#there's a portmanteau here somewhere

[fallingsatellive]

⩝

This isn't just an essay about my archetrope identity; it's also the explanation for what it even is.

I've tried to narrow it down, I've tried to separate it, and I've tried to find convenient ways to define it. I explained it as having multiple distinct archetrope identities that were closely related—"wanderer," "mimic," "opportunist" "shapechanger"—but they aren't distinct. Most archetropes will say their archetypes are things like knight, or unreliable narrator—I don't think mine is inherently different or more internally complicated in any way, but the problem is that most archetypes and concepts have words that mean them. Everyone knows what a knight is. No matter where and how long I pored over the dictionary and Etymonline, I couldn’t find one single word that explains what I am. I had to realize that it's the very fact of what it is that makes an existing word or phrase impossible. So I made my own.

I call it Wayvariance. It's a portmanteau of sorts, between the words "wayfar" and "variant." A wayfarer is obviously a traveller or explorer, but the etymology of way (to mean the course by which something occurs) and fare (to mean to wander, to be/exist, or even simply just to go) implies a connotation of someone who doesn't just travel, but who's defined by it. Variance originally meant only the act of undergoing change. Its meaning of diversity, difference, came later; a result of inevitable change. The way evolution is a constant course of change, meaning inherently that it's also existence in infinities.

Wayvariance is being a wanderer. Not because I travel a lot, but ontologically. I always leave. I leave both physically and existentially. The wanderer grows bored with home, with comfort and familiarity. Not just bored. Sick. Sick to its stomach. Being in one place for too long creates a miasma. I could find something to hate about anywhere I end up. I've lived in enough places in a short enough amount of time to feel that anywhere I go next is implicitly not a place I'll stay for very long, and to feel like even just three years is a crazy long amount of time for me to spend living somewhere. A new city to become part of is my version of someone else’s return to a cozy childhood bedroom. But I never really am a part of them, I know by now. The homebody is a river carving canyons over eons. The traveller is always the fish.

"I would tell you about the ocean if I had a moment to stay and chat. But those other places call again and we will never see each other after this. I seem to be the only one who recognizes this. You say ‘keep in touch’ like I have hands and not fins."

I go where I go. It’s a matter of perspective whether it's freedom or being towed by an invisible rope to unknowable destinations, I guess. I choose to appreciate it, but only because I couldn't ever choose to stop it. To drift through existence. The word “plankton” etymologically traces back to the Greek for “wandering.” Plankton are defined as any creature which does not swim purposefully, but rather is carried by ocean currents. Am I purposeless? Rootless? Is this why so many people think their roots are their purpose? I never knew what it was like to have either. No wonder I'm anti-zionist as a Jew. Doikayt doesn’t just mean hereness to me, it means anywhereness. There is no soil or stone with my names already carved. There are no waters that whisper for me, only to. You get it.

Which is all to say: the difference between a wanderer and someone who is lost is only a matter of deciding that what you are is a conscious choice rather than being haplessly dragged along by the universe. Either way, there is no end and no source. I don’t even know what to say when people ask where I'm from. Whatever works, who’s asking?

Wayvariance is being a shapeshifter. One who changes. Not just their shape, too, but their whole self. Recreates the self. In fact, it’s my only constant. The one thing that will never change about me is that I will always change. I know that I'm trans because I seek radical physiological transformation more than any other reason. I cannot live a whole life without knowing what it feels like to be so drastically modified; not even out of a frenzied sense of curiosity, but out of an unavoidable instinct. I crave change, and I need it. The wanderer grows bored with home, with self, body, mind. It needs to leave. Stagnation kills me, like mosquitoes breed eggs in the still waters of my life. My name isn’t the same as it was 3 years ago and it won’t be the same three years from now. Even the way I write or draw is inconsistent. Even the way I type. An example: it wasn't a mistake to switch from digit to word when writing the same number just now. I felt like it—but I can't explain why.

Shapeshifter transforms the body and the mind remains intact. Wayvariant, on the other hand, becomes. Embodies. Change does not even have to be from the inside out. When I put something on myself—a name, an answer, an image, a character, a preference—it seeps into my epidermis like the ink of a tattoo until the only way to remove it is with the regular moulting of my feathers. I can't relate to stories of fictional shapeshifters because I can’t imagine turning into something physically but not becoming it in my entirety. What do the words mind, heart, body and soul mean? They are all equally mutable and impermanent. I have identified as otherkin for nearly eight years and I don’t have the same kintypes I did when I first realized, not because I was wrong about being a fox, but because I became a badger instead. Not even the same kintypes I did half that time ago, not because I was wrong about being a badger, but because I became a cladotherian instead. Queer, but never wanting to call myself “against labels” or “still questioning” just because I was aroace femme-presenting nonbinary and now I'm a butch bi man. You get it.

I used to relate to the phoenix. But there's no dramatic blaze of fire or victorious rising up from the embers for me. I don't need to burn to exist in the ashes of everything I used to be. Maybe someday a sapling will grow from them instead of a bird. If there was such thing as consistency, I would consistently be changing. But there isn’t. So when I grow into a tree, I certainly won’t be a bird anymore.

Wayvariance is adaptation, and by extension, survival. Sometimes Wayvariating is like being the last survivor of an apocalypse because you refused to die more like a cockroach than a hero, but that’s OK, you’re used to the loneliness. Sometimes it’s change that’s evolution at such a rapid pace it doesn’t need generations, only you and a certain willpower. Was there a reason the bird needed to suddenly be a tree in the first place? Sometimes Wayvariating is like chewing your leg off to get out of the trap. Backed into a corner snapping and hissing, it’s not very heroic either but I’ve always been more like a wild animal than that particular archetype allows for.

That also means Wayvariance is mimicry, inherently. Mimicry is survival. An adaptation. Some creatures will mimic a coloration of a poisonous species to deter predators. Some creatures will mimic the beats of a human interaction, perfectly memorized and choreographed to avoid being noticed. Some won’t even realize they are the only one in the room who’s having to pretend to be human. For a lifetime. They just know that snapping and hissing don’t protect them as well as dancing and laughing do. So I learned how to dance and laugh, but not because it's funny.

A terrifying concept for humans to think someone in the room might not be the same as them, but somehow smiles and speaks like them all the same. Like it has learned their behaviors, their patterns. A horror movie monster. One you don't notice right away, even speaking to it. What is it scheming? A great evil? To hunt, kill, devour? To make innocent humanity its victim?

Why would an animal have to pretend to be poisonous if it was the one who was bloodthirsty?

Wayvariance is opportunism. That’s also an adaptation. A Wayvariant is an animal that can survive on any diet, in any biome, because it takes what it can get while it can get it. That’s being a generalist. For a wild animal, at least. A sapient person's version I guess would be called eclecticism. My preferences are wide enough that I may as well not have any. Being a generalist means I say I “don’t play favorites” and I say I “have no taste” in things because I never know what to say when someone asks me my favorite type of movie, or game, favorite genre of music, what’s your dream job… where would you like to live? No answer, for me. Every answer. I could find something to love about anywhere I end up.

I also endeavor to diversify the self, too. Not just my options. It’s not just about differences. It’s about encompassments. It is difficult for me to make my self small because it naturally desires so many things. Therian, but struggling to whittle myself down to as socially acceptable a polytherianthropy as I can muster even if some people can only imagine I'm struggling to “maintain so many conflicting identities.” Autistic, and having special interests in topics some people find so impossibly broad like “art” that I have genuinely, not joking, had my disability fakeclaimed over it. Archetrope and having a 'type so conceptual and expansive as this that I need to make my own word for it. You get it.

Which means Wayvariance is to contain multitudes. It is not a contradiction for me to contradict myself. It comes easily because I'm not just OK with being confused or confusing, I embrace it. I don’t understand how others would find being "your own opposite" hard to wrap the mind around. Asymmetry? A walking paradox? Maybe in the eyes of others. Multitude eyes see those variating evolutionary infinities behind themselves. You can be both the desert and ocean. You can be snow and fire. You can be the desert and the ocean but not both at once. You can be snow and fire, but neither snow nor fire. This is so normal to me that it’s tricky to explain. When I write or do art, a million projects open at once that I chip away at over time across the board works better for me than putting all focus into one; if I'm playing three games, or watching three shows or reading three books at once, I finish all three before I would have finished just one if it was the only one. Something about the variety keeps my attention better than hyperfocus ever could, even with the autism/adhd combo. I liked having a million thousand nested links on my blog because there’s something about labyrinthinely navigated lists that makes more sense to me, and something about having different sideblogs for different topics that doesn’t. And I'm plural. No need to expound upon that one. Plural in more than one way, even. Plural in different ways that don't stay consistent. If I expound anyway, it's because I can't help it. You get it.

Wayvariance is ambiguity. I revel in it. I love those stupid link labyrinths, but I also like having nothing in terms of information that's accessible at all, even difficultly, because obscurity is my nest, where I feel safe. Vague isn’t uncomfortable for me, if anything, it’s familiar. Uncertainty is like a lullaby and a confident answer to a question is like waking with a start from the sensation of falling; you know the feeling—jarring, sudden. I'm not insecure when things don't make sense, though I know others sometimes see it that way if I'm nonsensical too often. I never feel more secure than when things don’t make sense. If there was such thing as home, mine would be the strange and ephemeral, and the antichronology of dreams, and enigmas. But there isn’t. So I am always waking up somewhere time exists, and you know the feeling, jarring and sudden. Making myself understood sometimes is like a fool’s errand, especially because way too many people think being esoteric is always a choice. I make an entire new word to describe my archetrope identity and then write an entire essay trying to explain it, because (as the modern adage explains) “human language is like trying to nail down the ocean” and unlike some, I am not human, I am the fish called to seas and from river to river, never with the privilege of walking back onto dry land where words lie.

G-d, why the hell was I an English major.

Wayvariants are outsiders, foreigners wherever they go, from across oceans to their home towns to the inside of their own heads. I am, after all, a wanderer, and I always leave. I leave both physically and existentially. Because I always leave, I also always arrive. I am a stranger wherever I arrive. Both physically and existentially. And a journey inevitably always changes the traveller. If I ever were to come back home, I'd be a stranger there too.

But like I said. There is no such thing as home.

[librarycards]

Hello! Sorry if you’ve posted about this somewhere already/if it’s redundant, but I thought your coinage of “transMad” was very cool and I’m wondering what that term means to you? I’m really happy to see other people talking about madness being intertwined w their gender/transness and looking forward to checking out your reading lists :))

thank you so much for asking about one of my favorite things to infodump about!! rather than rehash a bunch of stuff, if it's okay, I'm going to borrow a few quotes from past!me that i've published in different places // offer you some things of mine to read.

broadly, though, i use transMadness as a way to explore the identificatory, epistemological, methodological, and theoretical implications of an orientation (to use Sara Ahmed's term) toward bodymind noncompliance and self/selves-determination. this orientation refuses to delineate diagnostically between Maddened / transed experiences of the world/our many worlds, and instead takes this shared/overlapping ground as a jumping off point for solidarity and speculation - that is, something that allows us to imagine otherwise worlds / make them manifest through creativity and collaboration.

(Ha, and I claimed i wouldn't talk too much...famous autistic last words)

ANYWAY. here are some clips that might help explain more dimensions of transMadness. note that, in my dissertation-in-progress, i'm focusing on xeno/neogender and/as self-diagnostic cultures among queercrip and transMad internet users. i'm interested in the anti-psych liberatory potential of this digital community work, especially as it centers forms of knowledge and scholarship devalued within Academia Proper, especially because so much of it is made by and for disabled, Mad, queer, trans people, esp. youth. Onward to quotes!

On transMad epistemologies: citation/power/knowledge:

I’ll spend most of this piece looking not at what transMad is, but what it does. First and foremost, transMad cites. Even its name alludes to other portmanteaus: neuroqueer and queercrip being the best-known among them. Many people have offered many different (ever-“working”!) definitions of these terms; today, I offer co-coiner Nick Walker’s (2021) definition of neuroqueer: a verb and an adjective “encompass[ing] the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms” (p. 196). In terms of queercrip, I also return to its coiner, Carrie Sandahl (2003), who for whom the queercrip (as person and as method/movement) confuses the diagnostic gaze, bears sociopolitical witness, and performs glitchful[4], incongruous, confusing in(ter)ventions into possible community. At base, “queer” and “crip” appear as analogous, reclaimed slurs signifying marginalized transgression. When combined, they describe a loop, perhaps a Möbius strip: crip (ani)mates queer, queer tells-on crip. The specter of crip haunts queer—and even more explicitly, as we will see, trans—and the crip(ped) bodymind holds, moves, and fucks queerly. Who knows where “queer” stops and “crip” and “neuro” begin? Likewise, transMad, whose citational style leaves little room for diagnostic clarity amidst a pastiche of noncompliant text.

