#did ramblings

[thebumblebeesystem]

So, I went from suddenly playing every day and being on tumblr often to suddenly withdrawing. And it’s taken some time for me to figure out that the reason why was more than just a temporary flare of my chronic stuff.

This is gonna talk heavily about DID (dissociative identity disorder), so I’ll explain some things first for anyone who’s not familiar with it. But before I do that, I'll do a TLDR and put the rest behind a 'keep reading' to spare you from a long post.

TLDR: Our system had a host change. Our name is Bee now. We made a new ffxiv character. Our system's other characters still exist and those system members will sto do their own gposes, so you'll still see Baylen, B'Elarra, B'Elano, and the like. But we're making some changes to our main polycule.

Instead of B'Elarra/Haurchefant/Aymeric/Estinien, we're going to split it up. It's going to be B'Elarra/Haurchefant (still Haurchefant lives AU), Bee/Aymeric, and Estinien/someone else that we haven't figured out yet. Reason being, we're polyamorous irl but we have trauma with it, and gposing polyamory all the time in our main ship was triggering us. Also gposing B'Elarra/Aymeric was giving us some body image issues, and we want to gpose him with a fat disabled non-binary wol instead. But if B'Elarra misses gposing with Aymeric over time, they can still do an AU for their gposes. It just won't be the primary thing they do.

Long version:

Okay, defining some DID terms first:

—

System member: Our word for ‘alter.’ Think of it as multiple people sharing the same body and mind. 

Host: Like a dinner party host. The person in the system who runs the table, and manages who goes to and from it, seeing to everyone’s needs.

Front: The person in the system who drives the body. Consider it like… the person driving a car.

Co-front: The other people in the system who drive the body to a lesser degree. Consider it like someone in the passenger seat reaching over and holding the steering wheel sometimes. Or one person being given the task of the turn signal, or something. Not the primary drivers, but still people who have some degree of control.

Co-conscious: The other people in the system who are around and aware, but not in control of the body. Passengers in the car. If they want the body to do something, they need to ask the fronter to do it. And if the fronter says no, then they’re simply out of luck. So the fronter has a responsibility to be fair to the co-conscious system members.

Split: Consider it like… a slime in a game reproducing. There’s one slime and then it splits apart and then there’s two. There’s one system member and then, either slowly or quickly, a new system member splits off from them and becomes their own unique person.

—

So, basically, while we’ve been in our little isolation… our former host split off into a new one, and we had a host change that kind of jumbled things up both in real life, and in-game. 

B’Elarra (she/they) was formerly our host and our social media manager. She’s still around, but to a much lesser degree now. Our new host is named Bee (they/them). Looking back on it, we can see both irl and in-game how Bee slowly started to split off from B’Elarra. But we didn’t realize it was happening for a while, because it was very subtle.

So at some point, Bee kind of took over without any of us noticing, and couldn’t relate to B’Elarra’s character. We felt the pull to make a new character but we didn’t know why we felt that way. And we’re fed up with having to pay in both time and in money every time a system member wants a character of their own. So the others in the system said no to making a new character. And since this was a weird transition period, Bee was both a mix of fronting and co-conscious, a sort of halfway state between the two as they slowly learned how to take over, so they couldn’t simply go and make their own character themself. Even if they could have, we try not to defy each other like that and to talk through decisions that affect us all, so they wouldn't have done it while all the others said no.

Imagine like, you want to play ffxiv but you’re told you can’t play your own character. You have to play someone else’s, you have to inherit their whole headcanon and gposing and everything, and you can’t relate to it. Plus, that character triggers your trauma in multiple ways. I doubt you’d wanna play very much, either. So we disappeared from the game, and from tumblr, because our choices were either play a character we aren't feeling into or go play something else.

But, thankfully, we figured this out before that big sale ended. So Bee made a character - a Highlander since none of us have played one yet. They have our memories from ffxiv so they’re familiar with the story, and they used the sale to get the story and a class or two to 80, as well as catching up on some outfits and emotes and such. And we’ve been slowly working on catching them up on things, their grand company and getting them trade mentor and unlocking stuff and whatever.  

We’ve also been trying to figure out how to work Bee into our story and our gposing and such in a way that keeps B’Elarra happy. 

