#my brain function? linear

[spid3r-trans]

update will be up tomorrow sometime!

also if u sent me an ask or message recently i promise i see it i’ll get to y’all asap!!

[ruminate88]

Emotional Wounds and Functional Freeze: The Holidays

1/06/25 no energy and emotional wounds

Well we all know 2020 alone was super hard on everyone!!!! That year was hard to decorate for ANY holiday. Was also the year the unhealed trauma that I was unaware of, manifested itself physically and finally my gut gave way 😢 I had burning into my esophagus and I couldn’t eat for weeks!!!! Absolutely had to starve myself and lost over 25 lbs within 2 weeks… Everyone around me at the time got upset and started questioning me like crazy!!! I even tried to get into a Dr but it was heavy into Covid so… everything was about Covid and I couldn’t get help. People in my life still blame Covid for my situation and I don’t correct them 🥺🌹

Last Christmas in 2023, I fell off a ladder trying to hang up lights over my garage and I hit HARD, face planting on concrete and was nervous I broke my nose… THANK GOD nothing was broken that I know of but I had deep large bruises on my legs that changed colors for months and still if you press hard enough on my legs, I sorta can still feel it but it doesn’t hurt so much. THAT EXPERIENCE helped to mirror my unhealed emotional wounds 😭😭😭 That Christmas after I fell, it was super difficult to wrap presents or decorate cuz I was physically sore/tired and unsure what to do about my emotional wounds….

I had already made this blog and started writing down my story but didn’t understand why I was writing my story down…. I felt bad for making this blog and talking about my exes till I understand how important it is to process everything and talk about it. I needed to sort out my emotions and release everything I had been repressing!! As I continued to write though, I began to feel soooooo exhausted everyday. Almost zero energy and I push myself daily to get stuff done. (There was a traumatic death Feb 17th in 2024 also added to my plate)

This Christmas, all I wanted was lots of Christmas lights cuz it brings me joy but my family all begged me not to get on anymore ladders AND everyone was so busy, I couldn’t get them to come hang the lights for me, so I understood but was sad. I did get some lights up that I could reach and I did decorate inside but it all felt like a big chore. Buying Christmas gifts and wrapping them also felt like a major chore!!! Even though I wasn’t physically sore this Christmas, I just felt like I had to “get everything over with.” I mean, money has been tight since inflation, also stores closing down that I normally would shop at during Christmas…. So that was all sad. I LOVE Christmas it’s my fave holiday but it also always brings back bad memories of the Christmas I spent with my ex Andrew and the hurtful things he said…..

Now I’m taking down the decorations and ugggggh fudgin sucks!!! I just want it to be over with so I can get it off my plate. Part of me wants to throw a lot of it away but I know come next Christmas; I’ll wanna put it back out lol I would just leave it all up but eh, it’s over. Gotta accept Christmas is over. Just like I’ve had to accept my past is over. My exes are out of my life and they don’t love me. They only used me and hurt me. Idk why the wounds are so deep or why they take so long to heal. The impact alone from the emotional abuse has been CRAZY!! I’ve often wanted to pull my hair out and hide my face. Also, trying to get my energy back!!! It’s like in 2024, I just ….. am fried. Completely burnt out.

also this Christmas, I wanted to try makeup again and trying to style my hair and wore new dresses…. I just want to feel “beautiful” again…. Real beauty is on the inside but when you’re so exhausted and hurt, you struggle to feel any kind of beauty at all … there is a difference between humbling yourself and self-loathing. Gotta talk positively about yourself!! (Feels uncomfortable) Coming home to myself has been a journey separately in itself!! I am going to make it there and not give up!! Facing the demons of the past head on. Dismissing every lie my exes told me about myself with their brutal discarding!!! 🌹🌹❤️‍🩹

[hiiragi7]

Is Final Fusion Really Final?

My experiences with splitting again after final fusion and some notes on one of the most controversial debates about final fusion.

-

Hi - My name is Duckie.

I'm a new split. The first "proper" split in my system since 10/12/2023.

I split 2/16/2025, after months of chronic stress and trauma and reaching a safe place to finally just collapse and fall apart about it. We also split another new part, Retro, 2/22/2025.