On transMad epistemologies: multiplicity (h/t @materialisnt):

They encourage us to remove others’ names from our bodies, to reign in unruly citations, to set “boundaries” which violate Mad, crip ethics of care (see Fletcher, 2019). In truth, any framing of individual authorship in which the body text is “mine” and the citations gesture “elsewhere” belie the inherent interdependence of all intellectual life, and particularly of transMad intellectual life. transMad plural scholar mix. alan moss (2022) argues in relation to the pathologization of multiple systems: “all people, indeed all that exists, is a system that itself is constantly enmeshed in several overlapping and interconnected systems.” In short, I am full of Is, and will continue as many more. Just as disability justice helps us understand all life as interdependent and deserving of access, a transMad approach sees our selves as numerous and fuzzy. We have permission to dispense with the need for tidy texts, with our interlocutors, edits, and iterations either obfuscated entirely or exclusively relegated to a bibliography. transMad citation may thus be considered akin to visible mending[6], creating flamboyantly messy, multiplicitous work that does not seek to pass as objective or discrete.

On the value of (crip) failure and/as "virtuality":

Don’t get me wrong: Zoom PhD work is a failing enterprise. That is to say, it is a queercrip, transMad enterprise, which is to say, it is a beautiful, beautiful project. Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware describe such “fortunate failures” in the context of “curricular cripistemologies.”5 Coined by Merri Lisa Johnson, the term “cripistemologies,” refers to “embodied ways of knowing in relation, knowing-with, knowing-alongside, knowing-across-difference, and unknowing,” ways which frequently exist outside the purview of mainstream academia.6 Curricular cripistemologies, then, refer to an intentional, queercrip deviation from normative pedagogical approaches which trades the corrective impulse of “special ed” and other rehabilitative programs, and offers instead a generative noncompliance.7 That is, rather than trying to identify, isolate, and ameliorate difference, curricular cripistemologies lean into difference as it is experienced by disabled students ourselves, querying how atmospheres of in/accessibility shape normative approaches to education and how the embrace of “failure,” not as a last-resort but as a first choice, poses potentially transformative possibilities.

On transMadness and fat liberation: (for @trans-axolotl's Psych Survivor Zine)

A transMad, fat approach to disorderly eating requires making connections with humility and understanding, and, as I discussed above, engaging in compassionate, critical interrogation of our own anti-fatness.

[...]

A transMad, fat, abolitionist politic is one that makes room. We imagine beyond the cage, even if the details of that imagining are not yet clear. Just as we have carved micro-sites of support within violent digital and in-person contexts, just as we have learned to think about our lifeworlds beyond the paradigm of “recovery or death,” we can also reconceptualize fatness not as the enemy, but as another form of bodymind noncompliance in alliance and/or entanglement with disorderly eating practices. For thin disorderly eaters, this requires us to fundamentally challenge the way we view food and embodiment, even while maintaining a Mad respect for alternative ways of approaching reality.

On xenogenders, virtuality, and self-determination:

It is this very “irrationality” –– the “unrealness,” the “you’ve-got-to-be-kiddinghood,” that is most frequently weaponized against xenogenders, as well as their newly-coined sets of xenopronouns. The perceived and actual virtuality of xenogenders is often placed against the notion of “actuality,” in this case, of “real” (or “practical”) genders and pronouns to be used in one’s “real life.” Disabled activists have rightly resisted the distinction between online and (presumed-offline) “real life,” given that this categorically excludes homebound bodyminds, as well as those without IRL social and support circles. That said, I believe the virtual –– as almost, not-quite, proximite, making-do –– is incredibly useful in thinking about xenoidentities as transMad tools –– particularly, as transMad tools of underground collaboration / co-liberation.

[...]

What if gender was a project we wanted to fail? That is, what if trans- was a process not of getting better, not of moving-toward a bodymind more sane, more straight, and more cisheteropatriarchially desirable, but rather a line of flight on a longer trail to illegibility? Indeed, what if we replaced pathology’s narrow “path” with a trail lighted by the language of our comrades, whose linguistic interventions make and break gender in ways heretofore unimaginable? Xenoidentities, both individually and as a trans-gressive M.O., are fundamental to a broader transMad project of crafted, collective illegibility; intersubjective citation (imagine what it feels like for someone to be the gender that you coined!); and collective care that refuses a politics of cure. Crucially both virtual and digital, xenoidentities are furthermore a manifestation of the power of trans, predominantly disabled digital counterpublics, who overturn the hierarchy which places the IRL-real above the digital-unreal, making unruly, Mad space in which (with apologies to Donna Haraway) a hundred xenoselves might bloom.

On Maddening queer "diagnosis":

In her indictment of all “Kwik-Fix Drugs,” Gray further indicates the practice of forced treatment as in and of itself as a project of violent normalization, regardless of specific target or reason. The intentional ambiguity between her narrative of Madness and her narrative of asexuality disrupt mounting demands for a healthy (sanitized, neoliberal, and consumable) queerness. A Mad ace approach identifies these demands as, indeed, comparable with cis heteronormative notions of sexual maturity and responsibility – the idea that participation in culturally-normative sexual practices is a prerequisite for health (Kim, 2011, 481) and thus, personal autonomy (Meerai, Abdillahi, and Poole 2016, 21). By fusing the “lack of sexual appetite” attributed to her medications for bipolar disorder with her asexuality, Gray destabilizes the binary between healthy-sexual-diversity and unhealthy-psychopathology. She is once again disrupting contemporary queer impulses to dissociate from ongoing histories of pathologization. Here, Mad and queer/asexual activism are as inseparable in text as they are in Gray. Gray and her comrades collectively refuse both sexuality-as-“rehabilitation” (See Kim 2011, 486) and asexual acceptance predicated upon normative “health” (Kim 2010, 158) – that is, they Madden asexuality. Twoey, in her own voice, remixes the sources of her own pathologization, staggering the supposedly-divine pronouncement of the DSM across pages and bookending its extracts with her own writing and art. In this undermining of the DSM’s epistemological polish, Gray disrupts the domination of written prose over poetry and visual art, while also critiquing the role of the DSM in commercialized health “care.” Her zine opens with the lines “sex sells and sex is sold / sex was being sold and i didn’t buy” (Gray 2018, n.p.). Gray indicates a pathology perceived not only in a refusal to practice sex, but also in a refusal to buy (into) it. After all, a refusal to buy into existing sexual paradigms is for her also a refusal to buy into a feminized reproductive mandate.

[weirdmarioenemies]

When you think of enemies from Super Mario Bros. 2, who comes to mind? Personally, one of the first that comes to MY mind are those weird birds that you find as early as World 1. The borderline flightless ones that were colored red, white and black in the original, but weirdly got some purple coloring in the All-Stars remake — the ones who weirdly barely appeared again. You know,

Name: Pidgit

Debut: Super Mario Bros. 2/ Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic

Did I actually trick anyone into thinking today’s enemy would be sweet old Tweeter? I don’t know if Tweeter is well-known enough to get that kind of anticipation!

Regardless, Pidgit’s a weird enemy, to be certain! Of course, one could say almost all Super Mario Bros. 2 enemies are weird, but “flightless crow riding on a carpet” is a bit more weird than enemies like “walking bomb”, “walking cactus”, and “bird that drops walking bomb”.

And that’s right: despite its name, Pidgit is a crow, which is not a pigeon at all! It is actually more wrong to name Pidgit after a pigeon than it is to name a gorilla enemy with some sort of hare-related pun in mind. And that’s science!

However, even its original Japanese name is just a portmanteau of “dodo” and “Rodrigues solitaire”, both of which are pigeons…this is Pidgit’s Trick.

This guy’s an oddball, one that didn’t debut in a Mario game and has had very few reappearances since, but has left an inescapable impact since. Before that, though, let’s cherish the reappearances it HAS had!

Pidgit’s first reappearance is a weird one—instead of riding a magic carpet, it finds itself being blasted out of Turtle Cannons in Fall as the Pidgit Bill! Super Mario World sure seems pretty fond of Super Mario Bros. 2, and this might be one of its most blatant callbacks. Funnily enough, in the SNES version only horizontally-moving Bullet Bills get replaced, which seems fine until you realize Super Mario World also introduces vertically- and diagonally-inclined Bullet Bills. Woopsie!

Pidgit Bills appear in the ending of Super Princess Peach, too, congratulating the player! That’s cute.

Pidgit’s next appearance would be another weird one. Wario’s Woods has it be one of Wario’s goons, replacing the fairy when Wario appears on the upper right screen to drop only bombs. Remember when Wario was a villain who could have minions? Yeah. Pidgit can fly here without a carpet at all, no foolin’! Is this part of the spell Wario put over his Woods? Is this why Pidgits fight for him? I don’t know! I think they just forgot.

They wouldn’t reappear until Partners in Time, and wow! This might actually be their only in-game reappearance where they actually ride their carpets! Which reminds me, do Pidgits make their own carpets, or do they get them from somewhere, or…?

I’ve never had nor played this game so I don’t know exactly how they act, but what I do know is that in the American version, they’re stronger and more likely to drop loot than any other version! That’s fun.

Do you remember 12 paragraphs ago, when you still had your youth and I said we’d get back to how Pidgit left an inescapable impact on the franchise? Well, that time is now, and that inescapable impact is the Lakitu!

“But Weirdma Rio Enemies dot Tumblr dot Com!,” you cry. “Lakitu debuted in Super Mario Bros., before Doki Doki Panic and thus long before Super Mario Bros. 2 was even conceived!” And on that, you’re right. But let’s look at an attribute unique to Pidgit!

You see, Pidgit rides a magic carpet, yes, but when it’s picked up, the player can ride the carpet themselves temporarily — after a certain amount of time, though, the carpet starts flashing before disappearing completely. Sound familiar?

Sounds a lot like Lakitu’s Cloud, if you ask me! While Lakitus have been riding their fair-weather friends since 1985, we weren’t privy to that same experience till long after Super Mario Bros. 2, in a little game called…Super Mario World! In a game which already has Pidgit, is it truly at all absurd to say it would have just one more reference to it?

So remember, in every game where you can ride a truculent terrapin’s silly cirrus, be sure to thank your local Pidgit!

…man, too bad we couldn’t segue into at least something about Tweeter, huh? First they were bought out by a rich muskrat, now this. Is there anything Tweeterheads get to look forward to?

the answer is ME!!!!!!

Hi!! I’m Mod Tweeter, and today’s post was written by none other than moi! It’s a real tweat and an honour to join the cast of Oddball Red-Cloaked-Daisy Critters, and I hope you will all enjoy my writings about more sillybeasts in the future!

For now, let’s close this post with a smooth songbird’s swingin’ serenade…

[mhalachai]

Word of the week: Canadianisms: Loonie and Toonie

getting back to things, here's a join word of the week/just Canadian things for you.

Loonie

The loonie, aka the $1 coin. Named such as, in 1987 when Canada moved from the $1 bill to the $1 coin, the winning design for the back was a lovely loon. To differentiate from the quarter (and other coinage that are silver in colour, the loonie is brass). Called huard, or loon, in Quebec.

From this...

to this:

However, the move to the coin resulted in an explosion in popularity of the $2 bill (which prior to this was as popular as the $2 bill is in the States today), which in turn led to the introduction in 1996 of the…

Toonie

When the chuckleheads at the Mint decided to turf the $2 bill in favour of a $2 coin it was in turn nicknamed the "toonie" (a portmanteau of "two" and "loonie"), because Canadians love a two-trick pony. Also known as the twoonie if you're trying to make up points in Scrabble. Apparently called deux piastres or deux piastres rond in Quebec because at that point the linguistic logic fell apart - if anyone out there is Québécois, please correct me if that's wrong.

