#circa-binary system

[anomalymon]

Addressing Anti-Endogenics in the Alterhuman Community

I keep seeing posts about being baffled by anti-endogenic alterhumans, but I haven't actually seen too many posts which address why being an anti-endogenic alterhuman doesn't make sense. Nor have I seen many which don't talk down to anti-endogenics or intentionally piss them off, which I think is counter-productive in this. I'm on an essay writing kick so I might as well.

This isn't to try to prove endogenic systems. There are already many who have done this. I'd recommend looking through Endogenic & Non-Traumagenic Plurality Resources by Guardians System. I don't agree with the use of sysmed, but for a link collection, it's very effective. Rather, this is to explain why there is an overlap and why some are concerned.

Because I feel this essay is important, I will be making a bulleted list first, and you can read further if you want the elaboration. I understand not everyone wants to read an over 1,500 word essay.

What is endogenic?: Endogenic for systems means being a system for a reason other than trauma - endogenic systems can still have trauma and dissociation, and the belief of cause can be literally anything including neurological, spirituality, or intentional creation. Many subcultures, some unrelated, exist under it.

System/Otherkin Historical Overlap: Plurality and kin have overlapped for over twenty years. Otherkin was used to mean nonhumans in systems, and fictive came from soulbonding which was/is a very fictionkin-dominant space.

Terminology: System is not DID only and has been used predominantly by endogenic systems since the early 90s. Most plural groups have historically shared terminology and the gatekeeping of such is very recent. This is concerningly close to paralleling what we're seeing with therianthropy gatekeeping.

Subjective Experiences: Trying to explain your subjective experiences to anti-endogenics and anti-kin are alike in being difficult and people not always being receptive to actual studies or arguments.

Similar Spirituality: Spiritual endogenic system origins are very similar to many spiritual alterhuman origins with the difference being level of separation and indiviudality between host/'type or different 'types.

Similar Experiences in Psych: Both alterhumans and endogenic systems have gaps in research and similarities with how we experience degradation from a psychological standpoint or being "insane". What is an endogenic system? This may be the most important thing to get out of the way - as I've noticed many people who are anti-endogenic don't actually know what endogenic means.

Endogenic just means a system that formed for a reason other than trauma. It doesn't say anything about having no trauma at all nor anything about dissociative experiences, and it can be anything from neurological, spiritual, intentionally created, or seemingly random odds. There are several subcultures under this umbrella - including some that don't even use endogenic or origin terminology, or ones that don't use system terminology.

Endogenic systems can have trauma later in life, they can also still have dissociative disorders from that trauma. Endogenic systems can still be diagnosed with DID.

It is a poor binary - but the reason it exists is most conversations surrounding systems have to do with trauma. Origin doesn't always matter when it comes to systems and that is a separate topic, however, it surrounds validation discussion and discourse.

The otherkin and plural communities have overlaped for over twenty years

For a long time there has been a huge overlap between otherkin and fictionkin with plurality in particular - at least for as long as both groups have been making websites and likely longer.

To highlight this the best, the overlap was to the point that "otherkin" was used for nonhuman system members in the past. Dark Personalities circa 2001 defined otherkin as "People in a multiple system who are not human. Often they are walk-ins, claiming to be older than the body in which they reside, and having physical traits very different from the body itself. Multiples are often hosts to otherkin." Source, Kinhost had an otherkin multiple FAQ since 2001 Source, and it even appeared in a list of DID terminology in 2013 Source.

On top of that, the term "fictive" originated within fictionkin-dominant soulbonding spaces. I'd recommend A Timeline of the Fictionkin Community by House of Chimeras for further reading on this.

The overlap exists in many ways in addition to what we have historically. What we deal with when it comes to certain types of discourse is simular, dealing with people against our subjective experiences has the same level of frustration, we have very similar spiritual beliefs in particular, and there are similarities with what we go through in the field of psychology.

Terminology out of the way: "but system is DID only!"

The simple answer is that it's not. I'd highly recommend reading A Brief History of the Use of "System" in Non-DID Spaces by LB-Lee on this subject, as they have been around for longer than my system has and this is a well-researched article. "System" is just a noun for a group of entities that exist in a body.

Terminology has historically been shared between both groups as they're needed. Fictive and headmate for example originated from endogenic groups while "host" seemingly cropped up multiple times independently - and terms like switching and fronting are needed because there isn't a better alternative. This didn't become an "issue" until about 2015 or so.

From a sociological standpoint however, something very similar has almost happened to the therianthropy and otherkin communities and arguably there is a similar problem already happening. There are those who claim that therian and otherkin are spiritual only and completely exclude and gatekeep psychological experiences - or cry someone with clinical lycanthropy using terms like shifting is appropriation. While they can normally be disproved, there are those who double down that this is spiritual-only. These communities are even developing their own binary - spiritual vs. psychological.

While this is a bit of a reverse to what happened with the plural community, that is a note of why these beliefs can be concerning within the alterhuman community. We are getting a bit too close for comfort to restricting and gatekeeping terminology based on a binary, and also teeter on the edge of expecting "proof" of an experience that's very hard to prove.

The nightmare of trying to explain your subjective experiences

As this is an essay for the alterhuman community, I am sure most of you reading this have encountered the scenario of trying to explain your subjective experience to some anti-kin or other group that is not having it. You can try to discuss your nonhuman experiences, cite historical and academic sources, insist with everything you have that what you're experiencing is real, but if someone is set in not believing you, it's ultimately a waste of time. The same thing applies here.

I could give you a long, detailed explanation about why we know we are a system. Many other systems would also be able to do the same thing - and many have tried. Ultimately it's up to you if you want to believe someone's subjective experiences or not - and if you don't believe it, it's up to you if you want to respect them or not.

To also claim that one is appropriating experiences is ridiculous. Are therianthropes appropriating from those with clinical lycanthropy, fictionkin appropriating from delusional misidentification, or otherlinkers appropriating from copinglinkers? There is a broad overlap and some shared terminology for convince over what can be subjectively a very similar experience - and you can't claim with certainty or in good faith that someone's experiences in and of themself are appropriating someone else.

Spiritually, you're likely very close to believing in endogenic systems

While not every otherkin, therian, or other identity inherently believes in spirituality, there is usually some coexistence or respect for others with beliefs different from you as spirituality can be a large element of the community. Most of these spiritual beliefs are already close to how spiritual endogenic systems might experience things.

Almost the exact same mechanisms which create spiritual alterhumanity is the same for spiritual systems. Various terms are already shared between spiritual alterhuman and spiritual system communities (and even non-spiritual system communities): walk-in for spiritual events and source vs. canon for fiction-based identities for example.

Additionally, several experiences are shared between these two groups. Existing in the astral plane or having experiences travelling through the astral for one. Communicating with spirits can also be a part of both - and that's where communities like soulbonding existed in tandum with fictionkin and even created the term fictive itself.

If someone believes in reincarnation and they can talk to and interact with their past selves - that is plural and can be considered an endogenic system. Same for if someone feels that their body at birth gave host to multiple souls. The difference between these experiences and polykin beliefs is just degree of individuality.

In the field of psychology, we are allies

Much of alterhumanity is arguably even less recognized by psychology. There are studies which showcase them of course, but there are also studies which showcase endogenic systems. Neither has many studies for similar reasons - we don't usually have a clinical need for help, and if we do, it can be extremely difficult to get it.

The potential for psych abuse or degradation in psychological settings exists for both of us - with how ridiculous it is to have abnormal other than human experiences, or how insane it is to be a system without fitting the DID model. The otherkin and therian communities in particular have a known saying along the lines of "If someone outside the community asks you for an interview: run" and it can be the same for endogenic systems.

Accusing others of faking their experiences only does harm to all of us. Giving our oppressors and ableists - in the sense of those who mock or degrade experiences for deeming them "insane" - an excuse to do so means they will take it and will use it to turn against others. If someone doesn't believe someone for something like being more than one entity in a physical body for any reason other than trauma, why should they believe you for identifying as nonhuman?

Conclusion

The endogenic and alterhuman communities are intertwined and respect of alterhumanity is in most of the steps the way to respecting all systems. The purpose of this essay is to get anti-endogenic alterhumans to reflect on their beliefs, and I hope that this was successful in doing that.

Others have made essays trying to argue for proof of their existence, and the sources are out there. I'd still implore you to get to know endogenic systems and remember that we are people and not just a discourse topic. Reflecting on our similarities in discourse, spirituality, ableism can help us move forward as communities.

[neopronouns]

flag id: a flag with a dark grey background. in the center is a pentagon, which is large enough that its top point and bottom edge are cut off by the flag's top and bottom edges. the pentagon is divided into five triangles; clockwise from the top right, they are light grey, soft sky blue, purple, soft red-pink, and light yellow. end id.

banner id: a 1500x150 teal banner with the words ‘please read my dni before interacting’ in large white text in the center. end id.

a general circa-binary flag for anon!

i wanted a flag that had all five of the circa-binary system's attributes meeting in some way. i divided a pentagon into triangles that represent those attributes! pink represents femaleness, blue represents maleness, purple represents androgyny, yellow represents epicenity/neutrality, and grey represents genderlessness.

tags: @radiomogai | dni link

[aaronsrpgs]

I've been so excited about this game for so long! They were kind enough to let me write a foreword for it, the entirety of which is below the break.

Thank god for mutants.

My first mutant encounter was in a flea market at the Warrens Cranberry Festival circa 1991. I hesitantly parted with my allowance to buy a comic whose cover’s top third (where the title and issue number were) had been torn off to secure monetary returns from the magazine distributor. Inside, five mutants struggled with being hated and, thereby, hating themselves. The art had a violent energy to it, ink scraped and splattered across the page by a young Bill Sienkiewicz and spare, harsh colors by Glynis Wein. Despite being in the X-Men family of comics, New Mutants shocked me in a way that changed my perception of art forever. It felt struggling and sinewy, like it was pulling itself toward its own creation.