Bee and B’Elarra have both agreed that we’re going to shuffle things around to divide up our fictional polycule. Because the thing is, we’re polyamorous irl, but due to an abusive polyamorous relationship 5 years ago, gposing the polycule of 4 - B’Elarra/Haurchefant/Aymeric/Estinien - set off our flashbacks bigtime almost every time we gposed them. And we were just having trouble writing the logistics of it. B’Elarra wanted to be in Camp Dragonhead after Heavensward with Haurchefant, but felt compelled to stay in Ishgard for Aymeric, and she had a lot of trouble balancing both relationships. 

B’Elarra/Aymeric was also triggering some other stuff from our past. We kept feeling like “Aymeric would never notice or want to be with someone like me if this were real,” and it’s a feeling we’ve seen a lot of our followers have as well. In this case, “someone like me” was someone fat, disabled, and non-binary. And out of all of the Aymeric shippers we follow… very few have fat wols, and even fewer have ones that aren’t feminine, and even fewer have wols that are disabled. B’Elarra is naturally pretty dainty and feminine and able-bodied in-game, and shipping her with Aymeric was just doing bad things in our head.

So, fuck it. Bee will be fat, non-binary, and disabled. We’ll make our own representation, help ourselves with it, and hopefully help others in the process. 

Anyway. So yeah, B’Elarra is going to be with Haurchefant (still a Haurchefant lives AU) and Bee is going be with Aymeric. Estinien will get someone else, we’re not sure who yet. We have ideas of him meeting a Roegadyn man in the Far East who introduces him to dried squid, and it takes him a while to realize that when he misses dried squid, he's missing the person who introduced him to it as much as he's missing the food. D'aww.

We’ll still have some poly ships. Lucia/genderfluid!Maxima/someone, B’Elano/G’raha/Erenville, and whoever else comes up naturally. It’s just for our main ship, we can’t be having polyamory in our gposes so often dredging our trauma back up.

Hopefully with this, we'll be able make our way back to being active. At least after we get this initial grind of unlocking things taken care of and can start playing again. This isn't the only game we're shuffling around to accommodate a new host, either, so it'll take some time in our other games as well. We'll likely still be quiet for a time as we continue adjusting to the host change both irl and in all of our games. We're also getting some meds adjusted, and things are going to be a little wonky from that for a time. But things should be only getting better from here.

So, yeah, hi, missed you all, that's why we've been quiet.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Love it when Rolling Stone puts out an article about the 25 most influential internet creators and I've only heard of 7 of them

[unforth]

Y'all I know that when so-called AI generates ridiculous results it's hilarious and I find it as funny as the next guy but I NEED y'all to remember that every single time an AI answer is generated it uses 5x as much energy as a conventional websearch and burns through 10 ml of water. FOR EVERY ANSWER. Each big llm is equal to 300,000 kiligrams of carbon dioxide emissions.

LLMs are killing the environment, and when we generate answers for the lolz we're still contributing to it.

Stop using it. Stop using it for a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. We need to kill it.

Sources:

[temporalteardrop]

bass makes a dollar. i make a dime. that's why i think about lesbian sex on company time

[goldensunset]

advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

[darlingofdots]

my parents are on holiday in their mobile home

they're expected back this upcoming weekend

I just spent ten days in my childhood home to keep an eye on things

I have hidden 100 small yellow ducks all over the house

I am very excited for my parents to be back

[eydilily]

would you bite the hand that feeds you?

[the-messy-artist]

Has this been done yet

[squishydem0ns]

"Is Vox inse-claw, purr-suing allure? Flitting between this cat and that, is nothing working?"

"IGNORE HIS CHIRPING!"

[secondbeatsongs]

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

[whatafuckinnerd]

I find it unfathomable and astounding that Tumblr isn't more obsessed with Sam Reich. You're telling me there exists out there a man who was born into the aristocracy of our country—with every privilege of modern society at his fingertips—who didn't complete high school (due to his mental health) and instead chose to devote his life to making strangers laugh and raising awareness on mental health. A full-bearded short king who is so committed to being the change he wants to see in the world that he decided to take the company he worked for into his own hands so that he could make sure all the people who worked under him could keep their livelihoods.