From:

To:

Fun fact, when they introduced the toonie, everyone tried to get the two parts to pop apart. I was working at a fast food restaurant at the time and i had a couple of ten-year-olds trying to buy an ice cream cone with a separated toonie. I swapped it out for a $2 bill in my pocket and kept the outer part on a chain; still have it around somewhere (unless you're from the Mint in pursuit of criminal charges as it relates to currency defacement in which case I didn't and I don't)

And bonus:

If you’re ever up in Canada and at a liquor store and someone suggests you get a mickey, they’re not offering to spike your drink,  they’re suggesting you get a bottle of liquor that is 375ml, or 13 florida ounces.

And I cannot find anyone who has a reason as to why we call it that.

[marine-indie-gal]

I've been developing some ideas lately that would've been added to the Lore behind "Space Goofs" that being that a Show that could've have had its own Lore compare to the Other Successors that tend to have its own Little World Building within a Cartoon.

What kinda questions Me is how is there a Planet with a "B" next to it as if there were to be Another Planet with the Same Name out there in Space that has never been established before?

Because in the Show, the Goofs' Home Planet is called "Zigma B" in which "B" in Key Words would equal to "Second", so if there is a Second Home-Planet, then where would the First One be somewhere in the Galaxy?

Which then blends Me to a surprise that there might be some Secret Lore within the Species of where the Five Aliens' extraterrestrial habits might've come from that perhaps that there are only TWO Planets within the Same Name but each has their own Different Unique Environment. So, here I am to be the Very First Person in the Fandom to ever do so if I were to write my own Zigma Lore.

Introducing my very own Personal Sub-Species of Alien within "Zigma A" only instead of having the Goofs' Counterparts be in the Exact Same Size, I thought why not pull over...The Opposite Way around.

Because since that if the Straitened Aliens on Earth were meant to be based off within the Whole "Cartoonish Creatures through a Adolescent's Imagination" Trope (like with Pixar's "Monsters Inc"), why not have the Sub-Species of the Goofs be more on a Sapient-based level while also having each of their own Kind in the First Homeland to be way more "Gigantic"?

So if you guys tend to remember where Last Month, I drew Bolok as an Alien. Technically, the Design that I did for Him was based off of a Certain Theory that I had in mind for awhile which I'd figure would now be the Best Time to share within my own Personal Headcanon Alien Lore behind "Space Goofs".

I'd figure that if the Aliens from what we see were in Human Size, I'd thought why not have a Race of Different Size Aliens while still playing as the Complete Opposite towards the Small Invaders' Nature.

Mainly inspired by "Ava's Demon", "Fantastic Planet", and even "The BFG" (which is where I got the inspirations from behind these Personal Alien OC Designs).

Introducing the Space Goofs' Species' Cousins from Another Home Planet ("Zigma A"), the Gigazines (a Portmanteau Blend between Two Words; "Gigantes" (Greek for "Giants") and even "Zinzins" (which is French for "Goofs")), which serve to be the Universe's Giants from one of the Planets across the Galaxy where they have their own Domination within a Giant Planet populated by their own Species of Giants, in which, each of their own Race (similar to the Smaller Goofs and the Humans) inhabit Many of the Lands of Zigma A.

Oh, they also have their own Space Animals (which are also Gigantic).

Unlike the Smaller Goofs, the Gigazines are somewhat Neutral (despite some of them being Tyrannical while Others seem to remain more Peaceful), being that they are the Complete Opposite to most Smaller Aliens from around the Worlds, as they tend to act more just like the Humans while also serving their own Personal Natural Environments to their World. They all come in Shapes and Sizes in terms of being more "Humanoid", raging from Space, Elemental, or even More Beastly of Anthro-Based.

Their own Mythology behind the Lore behind Two Different Planets shares a brief connection to their own Identical Smaller Species (in which both of their Planets happened to share the Same Religions despite each of them having their own Different Beliefs compare to the Humans on Earth).

Long ago, a Galaxy Deity by the Name, "Zagami" created Many Different Planets across the Universe, but One Certain Planet however remained to be Split Apart into Two Completely Different Planets (that being the Planet, "Zigma"). In Zigma, Two Different Species of the Family once lived together. It was all once peaceful until the Day when the Giants start to becoming more Evil day by day, not caring to what Other Creatures are trying to thrive for in order to survive as the Gigazines took the Planet as their World. Desperate to have the Lands back, the Small Counterparts decided to declare a War between both the Giants and the Small Ones to receive their own lands back but as long as the Great War went on, the Goofs failed to receive their own Lands back in the Hands of the Giants' own Great Gigazine King.

When the War ended miserably, the Small Aliens prayed to their God to receive their own Lands. While the Gigazine King didn't listen a word to what Zagami said when the Creation Deity convinced the Gigazines to change their own mind to share the World with their Small Counterparts, Zagami decide to teach them a lesson by "Splitting" The World into Halves of Two Worlds (Zigma A and Zigma B). Because of this Decision of Splitting Each Other apart, the Giants had to live on their own Planet on their own while the Small Aliens received such Joy and Happiness into their Lives when they finally got their own Home Planet to themselves without any Evil Giants around.

By the Time when Humans came around from Earth ever since the Beginning, the Aliens have recently discovered on how to use Technology in which the Gigazines decide to find Some New Species to capture and even use them as Animals (either for Science or to have Pets). When the Humans were gaining the Attention towards the Giants, the Gigazines decided to capture the Earth's Domination of Humans and even take them to Earth where they treated each of them like Animals to spare within a New Species of Creature. As things were already bad from the Start, the Rest of the Humans had enough of being kept as Animals to in which they decide plot a Rebellion against the Aliens who kept them as Prisoners from all these Years as they managed to Escape the Alien World (despite some of them who have died along the Way) far away from the Gigazines (just as soon as they were about to exterminate the rest of their own Population when the Betrayal came during the Revolution).

When the Humans are somewhat now being helped by the Gigazines' Tiny Counterparts after being accidentally crashed into Zigma B, the Good Aliens contacted Peace with the Humans as they manage to create a Solar Alarm which would Trigger a lot of the Gigazines for a Loud Sound that would hurt their own Ears for the sake of Karma for kidnapping One Planet's Dominated Species for the sake of it.

Wanting for Peace when having enough of the Rebellion, the Gigazines decided to apologize to the Humans for what they have done to force them as their own New Animals through a Radio Signal in Space as they were sent out in Zigma B to retrieve the Humans to put them back to their True Homeland where all of the Dominated Species of their own Planets return to Peace and Harmony once and for all as they started to build their own Towns and Cities around each Country of Earth as the Gigazines have learned to never kidnapped Another World's Species ever again. Which all explains the Whole Truth of why Gigazines are so different from All Small Aliens (even their own Counterparts, the Goofs).

I'll probably later do some more Designs of Other Gigazine Species since the Very First Ones that I drew were meant to be some Digital Concept based off of Sci-Fi Media like I've mentioned before.

Despite the fact that Fantastic Planet's Alien Characters were one of my Inspirations for these Aliens, The Whole Inspiration behind my own Lore for these Counterparts of the Space Goofs' species is also loosely based on the Concept behind Fantastic Planet (that being Gigantic Aliens vs. Humans against the Future), though while the Story itself (despite being a Futuristic Version of the Biblical Story of Moses) contains a much more Darker tone, my version behind the Concept itself takes an even more "Lighter" tone compare to its Literary Counterpart.

Also, I have no certain HC on what the Aliens on Zigma B's own species might be called since I haven't figured it out yet, but since I'm only referring to them as "Smaller Counterparts" compare to my Alien Species OC, I'll just still end up calling them "Goofs" just because of the Franchise's own title while still rhythming that might have something to do with either "Goofs" or "Aliens".

Zigma A, Gigazines (Giant Alien Theory and their own Designs) (c) Me

Space Goofs (c) Xilam

[desceros]

I'm really sorry for asking this but....

What does Blurple means? And what's the fic about?

don't be sorry!! it's always good to seek knowledge if you do not have it!

"blurple" is a portmanteau of "blue" and "purple" and for my use refers to a poly relationship a reader character would have with leo and donnie. so you'd be dating both of them at the same time, as opposed to one or the other.

i have a few blurple fics floating around, so i'm not sure exactly which one you're asking about specifically! i have a blurple villain au, the masterpost for which you can find here. i also have a blurple au for my long fic, symphony, the tag for which you can find here. those are the two big ones, though i'm sure somewhere around here i have ideas floating around for others.

[haalfpipe]

Well-developed, well-nourished white male in no acute distress.

This is what she writes about me. Look, as your sponsor, I need you to write this down. All of it. Word for word. Don’t try to make sense of anything I say, just write. When you’re confused, keep writing. Tired, keep writing. Cravings, for God’s sake just keep writing. Because if it works for you, it might work for somebody else.

Now go back to that note.

She’s my primary care physician, the woman who's seen me since I outgrew a pediatrician. She sits there with her legs folded together in knobs and branches poking through bright blue doctor fabric, and a suspicious thickness around her belly. She's the same as any other anorexic physician who eats only something with oats she poured from a blender.

Write this down—this is how you should be eating.

If she’s your doctor, you don’t feel better after reading her notes. That's if you remember to find them in her office’s digital patient portal, where after every visit they’re posted on the other side of a forgotten login and a compromised password.

Write this down—read about yourself.

It will be midnight, lying in your bed with your phone glowing at your chest. Picture an otter on its back. Swiping through, passing content from one thumb to another like the screen is a stack of cash, except you're counting fifteen second clips of billionaire porn. Supercars. Island waterfalls. French-press coffee on private jets. Squats and deadlifts and protein powders beaming into your eyes from a girl with perfect pores and skin vacuum-sealed against her clavicle.

Every fifth swipe is an ad.

A reminder.

Refrigerated ship-to-home ingredients—remember to pack lunch.

Swipe up.

High-yield online savings—pay your credit card bill.

Swipe up.

Cable-knit sweaters on some Macedonian model—do laundry.

Swipe up.

Machine-surfaced cast iron—run the dishwasher.

Swipe up.

Anymore, this is why you read the portmanteau digitox. Pause your social media for a week, the usual prescription. Put down your phone and try to work on impulse control just to discover you haven’t eaten anything green, and you’re still in the same clothes with an overdue balance on your credit card.

Your grade school teachers tried to teach you the habit of using a spiral-bound calendar. Now all you need is phone streaming a river of social media as you fall asleep.

Swipe up.

Lying here in the dark and your life support is a lithium battery glued to a glowing rectangle.

Swipe up.

Grounding your bare feet in water without sunscreen on a hot day in the mountains—schedule your booster shot.

Swipe.

Wet coffee grounds into cute countertop compost bins—it’s Monday. The trash should be at the curb.

Swipe.

Robot vacuums for pile carpet—clean your floors. And when you see it, remember that your shitty old vacuum has a filter bag with a lifespan.

Swipe up. Swipe right.

Until you’re unconscious.

Wake up and your phone is down on the carpet, smeared with oily fingerprints in the shape of a cross.

Swipe.

This is content that wakes you up.

Swipe.

Content that keeps you alive.

Swipe.

You’ll watch the same shit again tomorrow.

Swipe.

Another night and your thumbs make streaks right and downward until you watch an ad for a metabolism diet that reminds you of poor appetite reminds you of weight loss reminds you of a balance scale and a stainless sink with a floor pedal. The gaunt doctor’s notes and your decade of symptoms are on the other side of a login somewhere behind all these crucifix-shaped smears.

Swipe.

Reading about yourself and why you aren’t going to die gets you through a few days. But you feel like the way she sits there with all her machines and her complete sentences perfectly typed into a keyboard are missing something. The way you might miss your own addiction. Like I did. I didn't know I was an addict until after my first meeting.

Write this down—find a meeting.

In recovery, you wake up to your phone but the real-life support is downstairs on the fridge: a full calendar, a dry erase board with dented corners you can grab when you're in the kitchen section of a savings store. It comes with battle scars just as much as you’d expect from colliding with errant wheels, the magnetic corners trying to grab onto every shopping cart that comes too close. Underpaid employees tire of wedging it back onto a shelf because for shoppers a blank calendar is too much commitment even at a discount, and it's too big and boring and cheap to steal. Not that anyone would care. It’s five rows, seven columns, a sequence of days that never change tattooed in cute cursive across the top.

In recovery, you see a blank calendar and it just means you haven't yet been told what to do. You put it on your fridge. Let it observe every moment of the day, every time you leave the house, or empty the trash, the dishwasher, like somehow it will learn your entire week, until you're awake the next morning and surprise, it's still blank. At midnight when you open the thick, insulated door and the cold light rips out into the dark kitchen, it's there, caught in the beam. It might as well be found in a searchlight, flattened against the side of some dumpster, hiding from its destiny: thirty-five squares of graffiti in vibrant dry-erase marker, instructions squeezed wherever they fit.