The X-Men are famous the world over and must remain vaguely and forever themselves for the sake of marketing. The New Mutants, on the other hand, are virtual unknowns. They’re allowed to change. They get weird.

The joy of getting weird.

It’s great to fantasize about being beautiful while also shooting deadly beams from your eyes. But it’s a power fantasy, and for most of us, it remains out of our reach.

But to be a freak is a different kind of fantasy. Most of us are at least on our way there; many of us are already registered citizens of Freaktown. And the fantasies of freakdom are a bit different. They might include…

Watching the system collapse in the face of your freakiness.

Finding a bunch of other freaks.

Being accepted in your full freakitude.

But to me, to be a freak is to be allowed to change. To mutate. A freak can grow a new arm and remain at an equivalent level of freakiness. A freak can cancel their plans because of anxiety and not be rated any lower or higher than they already were. Being a freak is both a binary “yes” and an infinite spectrum. And this invitation to change is what the world (or at least the very limited pieces of it I see) needs right now.

Don’t fart on buses.

In the places I frequent, the refusal to change is extreme. I would not be surprised to read a news story where, upon farting aboard a crowded bus, a man is scolded for his behavior and asked not to repeat it, whereupon he stands up and hold forth on freedom: the freedom to fart where he pleases, no matter who is present and how thick the air is. And to request that he not engage in his god-given freedom to hot-box commuters, why, that is many degrees more sinful than the flatulent act, and you should be ashamed to even have mentioned it! This man is the worst X-Man ever, refusing to change, because that would mean hard work and ego death.

But we should be thankful for change! We should work on change. Change is why we’re not babies anymore. Change is why we don’t make the same stupid mistakes. Change is the only hope we have for a world where we’re not stuck huffing the farts of insistent farters.

Finally, Plasmodics.

Let’s get to the point. Plasmodics is a celebration of freaks. All the mutants are here, and we’re all smiling. But it’s not a static utopian fantasy; it’s an irradiated fata morgana of our own anti-freak world, where bad decisions outside of our control have ended our hopes for utopia over and over, and they will continue to do so.

So we scrabble around, searching for the artifacts our mutantcestors left behind, reveling in what might have been, and doing our small part to hold off the next ending so we can build some space and party down.

Come on in! The plasm’s fine.

[canmom]

yarr harr, fiddle de dee [more on piracy networks]

being a pirate is all right to be...

I didn't really intend this post as an overview of all the major methods of piracy. But... since a couple of alternatives have been mentioned in the comments... let me infodump talk a little about 1. Usenet and 2. direct peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella and Soulseek. How they work, what their advantages are on a system level, how convenient they are for the user, that kind of thing.

(Also a bit at the end about decentralised hash table driven networks like IPFS and Freenet, and the torrent indexer BTDigg).

Usenet

First Usenet! Usenet actually predates the web, it's one of the oldest ways people communicated on the internet. Essentially it's somewhere between a mailing list and a forum (more accurately, a BBS - BBSes were like forums you had to phone, to put it very crudely, and predate the internet as such).

On Usenet, it worked like this. You would subscribe to a newsgroup, which would have a hierarchical name like rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated (for talking about your favourite TV show, Babylon 5) or alt.transgendered (for talking about trans shit circa 1992). You could send messages to the newsgroup, which would then be copied between the various Usenet servers, where other people could download them using a 'news reader' program. If one of the Usenet servers went down, the others acted as a backup. Usenet was a set of protocols rather than a service as such; it was up to the server owners which other servers they would sync with.

Usenet is only designed to send text information. In theory. Back in the day, when the internet was slow, this was generally exactly what people sent. Which didn't stop people posting, say, porn... in ASCII form. (for the sake of rigour, that textfile's probably from some random BBS, idk if that one ever got posted to Usenet). The maximum size of a Usenet post ('article', in traditional language) depends on the server, but it's usually less than a megabyte, which does not allow for much.

As the internet took off, use of Usenet in the traditional way declined. Usenet got flooded with new users (an event named 'Eternal September'; September was traditionally when a cohort of students would start at university and thus gain access to Usenet, causing an influx of new users who didn't know the norms) and superseded by the web. But it didn't get shut down or anything - how could it? It's a protocol; as long as at least one person is running a Usenet server, Usenet exists.

But while Usenet may be nigh-unusable as a discussion forum now thanks to the overwhelming amount of spam, people found another use for the infrastructure. Suppose you have a binary file - an encoded movie, for example. You can encode that into ASCII strings using Base64 or similar methods, split it up into small chunks, and post the whole lot onto Usenet, where it will get synchronised across the network. Then, somewhere on the web, you publish a list of all the Usenet posts and their position in the file. This generally uses the NZB format. A suitable newsreader can then take that NZB file and request all the relevant pieces from a Usenet server and assemble them into a file.

NZB sites are similar to torrent trackers in that they don't directly host pirated content, but tell you where to get it. Similar to torrent trackers, some are closed and some are open. However, rather than downloading the file piecemeal from whoever has a copy as in a torrent, you are downloading it piecemeal from a big central server farm. Since these servers are expensive to run, access to Usenet is usually a paid service.

For this to work you need the Usenet servers to hold onto the data for long enough to people to get it. Generally speaking the way it works is that the server has a certain storage buffer; when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting old files. So there's an average length of time until the old file gets deleted, known as the 'retention time'. For archival purposes, that's how long you got; if you want to keep something on Usenet after that, upload it again.

As a system for file distribution... well, it's flawed, because it was never really designed as a file sharing system, but somehow it works. The operator of a Usenet server has to keep tens of petabytes of storage, to hold onto all the data on the Usenet network for a retention period of years, including the hundreds of terabytes uploaded daily, much of which is spam; it also needs to fetch it reliably and quickly for users, when the files are spread across the stream of data in random places. That's quite a system engineering challenge! Not surprisingly, data sometimes ends up corrupted. There is also a certain amount of overhead associated with encoding to ASCII and including parity checks to avoid corruption, but it's not terribly severe. In practice... if you have access to Usenet and know your way to a decent NZB site, I remember it generally working pretty well. Sometimes there's stuff on Usenet that's hard to find on other sources.

Like torrents, Usenet offers a degree of redundancy. Suppose there's a copyrighted file on Usenet server A, and it gets a DMCA notice and complies. But it's still on Usenet servers B, C and D, and so the (ostensible) copyright holder has to go and DMCA them as well. However, it's less redundant, since there are fewer Usenet servers, and operating one is so much more involved. I think if the authorities really wanted to crush Usenet as a functional file distribution system, they'd have an easier time of it than destroying torrents. Probably the major reason they don't is that Usenet is now a fairly niche system, so the cost/benefit ratio would be limited.

In terms of security for users, compared to direct peer to peer services, downloading from Usenet has the advantage of not broadcasting your IP on the network. Assuming the server implements TLS (any modern service should), if you don't use a VPN, your ISP will be able to see that you connected to a Usenet server, but not what you downloaded.

In practice?

for torrenting, if you use public trackers you definitely 100% want a VPN. Media companies operate sniffers which will connect to the torrent swarm and keep track of what IP addresses connect. Then, they will tell your ISP 'hey, someone is seeding our copyrighted movie on xyz IP, tell them to stop'. At this point, your ISP will usually send you a threatening email on a first offence and maybe cutoff your internet on a second. Usually this is a slap on the wrist sort of punishment, ISPs really don't care that much, and they will reconnect you if you say sorry... but you can sidestep that completely with a VPN. at that point the sniffer can only see the VPN's IP address, which is useless to them.

for Usenet, the threat model is more niche. There's no law against connecting to Usenet, and to my knowledge, Usenet servers don't really pay attention to anyone downloading copyrighted material from their servers (after all, there's no way they don't know the main reason people are uploading terabytes of binary data every day lmao). But if you want to be sure the Usenet server doesn't ever see your IP address, and your ISP doesn't know you connected to Usenet, you can use a VPN.

(In general I would recommend a VPN any time you're pirating or doing anything you don't want your IP to be associated with. Better safe than sorry.)

What about speed? This rather depends on your choice of Usenet provider, how close it is to you, and what rate limits they impose, but in practice it's really good since it's built on incredibly robust, pre-web infrastructure; this is one of the biggest advantages of Usenet. For torrents, by contrast... it really depends on the swarm. A well seeded torrent can let you use your whole bandwidth, but sometimes you get unlucky and the only seed is on the other side of the planet and you can only get about 10kB/s off them.

So, in short, what's better, Usenet or BitTorrent? The answer is really It Depends, but there's no reason not to use both, because some stuff is easier to find on torrents (most anime fansub groups tend to go for torrent releases) and some stuff is easier to find on Usenet (e.g. if it's so old that the torrents are all dead). In the great hierarchy of piracy exclusivity, Usenet sits somewhere between private and public torrent trackers.

For Usenet, you will need to figure out where to find those NZBs. Many NZB sites require registration/payment to access the NZB listing, and some require you to be invited. However, it's easier to get into an NZB site than getting on a private torrent tracker, and requires less work once you're in to stay in.

Honestly? It surprises me that Usenet hasn't been subject to heavier suppression, since it's relatively centralised. It's got some measure of resilience, since Usenet servers are distributed around the world, and if they started ordering ISPs to block noncomplying Usenet servers, people would start using VPNs, proxies would spring up; it would go back to the familiar whack-a-mole game.

I speculate the only reason it's not more popular is the barrier to entry is just very slightly higher than torrents. Like, free always beats paid, even though in practice torrents cost the price of a VPN sub. Idk.