So, what does this mean for my system? Does this mean we've "failed" final fusion, or that final fusion is not viable as a recovery path?

Well, no. At least, I don't believe so.

Let's talk about it.

A misconception that I see a lot is that final fusion is essentially a "cure" for DID - it isn't.

Final fusion is a state, an experience, rather than an ending or a finish line. In fact, recovery work extends far past when final fusion happens, and for those of us receiving clinical treatment, it is strongly recommended that treatment continue beyond final fusion, with some recommendations even suggesting a year or more of continued treatment and stabilization.

Recovery isn't linear, and this still applies after final fusion.

Final fusion coming apart is not only something which happens, but is something that is expected to happen. Many people will even go through several final fusions.

Does this mean that final fusion isn't really, well, "final"?

In some sense, absolutely. In fact, a more appropriate term would probably be "full fusion", rather than "final". I use "final fusion" mostly out of habit, and because it is the most recognized term for this experience.

Maintaining final fusion is a practice, and even beyond that, there are times where splitting is necessary - not because of a failure in final fusion, but because final fusion is not what we need in that moment. At times, splitting helps us more than final fusion.

Splitting is a tool, a coping method, one that is often very good at what it does.

In my case, my DID brain is just doing what DID brains do: Dissociating as a response to chronic stress and trauma. I experienced stress and trauma beyond what I could reasonably cope with, and so my brain is relying on its oldest, most reliable methods of survival. This is a good thing - This is exactly what it is meant to do in this situation. Dissociation and amnesia allows me to experience life in smaller pieces while I rest, recover, and eventually process.

Additionally, dissociation and amnesia makes it more possible for me to actually hold myself to resting - I am extremely prone to pushing far past my limits and burning out and crashing, and it is harder to do this when I am dissociated and cannot think too hard about many things and cannot remember the things I wanted to do anyway. And, well, that's exactly what I need right now - I am lucky to be in a place where I can just let others help me out while I recover for a while.

That being said, although the dissociation and amnesia certainly serves me and protects me when I need it, it is not by any means all smooth sailing - It is, simultaneously, very frustrating to be dissociated all of the time again, as well as other symptoms such as mood swings, fatigue, increased anxiety, confusion, and so on. I have also gotten deeply comfortable with the constant background chatter and support of all of my parts, and not having that is isolating and disturbs me. My DID symptoms have always been on the "severe" end, so having an increase in these again has been very hard on me.

Both of these truths - that dissociation is useful as well as difficult - can coexist at the same time.

What my DID brain is doing is a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances; Rather opposite from a failure, I believe that both final fusion and splitting are completely normal functions of my DID brain which operate in different contexts.

I have, at times (and especially lately), caught myself being incredibly perfectionistic about my recovery and my fusion, and I do think that a big part of that comes from this expectation that final fusion is final, an end goal, a cure - and, oppositely, that splitting is bad, unhealthy, or a sign of failure. How much less pressure would it be, and how many more conversations could we open up, if we were to think that final fusion is simply just another way of being DID, a system structure like any other, and that splitting is simply something many systems do? If final fusion wasn't treated as any "better" or "worse" than, say, being polyfragmented, but just a different sort of systemhood? If splitting was just as valued as fusion?

Personally, I think that it would help a lot, and I believe that a perspective shift like this would help us to imagine even more ways to live as DID and futures with DID.

[syllvarin]

Non-traumagenic plurality: How could it be possible?

First off, let's start with what some anti-endo folk mean versus what they don't mean with traumagenic plurality

They mean systems caused by/as a response to trauma and traumatic events, and those who are still affetced by them, aka systems who are disordered, DID/OSDD/UDD.

What they don't mean is systems who have trauma in their origin along with other causes. They do not believe a system can very well be traumagenic but function smoothlessly due to recovering, or have multiple origins.

Note: We are a diagnosed DID system with mixed (trauma/ramcoa/neuro/para) origins. Yes, we know what we are talking about. No, that doesn't mean we can't do mistakes, but we will try our best to be as accurate as possible. We will include scientific articles, DSM-5 DID checklist, and many more in this post.

How can that be possible?