Eventually you’re just some kid who can't color inside the lines, smearing it with bright letters, thick from bent tips of markers always dropping and rolling under the refrigerator. When it’s finally numbered, you’ll need a quote-a-day paper pad showing the date in tall digits leaning off the page at you when you open the refrigerator for milk. This way every morning you have to interact with the calendar. Tear off the old sheet of digits for another and find the square it matches.

It says, twenty-two.

A new day.

A new set of instructions.

A new inspiration to forget.

Today’s italicized quotation will stick because this is Monday.

It says, chance favors the prepared mind. The corner of the date pad says Louis Pasteur. The reason you don’t get sick from the milk.

Before it was clung onto our kitchen monolith, my calendar began on my phone as a progress tracker. If you’re burdened with the twelve step curse of recovery, the meetings and your therapy will refer to this as a habit tracker. It’s how you’re supposed to visualize an accumulation of effort. How you’re supposed to feel normal when you look backward. Everyday is another responsibility you were never taught, but on Sunday at least you washed the bedding. You never see how much goes into a normal life until you’re doing none of it. Somebody has to tell you that you’re living in trash and the blanket over your laundry smells so much like air freshener it stinks.

Somebody has to tell you to get out of bed.

Buy a new toothbrush.

Open the windows.

Go to the interview.

Eat.

Put down your phone.

That today is your mother’s birthday.

Somebody has to save you. And then you owe her your life. You get married.

Swipe to thirteen years later, and recovery doesn’t matter. Try telling someone you just met that you've been clean for thirteen years. Nobody cares. Picture showing up to defend a decade-long dissertation of research to have your advisor say thanks, it no longer counts toward your grade. You can dry-clean your academic attire, like everyone else. She tosses it onto a stack of papers sunk into her carpet with its own footprint, a white pillar, the size of a trash can. Still, you want her to least read it. You want anybody to read it.

If you’re like me, what you want is somebody to start a pot of coffee after dinner and stare at you across the kitchen table while it gets hot. You want somebody to talk with all night until the sun comes back.

If you’re like me, you don’t stop talking. Somebody finally sits down and drops a nickel at your booth and they have to let the song play.

This is the jukebox full of fresh vinyl.

I didn't want to have to tell you any of this. Nobody else needs to know anything here.

This is the note accidentally left unlocked.

This is the essay that ends up shredded in the back of a mobile secure destruction truck.

This is the long form note written in couples' therapy to wrinkle up for a waste basket, never to be read.

This is the confession after the crime found scribbled in a notebook when all the neighbors say they never saw it coming. If they did, then there wouldn't be a vacant house ribboned with yellow tape and an overgrown lawn to explain to all the divorced pickleball women when they come over for cocktails.

What I'm trying to say is none of this matters anymore.

I haven’t done anything wrong. There hasn’t been a crime. I don’t have the time. There’s no space for it on my calendar. After work I’m showering and brushing my clothes with horsehair so the hard water doesn’t fade the blacks to grey on waistbands and seams. Then I’m reaching into the fridge and cooking dinner and the dry erase marker says I’m exchanging table decorations for the new season, spring. Outside in the dark I’ll use a flashlight and leaf blower to clear fallen seed pods out of potted plants. The kitchen drawer will be out of dish towels and it’ll be one in the morning before those will be ironed and folded.

Write this down—never landscape with sycamores.

If you’re like me, you’re too tired to do anything wrong.

It’s because I’ve been on step twelve for so long. That's how they pull you in, with their logos and websites and filtered headshots of mentors and their about-us sections, seining through the candidate swamp of deadbeats as wide as freeways across the city. The dozen secrets to success that can be yours if you act now, no signature required.

A fresh start. Anonymous.

You can learn all the reasons addiction is ruining your life and how much better you’ll be in recovery. By step one you’ll sleep better, they tell you. By step six you’ll be giving presentations at work, they tell you. What they don’t tell you is by step twelve you should be growing the pyramid. Sponsor the kid who bags your groceries. In recovery, his bagging will be a little sloppier. Eggs on the bottom, untrimmed carrot tops flowering like pampas grass from sacks of wrinkled paper. For eight hours of bagging, his eyes follow the backs of his hands. He never looks up. Because in recovery he feels like shit.

What they don’t tell you about recovery is a lot.

What they don't tell you is that after step twelve, there's nothing. It’s just more step twelve. More meetings. More relapses. Until you’re dead. After I turn out to be your sponsor, then after years of me and a therapist telling you what to do, one day you find yourself at the curb outside a meeting like they just signed you out of the hospital and stuck you in a wheelchair on the sidewalk.

Hospitals have to get rid of you.

It's for liability.

You're discharged, but until they get you to the curb, they're on the hook for your life. The administrators don’t care about a junkie until they need his bed for the next admission from a crowded emergency lobby. For a few days your entire world is one hundred square feet between four walls with a sealed window and a mechanical bedframe. You have your own bathroom. There’s a whiteboard showing names of physicians you never see. It’s a different sort of dry erase calendar with notes in three sections: Today. Tomorrow. Future.

In recovery, planning ahead feels like predicting the future.

To fix you, people in scrubs who aren’t nurses bring trays with pills in little cups of wax paper, made for ketchup. Every pill is constipating. That, and the immobility of lying in bed until your back aches. This is why there are wall stud-mounted steel handles around the toilet. You get microwaved meals, and hourly visits from exhausted nurses wearing too much concealer smeared over their bad skin.

You like it inside the sterile room, baseboards to ceiling in taupe, and a floor drain in the bathroom. You wish you could stay. But this is what real care feels like—being discarded, thrown back out onto the street.

Anymore, your friends are all stoned, you say this to the nice nurse that you want coming with you. To bring you little stacks of cups at home. She uses your face to unlock your phone and dials an emergency contact. She props you in a wheelchair still wrinkled in the seat from her last castaway. She starts pushing. What you don't know is that after twelve hours of babysitting a floor of invalids and texting her ex in the supply closet, she'll collapse at her apartment with shitty alcohol, neglect her kid, rub one out and fall asleep with the television. Her own pile of laundry stinks of air freshener. And after a week with that botched fantasy you'll want her pushing you out again, faster, you’ll kick your legs straight out when you see the double doors beneath the exit sign. You’re thinking all this and then the wheelchair's at the street, she sets the brakes, puts a hand on your back and bolts you upright. Right beside the trash bins.

Swipe to this blithering milksop balancing on the curb waiting for my emergency contact to show up with a fast food bag of burgers because that’s exactly how this whole thing happened.

Write this down—fast food is what started this.

I'll get to the beginning. What ended up being the beginning.

There's one thing the alcoholics, junkies, and sex addicts in recovery won't tell you in their propaganda. I hate to ruin the surprise: walk into a meeting, and this is the rest of your boring ass life that nobody will ever care about. It says it right there in the branding. Anonymous. There’s no background check. Nobody asks to see track marks, or a collapsed septum. All you have to do is show up and give a name. Every week it isn’t any different. It’s a United Methodist rec room that hosted a day camp of kids with sticky fingers making crafts before organizers got there at sunset to unfold a card table and plug in a coffee percolator, a big trophy passed between support groups. Except instead of a bright Stanley Cup this is a storm-tossed aluminum bombshell that means your quiet gathering of church sponsorship has made it. Men's groups. Yard sales. Slow-read Bible study. Blood drives. Tonight it's with a room full of enablers. Because at some point they all relapse. That's why they keep coming back. Two dozen strangers who all share the same passion means the best networking opportunity junkies can get.

Swipe to a room full of cravings triggered by one of these caffeine dispensers looking like it was pulled from the basement of some parish.

Write this down—you’ll have meetings on Tuesdays. No matter what. This is what they call them.

No matter what, you make time for it.

No matter what, you attend.

No matter what, someone from last week is missing.

For me, recovery is never more than arms' length away. Even now, on my nightstand, where instead of an orange bottle of pills with a label showing the name of a hospice patient I'll never meet, there's a wallet as thick as an Uno deck and right next to it is a small leather journal with a checklist of everything I have to do not to sink. A calendar of instructions to-go. It's the same journal I've used since step four.

At first, the steps feel good. After your first meeting you might as well be twelve years old, and wide awake the night before a vacation. You’re going somewhere new. For a few days you walk upright with great posture. See yourself in the mirror of a department store where you’re trying on new shirts and you realize you have shoulders. It's a proud moment when you can check step one off your list. The first three go pretty fast and then you get stuck on step four. The moral inventory. All the lies, betrayals, and cheating, all the people you've hurt and jobs you've lost. You have to open a note on your phone and start typing. A rap sheet of all your sins, synced with cloud storage. That way every dumbass moment of your life is right there beneath your passcode.

I'm always writing things down. Journaling. Calendaring. Staying clean means keeping busy, having something to look forward to, always wanting to see tomorrow. It's when tomorrow doesn't matter that you give in. Find your local NA schedule and poke your head through the wrong door at the community center for that room full of liars calling itself a No-Matter-What meeting and tell me if it looks like any of them care about tomorrow.

Before relapse, most of them get lost in responsibility piling up at home. Picture Sisyphus. There's no reward for your work. When you stop feeling perfect for zero effort—that's addiction—daily routines are labor. In recovery, suddenly it all matters. Nobody wants another day of it. So you offload it from your brain, suspend your decision-making ability. Turn yourself into an implement. If you don't have to remember what to do next, then while you're at the sink soaking the sweat stains out of your new shirts, you're free to daydream about eventually sleeping in again. Because there's always more.

There's the alarm clock to wake you.

There's a duvet to fold.

There's clothing to launder.

There are dishes to wash.

Carpets to vacuum.

Now go back to your thirty-five squares and start writing—

Blow the leaves.

Put gas in the car.

Pack a lunch box.

Buy groceries.

Pay the utilities.

Today it's all on the calendar and the dry erase bleeds together in a way your brain can't decipher. No square is big enough. Cram all this in between five, eight-hour minimum wage workdays crutched by black coffee and chewing gum and next time you're washing shirts you'll daydream about not waking up.

After enough of step twelve, addicts in recovery suffer an increased chance of relapse, a brief glimpse at being high and productive. The meetings will call this functional addiction, the sustained twilight before once again losing your footing, being fired, and going broke. Keep going to meetings, and therapy, and tell yourself to keep trying but eventually everyone gives up running to the sunset, the sinking reminder that you can do everything right and still fail. You need structure. Somebody has to tell you what to do. There's a blank calendar to fill.

Swipe to when you bring home the dented thing, still wearing its torn shrink-wrap. At first, you won’t unwrap it. Thinking two weeks out might as well be next year. Nobody can see that far ahead. You put these thirty-five blank squares on the fridge and walk away. You’ll start writing tomorrow. Today, grab a sheet of paper and fold a single crease, forming two pages that will tell you what to do. Make a checklist for right now. After a week, replace this with a notebook so you can flip back to yesterday’s completed list, then another one from seven pages ago, or sixty pages ago.

Like everything else, at first a list makes you feel good. You write down everything you have to do and draw a little empty square next to it where you can scratch a check mark. What the meetings and therapy won’t call this is the Dunning-Kruger effect. We won’t tell you to overestimate your own success as you check off all the to-dos for which nobody else needs reminders.

We won’t tell you, but this is what happens. With every box, give yourself a gold star.

Write this down.

Brush your teeth—check.

Make coffee—check.

Turn off the coffee pot—check.

Remember your wallet—check.

Close the garage door—check.

Finally, you're getting somewhere. Every day, it's the same list, telling you what to do. The same set of successes. Because before, you were barely able to find the door out of the house in the morning.

By the end, every box is inked and you get to see just how much filled your day. Everything in your life becomes an item on a list. A direction. Something to achieve. You get to see the set of instructions for your life.

Everything becomes a step. One step closer to the completed pages of your boring life and knowing that tomorrow you have to start at the top of the same stupid blank page with a new list. Then another the next day. Then next week. And the month after that. Until you're dead.

Like normal people.

It's been a long time since you felt normal.

Everyday you're charging upright into a rough surf of surprises heaving themselves against you. Look back at your little piece of paper. It'll tell you where to go next. Plan out every minute from the moment you make coffee in the morning until you’re home and you step into the garage after a shower to grab the electric leaf blower and surprise, it’s dead.