(You might say it requires technical know-how... but is 'go on the NZB indexer to download an NZB and then download a file from Usenet' really so much more abstruse than 'go on the tracker to download a torrent and then download a file from the swarm'?)

direct peer to peer (gnutella, soulseek, xdcc, etc.)

In a torrent, the file is split into small chunks, and you download pieces of your file from everyone who has a copy. This is fantastic for propagation of the file across a network because as soon as you have just one piece, you can start passing it on to other users. And it's great for downloading, since you can connect to lots of different seeds at once.

However, there is another form of peer to peer which is a lot simpler. You provide some means to find another person who has your file, and they send you the file directly.

This is the basis that LimeWire worked on. LimeWire used two protocols under the hood, one of them BitTorrent, the other a protocol called Gnutella. When the US government ordered LimeWire shut down, the company sent out a patch to LimeWire users that made the program delete itself. But both these protocols are still functioning. (In fact there's even an 'unofficial' fork of the LimeWire code that you can use.)

After LimeWire was shut down, Gnutella declined, but it didn't disappear by any means. The network is designed to be searchable, so you can send out a query like 'does anyone have a file whose name contains the string "Akira"' and this will spread out across the network, and you will get a list of people with copies of Akira, or the Akira soundtrack, and so on. So there's no need for indexers or trackers, the whole system is distributed. That said, you are relying on the user to tell the truth about the contents of the file. Gnutella has some algorithmic tricks to make scanning the network more efficient, though not to the same degree as DHTs in torrents. (DHTs can be fast because they are looking for one computer, the appointed tracker, based on a hash of the file contents. Tell me if you wanna know about DHTs, they're a fascinating subject lol).

Gnutella is not the only direct file sharing protocol. Another way you can introduce 'person who wants a file' and 'person who has a file' is to have a central server which everyone connects to, often providing a chatroom function along with coordinating connections.

This can be as simple as an IRC server. Certain IRC clients (by no means all) support a protocol called XDCC, which let you send files to another user. This has been used by, for example, anime fansub groups - it's not really true anymore, but there was a time where the major anime fansub groups operated XDCC bots and if you wanted their subs, you had to go on their IRC and write a command to the bot to send it to you.

XDCC honestly sucked though. It was slow if you didn't live near the XDCC bot, and often the connection would often crap out mid download and you'd have to manually resume (thankfully it was smart enough not to have to start over from the beginning), and of course, it is fiddly to go on a server and type a bunch of IRC commands. It also put the onus of maintaining distribution entirely on the fansub group - your group ran out of money or went defunct and shut down its xdcc bot? Tough luck. That said, it was good for getting old stuff that didn't have a torrent available.

Then there's Soulseek! Soulseek is a network that can be accessed using a handful of clients. It is relatively centralised - there are two major soulseek servers - and they operate a variety of chat rooms, primarily for discussing music.

To get on Soulseek you simply register a username, and you mark at least one folder for sharing. There doesn't have to be anything in it, but a lot of users have it set so that they won't share anything unless you're sharing a certain amount of data yourself.

You can search the network and get a list of users who have matching files, or browse through a specific user's folder. Each user can set up their own policy about upload speed caps and so on. If you find something you want to download, you can queue it up. The files will be downloaded in order.

One interesting quirk of Soulseek is that the uploader will be notified (not like a push notification, but you see a list of who's downloading/downloaded your files). So occasionally someone will notice you downloading and send you a friendly message.

Soulseek is very oriented towards music. Officially, its purpose is to help promote unsigned artists, not to infringe copyright; in practice it's primarily a place for music nerds to hang out and share their collections. And although it's faced a bit of legal heat, it seems to be getting by just fine.

However, there's no rule that you can only share music. A lot of people share films etc. There's really no telling what will be on Soulseek.

Since Soulseek is 1-to-1 connections only, it's often pretty slow, but it's often a good bet if you can't find something anywhere else, especially if that something is music. In terms of resilience, the reliance on a single central server to connect people to peers is a huge problem - that's what killed Napster back in the day, if the Soulseek server was shut down that would be game over... unless someone else set up a replacement and told all the clients where to connect. And yet, somehow it's gotten away with it so far!

In terms of accessibility, it's very easy: just download a client, pick a name and password, and share a few gigs (for example: some movies you torrented) and you're good.

In terms of safety, your IP is not directly visible in the client, but any user who connects directly to you would be able to find it out with a small amount of effort. I'm not aware of any cases of IP sniffers being used on Soulseek, but I would recommend a VPN all the same to cover your bases - better safe than sorry.

Besides the public networks like Soulseek and Gnutella, there are smaller-scale, secret networks that also work on direct connection basis, e.g. on university LANs, using software such as DC++. I cannot give you any advice on getting access to these, you just have to know the right person.

Is that all the ways you can possibly pirate? Nah, but I think that's the main ones.

Now for some more niche shit that's more about the kind of 'future of piracy' type questions in the OP, like, can the points of failure be removed..?

IPFS

Since I talked a little above about DHTs for torrents, I should maybe spare a few words about this thing. Currently on the internet you specify the address of a certain computer connected to the network using an IP address. (Well, typically the first step is to use the DNS to get an IP address.) IPFS is based on the idea of 'content-based addressing' instead; like torrents, it specifies a file using a hash of the content.

This leads to a 'distributed file system'; the ins and outs are fairly complicated but it has several layers of querying. You can broadcast that you want a particular chunk of data to "nearby" nodes; if that fails to get a hit, you can query a DHT which directs you to someone who has a list of sources.

In part, the idea is to create a censorship-resistant network: if a node is removed, the data may still be available on other nodes. However, it makes no claim to outright permanence, and data that is not requested is gradually flushed from nodes by garbage collection. If you host a node, you can 'pin' data so it won't be deleted, or you can pay someone else to do that on their node. (There's also some cryptocurrency blockchain rubbish that is supposed to offer more genuine permanence.)

IPFS is supposed to act as a replacement for the web, according to its designers. This is questionable. Most of what we do on the web right now is impossible on IPFS. However, I happen to like static sites, and it's semi-good at that. It is, sympathetically, very immature; I remember reading one very frustrated author writing about how hard it was to deploy a site to IPFS, although that was some years ago and matters seem to have improved a bit since then.

I said 'semi-good'. Since the address of your site changes every time you update it, you will end up putting multiple redundant copies of your site onto the network at different hashes (though the old hashes will gradually disappear). You can set a DNS entry that points to the most recent IPFS address of your site, and rely on that propagating across the DNS servers. Or, there's a special mutable distributed name service on the IPFS network based around public/private key crypto; basically you use a hash of your public key as the address and that returns a link to the latest version of your site signed with your private key.

Goddamn that's a lot to try to summarise.

Does it really resist censorship? Sorta. If a file is popular enough to propagate enough the network, it's hard to censor it. If there's only one node with it, it's no stronger than any other website. If you wanted to use it as a long term distributed archive, it's arguably worse than torrents, because data that's not pinned is automatically flushed out of the network.

It's growing, if fairly slowly. You can announce and share stuff on it. It has been used to bypass various kinds of web censorship now and then. Cloudflare set a bunch of IPFS nodes on their network last year. But honestly? Right now it's one of those projects that is mostly used by tech nerds to talk to other tech nerds. And unfortunately, it seems to have caught a mild infection of cryptocurrency bullshit as well. Thankfully none of that is necessary.

What about piracy? Is this useful for our nefarious purposes? Well, sort of. Libgen has released all its books on IPFS; there is apparently an effort to upload the content of ZLib to IPFS as well, under the umbrella of 'Anna's Archive' which is a meta-search engine for LibGen, SciHub and a backup of ZLib. By nature of IPFS, you can't put the actual libgen index site on it (since it constantly changes as new books are uploaded, and dynamic serverside features like search are impossible on IPFS). But books are an ideal fit for IPFS since they're usually pretty small.

For larger files, they are apparently split into 256kiB chunks and hashed individually. The IPFS address links to a file containing a list of chunk hashes, or potentially a list of lists of chunk hashes in a tree structure. (Similar to using a magnet link to acquire a torrent file; the short hash finds you a longer list of hashes. Technically, it's all done with Merkle trees, the same data structure used in torrents).

One interesting consequence of this design is that the chunks don't necessarily 'belong' to a particular file. If you're very lucky, some of your chunks will already be established on the network. This also further muddies the waters of whether a particular user is holding onto copyrighted data or not, since a particular hash/block might belong to both the tree of some copyrighted file and the tree of some non-copyrighted file. Isn't that fun?

The other question I had was about hash collisions. Allegedly, these are almost impossible with the SHA-256 hash used by default on IPFS, which produces a 256-bit address. This is tantamount to saying that of all the possible 256KiB strings of data, only at most about 1 in 8000 will actually ever be distributed with the IPFS. Given the amount of 256-kibibyte strings is around 4.5 * 10^631305, this actually seems like a fairly reasonable assumption. Though, given that number, it seems a bit unlikely that two files will ever actually have shared chunks. But who knows, files aren't just random data so maybe now and then, there will be the same quarter-megabyte in two different places.

That said, for sharing large files, IPFS doesn't fundamentally offer a huge advantage over BitTorrent with DHT. If a lot of people are trying to download a file over IPFS, you will potentially see similar dynamics to a torrent swarm, where chunks spread out across the network. Instead of 'seeding' you have 'pinning'.

It's an interesting technology though, I'll be curious to see where it goes. And I strongly hope 'where it goes' is not 'increasingly taken over by cryptocurrency bullshit'.