How many other CEOs are out here being as honest and transparent with their target audience/market as Sam Reich is? How many of them acknowledge when they fumble and continuously strive to be better than they were? How many of them actually seem like they respect their talent, both in the cast and crew? Sam Reich is the standard we should be holding other CEOs to.

But forget about all that (I could talk for a long time about the respect I have for Sam Reich)—ignore just how respectable he is as a businessman and a person. Ignore all the wholesome reasons for obsessing over Sam Dalton Reich.

The man is a stone-cold fox.

He's a little chaos gremlin and an absolute evil mastermind all rolled into one classy suit and well-groomed beard. Whenever Sam is on the set, you can guarantee he is going to make you crack a smile. And for someone with such natural authority, he's never afraid to be the butt of a joke and show himself being embarrassed. Go ahead, watch any clip of him trying to improvise in No Laugh Newsroom and just try to resist that blush.

You're sleeping on a goldmine of a man, here, damnit! And I will NOT let this go ignored any longer!

[jupiterlandings]

“How is 12 year old Annabeth head of the Athena cabin??”

1. Demi gods have the life expectancy of a lemming.

2. Gifted kids often burn out by age 16 & I doubt any of the Athena teens have the energy or desire to argue with their little sister who willingly takes care of all the family paperwork.

[goldensunset]

did you know? if you do your laundry you can get your clothes back

[kiachnishsblog]

Superbat headcanon:

Clark goes to interview Bruce Wayne. He expects either a flirtation by Wayne or just talking business. What Clark DOESNT expect, is to have Wayne, a multimillionaire/billionaire, info dump about Gray Ghost because nobody else would listen to him talk about it.

Now, when Clark leaves Wayne Enterprises, he knows all the Gray Ghost lore. What is he gonna do with this knowledge? He has no idea. But atleast Bruce looked happy infodumping on him.

[caruliaa]

does anyone else remember when glados was like btw get out my facility its too hard to kill you so just leave. then she immediately puts u in a situation where it wld be very easy to kill u but instead u have a song sung to you that she wrote abt u being her precious darling beloved babygirl then after u left gave u back the one thing u had any attachment to in the facility that just so happens to have a heart on it. gay ass.

[kcrabb88]

It's truly wild to me how many people out there don't understand that the Star Wars prequels are a tragedy or how tragedies work.

Posts like "these are the Jedi failed movies" truly just make me shake my head. They're actually the "fascism wears a smile until it strikes you down and then it's too late" movies. They're the "the senate became corrupt and clapped in the face of genocide" movies. They're the "make people scared enough of war until they accept authoritarianism" movies. They're the "fear and possessiveness will tear you up on the inside" movies. The Jedi were the heroes of lore, people loved and looked up to them, looked to them for safety, and then too much got put on their shoulders on purpose by Palpatine, and also by a senate that didn't want to act (not you Padme and Bail and Mon, you're perfect). They were drafted and used and scapegoated, which is, you know, a tenet of the vast majority of authoritarian governments (Hitler and Stalin, for instance, might be on different ends of the political spectrum, but they sure both did scapegoat specific groups and commit mass murder, just differently).

When some people say "these movies are about the fall of the Jedi" what they mean is "the Jedi failed" but that's not what "the fall of the Jedi means." It means they were wiped the fuck OUT. Like, Jesus, in Rogue One Tarkin is talking about burning out the final MEMORY of the Jedi by blowing up the holy city in Jedha. Palpatine had to get rid of the Jedi because to get rid of the Jedi was to get rid of the final people standing in his way after he had already worn them out. His intention was not only to kill them, but to alter the galaxy's entire perception of them. To rip away hope. People are always looking for the Jedi to be Bad or nitpick their mistakes (because while other people are allowed to make mistakes, the Jedi never are). Palpatine made himself look like a benevolent grandpa who would keep everyone safe. And that, more than anything, is what gave him SO much power. He stole the narrative.

It's just like. Of course WE know what was going to happen! We know from watching the OT that the PT can only end in tragedy. But the characters don't know that! They don't have all the info! That's how a tragic story structure works. We see it coming and they can't.

Anyway. The Jedi are laser-sword wielding monks with psychic powers who just wanted to do what they could to help. The world would be better if more folks remembered that.