Write this down—plug in leaf blower.

It needs to be cabled to a heavy charger that gets hot and smells like ozone. The one-hour charge is just enough time for the clocks in your house to be suddenly louder. The carpet is more matted than it was yesterday. In the walls, all the plumbing squeaks with hard water and suddenly it’s caked inside the mesh aerators of every faucet.

Write this down—polish the hardwood.

Electric mop the high-traffic carpets.

Soak the stainless faucets in vinegar.

From the size of my list, our house looks like Xanadu.

Find another achievement. Check another box. Until one day in the middle of it all you're on a ladder in your bedroom replacing a smoke alarm with a ten-year battery and you realize you'll be up on this ladder maybe five more times before you're dead.

One day when you’re off work you get back to the calendar and pair it with the date pad of quotes. It feels smooth, the unused dry-erase surface. To make progress, you have to fill it. Thirty-five blank squares.

For monthly maintenance, pick a square.

For laundry, pick five squares.

Bedding, pick two squares.

Clean the oven.

Then the bathrooms.

Vacuum.

After a few months the neat printing is full of abbreviated instructions, and you can't see any outlines between the white blocks. Each day dissolves into the next. In the morning you see it when you get to the fridge for milk and tear open the next quotation.

Louis Pasteur’s quotation.

What I’m prepared for is running out of ink, and dry erase markers.

What I’m trying to say is—let’s hope this works. Recovery is what got me into this whole mess. Recovery, and McDonald's.

[froshele]

compiling this for my own nefarious needs but any of you with fanventures may be able to appreciate it:

List of things in Homestuck that are direct results of Scratch or Caliborn's involvement and would not exist in AUs without them,

Or: A Fansession Worldbuilding To Do List

Please feel free to rb with additions!

1. The troll caste system and society as we understand it

What's pivotal to the fuchsia hegemony more than literally anything else? Their psychic resistance, which is necessary to survive proximity to their living alien god? Sure, but canonically Doc Scratch introduced her after the... well, the scratch.

Glb'golyb isn't organically part of troll society in all universes and didn't choose to come down all theophanic and shit one day:

I like to think of her as the pet I gave to their race, at the dawn of their species' evolution. Again, it's just the sort of thing a good host does.

-- Scratch, panel 5936

She is also probably one cause (next to the everything proceeding from her) of everyone's nightmares and thus the invention of recuperacoons.

So whattafuck was going on before? Well, based on troll biology's every canonical indication, probably they were chugging along fine in discrete non-child-exiling hive societies run by mother grubs (who were once also people to them).

In the Beforus timeline it seems the concept of an empress is still real and she still is more important than the colony mother, so that's a cultural shift that may have been contemporary with the beginning of lusii as commensals (basically, queens lost sway as they made more longer lived more specialized workers, and those outsourced childcare to lusii).

In such a scenario it is your choice whether lusii are still a normal part of life for the trolls in your universe, and how your troll society developed is in your hands anyway so maybe none of this is real.

As for the other, canonically spacefaring terrors and cherubim, your fansession trolls could probably worship them just as well as having any other type of religion. It depends on what you want horrorterrors and cherubs (and angels more generally) to symbolize and do in your narrative.

2. The moons

Derse and Prospit are defined in gameplay by contact with Skaia and the Terrors respectively. But the Terrors are only talking because Caliborn is massacring them, though the planetary orbit does take it into the Furthest Ring where they live, so... do with that what you will. What are they doing? My headcanon personally is that they eat the detritus of finished or failed sessions... but not everyone has a take nearly so ecological.

Also! Chess usually has two players, but what if the tabletop war metaphor of your session is some form of checkers, or three player chess, or ...? :^) Why then you would need another portmanteau moon... back in the day we called it Derspit and we liked it!

3. Troll nocturnality

This is specific to Alternia. If your guys evolve somewhere else they may not face such a terrible sun...

4. The Green Moon and Sun

Didn't exist on Beforus! The Moon was created by the B1 kids for Green Sun shenanigans, which are impossible without it. Also to do with LE (presumably) and thus a post-Scratch world construction; first guardians (which Scratch is, and which he makes fusion caliborn upon, um, hosting him) probably act very differently for most fansessions.

5. Scratching and the Denizen Choice

Doc Scratch inherently is somehow connected to it. It may not be supposed or able to happen in worlds without him and Sburb forks without universe cancer, and the price may be steep for the fact that it does. After all, he has never failed to summon his master, who is always already here...

You may want to consider a few rule changes to your SBURB game. :^) What'd be new for Denizens without all this?

6. Troll religion, generally

Scratch is their First Guardian and sent them Glb'golyb. He/English are also the Mirthful Messiahs somehow (don't ask, it has to do with Gamzee and Arquiusprite also being components of English along with Caliborn), and probably paradoxically connected to,,, all the juggalononsense, and maybe the Jewish parallels idk I don't want them to be and so that's my blind spot, I don't care if they caused The System and neither has anyone fun ever. But maybe they did. In that case we must consider how they could not do that, which is not hard. Just as it takes more muscles to frown, it takes less brainpower to just handwave stuff like this as cultural development coincidence.

I think it's funny because we live in ICP town and so I keep it in when I fuck around in here, because I think the entire signless thing is interesting and leads to heartwrenching implications, but you actually can define your purples however. My homestuck-hiatused partner has one who's coded sort of like a commedia fuckup court reporter.

7. The entire canon limitations

All of it loops back to make English, so the MSPA reader stuff goes out of its way to define that universe as locked away and separate.

This is possible in more ways, I think. I'm probably missing a lot, which only seems core because it's prominent in the anomalous session. I don't know! Does anyone else? Thoughts towards a world in which he is not already here, and the frog can hope for something?

[callioclops]

Woah, a pinned post

Figured I may as well start using Tumblr as an actual blog rather than a promotional tool for streaming that I no longer do and letting it just sit here and occasionally reblog something funny from my friends, so I'm making a introduction post.

Hi, I'm Calliope or Callie for short. I'm an autistic trans woman and I use she/her. My primary interests include structural analysis of TV and anime, and getting way too deep into the mechanics of various video games inevitably resulting in an attempt to flawlessly optimise whatever it is I'm meant to be doing. As you can imagine this draws me to roguelikes a lot, but also fighting games, RPGs, etc.

If you fall under any of these groups kindly fuck off: Homophobes, TERFs and other transphobes, and honestly just as a general catch-all if you harbour a hatred for any group of people for no reason besides their appearance or the way they refer to themselves.

Quick pre-emptive Q&A:

Why do you have anon asks turned off? - Simple answer is that I don't want anon hate. I think if you want to be mean to someone online you can at least have the courage to stand by what you said without hiding behind a circle with sunglasses. If you want to send an ask but don't want it to be public that it's you, put "[/p]" somewhere in the ask. If you aren't being hateful I'll respect your want to be anonymous. Obviously I'll still know but that's the best I can give.

What TV shows/anime do you usually talk about? - That's very dependant on what I'm watching at any given time. I'll try to keep this up to date (no promises) with what I'm currently interested in. At the time of writing (23/12/23) the two main ones are Rick & Morty and My Hero Academia. These two specifically I have heard are a turn off for a lot of people due to the fandoms, personally I don't really interact in that space.

What posts can I expect? - Probably not that many in all honesty. I'm writing this at 11pm and it's entirely possible that I'll just forget about this for weeks on end. But if I am to post it will likely be short rants about any of the above mentioned media. Either talks about specific episodes of a show or mechanical intricacies of video games. I like to imagine that it will be educational in a way that is completely incomprehensible in an academic capacity.

Why a cyclops? - Initially, I was attempting to 'transition' my online persona at the same time as I was transitioning in real life and wanted a pun or portmanteau based on my new name. Callioclops was the only one I could think of and I stuck with it. Over time though it really grew on me, I had design ideas for an icon (Thanks to @caeruluspirit for the profile image), I really just became engrossed in cyclopes and monocular creatures in general. I think part of this fascination also stems from an irl friend who has depth perception issues and once tried to explain it to me by saying "The sky is in front of the trees." I've been thining about that every so often ever since.

So yeah, I'm going to try and be a bit more active on here. Share a piece of my autism with a wider audience. If that interests you stick around, if not then by all means keep on moving.

[nemo-duspy-writes]

Let's see whether it's appreciated to put a snippet of my current WIP here. It's hard Sci-Fi, called Anarchtica, and mostly takes place in the early 23rd century in the Antarctic.

i'd love to hear what you think of this start of the Prologue. It's only the first draft, so don't be too harsh.

Anarchtica

Prologue

Somewhere on the Antarctic circle - 2057-12-31

From the small research vessel on a calm sea, Professor Bergmann spotted one of the massive, converted cargo ships. If he had spotted it, the staffless ship must've spotted them as well, though it did not make any efforts to change its course. It kept gliding through the water slowly, mostly moved by the current. It resembled a whale, using minimal movements to conserve energy. 

The container ship's propellers would only engage to keep the vessel on its long trip around Antarctica, or, after the curtain project is activated tomorrow, to hunt down every man-made object trying to cross the boundary to the cold continent. 

Bergmann's ship was the last manned vessel allowed in these waters, the last that would see the southern land mass for 150 years. The silence was eerie, it stood in stark contrast to the bustling of workers that used to work here over the last few years. The temporary housing still marred the otherwise untouched land, a windswept desert of snow and black rock. Though, it wasn't totally dead anymore. On some spots by the seaside, the snow had melted, and resilient plants took the opportunity. 

A bit away from the coast, on the side of a hill was a massive concrete cube. It had many nicknames while it was being built, but the one that stuck was 'Chtultwo', a portmanteau of the cosmic horror's name and two. 

Within its thick walls lay the world's entire stock of Sodium-22-chloride. Chemically nothing more than table salt. You could have used it for cooking, if the sodium isotope hadn't been radioactive, producing Neon-22 by emitting a positron - the antiparticle to an electron. Half-life time: 2.6 years. That in and of its own isn't too special, nothing that would warrant quarantining an entire continent. Until they figured out that Sodium-22 is the perfect catalyst for cold fusion of deuterium. The reaction created enough heat to be self-sufficient.

This was a great discovery. It promised an easy way to cover the world's entire energy needs for millennia, or even making the colonization of the solar system feasible. 

Then, in 2048, the city of Kairo was wiped off the earth by an explosion bigger than the Tzar bomba's. The victim count was above 10 Million. The culprit was suspected to be a small terrorist cell, having built a cheap and easy fusion bomb with the help of Sodium-22.

The destructive power that was the driving force for most politics since the second half of the 20th century, now in the hands of everyone with college level physics' knowledge, water, and a few grams of a relatively easy to buy isotope.

This was one of the few times in history the world came together. They knew no human and no government on the planet should wield such power. They put heavy restrictions on every way to produce or isolate the isotope, and they confiscated each gram of Sodium-22. 

At this point, the distrust between the nations welled up again. China absolutely refused the Americans' plan to store it in a safe area on their mainland until it is degraded, and vice versa. There needed to be a land on earth that was not affiliated with any nation, tectonically stable and easy to defend from anyone trying to take it.

As ludicrous as it sounded, Antarctica was the only option. 

And so, they rebuilt a fleet of container ships to be armed with drones, controlled by an AI program whose task was to destroy every attempt to reach the Sodium-22, until it was degraded far enough to be a threat. They settled on 150 years; in that time the stock would degrade to 4.3 quintillionth of its original mass. 

A big challenge was to make sure the ships survived the time without any outside help; that they wouldn't run out of energy. Most of the vessels were fitted with fission reactors; reliable and tested. But for some, as an experiment, some ships had different energy sources in their bellies.

His colleague, Doctor Defarote, joined Prof. Bergmann at the railing. 

She blew into her hands to warm them up.

"Cold here even in the summer," she said with a strong Argentinian accent.

"Yes, Daria," Professor Bergmann said, his view still on the container ship. "It's not that much of a loss that no one can be here for one and a half centuries."

Daria looked at him. "Is that sarcasm? We will miss all the effects that climate change has on it. With it becoming more temperate, we will lose out on the opportunity to observe a new ecosystem forming, while we will miss a lot of the old inhabitants dying. It's a loss for everyone."

"Yes, I know. But we won't be able to change it." 

The container ship was now almost at their vessel.

"Which number is that?" Doctor Defarote asked.