In terms of security, an IPFS node is not anonymous. It's about as secure as torrents. Just like torrents, the DFT keeps a list of all the nodes that have a file. So if you run an IPFS node, it would be easy to sniff out if you are hosting a copyrighted file on IPFS. That said, you can relatively safely download from IPFS without running a node or sharing anything, since the IPFS.tech site can fetch data for you. Although - if you fetch a site via the IPFS.tech site (or any other site that provides IPFS access over http), IPFS.tech will gain a copy of the file and temporarily provide it. So it's not entirely tantamount to leeching - although given the level of traffic on IPFS.tech I can't imagine stuff lasts very long on there.

Freenet Hyphanet

Freenet (officially renamed to Hyphanet last month, but most widely known as Freenet) is another, somewhat older, content-based addressing distributed file store built around a DHT. The difference between IPFS and Freenet is that Freenet prioritises anonymity over speed. Like in IPFS, the data is split into chunks - but on Freenet, the file is spread out redundantly across multiple different nodes immediately, not when they download it, and is duplicated further whenever it's downloaded.

Unlike torrents and IPFS, looking up a file causes it to spread out across the network, instead of referring you to an IP address. Your request is routed around the network using hashes in the usual DHT way. If it runs into the file, it comes back, writing copies at each step along the way. If a node runs out of space it overwrites the chunks that haven't been touched in a while. So if you get a file back, you don't know where it came from. The only IP addresses you know are your neighbours in the network.

There's a lot of complicated and clever stuff about how the nodes swap roles and identities in the network to gradually converge towards an efficient structure while maintaining that degree of anonymity.

Much like IPFS, data on Freenet is not guaranteed to last forever. If there's a lot of demand, it will stick around - but if no nodes request the file for a while, it will gradually get flushed out.

As well as content-based hashing, the same algorithm can be used for routing to a cryptographic signature, which lets you define a semi-mutable 'subspace' (you can add new files later which will show up when the key is queried). In fact a whole lot of stuff seems to be built on this, including chat services and even a Usenet-like forum with a somewhat complex 'web of trust' anti-spam system.

If you use your computer as a Freenet node, you will necessarily be hosting whatever happens to route through it. Freenet is used for much shadier shit than piracy. As far as safety, the cops are trying to crack it, though probably copyrighted stuff is lower on their priority list than e.g. CSAM.

Is Freenet used for piracy? If it is, I can't find much about it on a cursory search. The major problem it has is latency. It's slow to look stuff up, and slow to download it since it has to be copied to every node between you and the source. The level of privacy it provides is just not necessary for everyday torrenting, where a VPN suffices.

BTDigg

Up above I lamented the lack of discoverability on BitTorrent. There is no way to really search the BitTorrent network if you don't know exactly the file you want. This comes with advantages (it's really fast; DHT queries can be directed to exactly the right node rather than spreading across the network as in Gnutella) but it means BitTorrent is dependent on external indices to know what's available on the network and where to look for it.

While I was checking I had everything right about IPFS, I learned there is a site called BTDigg (wikipedia) which maintains a database of torrents known from the Mainline DHT (the primary DHT used by BitTorrent). Essentially, when you use a magnet link to download a torrent file, you query the DHT to find a node that has the full .torrent file, which tells you what you need to download to get the actual content of the torrent. BTDigg has been running a scraper which notes magnet links coming through its part of the DHT and collects the corresponding .torrent files; it stores metadata and magnet links in a database that is text-searchable.

This database isn't hosted on the BitTorrent network, so it's as vulnerable to takedown as any other tracker, but it does function as a kind of backup record of what torrents exist if the original tracker has gone. So give that a try if the other sites fail.

Say something about TOR?

I've mentioned VPNs a bunch, but what about TOR? tl;dr: don't use TOR for most forms of piracy.

I'm not gonna talk about TOR in detail beyond to say I wouldn't recommend using TOR for piracy for a few reasons:

TOR doesn't protect you if you're using torrents. Due to the way the BitTorrent protocol works, your IP will leak to the tracker/DHT. So there's literally no point to using TOR.

If that's not enough to deter you, TOR is slow. It's not designed for massive file transfers and it's already under heavy use. Torrents would strain it much further.

If you want an anonymisation network designed with torrents in mind, instead consider I2P. Using a supported torrent client (right now p much just Vuze and its fork BiglyBT - I would recommend the latter), you can connect to a torrent swarm that exists purely inside the I2P network. That will protect you from IP sniffers, at the cost of reducing the pool of seeds you can reach. (It also might be slower in general thanks to the onion routing, not sure.)

What's the future of piracy?

So far the history of piracy has been defined by churn. Services and networks grow popular, then get shut down. But the demand continues to exist and sooner or later, they are replaced. Techniques are refined.

It would be nice to imagine that somewhere up here comes the final, unbeatable piracy technology. It should be... fast, accessible, easy to navigate, reliably anonymous, persistent, and too widespread and ~rhizomatic~ to effectively stamp out. At that point, when 'copies of art' can no longer function as a scarce commodity, what happens? Can it finally be decoupled from the ghoulish hand of capital? Well, if we ever find out, it will be in a very different world to this one.

Right now, BitTorrent seems the closest candidate. The persistent weaknesses: the need for indexers and trackers, the lack of IP anonymity, and the potential for torrents to die out. Also a lot of people see it as intimidating - there's a bunch of jargon (seeds, swarms, magnet links, trackers, peers, leeches, DHT) which is pretty simple in practice (click link, get thing) but presents a barrier to entry compared to googling 'watch x online free'.

Anyway, really the thing to do is, continue to pirate by any and all means available. Don't put it all in one basket, you know? Fortunately, humanity is waaaay ahead of me on that one.

do what you want 'cos a pirate is free you are a pirate

[beyond-mogai-pride-flags]

Abinary Ambinary Pride Flag

Amabinary/nymambinary/nymamby or ambiabinary/ambiabin (ambiaphorian/abinambinary or amaphorian/ambiaby/ambiaby) [apisambinary/ambiapsgender/ambips/ambiaps]: being ambinary and abinary/aphorian.

Ambinary: experiencing both binary genders.

Abinary/aphorian: experiencing a genderness that is completely unrelated to maleness, masculinity, femaleness, or femininity, and is nowhere in between those things.

This can be for any reason. Some examples include: genderfluid, pangender/omnigender, multigender/polygender, plurigender, varsex/intersex/altersex/aldernic, GNC/PNC, system member plurality/medianity, centrigender/circa-binary, "both neither", gendervast/gendercollector, cusper/evenic, cross-aligned/cronant-aligned, liaspec/mesospec exospec/abiaspec, bonusbinary...

[doodlecircuitredrawn]

Another one! I have made another one!

…Why? Because I wanted to!!

Warnings: Spoilers for the entirety of ISaT, descriptions of nausea (not graphic, but still)

If there are any other warnings you feel like I should put here, do let me know! Link to the fic under the cut!

Okay! So this one is called (Non)Binary Stars!

Binary stars are a star system that consists of a pair of stars that orbit and are gravitationally bound to each other!

Okay, so I wanted to take a crack at writing for Loop! I really like Loop as a character, but for some reason I couldn’t really figure out what headcanons to give them…

Until now! Here’s my fic full of headcanons!!!

Enjoy! Let me know if the link is fucked! And as usual, this will be edited so many times because I always notice little things!!!

- Circa [:

[esynk]

source, circa 1999

[ID: Text reading:

We don't want to be on any talkshows, be in any ads, sell any products, star in any sitcoms or be a target market.

We want more language, more funding, more healthcare, more small-sized suits, more research, more options.

We want more space for more creatures.

We demand safe and accessable bathrooms for people of all genders and until then we will piss and shit wherever we want.

We are not deceiving you.

We are not mutilating our bodies.

We are not betraying y/our communities.

We are being and becoming out true, foxy and glorious selves.

We are putting the "sex back in transsexual.

We cruise men with tits, chicks with dicks, bearded ladies and genderqueers of every species.

We want to lick your scars and make it all better.

We refuse to check either box.

We are guaranteed to stay hard all night long and not get you pregnant.

We bat for all teams -- we bat for the whole fucking league.

We will keep crashing your events, your potlucks; your bathhouses, your dyke and your fag bars, your shelters, your support groups and your play parties until you realize that

we are part of your communities.

Until you realize that your liberation is tied up with ours.

Until you realize that trans is more than the "T" on the end of GLBT.

Until you realize the endless ways that transphobia limits and hurts all of us, trans-identified or not.

We are going to breathe fire into your lungs and light itunder your ass:

We are the s/heroes of our own movement -- join us -- the trans revolution begins here and now.

A million gender for a million people!

smash the binary gender system!

\End ID]

[your-bigender-big-brother]

I think I just had a gender identity breakthrough and I need a bit of help. I don't know if there's already a term for what I'm experiencing or not

I've related to agender for about 2 years but never really fully? But something about it felt so close to how I experienced my gender. For awhile I settled on this being some outherine gender or some non descriptive version of nonbinary but this never felt quite right or specific enough?

I became familiar with centrigenders because of this blog, and now I'm wondering if that concept can possibly apply to the idea of being somewhere between agender and binary woman,, or if it's already been coined?

So I would like some help either coining this new term, or finding an existing term to describe this third gender experience. If it's a new term, if you could also make a flag for this term that would be great.

I think the flag should have some sort of shades of greens and yeollw (dull)for agenderness and soft oranges and red-ish in a style similar to the existing centrigender flags.

Thank you in advanced.

Staying angle because I'm a member of a plural system :)

I made two: The left one was your suggestion and the right one is more like how I might do it.

I was thinking of calling this femanix, a centrigender between (binary) woman and agender. The -nix comes from nixic genders, which are a part of the circa-binary system much like many existing centrigenders. - 💙💚

[thetranssupportsystem]

Back when I was 100% comfortable in my transness. Slowly working my way back to this. This joy.