1st: Brains are quite complicated. Research on brain functions is far from being complete, it is a long road that we are still at the very beginning of. We still don't know how brain exactly works let alone how it can form seperate conscious identities and work them together. We do know headmates exist based on brain MRI's ( link here ) That proves us that systems indeed, exist.

2nd point i want to make is that science is not done in a linear fashion. We are studying to be neuroscientists ourselves and the very core of what makes science doable is MONEY. Yes, in this capitalist system even the most seemingly basic research requires funding, money, and a goal that can be monetized to get done. Reseaches on female autonomy, rare disorders and "demonized" disorders such as DID is therefore not often as it is not easily capitalized and funded.

Therefore we do not have enough research to prove or disprove that the only way of becoming a system is through childhood.

And that brings me to my 3rd point, where we will take a look at what DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) says about diagnostic crietria of DID. We will see how it is a dissocative disorder, not a trauma disorder.

Found under dissociative disorders (not trauma disorders!), checklist for DID is as follows:

See how none of those checklist include trauma as checklist? Yes DID is commonly caused by trauma but not always. Yes it commonly is created during childhood but not always. Those arent in diagnostic criteria.

Definitive feature is not trauma, it is distinct personality states or experience of possession.

DID is associated with traumatic events, does not mean it requires it.

DID can manifest at almost any age (DSM-5 is saying that, folks)

What's more is OSDD doesnt even have a definitive checklist like DID. it is found under differential diagnosis, with other disorders. PDID (partial DID where one part is frontstuck a majority of the time) is also up to psychiatrist's evaluation rather than a concrete checklist.

4th point is : What about Structural Dissociaton Theory?

This theory is as it goes: The theory of Structural Dissociation works off of the assumption that everyone is born with different ego states that later merge in life. Those different ego states operate for different actions in life, that later integrate into one person during ages of 4-6. Trauma disrupts that integration and causes ANP (apparently normal parts) and EP (Emotional parts). EP's are stuck in the trauma while ANP's are not.

source: The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization" by Onno van der Hart, Ellert Nijenhuis, and Kathy Steele. 

Yes, theory. Theories are not concrete. They can be disapproved, they can change, they may not fit every experience. Structural dissociation only explains how DID can manifest at childhood, but we already know by now that DID can manifest at almost any age.

So I personally think basing everything on a theory about how DID might've been caused (which doesn't even perfectly explain every possible way) is not as fault-proof as one might think it is.

Point 5: experiences of "multiple identities" exist for so long into history (people who are possessed, talk to themselves, act weird at times, are very different at times, etc), way before any DID/OSDD terms were created. And actually, how can we know how many people in history have had this experience when the very society we are in is very scared of them? It is fair to say only the disruptive cases must've been noticed, and majority of them probably were either deemed as crazy or exorcised as they believed those people were possessed by spirits. Just because your experience does not fit with others and just because science hasnt done anything to back them up, doesn't mean people's lived experiences are false. Why would so many people tell that they are a system when they are not? We are not living in a place where being a system is happy or fun, we are not in a society where its profitable or anything. It literally gives a person zero + points for being plural if they arent. It would be a nonstop roleplay they have to keep up throughout every aspect of their life; and at that point, it must be either impossible or that person is already plural and not roleplaying when no one is looking at them.

Creating headmates is on the same basket. A person with DID can create headmates in blink of an eye (we know from oursleves) sometimes splitting threshold is so low you may split off multiple people at once. You cannot know what is going in a person's mind, and what mechanisms work for creating a headmate. If they claim they did, it is very much no chance they are faking being different people 24/7. It *is* a real chance that they actually did develop a headmate. If you do not believe them; ask them about their experiences. I am %100 positive that if you actually listen to them, you will see those people are only trying to live their life.

Also, if you think healthy systems cannot exist and only way to be a system is through dissociation and dysfunction; then why would DID systems try to heal anyway? Wouldn't that just be sanist and ableist to expect all of them to turn into singlets because healthy multiplicity isnt a thing?But no, it is a thing, and healthy multiplicity and recovery is possible for systems. DID and other disordered forms of plurality do indeed exist, and they are indeed, treatabe in multiple ways according to what a person feels comfortable with. That is also a system's right to heal however they please. They don't owe anyone their right to stay as plural or become a singlet.