"34"

"Oh, so this is yours?"

"Yes." Professor Bergmann couldn't hold back the proud smile. "A thorium fission reactor coupled with an inertia-type fusion reactor. Not as efficient as a theoretical Natwotwo, but more efficient than anything else right now, while still being reliable enough to run for more than 200 years."

The container ship passed them, showing how much bigger it was compared to their vessel. Like an unscalable wall of steel. 

The Professor and his colleague looked at it with awe.

"A true marvel of human engineering," he said. "A monument to the intellect of humans and that with science and technology, their creations can even withstand the harshest conditions."

Doctor Defarote scoffed. "For me it means exactly the opposite. That humans are stupid and stubborn, that they'd rather quarantine a whole continent than not using the newest science to kill other people or destroy our home planet."

"What a pessimistic view." The vibration of the device in his jacket interrupted their conversation. "We can discuss this later, but I think it's time to leave the area. We don't want to be on this side of the curtain when it activates."

Professor Bergmann ripped his eyes from the massive steel hull. As he turned to go under deck, he spotted something else on the horizon in the water and froze.

"Is that another ship?"

[sasquapossum]

I know I've beaten this drum before, but here we go again: "everybody move to the city" is not the solution to car-culture and urban-design problems. In fact, I think it's part of the problem. Allow me to explain.

tl;dr it's all about the votes

First, let's figure out what "the city" means. Most large cities consist of two parts: a very dense core, and outlying areas which are practically the same as suburbs. Still vast tracts of single-family detached homes, sliced apart by "stroads" that isolate more than they connect. (For those who don't know the term, it's a portmanteau of "street" which is a place of commerce and "road" which is a way to get from one city/town to another. Stroads combine the worst of both, separating what's on either side with high-speed traffic.) A classic example is Detroit, which is one of the largest US cities geographically. The stroad near us when we lived in Detroit was actually worse than the one near us in an adjoining suburb (Hazel Park), in both we were surrounded by other SFD homes, in both we had major highways nearby, a dearth of stores, and so on.

So, "move to the city" can mean one of two different things: moving to the core, or to the outer areas. If you move from the suburbs to an outer area, that's what we in computing call a "no-op" - an instruction that does nothing. Neither the place you left nor the place you went to has or will change, except for a few exceptions I'll get to later. Most importantly, nothing has changed for you. You're still living in basically the same environment (except maybe a bit dirtier and with fewer trees). On the other hand, if you move to the core - the only version of "move to the city" that really means anything at all - you might have well improved conditions for yourself, at the expense of making that core even less affordable. You will also have added to the infrastructure challenges there. "New urbanists" like to talk about the infrastructure costs of sprawly suburbs, but for electrical power in particular there are equal challenges for dense urban cores. The optimal distribution is actually somewhere in between. This effect is somewhat attenuated for other kinds of infrastructure such as fresh water, food distribution, and waste disposal, but we still have to ask: how many more upstate New York communities have to host New York City's trash? And where do all those garbage trucks go at night? Hint: it's not near the people whose trash they're hauling. Another "externality" imposed on adjacent communities so that the core residents can forget about it.

If everyone tried to move from the suburbs to denser urban cores at once, it would be a disaster even for the cities themselves for all the reasons above, but there are other problems as well. What would happen to all of the abandoned buildings and infrastructure back in the suburbs? To get an idea, take a tour of the "Rust Belt" some time. That will show you quite clearly the human and ecological toll of emigration on such a scale. What a waste. With disasters at both ends, how is that a solution?

This is where we get to the other ill effect of people moving to the city. Everyone who leaves from a suburb to a city is leaving their vote behind. That leaves even fewer voters to do anything about zoning and other policies that make suburbs the way they are. I've seen it over and over; the people who care about creating walkable neighborhoods and reducing car dependence leave, so policy remains in the hands of people who want to keep things the same. That is, quite directly, why most suburbs have town centers that are sterile and useless - if they even exist. Too many suburbs don't even have a real center, just one or more extended strip malls.

What we need is not more 15-minute cities but more 15-minute towns. Thousands of them. Reconfiguring and repurposing existing structures, where people already live and will continue to live, instead of abandoning them and building even more in the cities. Mixed use, mixed income, medium density. The missing middle according to some. To achieve that goal, people need to stay and vote (or, even better, serve on town zoning boards and such). The day when the cities could absorb the nearer suburbs - as Detroit did once, to become so big - are gone. No suburb would submit to such incorporation in the current milieu of property values and school funding and so on. The weight of numbers from city dwellers can't be used to force change anywhere else at anything less than the state level. How well does that work? Again, Detroit - ringed by more prosperous suburbs - tells us the answer: not at all. Detroit has no influence over poor suburbs like Hazel Park or River Rouge, let alone rich ones like Birmingham or Bloomfield Hills.

Every town (or small city) that has succeeded in reversing the process of suburban sprawl, in creating walkable and pleasant but still affordable and ecologically sustainable neighborhoods, has done so through the efforts of residents who stayed and did the work. "Move to the city" is a religion among the privileged few (who must be few for it to work at all), not a solution for the many. As long as it's the mantra among self-styled "new urbanists" we will all get exactly nowhere. Let go of that idea. Embrace strong towns instead.

[kadavernagh]

TIMING: Current LOCATION: Frank's Frogurt PARTIES: Elias and Regan SUMMARY: After Elias and Regan discussed froyo online, Regan begrudgingly agreed they could get some. She could only find frogurt which is probably close enough. They're not welcome back. CONTENT WARNING: None

Could it still be called froyo if the store said it was frogurt? Regan stared up at the Frank’s Frogurt sign and frowned at it. Something about the portmanteau seemed sinister and wrong. She had told Elias she would find somewhere for them to get frozen yogurt, and it already felt as though she’d failed. As soon as he shuffled up, she was ready to roll in with an apology and explanation. “Elias. Hello. You probably see this is a frogurt store. I was looking for froyo, but I thought I caught a whiff of putrescine and ended up following it, and now we’re here instead, and I don’t know if – I mean, it’s probably the same thing, right?” She looked at him, and judged him the expert on the subject matter. Her expertise was limited to regular yogurt. 

“Also, are you sure about this? Isn’t it strange to eat in each other’s presence for no particular reason? I usually eat alone. And – and I don’t usually see other people eat, only what they ate after they ate it and if they’re dead.” Okay, so she might have been a tiny bit nervous – she hadn’t done anything like this in years. But that didn’t matter. She forced her nerves to come to a screeching halt, sealing them with a couple of deep breaths. Right, Elias could go in now. She didn’t have to, right? “Okay. I will wait for your return.” She looked to Elias and then the door, as if it were obvious she wasn’t going in.

After receiving the time and a place to meet Regan at for ‘froyo,’ Elias had been happy to oblige. Even though he had seen the doctor claim that she did not have a need for friends, she seemed kind enough to not turn him down. Maybe it was the pull of yogurt? Who knew. He hadn’t gone to a frozen yogurt place in a while, so the idea of meeting up with someone who he considered a friend (even if she didn’t) was quite nice. As soon as he came up to her, she had begun talking. Putriscine, what she smelled death? Well, that was certainly a good sign. And most importantly, very Regan. “That’s just their way of shortening frozen yogurt, just like froyo.” He explained with an amused smile spread across his face. “It is the same thing, we’ll be just fine.” 

“I’m sure! People hang out all the time, there’s nothing weird about going to grab a tasty treat together.” He frowned, realizing that the woman had very little social habits at all. Surely it wasn’t her fault, could it be? He wasn’t sure. But he did know that there was something about it that he found endearing. “Well then consider this a lesson in socializing with others.” He spoke, phrasing it in a way he hoped she’d find palettable. “What, you’re not coming with me?” He asked, turning to the door, then back to her. “Oh no. If you’re getting something good out of this from your assistant, you’ve got to go in with me. I’ll talk and pay so you don’t have to interact with the person behind the counter.” He insisted, gesturing to the door with a tilt of his head. 

Elias was so chipper all the time, and Regan couldn’t fathom how he managed to stay that way in a town like this. Maybe it was the only thing keeping his sanity from dribbling out his ears. He pressed so hard for answers sometimes and didn’t realize he was melting his own wax in the process, and risked being reduced to nothing. “I think it’s weird to watch other people chew.” She remarked, unconvinced. “And what makes you think I need a lesson? You and Marcy both. Why is your way more correct than mine?” But Elias practically glowed, and something about it was… foreboding. Like the way the air felt charged right before a thunderstorm. Why? She wasn’t sure. There was no scream swelling inside of her. But change was on its way, and she knew it. She needed to make sure it was in her favor – and preferably Elias’s, too.

Regan met his lightheartedness with a grave expression. However, she considered his proposal. He did make it sound as though it might be okay. That was a skill of his, and one she was slowly coming to appreciate. Regan nodded. “I accept your terms.” 

She looked left and right as she walked through the door, eyes narrowed in suspicion. But there was nothing suspect. Just a mustachioed man behind the counter and a display full of a rainbow of froyo colors and consistencies. Regan stared cautiously at the flavors. As if she didn’t already know what she was going to get. There was something else tugging at her though, a tickling across her skin, and her attention was diverted away from Elias and the froyo and the flies flitting in and out of her vision. “I’ll have the vanilla.” Regan said rotely, almost bored, and directed neither at Elias nor the mustache man in particular. She had her eyes on something else. Sure, she couldn’t see it yet, but it was there, she could feel it, its stiff little fingers wrapped around her heart.

Upon entering the small shop, Elias began to look around at the different flavors, and honed in on the cookies and cream immediately. Picking up one of the cups, he gestured to Regan to pick one up and fill it herself, then he walked over to the tower and pulled the lever, the frozen yogurt pouring into his cup. Then, he made his way over to the toppings to start putting on different ingredients. 

He didn’t pay Regan any mind as she seemed to look around the place, like a hound sniffing out its target. He was too content with putting together his ice cream the way he wanted, some brownie pieces, cookie dough, and oreo crumbles. He knew it didn’t really match his age, but he found that he didn’t particularly care either.

After he finished his froyo masterpiece, he turned to Regan to see how she was doing with hers, only to find her looking around. “Uh. Everything alright?” He asked her, brow raised as he tried to figure out what she was searching for. She looked bored, which he wasn’t surprised to see, but she also looked as if she were seeking something out. “Regan?” He then spoke, trying to figure out what she was up to.

Regan was somewhat aware that Elias was moving around in the store, collecting toppings on his yogurt like flies on a fresh cadaver, but she couldn’t pull herself away from that feeling in the air and charge against her skin. “Yeah, yeah, just a moment…” Her interest in frozen yogurt had evaporated. She was getting closer, and she wasn’t leaving here until she achieved victory. Cliodhna had much to be ashamed of when Regan was concerned, but her persistence was the one thing that she openly praised. She paced around the perimeter, scanning the floor where it met the wall. There may not have been anything dead in her sight yet, but she could tell that whatever she was picking up had skittered around the store just prior to dying. The mustache man was saying something, asking her to stop, but that barely entered her consciousness. 

Closer… she was getting closer. Regan stopped next to one of the soft-serve machines and stared at it for a moment. “Ma’am, please just get some frogurt like everyone else. Here, it’s free.” He gestured emphatically to the cups, then to the machine. Regan practically looked through him, then Elias, and went right back to examining it instead of using it. She knelt down, and knew she had it. “It’s here. It’s–” She reached blindly behind the machine. It was a narrow crevice, but there was enough room for her to grasp for the prize. “Aha!” She said gleefully. She reeled out a fetid, limp rat tail-first, and displayed it for Elias. “Found it!” 

Regan popped up and admired the rat. It was supremely fresh, had probably only died a few hours ago. She felt a little bad to be robbing Frank’s Frogurt of the smorgasbord of stenches it would let off a day or two from now, but finders keepers. “Did you get your yogurt?” She looked at Elias and confirmed he had a mountain of dessert, drowning in oreos and sprinkles and more. “Great. I’m good now. We can leave.”

Eyes widening as Regan all but sniffed around the store, Elias stood stock still as she did whatever it was she was doing. He had placed the yogurt down on the counter and watched with mild horror at the show she was putting on, kind of glad that there was no one else in the shop to watch what was happening. The mustache man started yelling at her, and he felt as if he wanted to melt into the floor and disappear. The last thing he needed was to be nearly kicked out of some place because of her. She was strange, yes. But he’d never seen her act this strange.