Slowly reviving my dream of creating a support system for the transgender and non binary community. Started circa 2011ish

[ilraksroost]

Six Thousand Nine Hundred Sixty-Nine Words About Being a Raven and Ceratosaurus Stelliferoforme (Including the Disclaimer)

(Reading time: 54 - 69 minutes)

(Full text on both the website and below the cut)

Header art: "Masks" - A self portrait by myself circa March 2023

Disclaimer: This essay does not reflect a definite nature of reality and is only based on the beliefs and personal gnosis of ilrak, the core of the Ceratocorvus Nebula and the way that they have observed and experienced their existence. The causes are purely speculative as there is no way to truly prove or disprove the existence of this type of experience. This essay will only provide a general view as certain subjects related to this (i.e. the Ceratocorvus Nebula Gateway System and how certain members and experiences came to be, a detailed discussion about how gender, alterhumanity, and neurodivergence intersect in ilrak's personal experience, and more) will be discussed in future essays.

Introduction

My name is ilrak (a.k.a. K D Val) and I am a member of the greater alterhuman community. I have used a few different labels in the past - otherkin, therianthrope/therian, raven-kin, and my current favorites, theropodanthrope and stelliferoforme - but in trying to categorize my experiences, I find myself struggling to actually fit into any of the more established labels exactly. In this piece, I will be discussing three aspects of my identity, how they affect each other, how they are different, and how they are similar to and different from the different labels in the alterhuman community that I have used.

To help anyone who is unfamiliar with alterhuman community terms, I'll direct you to the following resources to cross reference with as they define the terms better than I can for reasons that will soon become clear.

I highly recommend looking into the works by Orion Scribner (http://frameacloud.com), House of Chimeras (https://houseofchimeras.neocities.org) and the Sol System (https://invisibleotherkin.neocities.org/Home), who are three excellent community historians. I also recommend looking into The Otherkin Wiki (https://otherkin.wiki/) which is an actively archiving encyclopedia of notable works, events, and people in the otherkin community. I also suggest visiting the Alterhumanity Archive (https://alterhumanarchive.neocities.org/Home).

A little bit about my human self before I get into the proper essay first. I am a Black, non-binary person who was born female. I am married, have a little backyard homestead, and a film and media arts degree that currently is being used to create a musical theatre podcast with my husband. I was born in the late eighties, I am formerly Christian (currently agnostic), and I did not have a decent internet connection until I was a teenager - and even then, I had grown up in the era of Stranger Danger so I did not participate in online communities outside of writing fanfiction. The first online otherkin community that I joined was Livejournal around 2006 and the now defunct forum, True Form Within, in 2007. I have been a member of many, many different websites centered around otherkin and therianthropy as both a semi-active participant and a lurker as I drifted away from some of them.

I have always identified as some flavor of non-human, even before knowing that there was a term for someone like me. I would dress as different animals, trying them on as identities, and for a while, was very into being a feline - but this also felt like putting a square peg into a round hole. When I would wear a shawl as if they were wings (or a dress that was my Diana Ross if she was a dove dress), or if I placed the maple helicopter seed pods on my nose and pretended I was a dinosaur, then I felt a sense of overwhelming euphoria (I still have the articles of clothing, even if they will never fit me again). It wasn't until my first year of college that I started to actually think more about the bird and dinosaur, however for reasons that will be outlined further in the essay, I only focused on the bird identity - specifically the raven which had appeared many times in my life as something I would see and secretly think to myself that is me.

The third identity that will be discussed later in the essay is another one that had always been there, even when words weren't there for me to describe it. An identity that I struggled with because of how outlandish it sounded. Ravens and dinosaurs are organic things that lived. The material that makes up a star is not. When I was a child, the Planetarium was just as much of a comforting place as the Aviary or the Natural History Museum. I felt like I was home when watching the laser shows that showed planets, stars, black holes, and other celestial bodies. Not in the sense that I was an alien from another planet, but rather that those forms were something I was supposed to be. I had adorned my ceiling with those glow in the dark stars. I had my favorite astrological pullout posters from National Geographic. I adored Cosmos and Carl Sagan. The history of deep geological time fascinated me. All of this influenced and was influenced by my identity.

As we go into this essay, I'll talk about how exactly I identify as a raven, a ceratosaurus, and star material, the terms I've found I prefer over the years, and what I think is the personal cause of this identity. I am generally agnostic about the causes of my own alterhumanity, however towards the end of this essay, I'll get into my current, more metaphysical beliefs regarding why I am what I am.

Now, consider the raven …

Raven

Being a raven is what I am probably more known as in the community as this is what I joined the online otherkin community as (after some, what could be called cameo shifts as a lion - however some of this will be brought into question in a later heading as these shifts may have been legitimately part of my non-humanity but interpreted incorrectly). Being a raven is the easiest, simplest part of my identity to talk about because, with ravens being extant animals, I could point to aspects of myself and say Yes. This is me. This is what my body should look like, this is how I act, this is a translation of how I think, etc. This is the aspect of myself that I was the most comfortable sharing with the therianthrope community because I was safer from grilling - the term for harsh questioning within the community that has started to fall out of favor. Part of it may also have been that, with an uncommon theriotype (the animal that a therianthrope identifies as), people either find it to be more legitimate (see the countless essays asking the question of Why are there so many wolves?) or there is simply not enough interest in questioning someone with a theriotype that is farther away from being human than a wolf or a deer. After all, the experience of being a non-mammal in a human body is very different from being a non-human mammal in a human body.

When I was still using therian terminology, I called myself a cladotherian (a term for those who have identities that are not a distinct species but rather the genus or family), as while it was easy to say I'm a common raven, it wasn't always accurate when dealing with different shifts (as will be discussed and defined shortly). Common ravens, African white-necked ravens, Thick-billed ravens, Brown-necked ravens, and the extinct Pied raven all feel like they are the same amount of who I am (and this may be partially explained with the third identity that I will talk about later). While the exact species used to be an important thing for me to ponder about, I have since just embraced being called a raven. Whatever sort of raven comes to mind when people hear I am one, they are correct.

On the most basic parts of this identity, we'll talk about shifts. When I say shifts, I mean the mindset changes and instinctual triggers that could be considered a mental shift as well as things such as your mental self image changing called an envisage shift (this is difficult to describe but is essentially how you are visualizing yourself - while I am very aware that I am in a human body, sometimes I still see myself as my theriotype when I'm interacting with the world), and, of course, the phantom shift - where one would feel they have a tail, talons, feathers, etc. This, for me, is a little bit different (and will ring true for the other theriotype that I will be discussing next). I don't so much feel that I suddenly or gradually have feathers or a tail. It's more that I do not currently have them and I am suddenly very aware of the absence and the feeling of wrongness at not having the correct body map. Some aspects of this will also blend in with my gender dysphoria to the point where I often don't know where one begins and the other ends. After all, birds do not give live birth and they also do not possess mammaries. When you're a non-mammal born into a female, mammalian body, some things get extremely alien at best and distressing at worst.

I do not have a name for the form of phantom shifting that I experience (maybe absence shifting is better - mostly joking - mostly), but other shift types, such as envisage shifts and mental shifts, I do experience. When I experience mental shifts as a raven, this often comes with behaviors that I find myself either wanting to do (flying - especially if startled, scavenging, anting, territorial urges - yes, ravens are more territorial than crows, and on the most extreme, becoming mostly nonverbal as I struggle to translate thoughts to the correct words) as well as behaviors that can be translated to a human body easily and be unobtrusive (toe walking, perching on my chair, echolalia, allopreening by mostly having my husband touch my head, neck, or back in a way that simulates preening - he is also the only person allowed to do this as per the above territorial urges). There are other behaviors that are difficult to describe other than I'm seeing a human world through a raven's mind. Capitalism and money is dumb. Coffee, chocolate, and human entertainment are cool.

Some of the more destructive urges that I've had, feather picking, scavenging, anting, and territorial urges, are things that I have had to work on and redirect. As a child I often picked at my sweaters but would get scolded which turned into me then picking at my hair, my face, my head, my ears - all trying to do it surreptitiously - and unfortunately for this one, the closest solution I've found that doesn't destroy my clothing is to rely on other forms of stimming, my current favorite being drywashing my hands because then at least they are doing something.

Scavenging is easier to redirect to other things. I currently have a garden and I love scavenging through it for the dopamine rush of a pod of black eyed peas or a perfectly ripe tomato as well as for bugs to toss to the chickens. I also have scattered high value treats (chocolate eclair ice cream bars) in our freezer on occasion for when the scavenging urge gets really bad. Anting is one that I've not found a solution for but is also one that, in my human body, I know that I cannot do so I just resign myself to the mantra, you cannot ant. Instead, showers with a good pressure shower head are heavenly and if I had the choice, I would probably stay in them forever.

For territorial urges, I've found that it ties into what I consider my introverted nature. I do not like large crowds, I find I can be territorial over my home space, my husband, and also over food - while I do share, I don't take kindly to folks helping themselves to my food without asking and the urge to squawk or peck bubbles up very quickly. Now some of this could also tie into my neurodivergence/suspected autism, however this is something that would cost a lot of money to finish the formal diagnosis I started in 2017 - which leads back to my previous statement of Capitalism is dumb.

Managing my instincts and behaviors with the raven side of my identity is surprisingly easy after years of learning to mask. I do have very strong parental instincts towards a lot of birds - eggs are both tasty food but also, at the right time, something I would want to try and incubate - and as a preteen I did try this once putting an egg in a sock drawer - I probably should have candled it first and was very lucky that it did not explode or rot when it became obvious that it wasn't viable. I've been able to satisfy the parental urge by raising chickens. Even if they are not the same species, they help fulfill that parental instinct - especially because chickens are very, very easy to communicate with, being a domesticated animal. If you do not have access to keeping chickens, taking care of a plush bird or being able to volunteer at places that have birds helps in a pinch. Due to issues with behavior and problems inherent in the parrot trade, I don't actually recommend parrots. I got lucky with my lineolated parakeet, but they are all still wild animals -which would be a whole other essay in and of itself.