6th point I want to make is about: Why do we even care?

If a person says they have multiple people in their head, why do we care and tell them they are faking? They are not claiming to have a diagnosis, even if they did; if their situation is causing a distress to them, then they ARE diagnosable and that therefore is none of our business, again.

Last point I want to make is how endogenic DID is possible. yes, possible. remember how trauma is not in diagnostic criteria and DID can happen at any age? If endogenic plurals can happen, they can also form DID at later in life. They can also become disordered due to an event in their life. They can lose harmony and become so dysfunctional they need professional help. That doesn't mean they are no longer endogenic or some other origin, that simply means their state is different than what it was and they need help.

End of our post. Thank you for reading.

[copperbadge]

i was thinking of you the other day and your discussions of your ability or lack thereof to visualize things in your mind, because someone asked me who all had been at a gathering, and i answered them by calling up the room in my memory and looking around it to see who was there. and it occurred to me after the fact that i suppose probably not everyone can do that? but i could even tell you at least approximately what everyone was wearing (color, cut, maybe not precise pattern, but the general style, sure). and while i can’t swear to you that it’s 100% accurate because i don’t have a picture to compare it to, i think it’s pretty close.

but now i’m curious - what would your thought process be if you were asked the same question? if you can’t just look around the room in your mind, is the memory interaction-based? or like… voices you remember hearing? or something else?

Well, bear in mind that I haven't got a great memory to begin with -- possibly the ADHD at work, but also there's a condition that's frequently comorbid with aphantasia called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory -- people with SDAM have trouble recalling huge chunks of their lives and when they do have recall they often remember it as if they'd been told it, they have no emotional sense attached. For example, I remember a trip I took where I had to do some hard shit and it was really scary, but I don't remember the feeling of being scared, I just remember that I was. I have no idea how long the trip was, no memory of the hotel room, very little memory of doing the scary thing. I know I did it, but there's not a lot of attachment there.

This is not ALWAYS the case -- for example I have extremely fond memories of certain other trips -- but I don't really seem to be able to switch it on or off. Like when I was in Europe, I stayed in an AirBNB in London, but by the time I got to Rome like, five days later, I couldn't remember what it was like. I ended up spending a little time one evening kind of calling up memories of where I stayed in London and in Paris to try and hard-code them into my memory, and that worked, but I also needed the help of photos and tumblr posts I'd made to achieve it. ("What did it even look like? Well -- wait, I cooked some pizzas in the microwave while I was there. The microwave was on the counter, opposite the bed, and -- oh, okay, I remember now.")

So like, I would have no goddamn idea of the majority of people at any given gathering where I attended, but is that SDAM, ADHD, a function of my anxiety in social situations, or the aphantasia? Difficult to say.

I hosted a get-together on Sunday and because I was host and there weren't that many people in attendance I could name them off, but I couldn't tell you what they wore. The last party I attended, a week or two previously, was at a friend's house and it was mostly folks I was at least passingly familiar with, but I am bad with names and so couldn't NAME a lot of the people there -- but for example I could say "Well, the hosts were there, and I spoke with X, Y, and Z, so they were definitely there, but I also spoke with like four other people whose names I didn't get. I dunno what any of them were wearing even though it was a costume party." But yeah to even come up with that I would have to think about when I arrived, walk myself through whatever I remember of the event in linear order, and just note down who I spoke with. If I didn't speak with them, or if I didn't know them well, they didn't exist for me.

So I guess the answer is that my memory isn't visual and also just kinda...isn't there a lot of the time. It's not like amnesia, or the profound brain damage you read about where the person only remembers the last ten minutes or doesn't remember anything past a certain date in their life, but I just haven't got much memory for things. It's why I use a lot of lists and spreadsheets and make yearly photobooks.

My photo archive on my computer goes back to about 1998, and it's sorted by year, but the top level folder all the years are stored in is simply titled "Where I've Been" 'cause I probably wouldn't remember, otherwise.