Elias opened his mouth to speak as she reached down behind the yogurt machine, tilting his body to watch as she did so. When she picked up the dead rat, he nearly let out a shriek. He didn’t, as he was able to calm himself enough to not let out that scream. The mustache man looked as horrified as he felt, quickly taking a wide step away from the ice cream he no longer had any desire to eat. 

“You… you want to leave now.” He spoke, watching as she handled the dead rat with no gloves. Shooting the mustache man a sidelong glance, he decided it was best to leave before something else nefarious showed up, like cockroaches in the toppings. “Eh, sorry…” he muttered to the worker before making a beeline for the door. “I’m glad you’re happy,” Elias muttered to Regan on their way out the door. 

The man grumbled as the two of them swung out the door. The searing way his eyes burned into them communicated one thing: do not tell anyone about this. It was difficult to decide what to do. On one hand, others should know about Frank’s Frogurt and, with a little luck, what might be found there. On the other hand, Regan wanted to be able to return for round two without any competition. She would ponder it. For now, she looked down at Elias’s empty hands. Oh… “You didn’t bring your frogurt. Which is understandable, considering the circumstances. But… we could go somewhere else. If you wanted. I mean, I am a satisfied customer, but you clearly are not.”

Happy? No. She wasn’t happy, because that was not allowed. So the airy feeling flitting around her stomach must not have been happiness. “I’m not happy. I’m pleased. There’s a difference.” In the sunlight, she could appreciate the way the rat’s greasy gray hair shined. Its paws festered, one of them gone entirely, and she could clearly see the outline of most of its ribs. This was probably starvation. Which was a shame. There was plenty of frogurt it could have eaten.

Regan beamed up at the Frank’s Frogurt sign as the two of them walked away from the shop. “This place is excellent.”

[cathartes-aura-shitposting]

TRANSFORGEES: the world of transformation (Literally) pt 1

(NOTE: description copy-pasted from DA where i normally post my works. any context that is missing here on tumblr can be found on my DA [linked here and on pinned post] )

[no image for this one. this first part will talk about how transformation victims, dubbed "transforgees", are treated for their situation and how the live their day to day lives]

______

So, i’ve been wanting to actually talk about tranforgees, transformations, and traforgee centers for a while. And i think now that i’m beginning to worldbuild not just planet argonus but also just my strangeworld franchise (if you call it that..) in general. But first: a little history lesson about how this idea came to be.

ORIGINAL BACKGROUND

[note: this part is edited to add extra context; ]

As somebody who’s been into the transformation genre for as long as i’ve been using the internet, it was bound that i would create things relating to it. One of these things is the idea of a place where fromer humans-turn-something-else go to get the care they need. This is where the idea of “Tranforgee Centers” come in.

Tranforgees center were an idea I had back somewhere in….2015? I think? Well, it was back with my original concept of topia.

topia was an old, old world idea that started as an unholy mashup of fnaf, paleofauna and whatever spec evo media/idea i had on hand. it also had a bit of post-apocalyptic stuff too, but it took place long, long after worlds healed form the big world war that caused it, and everybody was back to the modern day in terms of technology. it also briefly turned into an actual comic about a shapeshifting anthro doberman ("jane and the world of topia"), before being abandoned altogether.

Tranforgees (Portmanteau of “transform” and “refugees”) are people who were once something else, but has since been changes into something different (ie human turned animal), and tranforgee centers are just like what i said before: a place where tranforgees are sent to live at, whether only temporarily or permanently.

The original lore behind them was that the big, walled city of Gesidindo was a very inhospitable place for animals and something something “certain animals only” and “anything bigger than this is replace with a robot” (and also they were big racist against animatronics, of which the initial version's main character was one). Whether the animals were killed or just sent away, idk. But what i do know is that this weird rule also applied to people who turned into animals. So for whatever reason, they chose one of the abandoned mall in the equally abandoned city of Dezro as a safe place for them.

But, that was back in my early-mid highschool years. Now i’m re-working on this topic, and trying to make it work.

Also, a bit of a disclaimer: while i’m trying to make it “realistic” i’m not a professional or expert on some stuff, so bear with me.

TRANFORGEE CENTERS: REBOOTED/REFORMED

So, like said, tranforgee centers are places to help tranforgees with whatever transformation-related problem they have; from getting used to their new bodies, to helping shifters (who are also considered tranforgees) regulate and control their (often new) abilities, and even provide a place for tranforgees to live whether temporarily or permanently. They are ran by various codag-based groups, though it’s often expected that the local government will provide some aid as well.

There are three major types of tranforgee centers: clinics and townships

Clinics are, as expected, single-building clinics almost akin to a large hospital. This is where tranforgees most likely end up going to first. Clinics are meant to temporarily keep tranforgees, as they figure out what cause them to transform, what they can do to reverse/control it (if at all), and alot more.

Clinics only keep tranforgees temporarily, as they monitor both their physical and mental health. Most are usually kept for no longer than a month, during which tranforgees are helped with not only getting used to their new form, but also planning out their future and where they go from there. There are typically two major outcomes for a tranforgee after being in the clinic:

1-they’ll be able to go home: sometimes they may need modifications to their living space, sometimes they may need help from other people (either by family, friends, or outpatient staff), and sometimes they may not need it at all.

2-if unable to go back home, they’re often sent to places which are equipped to keep them for longer periods of times, sometimes permanently. These are often in the form of apartments or communities, which leads us to the other option…

Tranforgee communities, also known as townships, are exactly what they sound like: a community for tranforgees to live in. all townships have at least these four things:

1-a tranforgee clinic, which doubles as the main place of healthcare (ie doctors, dentist, mental health, ect)

2-various forms of housing for tranforgees, often in the form of trailer parks, apartments, dorms or suburbs.

3-various stores, with at least one general store and a couple specialty stores for various things (groceries, clothing, ect.)

4-misc places, which depending on the township can be things such as restaurants, a small mall, simple attractions, parks, ect. Just really anything a normal town would possible have.

Interestingly, while tranforgees may have everything that they need in these townships, they’re not bound to these places. As a matter of fact, all tranforgee townships are located right next to large cities, and not only are tranforgees allowed to venture outside the townships, but are actively encouraged to do so.

Tranforgee townships have their own form of transportation for such ventures, and so long as you’re in their system and/or have an ID of sorts, it’s completely free. However, many places require tranforgees to wear some form of identification gear, such as a collar or vest. And, depending on the situation, they may need to have staff come along with them, especially if the individual is on the smaller side and/or has difficulty in wearing said identification gear.

Now that we got down what exactly what tranforgee centers are, we can now get down to the fun part: life inside the centers. Or, more accurately…

LIFE WITHIN THE TRANFORGEE TOWNSHIPS

…since, like said, the clinics only will have you temporary while townships are commonly more permanent, or at the very least long-term.

HOUSING:

Like said, housing take the form of trailer parks, apartments, dorms and suburbs. However, which one you end up in can depend not just on the township alone, but also your exact situation. But, as a basic overview, all tranforgees housing have all of the basics for their living space (i.e. a kitchen, bed, rooms, heating/cooling systems, ect). Housing for tranforgees are split into three major categories: size, species, and climate.

-SIZE:

size tends to be a big factor in whether you get an individual house of your own or have the share the same building as other tranforgees. Bigger tranforgees will more than likely end up living in a building of their own. Likewise, smaller tanforgees will likely end up sharing the same building as others. The reason why can vary, but the two most common reasons are safety and efficiency. smaller tranforgees are often viewed as being weaker and more susceptible to landing themselves in danger (which to some extent is true), thus dormitories and apartment buildings tend to be safer. Plus, it is also cheaper to make them for the smaller individuals than it is for the larger ones. However, obviously this isn't the only determining factor.

-SPECIES:

what species you are can also be a major determining factor. Tranforgee centers will house you in districts alongside other related species. Most commonly, these districts will house species of the same taxonomic order and/or family. Some, like canines and felines, tend to get a district of their own (a canidae and felidae district respectively), while others such as waterfowl tend to live in a district that houses anseriformes (the order waterfowl belong to). If you’re a species that doesn't have a district of its own, you’re often placed with the closest related family. For example, if you’re a colugo, you’ll more than likely end up in the primate/lemur district, as primates are considered to be their closest relatives.

Many tranforgee centers that chose species-based separation will also have family/order districts neighbor other districts of the same taxonomic class (ie mammal, bird, reptiles, ect), creating mega districts. For example, you could expect parrot and passerine districts to neighbor each other in the aves mega districts. However, with these divisions, usually they take the form of apartments or dormitories, because like before they tend to be cheaper and more efficient.

Why do some tranforgee centers do this? Well, there are two major reasons: for one, it can help keep the place organized and easier to navigate when visiting individuals. The other reason for this is because it gives tranforgees some sense of community, allowing them to interact with other similar species and helping them further adapt to their new lives. However, there are many places who don't exactly agree with the idea of separating districts based on species, whether that be due certain difficulties in placing newcomers, the general cost of certain things (especially when applying it to climate and size), or the implications of segregation. Thus, many will either do this on a much smaller scale or not do it at all, and instead focus more on size and climate.

-CLIMATE:

The final major determining factor is climate. This depends not only on the tranforgees themselves, but also the very location of the center itself. Tranforgees, like the animals they turned into, may be adapted for certain and specific environments, like a tree boa needing a warm, humid environment, or a chinchilla that needs a cooler, dryer home. Regardless, they tend to cater to those climates for the health and comfort of their own home, and often in the form of dormitories or apartments because, you guess it, cost and efficiency. It’s not uncommon for these “climate housings” to have not just the air quality (temp, humidity), but also some plants, decor, and other things to add to the environment to make it seem more like the real deal (much akin to most zoos).

However, one may not even need to live in these climate housings, either because they’re already a highly-adaptable species, or because the outside environment is the same as what their species needs, such as a township that lies in a desert environment.

While these are the three main categories for tranforgee housing, there are other things that will determine the place you live:

-are you a shifter?: whether you’re a free-shifter (shapeshifting at will) learning to get used to their power, a restricted shifter (need specific trigger like lunar phase, emotion, ect), or somewhere in between, most if not all tranforgee townships have specific housing for shifters themselves.

-are you the only one or are your family/friends also tranforgees?: there are, indeed housing options for more than one individual, mainly for families.

-do you have any pets?: depending on if said pet is allowed, you may be put into the pet-friendly parts of the township.

-what are the specifics of your transformation/species?: sometimes housing your kind may be determined by more than just size, species and climate. For example, dragon tranforgee may get a fire-proof home, or some of the more violent shifters may be put into a reinforced room.

[tumblr edit: some extra things to note: usually township housing tends to be "cheaper" because the homes already have the necessary accommodations without the need to pay for any additional modifications. however, if there are no specific needs that can only be fulfilled by the transforgee townships/center, they can easily just as comfterbly live in a regular (albiet modified) houses ouside of townships]

I’m sure there are many other things I could, list, but this is all that I could come up with. But anyways, while housing is typically free, there are some rules and limitations to it much like the outside world, and Perhaps one of the most talked about rules for the homeowner is all about pet ownership.

Pets seem to be a content of both controversy and arguments when it comes to tranforgees. However, most agree that simply banning pets altogether is a bad idea, since just like anybody else, tranforgees heavily benefit from having pets, whether the animals help them in some way (physically, mentally & emotionally), or just for simple companionship. Alot of pets have been with their owners even before they’ve changed, and are heavily attached to their owners as their owners are to them. However, like said, alot of tranforgee centers have some commonly laid-down rules about pet ownership:

1-cannot be of a certain size: obviously the animal can't be bigger than what the tranforgee’s home can allow. However, some places will also not allow pets that are as big or bigger than the owners for safety reasons, and especially if they break some of the other rules…

2-must be well-trained/friendly: while there are certain exceptions (ie aquariums and such), most pets are required to at least be well-trained enough, and to have a friendly disposition toward both the owner and, more importantly, others.

3-certain species not allowed: this is the most variable of rules, as exactly what animals you can keep can heavily depend on the exact location. Obviously most if not all places will not allow illegal animals, but they also might not allow certain/most/all exotics, or they may not allow predatory/carnivorous species (which may unfortunately include cats and dogs). However, this rule may or not apply if the animal in question fits the fourth rule…

4-only certified service or emotional support animals allowed: indeed, some places do go as far as to not allow pets at all unless it’s detrimental to the tranforgee’s way of life, whether physically or emotionally. This is a point of controversy, however, for alot of reasons. For one, it can be easy to fake the need for a service/emotional support animal (as it does happen in real life), and like said many would benefit from owning pets for companionship. Thus, this rule is often only applied to pets that break rules 1 and 3.