I also can satisfy some of the cravings for odd animal parts that a scavenging bird would find very valuable, simply from purchasing the offal parts (hearts, livers, tongues, stomach) and cooking them up. As a raven, I would not have had a strong sense of taste and taste is what has gotten me into trouble as a human. Food is amazing and human cuisine is one of the species' greatest inventions. Human jaws and teeth also mean that I can access bone marrow much easier. One craving that I have barely been able to satisfy, however, is the craving of a whole, raw egg. I blame Joanna from the movie The Rescuers Down Under for making raw, in the shell eggs look so delicious. I have not eaten a raw egg in this manner, but the urge is there quite often. This may actually be my most embarrassing and potentially harmful strong urge since salmonella is not a laughing matter. The best replacement I've found are Cadbury Creme Eggs but the flavor isn't perfect and the shell is too thick.

Much like a raven, I do find that I enjoy collecting things that are otherwise useless to others. While rock collections are a common thing, and I'd love to one day categorize all of my rocks, things as seemingly insignificant as gravel have been a part of my rock collection. I remember being a child and bringing home handfuls of gravel that I had specifically sorted as being the best and prettiest gravel - with the occasional juniper berry or interesting seed hulls. This would have kept going had societal pressures not gotten in the way. (This is also something that will have to be discussed in a future essay about the gateway multiple system I am the core or host of.) Now that I am an adult, I still find myself grabbing interesting rocks that may not have any appeal to anyone else, along with the tops of acorns and interesting leaves.

As a raven, I do enjoy mimicking sounds and will do whatever I can to learn different bird calls, animal sounds, and on occasion try to match specific human voices (this latter one is more difficult unless I am singing). This could be tied to the echolalia from being on the spectrum, however it also does match with my raven-ness. The speed at which I have been able to match some calls gives me a lot of euphoria, with the one coming to mind the most being when I learned the vocalizations of condors and vultures in an evening in order to record them for the podcast I host with my husband. This alongside times when I've been able to have conversations with different backyard birds (as well as owls when I was just calling to a Great Horned Owl who was very confused when he saw me) provide an intense sense of species euphoria.

Now, when I'm talking about my experiences and shifts, I need to make clear that I always have some touch of one of these three kintypes/theriotypes/theropotypes going on. Usually it will go between either raven or ceratosaurus, which will be the next one I will be talking about, with regards to perspective and reactions to the world around me. My view of humanity can be confusing on occasion because some things about humanity are incredibly vexing while others make me fall in love with humanity more and more every day. As a raven, life around humans can superficially be the easiest, with more access to food and less predators - however individual humans can sometimes be cruel. On the same end, some humans can also be kind and ravens and crows have been shown to also recognize this - remembering and telling their friends and family about the humans who were kind as well as the humans who were cruel. When misanthropy shows up in the alterhuman community, it tends to trouble me because as a raven, I love humans for all of their perfections and imperfections.

Misanthropy doesn't even occur to the next kintype. This is because this animal has been extinct for about one hundred forty million years and never saw humans in life.

Ceratosaurus

The ceratosaurus kintype is one that I kept pushed down a long time, much like the third one I'll be talking about, and the main reason is because of an issue that pops up in the alterhuman community over and over again. Grilling.

Grilling was possibly born out of a fear of role players, internet trolls, and physical shifting scammers who preyed on the dysphoric members of the community and on the younger members of the community (and often still do to a lesser degree). There was often an overcompensation to some degree where because of role players, the community felt it had to act harsher to vet newcomers, with strict and constant questioning and often the pushing out or disbelieving of polyweres/polytherians - those with more than one theriotype, fictionkin, and people with kintypes that were either not animals or not even living things - plants, objects, elementals, concepts, and others.

This is why I tried to ignore the ceratosaurus side for so long even though it was alongside raven as being one of the strongest self-images I had had for the longest time. Ceratosaurus may even have been the first one my brain said yeah, that's me since I had seen ceratosaurus in dinosaur books before I saw accurate depictions of a raven (since most crows and ravens are colored like choughs instead in cartoons).

The ceratosaurus side has just as strong of phantom and mental shifts as the raven side but they are extremely different. The mental shifts as a ceratosaurus are, for lack of a better term, quieter, because they are what happens when you take a twenty-five foot long theropod dinosaur who had to hunt for their food as well as contend with much larger predators, and put it in the body of an animal that has most of their needs taken care of in one way or another. The ceratosaurus mind isn't as worried about the stresses of human life that the human mind is - or even as worried as the raven mind that observes humans. The ceratosaurus mind knows that the problems that a human faces are stressful to the human, but the ceratosaurus also knows that it does not have to face down an allosaurus or hunt a stegosaurus for its next meal. The ceratosaurus can get annoyed, get angry, but isn't as easily riled up as a human or raven mind when they're experiencing life in the current era.

With the phantom shifts, this is similar to the shifts that I get with the raven, where I'm less experiencing a presence and more experiencing the absence of a tail, the absence of the lacrimal ridge and nasal crest, the absence of osteoderms, scales and large teeth … and oddly enough the absence of feathers which has not been proven in the fossil record for ceratosaurus. This was another thing that kept me from exploring this side of myself as it was something I could not prove. At one time in the therianthropy community, some of the grilling that I witnessed related to similar things such as Blue eyed, black furred wolves cannot exist and I internalized that to try and disprove the feelings that I was having, even calling the ceratosaurus shifts cameo shifts or a misinterpretation of my raven self adjusting to the human body. However, neither ravens nor humans are twenty five feet long.

The strangest shift that I get is a ceratosaurus is related to my size. I am about an average sized individual. When I'm raven minded, I do have a mild feeling of my body being too large for me - complete with clumsiness from trying to control my longer arms and legs, but with the ceratosaurus, I feel too small. I feel like I should be twenty five feet long and with my head about ten feet above the ground (without even getting started on the posture feeling all kinds of incorrect). The feeling is difficult to describe, since it is hard to describe feeling too large for your body. A lot of my experiences regarding ceratosaurus specifically are related to envisage shifts. I tend to see myself as one whenever I am not seeing myself as a raven or as the third identity I will get into later. On occasion, when I am further into this identity, I feel as if I am a ceratosaurus looking through the eyes of a raven that is looking through the eyes of a human.

Instincts when I'm feeling more like a ceratosaurus are not as overpowering, since life is relatively easy for me compared to life in the Jurassic. Any sort of hunting instincts are easily redirected with play or just imagining myself having a successful hunt. Fishing instincts are helped because of the use of tools like fishing rods - something that ceratosaurus brain is ecstatic over - and sometimes I can even direct those instincts into non-food or actual hunting activities, such as bird watching and photography or weeding the garden as I need to be focused and observant when doing these activities.

This leads into another interesting thing as a ceratosaurus. Ravens are omnivores, as are humans. Ceratosaurus was a carnivore and was not around human cultivated plants ever. As such, when I am in a ceratosaurus mindset, human food is the most amazing thing in the world. Carrots, tomatoes, garlic, watermelon, corn - none of these existed or would have been eaten by ceratosaurus and when I'm in a ceratosaurus mindset, I savor these flavors even more. The ceratosaurus is happy to be human. It is ecstatic because it has everything it could have wanted - minus the mammalian things that do still cause dysphoria in this mindset.

Now, a ceratosaurus and a raven are corporeal with specific sizes, specific awareness, and easily describable instincts and thoughts. The same cannot be said for the third identity that I will talk about. When you look behind the human mask, behind the raven mask, and behind the ceratosaurus mask, you will see something whose awareness is entirely alien because it may not even have been aware until it landed on the molten, early Earth.

Stelliferoforme

So this one is the weird one and is one that I do not have a proper name for so I am going with The Stelliferoforme (from stelliferous - meaning having or abounding with stars and forme - from the latin form and greek morpha for bodily form, build) even though it's not one hundred percent accurate but does work enough for the basic form of this identity, being created sometime during the early stelliferous period and being made of the material that makes up stars while also being something that originally was intended to create one (other terms I have played with are Star Soul, Atomic Soul, and Stardust-kin). This is what I feel is the original form of whatever makes up the experience that my soul/atoms/what have you has taken. This is the form prior to the other two forms and encompasses the forms that could be considered cameo shifts or past life shifts. Lives that were formative but didn't shape my soul directly (such as lives trying out plants and deciding they needed to be more mobile or lives as mammals and their ancestors and deciding that mammalian life was not for them please and thank you). Shapes made by the dust or atoms that were forged in a nebula before the formation of earth - that feel so alien that it is hard to quantify because it is not life in the same way a human or a raven or a ceratosaurus would experience it as well as lives that did not form a part of my identity (much like how an experience of playing tag on the playground very much happened but it didn't shape your life in the same way as getting cast in a school play for a child who developed a love of theater).

The Stelliferoforme is the first form, the dust and elements that may have formed a star that may or may not have died out - or may have sent jets of material out towards a newly forming solar system. Being a part of that material and joining the molten ball that was beginning to form and orbit Sol before colliding with another planet. Material that could have ended up on both the cooling planet and the newly formed moon (or may not have). Material that could have been among the material that was hit by an icy comet, struck by lightning, and started to form into the building blocks that would become life. This Stelliferoforme, paradoxically, does not long for the other stars. They are quite happy remaining on earth. Earth has been their home since the first time they gained what we would consider consciousness as life began to form. Earth was where they became aware. Earth is home.

