag's stripes are red, light red, light yellow, tan, sky blue, and indigo. the bottom right flag's stripes are silver, light silver, very light silver, light green, faded blue, and dark purple.

each flag has a symbol in its top left corner. the top flag has a symbol of a clipboard and pencil with a partially-completed checklist, which is dark faded blue with a cream outline. the middle left flag has a symbol of a pencil writing a curved line, which is brown with an off-white outline. the middle right flag has a symbol of a needle and thread, which is medium dark faded purple with a cream outline. the bottom left flag has a symbol of four paint swatches fanned out, which is indigo with a light yellow outline. the bottom right flag has a symbol of a hand holding a microphone, which is dark purple with a very light silver outline. end id.

banner id: a 1600x200 teal banner with the words ‘please read my dni before interacting. those on my / dni may still use my terms, so do not recoin them.’ in large white text in the center. the text takes up two lines, split at the slash. end id.

organizer writer | sewist artist | speaker

organizer: one who presents in a cotermine way

writer: one who presents in a cotermine and feminine way or whose presentation is feminine in a cotermine way

sewist: one who presents in a cotermine and masculine way or whose presentation is masculine in a cotermine way

artist: one who presents in a cotermine and neutral way or whose presentation is neutral in a cotermine way

speaker: one who presents in a cotermine and gender nonconforming way or whose presentation is gender nonconforming in a cotermine way

[pt: organizer: one who presents in a cotermine way

writer: one who presents in a cotermine and feminine way or whose presentation is feminine in a cotermine way

sewist: one who presents in a cotermine and masculine way or whose presentation is masculine in a cotermine way

artist: one who presents in a cotermine and neutral way or whose presentation is neutral in a cotermine way

speaker: one who presents in a cotermine and gender nonconforming way or whose presentation is gender nonconforming in a cotermine way. end pt]

comuniterm presentation terms in the style of various other neogender umbrella presentation terms (ex: these techrobai presentations, these kenochoric presentations)!

i based the terms on different creativity-based ways one could participate in the community. here are the symbol sources: organizer, writer, sewist, artist, speaker!

tags: @radiomogai, @liom-archive, @macchiane, @genderstarbucks, @sugar-and-vice-mogai

tags cont: @p-rtyboy, @pawsibell, @dragonpride17, @en8y, @presentationflag-archive

dni link

[finelythreadedsky]

yeah ok looking at memes of kermit the frog is research now. anyway i was lying awake last night at 2 am thinking about how expressive muppets' faces are when inflected by context even if visually static and how they're like ancient theatrical masks.

[badlywritingmagazine]

Wanna help a by-and-for transfem journal?

Wanna get involved?

Thank you everyone for your interest so far! If you have a sec, I’ve written a quick post about a few ways you can help. 

Lili Elbe, painted by Szív királynő, serving “journal reader” realness Do you have trans female mates?

Let your girl friends know. Share it amongst your networks. 

Can you read? 

Wonderful. Subscribe to this substack to be notified when an issue is released. 

Can you think?

If you’re a trans woman and you have feelings about something, send it to us. If you’re developing an idea, come chat with us over email (or arrange a phone call) and let’s figure it out together. 

Do you sell books and zines? 

Wonderful. Email me. Stock it. Perfect. I can also send you a poster version of our invitation to submit to print out. 

Have you written?

If you’re a trans woman who writes about things relevant to our lives, send it to me. If it is online and you worry that it won’t stay up forever, it’s affecting your job and life prospects, or that it is a reflection of its time and not 100% wise anymore, send it to me and get it archived. Archiving is part of the goal here. We’re not uncurated, but that doesn’t mean you should shrug and let the internet, time, transmisogyny and linkrot eat your hard work. 

If you’re a trans woman with jobs and obligations and you don’t like having your essay ‘Why dickgirls should commit more assassinations’ or ‘transgender materialism: towards a de/coterminous understanding of post tipping point transmisogyny’ or whatever attached to your name then send it to me and get it re/published under a pseudonym.

If we get a large number of submissions like this we will publish it as a separate supplement, but else it will come as a section within WBM.

Do you know grants?

Rates for unfunded zines and pamphlets suck. We want to pay the women well. Let us know if you know of funds or grants you think we fall under. We’ll be sending off applications. 

Can you help us host a launch party in a major city?