[tumblr edit: yes, animals can recognise their owners and any former human post-transformation. the second part will touched on that subject

BASIC NECESSITIES, INCOME AND WORK

Starting with basic necessities, all tranforgee centers are required to give out free food and supplies on a weekly basis, often delivered straight to their place of dwelling. These packages are known as “weekly care boxes (WCBs)”. As the name suggests they’re large boxes that contain pantry-level essentials, including (but not limited to):

-canned goods (veggies, fruits, meats, ect)

-frozen goods (again, meats, fruits and veggies)

-toiletries and personal hygeine.

-baked goods

-boxed drinks/drink mixes (shelf-stable milk, juice boxes, tea bags, ect)

-other items (species-specific, baby care, ect).

Granted, this is just a general list. What one can get depends on the personal preference/necessities of the receiver. While most tranforgees are still able to eat human food (we’ll get to tranforgees themselves soon enough), there are many who have specific dietary needs, such as needing food to be diabetic-friendly, vegan, or gluten free. Now, some places will have those specific items in their pantry, however alot of places will only give you that stuff for free if it’s an actual necessity. If deemed not a necessity, you’ll more than likely have to pay for it, which leads into the next topic of work & income….

Non-working Tranforgees could get a daily income below that of minimum wage, if they even get one at all. Because tranforgees already get free food, shelter, and often medical/psychiatric care, most places don't even bother with given them free money, as it’s too expensive. Thus, many tranforgees settle onto finding a job.

While the exact title depends on, of course, the species in question, there are alot of places both inside and out of townships that are able to (and often willing to) hire tranforgees. Actually, in cities that have tranforgee townships, it’s a pretty common site to see tranfogees working in jobs such as retail, customer service, workshops, ect.. And while not the most rewarding of places (especially customer service as any retail worker would tell you), it is one of the main forms of income for tranfogees.

MEDICAL/PSYCHIATRIC CARE FACILITIES

Of all things tranforgee centers need, a place to be medically AND psychologically evaluated/treated is almost always at the highest priority when it comes to townships. Most townships will have the tranforgee clinics (the place where tranforgees go to first) as a part of the medical facility.

-Medically:

As seemingly degrading as it may initially seem, the rumors about tranforgees going to vets instead of doctors is actually correct..kinda.

When it comes to physical issues, tranforgee centers often employ veterinarians and other species-specific doctors, for the obvious reason being that they’re not dealing with humans most of the time. The doctors that work on tranforgees specifically are often called “doctor vets”, and while they may focus on a specific type of tranforgee, in general they know how to work with both people and animals.

However, normal, everyday vet techs are often employed as well. These people are often just starting in the field, and with the help of the doctor vets, will help, diagnose and treat tranforgees.

-psychiatrically:

one’s own psychiatric and mental health is just as important as medical. After all, transformations are often unpleasant and even traumatizing.

Much like with the physical side of things, psychiatric care is run by people who deal with both people and animals. However, more often this is split between mental health professionals and animal behavior specialists (Both mental health and animal behavior tend to be connected in some way).

MISCELLANEOUS STUFF

There are alot of other things going on in tranforgee townships, and while i cannot list them all, i can at least list some stuff that doesn't fit within the other categories:

-schooling: most if not all tranforgee centers have some form of schooling, whether it’s a public school on site, boarding school, or online classes. However, it’s not totally uncommon to see transforgee students go off-site, and often this is because on-site schooling is mostly for students who, for one reason or another, cannot go outside of the townships due to size, transformation specifics / triggers, ect. Thus, students who are able to go to off-site schools districts are more than likely going to end up there.

-visitations: visitors like friends and family are allowed in townships, and of course are encouraged if said person is allowed by both staff and the tranforgee in question (note: most of the time tranforgees must give consent to have said visitor). Of course there are some ground rules: no outside food/drinks (unless permitted by the tranforgee/staff), can only be there between certain times (most often during the daytime), no outside pets (shares some of the same rules as pet ownership), ect.

-off-site housing: Many tranforgee townships will have off-site housing, which much like with schooling, this is often meant for tranforgees who are able to live outside of the township for an indefinite amount of time. This is to help keep the towns less crowded, and if possible they’ll allow tranforgees to live in tranforgee-freindly homes outside of township limits. Of course, these homes are often still located right next to the townships.

Anyways, that all i can come up with, at least for now. I was going to also talk about tranforgees themselves, but this is already getting long and i’d love to work on my story. So, be on the lookout for part 2, where we actually talk about tranforgees, transformations themselves and whatnot!

[kuroimarzipan]

4, 8, and 9 for Esteem and Valerie?

4. What would be their ship name?

ooh, thats a tough one. if we go for the portmanteau. estlerie? idk i dont usually do those. what about a pokemon style one. oathshipping?? i bet that exists as a ship already somewhere. or does this mean like when people tag their ships with a name like. otp: devotion and beauty of an unconventional kind

8. What were their first impressions of each other?

They actually had a quite poor first impression of each other - Valerie initally joined Tartuccio's group, initially disapproving of Esteem's methods. Even after Esteem and its group rescued Valerie at the Old Sycamore, things were a bit rocky, but something slowly started to shift after Valerie fought and slew Fredero Sinnet (this is. a years long slow burn)

9. Have they made each other cry?

I sorry angst was not the first thing that came to mind with this question lemme try again ok here we go

I think, on occassion, Esteem has caused Valerie to cry from frustration at some of her actions. Somehow, in spite of things, she comes around to acceptance, though. Esteem has done a lot of explaining her intentions when Valerie looks ready to tear her hair out, and she's very convincing.

[chemicalbrew]

choose violence ask game 6 bc we both know where this is headed (cough all of them cough)

YEAH YEAH YEAH YIPPEE [immediately turns reblogs off]

6. which ship fans are the most annoying? [interpreting as romantic ship]

so. let's start with what we both know

Katana ZERO

As I said in DMs earlier, I think the only worthwhile KZ ship is Zero x the receptionist (preferably one-sided, but I think someone really smart could make it mutual. I certainly wouldn't be mad if it was confirmed mutual in canon, but I seriously doubt it - one-sided is way funnier, anyway.). I also kind of sort of in theory respect the hustle of people trying to write V and Snow (rarepairs... been there), but I think I could never see it that way; what we have in game of them is barely good enough for anything, which is what makes it hilarious. That said, the most annoying shit here is, as we know...

150 150 150 150 150 !!!!!!

Even their stupid ship name cracks me up. Like, I understand, you can't have a good portmanteau or anything when your ship has numbers, but half the ship is literally Zero (hehe another reason Zerocep[tionist] wins), however... the way you read it is not even conducive to a shipping read. One fifty? One hundred and fifty? Even the number doesn't want them together <3

There was a post somewhere in my KZ tag that actually puts my feelings better than I myself can, but I'll try anyway. Due to the way this game's plot\timeline is framed, all their past interaction is basically implied. They don't really get to exchange any words, no matter how awkward (compare this to the receptionist having the tiniest of character arcs, but still an arc, between the hotel and bunker stages) - Fifteen just shows up, confirms he's the real Dragon, kills the shit out of V, and leaves, and that right there is the closest we get to an interaction (surely you won't say Zero walking in on a conversation later counts?).

How the fuck can you wrangle a ship out of that?

'But muh implications' that's all they are, implications. Not a very fertile ground to build upon. And even then, what they imply is far more like camaraderie than anything, which, while a solid and even necessary (in real life, at least) foundation for a relationship, doesn't MEAN it has to be romantic!! Give me traumatized war buddies that aren't making out with each other, pleeeeeeease...

'But you're reblogging art with them together' YEAH BECAUSE THEY LOOK HANDSOME TOGETHER AND THEIR DESIGNS ARE PERFECTLY COMPLEMENTARY. THAT'S THE ONLY REASON. I'M LITERALLY OBSESSED WITH HOW WELL THEY MATCH IN THIS ASPECT. This is why they should just be fighting together and nothing else <3

Xenoblade (gonna try and be a bit more rapid-fire about the rest of this post, unless the wrathful mood strikes me again)

Shulk and Fiora do not make sense romantically at all to me. They're family, ffs. Same for Shulk and Reyn, if not doubly same. But the fans keep insisting otherwise and often. (Libra, if you're reading this, this doesn't apply to you or other friends of mine that like Shiora. You're the only ones I trust with these two, I just want no part of it myself)

Shulk and Alvis are amazing, but need to be viewed through a lens more complex than typical shipping to be fully appreciated (something I'm still somewhat guilty of and recovering from. Jesus, wider XB1 fandom can be the worst sometimes).

Shulk and Melia as a ship by itself does not offend me, but the fans that weep about how Melia never had any good shit happen to her, and say Shulk not returning her feelings makes it worse... can die in a fire :)

I don't understand how people can take Reyn and Sharla seriously together tbh... but I guess it's more acceptable than the stuff above?

Rex and Nia (on their own, without Aegis in picture) never needed to be anything more than friends. The way Nia gets over being ''''friendzoned''' (hate that word) canonically is better than anything fans have come up with regarding this matter.

Lora and Jin have barely been interpreted by anyone in the wider fandom correctly (that I know of - key word 'barely'). Just stop at this point <3

...I won't be talking about XB3 ships because I heavily dislike XB3 and haven't read anything shippy for it, not even for NoahMio.

PS. Morag and Zeke should get more attention (personally I'm still guilty of somewhat ignoring this as a ship, but if I ever replay\rewatch, I'll be sure to analyze their interactions more, especially bc they're fun no matter how you look)

misc.

I have seen people interpret Ares and Dela (Brandish series) as a romantic ship, and I'd like to see just how much their brain has rotted.

Olivier and Mueller (Trails in the Sky) are very fun as a ship! I'd just like to see people view their relationship through a more neutral lens sometimes. However, the fact that Estelle x Kevin fics exist is the real mind-bender here. HOW? It's called being playful and keeping up a front!! (Also, Estelle x Anelace is slept on the same way as Zerocep and Moragzeke <333)

Frog x Magus and Lucca x Magus (Chrono Trigger) make equally little sense, and yet seem to be popular. Ew. Not even mentioning my personal beef with Frog x Lucca. Don't.

Midna x Link and Malon x Link (Zelda series) were actually my first NOTPs, largely because of annoying fans. I see now I was in the wrong and am largely 'thog dont caaare' about it, but still, important.

Ace Attorney series... tbh its fandom is weird about ships as a whole, but I'm guilty of falling into the Blackmadhi trap, so I can't speak. Almost everything other than Blackmadhi, though, is a tough sell largely bc of fandom.

Any ship involving Stocke from Radiant Historia has to be included in here. I am by and large respectful of most popular stuff with him (especially Stocke x Rosch and the Stocke x Sonja x Rosch OT3), I just think it's more fun to have him not into any of it. Very similar situation to Zero KZ, honestly.

[wittecouple]

howdy fellow shippers o/

so a bit of context for this blog- i'm very new to the owl house fandom, but i have a big old soft spot for highly speculative and tragic pairings like caleb and evelyn (signless/disciple is my actual factual otp; iykyk). however, my main concern is that for whatever reason, people really like doing massive purges of their creations after leaving a fandom these days

if you're lucky, these works will have been cross-posted or reblogged somewhere, and so they can still bring fans a lot of joy- but as often as not, they wind up lost to time

one of my biggest hopes in making this blog is to be something of an archive for this pairing: a place where even years from now, new fans and shippers can share in the hype and headcanons and character designs, and old fans can look back on fond memories or find fanart they've never seen before.

it's going to be tricky to find older posts now that tumblr doesn't let you search by timestamps anymore (damn the Top and Latest categories straight to hell), so if you think that i have missed a post, please let me know and i will get it queued up! i am always taking song recs that we can add to a community playlist here, and i'm also happy to share any fic recommendations- i just don't have time to read them all :')

organizational tag suggestions are also very much appreciated; i'm probably going to add tags for things like flapjack, philip thirdwheeling, and parallels between our wittecouple (is that the best ship name to use?) and pairings like huntlow, raeda, and... lunter?? good lord the portmanteaus in this show are Bad.

anyhoo, thank you and enjoy! <3