The shifts for a Stelliferoforme are difficult to describe because a body is alien to it. When I try to focus on it and peel apart the layers, I find myself feeling as if I am the atoms of carbon, helium, hydrogen, etc but not knowing what they are called because stars and stardust don't have the same names for themselves. The gasses in a Nebula don't know they are called oxygen, hydrogen or helium. The specks of dust don't know their atomic number. They barely know the form they take or will take and being in a contained physical body is incredibly alien. They feel too big and too small. They feel cramped and yet too free. Sensations are overwhelming and addicting all at once.

They know and don't know so much. They don't understand how light and color works and yet they have an intimate knowledge of it in a way that doesn't make sense to an organic being's brain. A mental shift as a Stelliferoforme is both incredibly quiet and overwhelmingly loud. The Stelliferroforme cannot do math, cannot sing, cannot talk and yet they have so much to say, the numbers pull to them even if they cannot understand them, and music is their language.

The experience of human life as a Stelliferoforme is one that puts context to what they are. They can look into books now and learn words that describe what they know and use other words to describe what isn't written. They can experience sensations they would never have experienced if they had coalesced into a Proper Star as they had once been attempting to do. They could not create a star, a solar system, collapse into a black hole - maybe creating something new in it's collapse - as a star would imagine their life cycle to be if they could imagine such a thing, but as a human, they can create a universe of their own - stories are one of the things that fascinates the Stelliferoforme the most because in creating stories, whole new universes are spawned with rules that reflect the mind of the creator.

The Stelliferoforme is compelled to create and experience because the material was there to form a star, to create a planetary system of their own, but the forces of gravity weren't in their favor. In another universe, perhaps this material is currently a star in the same stages as our current sun - perhaps even part of a star system, with their own planetary bodies and asteroid belts, pulling comets into their orbits to create a fiery display in the skies of the planets that encircle it.

But they did not become a star and instead joined other bits of star material on the molten earth - and they like it better that way because they have had more varied experiences than they would have had as a star. Through landing on earth, they could experience consciousness, sentience … and sapience.

What's in a name?

Labels in the alterhuman community have been a sticky subject for myself. I began in the community as otherkin first and foremost as that was the term I had been introduced to in high school. I should add that I had seen descriptions of therians and weres (more commonly weres) in the early 2000s but I was not active on the internet due to stranger danger fears. Otherkin worked for the most part until I discovered the therian/therianthrope label, which was what I threw myself into mostly (and in retrospect, this hindered my own personal development as therianthropy forums and websites had some cultures that did not quite mesh with my own gnosis and so in order to be a proper therian, I tried to fit the mold and over question myself, leading to a lot of confusion and identity issues that resolved when I took an unplanned hiatus in the mid to late 2010s to focus on attempting a teaching career (perhaps an essay on how underpaying and overworking teachers is what wass leading to the teacher shortages long before Covid is in order). During this time, I still was a raven. I still had dinosaur shifts that I was trying to explain away, and I still had that nebulous (pun intended) feeling of something else being there.

Rejoining the communities that have names that sound and like they would first on the surface but have their own history and very different definitions, i.e. starseed and celestials).

Perhaps the terms aren't as important. If I say I am otherkin and list off my types, save for the stelliferoforme, anyone with a basic understanding has a bit of an idea about what I am. It's not a perfect fit still, but it's an entry point.

So what am I? Well, theropodanthrope is something I've toyed with but it doesn't shorten to anything other than theropod and it is more derivative of what I used to call myself. It also leaves out the integral star part of myself - the stelliferoforme part of who I am. If I wanted to simply use raven-kin, ceratosaurus-kin, and Star Souled or spacekin, I could (and in fact Star Soul or stelliferoforme is a term to separate myself from other communities that have names that sound and like they would first on the surface but have their own history and very different definitions, i.e. starseed and celestials).

Perhaps the terms aren't as important. If I say I am otherkin and list off my types, save for the stelliferoforme, anyone with a basic understanding has a bit of an idea about what I am. It's not a perfect fit still, but it's an entry point.

However, because of the way that the identities interact, perhaps stelliferoforme is the best name for the base identity - star stuff that has taken forms that have been the most impactful and shaped itself as such. A raven and ceratosaurus stelliferoforme.

The Whys of ilrak

So now that we have covered the three different aspects of my identity, we will talk about the whys. As I said, I am rather agnostic regarding my identity as if it turns out the cause is purely psychological, I am alright with that. If it turns out to be purely spiritual or metaphysical, that is also ok. It will just better explain why I am the way I am. I do prefer to lean into a metaphysical cause because psychologically, I have not found much to confirm exactly why I am a stelliferoforme, a ceratosaurus, or a raven. I can point to traits and say this is probably related to my autism but it doesn't explain the absence/phantom shifts. This is when it is a little easier to try and look for a metaphysical cause.

In my own case, because of the nature of these identities and that without one another I would be hollow, I like to compare it to a nesting doll. In the center is the core identity. It was what first gained consciousness and is what the experiences are being built on with each life or iteration of life the cosmic material is experiencing. The Stelliferoforme is what is the smallest doll inside the nesting doll - or to use the mask analogy, is what is wearing all the masks. However, it is not something that experiences life in the same way as an organic being so it needs a filter to experience it.

The ceratosaurus is the next filter (and while, in a drawing I did, it is the larger of the dolls, the ceratosaurus is actually a filter or doll nested within the raven). This is a life or an experience that left such a mark on the Stelliferoforme that it formed part of the shape it preferred - bipedal, feathered, reptilian rather than mammalian - and this form persisted as a preferred form as long as it was extant. Were there other lives prior to this or after this but prior to a raven life? Absolutely, but they did not leave the same impact on the core identity. Life as an early mollusk was interesting but the oceans were scary. Life as an early tree was long and fascinating but movement was missed. Life as a Dimetrodon spelled the end of life in the mammal line (until human) simply because mammalian traits were a big NO to the stelliferoforme. Other archosaur lives before the evolution of ceratosaurus were close but not what the stelliferoforme enjoyed. Then along comes a dinosaur that is bipedal and enjoys being flamboyant and flashy - to the point where it is the theropod dinosaur most known for it's crests and osteoderms, and it decides this is the form it prefers (until the form goes extinct and then it's a scramble to hop from horned dinosaur to horned dinosaur in all available groups until the non-avian dinosaurs go extinct - which then leads to lives as birds).

The raven is the third filter and until this current life was the most recent filter. This is the filter that has been around since about the Miocene, enjoying lives as different types of ravens throughout the world (explaining why I identify with more than one species of raven), being curious about humans but not wanting to be one. Being a raven was comfortable and fun. It was a way to experience a new level of thought and ability and there was so much to experience even as a bird - but all things must come to an end.

The human part of this is going to be expanded upon in an essay regarding fictive that joined the system at the end of 2022, because if the metaphysical explanation of my alterhumanity is considered, then the choice that was made after my last raven life was a catalyst for a fork in the road and, much like with the possibility of different actions creating infinite universes, one universe split off where I decided to give the human thing a go while in this universe I dug my heels in and had to be pushed into a human life later than I was in the other universe. My personal belief is that, in being pushed to incarnate as human, I decided to try and get as many human experiences crammed into one life as possible to limit the amount of time I was in the strange mammal body. Perhaps this is why I so easily was converted to (read: scared into) Christianity - and why I have constantly been on the Medical Mystery Tour since childhood.

While experiencing dysphoria from being in a feminine, mammalian body is difficult and I find myself very mismatched in my body, I am glad that I ended up in the form that I did. It helped me meet the love of my lives and find someone who was on a similar wavelength as myself. This life has helped me find words to describe what and who I am and to write them down in case they help someone else on a similar journey. I would never have been able to have a somewhat concrete way of explaining this experience as a raven that I do as a human (ravens have not invented any easily translatable forms of passing on stories outside of oral tradition and until a raven to any human language dictionary is written, we won't truly know the stories told around a carcass or to the hatchlings in the nest). I have discovered the joys of coffee, chocolate, and highly developed taste buds. Most importantly, I can be with the love of my lives who, if I had been a raven this go around, I would never have been able to be with him because humans and ravens are not romantically compatible (much less ceratosaurs or star material).

Though this doesn't stop me from occasionally wanting to do a display dance for my husband that would look incredibly silly without feathers or crests. Maybe I can convince him we should be birds next time … or perhaps a binary star system.

In Conclusion …

Being a raven and ceratosaurus stelliferoforme is how I view the world and has shaped my life in ways that I still am trying to find the right words for. The more layers I pull back, the more it seems I need to find better words to describe them. I am star material that is wearing the masks from the forms that have most defined who I was and who I am currently and through those masks, I see and experience the world differently than others. I'm star material looking through the eyes of a ceratosaurus, who is looking through the eyes of a raven, who is now living out their life with a human mask. They are all as equally me as I am them. They are who I have always been and who I will be throughout the rest of my lives. These ephemeral and nonphysical identities influence me just as much as my physical ones. They intersect with my neurodivergence and my spirituality and are what have shaped who I am today. If it turns out that only one of the possible causes is correct, or that neither is, it will be alright because that doesn't change who I am or the experiences that I've had.

The experiences as a raven and ceratosaurus stelliferoforme aren't even the strangest I have lived through. They in fact have made me more open minded to others' identities and experiences. In sharing my own experience with discovering and embracing who I am, I hope to maybe make the journey a little easier for the next alterhuman who is feeling alone in the community or who feels they have a weird kintype that they cannot easily describe and are worried they won't be taken seriously.

The experiences as a raven and ceratosaurus stelliferoforme aren't even the strangest I have lived through. They in fact have made me more open minded to others' identities and experiences. In sharing my own experience with discovering and embracing who I am, I hope to maybe make the journey a little easier for the next alterhuman who is feeling alone in the community or who feels they have a weird kintype that they cannot easily describe and are worried they won't be taken seriously.