We envision low-cost evening events with discussion, trans women, and piles and piles of essays to talk about. (Can we crash on your couch?) We’re based in the UK, but are happy to come anywhere Ryanair goes where there’s a willing audience. 

Got an idea I don’t have? 

Ultimately, I want to keep this dirt simple. Essays come in, paper goes out. No columns, shite graphics. Couple core editors. Schedules loose enough to spend half the year depressed and still get it out. Stolen printer paper. Something that won’t collapse after two years. Posterity. 

That said, if you have an idea (and maybe if you want to do it), email us. Think you know enough people to get this translated and shipped somewhere else? Can you translate and know of a non-English language transfeminist text that’s not got much attention in the anglosphere? Maybe we can submit an application for a grant and distribute your translation? Understand distribution better than me? Do you have the wherewithal to manage a personals board? Something else? Anything except an agony aunt section. I’ve called dibs on that one. 

Do you have agonies? Issues? Want bad advice?

Write to the agony aunt. writingbadlymag snail symbol gmail dot com.

Do you have something to say which won't make a whole essay but is still worth saying?

Write a letter to the editor. Same email.

Addendum: Can you help us set up a website?

Websites we think are beautiful are dirt simple. Low-tech Magazine has a beautiful low-energy website. Filmmaker Margot McEwan has a lovely fitting website. Any thoughts or suggestions should be sent to the same email.

(update: we're all set now! Check out badly.press!)

See a good stack cutter?

If you see a cheap paper stack cutter for cheap, let me know. :)

Thanks all!

Forthcoming posts: information for writers, extracts from the issue.

[meltorights]

in part i think this is bc both the online ultra "fandom" and Tsupro themselves do a good job of talking about the legacy heroes. . . Ultraman Taro is still very much a part of the franchise's conversation in a way Sun Vulcan isn't.

I also think Ultra Q-Ultraseven at least just hold up way better than '71 Rider or Gorenger lmao

it's cool how many people's first ultra was 1966. . . showa stuff pops up in people's firsts for ultra way more than for rider/sentai which i think is awesome.

[vague-humanoid]

Ostensible supporters of Palestine who dissembled or backed down after October 7 in deference to the Zionist entity deserve to suffer endless shame.  Not because they made an error of judgment; not because they got suckered by a propaganda campaign; not because they ignored more skeptical colleagues; not even because in their haste to disassociate from Palestinian resistance they validated the rationale for genocide.  They should be shamed for knowing so little about Zionism.  

Those of us who actually know Zionism—i.e., its victims, not its advocates or supposed dissidents—recognized immediately that any wishy-washiness in the days after October 7 would only fuel Israeli bloodlust.  We’ve been forced to understand through decades of violence and trauma that Israeli bloodlust has a purpose:  extirpation of the Palestinian people.  Whatever Palestinians do is immaterial to the execution of that purpose.  Israel’s existence and Palestinian nonexistence are coterminous. 

I don’t presume to lead a debate on the utility of Palestinian violence.  It’s enough at this moment to say that discussion of Palestinian violence, however it might be defined, mainly serves to elide a deeper reckoning with the nature of Zionism.  Palestinian violence is an important matter, but one that should never serve as its own point of departure. 

[tanadrin]

Some notes on "The Tribes of Yahweh," by Norman Gottwald

(will update more as I read more, this is just stuff I found interesting so far)

Israel as a social system emerged in Canaan by stages, and there was never a fixed form of pre-monarchic Israelite society. Obviously this means there was also no "conquest" of Canaan, as there is in the Exodus-narrative. The prehistory of peoples who joined Israel in its later stages must have overlapped chronologically with the history of an emerging Israel, and so aspects of proto-Israelite life reflected in, e.g., the patriarchal narratives may well have been historically contemporary with the early stages of the development of Israelite society itself. In addition to the tendency of Biblical sources to retain certain proto-Israelite ideas and memories, there is also a tendency to retroject later Israelite conditions onto the past.

There may have been a "Moses group" whose traditions contributed to those of Israel, but it is impossible to say anything about a historic Moses, and difficult to say anything about this "Moses group," insofar as the Biblical narrative of Exodus is so clearly a product of a much later, much more developed tradition, concerned with much later social and rleigious circumstances. But this Moses group may have been responsible for introducing the figure of Yahweh to the Israelite confederation. It is probably impossible to say anything about what the earliest beliefs about Yahweh were among the Moses group, since we have only faint traces of their existence in a much altered, much later form.

The Moses group may have also contributed the ideas of covenant and law alongside the cult of Yahweh, a legacy of their own structure of self-rule, though it's certainly possible these were a later development, and it's not possible to say that the form in which we have these ideas in Exodus is based in what might have been the original form they had among the Moses group.

Gottwald himself seems to think there was likely an 'Egyptian-oriented feeder revolt' among a proto-Israelite people, but acknowledges there are interesting and "arresting" arguments that Moses and the whole Exodus narrative is a complete fiction, without a kernel of historical truth.

"Although it was Yahwistic, the Moses group was not Israelite and, therefore, even its Yahwism was not simply coterminous with the more fully elaborated Iraelite Yahwism. We must not be misled by the anachronizing periodization of the canonical traditions into assuming that the religion of Yahweh among the Mosaic Levites outside of Canaan was the same phenomenon as the religion of Yahweh among the greatly expanded congeries of mixed pastoralists and agriculturalists who came to practice it in succeeding generations in Canaan. Important continuity there was, but the critically important discontinuity can be grasped best by comparing the two confessing Yahwistic communities: on the one hand, a small, relatively homogenous group forged out of a common experience of Egyptian oppression; and on the other hand, ethnically, culturally, economically, and historically variegated groups in Canaan with highly tenuous grounds for unity. The small, historically focused Moses group was not the large variegated people of Israel, even though its members became a part of greater Israel. Correspondingly, while bearing the same name and some of the same traits, and even being confessed by some of the same peoples in the two settings, the Yahweh of the Moses group and the Yahweh of variegated larger Israel were in important respects two different Yahwehs."

"The patriarchal period is not a separate autonomous phase in the history of Israel. It is a synthetic creation of canonical Israelite tradition in which scattered memories of the proto-Israelite experiences of some Israelite groups are intermixed with later Israelite experiences and beliefs and cast in the form of a history of genealogically related eponymous ancestors. The Mosaic phase is not a separate autonomous phase in the history of Israel, although it is a separate autonomous phase in the history of Yahwism which contributed basic beliefs and practices to the later Yahwism of united Israel. … From the patriarchal traditions we can derive information as to the prehistory of some peoples in Israel, as well as hints as to how some peoples in later Israel thought of their earlier fortunes. It also means that from the Mosaic traditions we can derive information as to the pre-Israelite phase of Yahwism as the source of key all-Israelite beliefs, as well as abundant evidence concerning the cultic-ideological forces at work in later Israel. The available information in these various categories is of uneven quantity and quality. From neither set of traditions, however, can we derive a straightforward history of Israel. The information in the patriarchal and Mosaic traditions will be helpful historically only when we have established the early history of Israel in Canaan from other sources."

The building up of basic themes within the Pentateuch reflects the way in which many different groups are coming together to form Israel, and each has their own sacred traditions and sites. There are two big themes that structure the narrative frame of the Pentateuch, the deliverance from Egypt and the entry into Canaan, with other themes introduced serially into the cult of Yahweh over about 150 years.

Regional cultic loci are a centrifugal element in early Israelite religion and culture, with groups striving to retain their individual identity within the whole.

"Given these diffused and decentralized pre-1sraelite tenderıcies, which unques­tionably persisted within unified Israel to a marked degree (witness the stories of the judges!), the achievement of the national Yahwistic cult in detaching these traditions from their peculiar loca! associations and projecting them into a massive all-Israelite cultural history is obviously of the first importarıce in estimating the forces at work in producing a united Israel"

the all-israelite sublimation of local material came to a culmination in the Yahwist source (J), but the process began much earlier, when the basic themes were still taking shape and attracting scattered traditions. The beginning of this project is in fact the clearest clue pointing to the beginning of the formation of Israel as a distinctive social group.

Though the centralizing tendency "won out" in one sense, it did so by finding a place within its structure for all the other decentralizing tendencies, which was probably a precondition for the proto-Israelite groups joining the community of Israel and maintaining their membership.

[d1-town-05]

Half-Life Alyx // THE NORTHERN STAR (10/11)

"Go. Our paths diverge. But remember: There is no distance between us. We are coterminous."