[mcgravin]

500,000 years from now, a machine intelligence residing in the matrioshka brain that has been built within the event horizon of Saggitarius A* (who is descended from a full-neural upload mind collective, who is descended from cybernetically enhanced transhumans, who is descended from you or one of your relatives) looks through the eyes of one of its remote drones 27,000 light years away, currently visiting the Museum of Old Earth Artifacts in orbit around Alpha Centauri B.

The machine intelligence sees something in the museum that catches its eye and pauses nearly a third of its million concurrent tasks to devote more attention to it: a rectangle of glass and silicon circuits in a metal shell, but self-evidently some kind of early communication device. The placard reads "iPhone 5, circa Human Era year 12,013 (2013 CE by the common Old Earth dating system)". Wasn't that around the time humans invented chemical rocketry to first leave their planet and set foot on its moon?

The intelligence marvels at the rudimentary technology, using sensors to probe the device down to the last electron in the NAND gates of its flash memory cell. The processing speed is laughably slow, and the data storage infinitesimally small. It uses a radio transceiver of all things (sub-lightspeed, how quaint!), and probably couldn't reach past 25km, let alone to the next planet.

Yet the device's operating system is completely intelligible, even compatible with the intelligence's own thought system. It knows that if it tunneled down through the layers of its own brain, through the kernels and interpreters, deep under even the qubit layer, its mind uses binary computation, just like this practically prehistoric device. It must be a bit like a human of that ancient era looking at a virus and recognizing that both have RNA in their cell nuclei.

Then the intelligence uses its drone to manipulate the "iPhone 5", activating the screen. The drone's eyes see on the screen:

The intelligence suddenly regrets not having a physical body that can sigh deeply, and instead uses its drone to roll its eyes. Perhaps it's for the best that this particular hominid species drove itself extinct only a few centuries later.

(Inspired by this post by @gallusrostromegalus.)

[neopronouns]

Can you design a general flag for the circa-binary terms/spectrum/umbrella/gender system?

Also, do you know a generic/illustrative flag for juvelic terms as well? If not can you design one?

circa-binary flag is queued and here's a juvelic flag!

[o-craven-canto]

Ea, Our Second Chance (10c)

10c. Eucytobionta (part 3/3, biotechnology)

(Index) (< 10b. Eucytobionta, unicellular diversity > 11. The early days)

(original link)

« For the future of war: study bacteria. Information is their key. Taking down antibiotic defence systems has involved them in every kind of infiltration, net-communicated adaptivity, cryptographic subtlety, plastic modularization, and synergistic coalition... Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war. » – Nick Land, Meltdown, 1994

« Remember that the so-called laws of Nature are always descriptive, never prescriptive... All that unfolds before us in the natural world, it's up to us to shape it in the form that serves best that which thinks and feels. Down with the natural; up with the good. » – architect Evgeny Kantorovich, The Inhuman Humane

« During cellular division, in both one-celled and multi-celled organisms, it's possible to identify a "mother" and a "daughter" cell by the fact that the latter receives only a copy of the protonucleus. Only once the division is complete does it divide again to generate the new paranuclei. Presumably this is a measure to limit the transmission of dangerous mutations (see Appendix B), which are bound to occur in the mother's paranuclei because of their massive activity of PNA replication, but not in the protonucleus, which bears only one, relatively inert copy of each gene.

[...] During paranuclear genesis, not all genes are multiplied equally. The exact amount of copies that are produced of each gene seems to be the most important tool of developmental regulation, especially in multicellular organisms, wherein different cells must be specialized for different tasks (see Appendix D, 23-31). [...] We believe that identifying the genes that regulate paranuclear gene multiplication would allow significant directed alteration to the development of economically-significant cultured organisms, for example by directly increasing the edible storage tissue of a new strand of nopal trees.

[...] It's worth noting that nevertheless a paranucleus contains far fewer mutations than one would expect from its rate of PNA replication (see Appendix D, 37-42), which suggests extremely strong safeguards against replication errors. [...] Given the multi-terabyte capacity of each paranucleus, we suggest that synthetic PNA within a paranuclear environment could be an extremely effective form of micro-storage for digital information.

[...] Sexual recombination uncoupled from reproduction, or conjugation, is common among Ean microbes as it is among Terran ones. Most commonly [...] two partners duplicate their protonucleus by binary fission, and exchange one copy with each other. The diploid nucleus resulting from the fusion of the stationary protonucleus with the one received from the other partner immediately performs meiosis to produce once again haploid protonuclei (see Appendix B ) carrying a mixture of genes from both partners. All such protonuclei but one are dismantled and digested, as are the existing paranuclei. New paranuclei are generated, as described above, by the division of the surviving protonucleus.

Recent studies (see Appendix D, 51-64) suggest that a similar process of quasi-sexual genetic exchange (microconjugation) may occur among the cells of multicellular organisms [...] and that virus- or viroid-like particles may be introduced into the conjugating nuclei (see Appendix D, 65-67). We propose to look into the potential of artificial microconjugation to insert arbitrary PNA sequences into selected target cells. This would allow highly targeted modification of already-developed Ean multicellular organisms, with an extremely broad array of applications: consider splicing metal-sequestering cuprophyte complexes into fast-growing phytoplankton for oceanic mining, or breeding edible Enantiozoa with pre-flipped flesh. »

– internal memo, Penglai-Lifeware, "Three avenues of investigation into cellular xenobiology", circa 160 AL

[taperwolf]

That discussion of representations of negative numbers in binary in computers reminded me of the following. It's from HAKMEM, a compilation of computer and mathematical hacks compiled by the MIT AI Lab circa 1972; the specific item was written by Bill Gosper, emphasis mine:

Item 154: The myth that any given programming language is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of powers of 2. If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period = 1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary — the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...111111 (base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = ...111110. Thus, 2X = X - 1, so X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that is two's-complement.

[just-archiving-tings]

Uh hi, thought I'd make a introduction post since yall will probably see me spam reblogging from yall lol

Yall can call me by my username or just Crash. I've been kinda watching the mogai community for a bit now and wanted to make an archive for the things I find interesting.

I don't really know what else to say lol I'm kinda a private person lol. Maybe I'll make some alt flags if I get bored🧐

Tag list:

Non archiving moment -just me talking lol

Circa-binary -genders that are or are related to the circa-binary system

Glg -gender loving gender orientations

Orientations -I think that's pretty obvious

Genders -also probably obvious

Uhhhh I'll add more tags as I go on

[sunkern-plus]

1, 7, and 13 for Jean Marie

1.) What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

HA that is a question. although ae's naturally quite prone to contemplating quite deep stuff ae ALSO hates being with aer thoughts for longer than .001 seconds, so ae often does impulsive things to avoid thinking. you can see where "jean marie cotard is the two main francises self insert" kinda comes from despite ae being a deuteragonist at most. it's actually what kickstarts aer to both get kicked out of aer grandparents' house because ae is constantly either rummaging through cabinets in search of food, punishing aerself when ae predictably gains weight due to it (ae gets a better body image but aer internalized fatphobia not HELPED by aer genuine gender goal being "i want to be a pretty fat feminine enby" conflicting with aer fear ae won't be taken seriously AND will be seen as ugly especially because ae's median facets make aer REALLY undecided about electrolysis so ae's afraid of looking like a stereotypical fat hairy amab nonbinary person who can't pass but is wearing like. a tutu at walmart or something, except ae's canadian so idk if canada HAS walmarts or what their walmart equivalents are up there), and also having...very risky sexual encounters that almost never end up WITH any actual sex because ae ends up pushing people away because again, median facets conflicted about whether to actually have sex with people or be the good submissive femby that other facets believe ae "should" be. so yeah. incidentally, jean marie's impulsivity is what triggered aer to do the demonic doppleganger summoning ritual in the first place, in the belief that "killing the worst parts of themselves would be like, making the world a better place, right?" (do not play with random demon summoning books, college aged people)

7.) What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling?

anything that aired on foxbox or ytv circa 2000-2007, usually stuff like cardcaptors or sailor moon (which ae was a huge fan of and usagi was aer first gender goal AND both ami, makoto, and setsuna was aer first crushes....btw the main fronter in jean marie's median system is an aporagender epicene mavrine (as in, the xenogender related to marine life) antheic (an aesthetigender related to love (especially, in jean marie's case, for aer body, gender, and other people), beauty, and aesthetics) femby (as in feminine but not female enby) who also considers aerself an nblw and nblnb but feels "phony" because "even though i know i'm not a man or a woman i still feel like since i wasn't born female i don't deserve to consider myself a nonbinary femme attracted to women"), but ae also surprisingly liked stuff like zoids, megaman battle network, spider riders, and stickin' around. ae loves the feeling of nostalgia ae gets from these shows, but often has unpleasant memories of being bullied for aer exercise intolerance and preference to stay inside, causing aer grandfather to abuse aer for being "too girlish". (this, in addition to aer general lack of alignment with binary womanhood in general and more with concepts ASSOCIATED with femininity, is what kept aer from identifying as a trans woman but ae does consider aerself transfeminine adjacent, though struggles to understand if ae considers aerself wlw-adjacent due to internalized transmisogyny and cissexism as well as genuinely preferring nonbinary people more often to the point ae thought ae was aromantic and asexual because ae KNEW no nonbinary people).

13.) What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color?

ae thinks ae looks best in pastels and bright "girly" colors like pink and seafoam green, and rock and yuuki both agree ae looks good in those colors. ae's often too insecure to wear those colors, much to the lack of understanding of rock and yuuki, because ae thinks it's like "putting lipstick on a very fat pig in drag".

when ae finally decide to wear the colors ae likes in the styles ae likes even in front of albina and aleksandra, even aleksandra, the characteristic stoic murderbabe (of demons mind you), is stunned and flustered.

(you see where i'm going with this right. jeanyuukirocksandra polycule n4n4n4w)