[tanadrin]

AI and copyright comment:

Look, I absolutely get the argument that there might not be a strict delineation we can make between the human brain experiencing a work of art and using that as inspiration, and a machine intelligence doing linear algebra on a piece of art and experiencing it as inspiration. I am very much of the opinion that what the human brain is doing is linear algebra (albeit with a number of algorithms we have not cracked yet) and that should we be able to replicate that on a machine, it would not be less possessed of creative thought than we are.

But my response to that is simple.

If the nature of input and output of a genuine artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from what the human brain is doing, then it should in fact be indistinguishable from what the human brain is doing under the law. That is, the artificial intelligence should be the person who has legal rights to the for profit use of their work.

If it is intelligent enough and possessed of enough agency to make its own decisions as a sovereign entity, it *and not the people who taught it* has the right to treat what it creates as a function of inspiration comma and not as a transformative action not permitted by intellectual property holders (and not meeting the for profit fair use exemption criterias).

Given that we are definitely not even a little bit close to that, I think we can treat this flavor of linear algebra as more similar to the existing body of linear algebra artistic transformations out there which are very much not protected for-profit fair use transformation under law. And that there is no circumstance under which the creators of a genuinely intelligent creative process should be given rights to the fruit of its intellectual labor rather than the genuinely intelligent creative entity itself.

Right now you are proposing that it should not even be legal for a human being to do by computer something I am pretty sure one would be permitted to do by hand; see my artwork example, in another post.

We don't even have a philosophically coherent definition of a sovereign entity; trying to enshrine such a distinction in law--nevermind one that didn't instantly create full human rights for everything with a nervous system--would be an incredible undertaking.

From where I'm sitting you are making wild demands of law that even the most arcane and ambitious fields of philosophy and cognitive science cannot meet, and somehow envisioning a consistent and fairly administered system will result. I think that's insane. I think the underlying philosophical framework you're operating on is incoherent and bad, but as a matter of actual policy what you want to do is impossible. As I said in another post, I'd be curious to see a proposed statute that would ban scraping the public internet to train MMLs and not create substantial adverse effects in terms of restrictive copyright laws in other domains, because I've never seen such a proposal. If you want to make even a token argument that what you're proposing is possible, point me at an example.

[sammylbir]

How do you make your sprites look good? I can barely shade sprites, lol 😭

Thanks for the praise, but I would hardly call my shading good, or even professional.

But if you really need advice, here's how I do it.

First, flat colors. Easy enough.

Then, you should use a brush with a darker color of where you are shading. Imagine where the light is coming from. Depending on the light source, shadows will vary. Now, add the shading there. And then use the "Blur" tool, in order to blend it in a bit. Then do the same for the rest and for further shading, (Yes shadows have their own shadows) use a darker color.

What I also learned with art, is that color theory is essential. Not only do some colors work well, but color temperature is important too. Here's an example.

Nui:

-Has darker colors and said colors are at a lower temperature, to showcase her more calm and gentle demeanor, while also making her look quite off-putting and bizarre.

Haruo:

-Has warmer colors, to match their vulgar and flamboyant personality.

If you struggle with color palettes, look for em online. Here is a site I sometimes use:

Now regarding shading, I make a new layer and set it to linear dodge and then lighten up the areas, where the light is directly aiming. I usually use an airbrush for that. I also lighten some of the shading parts, in order to make the artwork look more natural. After that, I do fuse the layers then duplicate it and set it to lighten, in order to make the light stand out more and erase the parts that should be darker.

And for the shadows, I duplicate the base layer and set it to multiple, lower the opacity and then erase the lighter parts, before fusing them all.

The lineart layer by the way, will be duplicated too and using the blur tool, you can make the lineart look more fluid and less stiff. Careful though- Don't use the blurring tool with too much strength, as the result can be off-putting otherwise.

Also, I would look for textures. I use this texture and select the clothing and hair parts, copy it on the texture layer then paste the result on a new layer with the "overlay" function and lower the opacity to 30%.

If you do want to get the dr style though, you need to focus on the eyes. The eyes are usually thick and big and have pretty sharp lines.

Regarding lineart, use a stabilizer. But do not do the lineart without a sketch. Believe me, it will be far easier.

Lastly, the most important tip I learned is this. When you get frustrated with art, take a break. Stop it.

Drink some water. Recover. There's a reason why athletes don't just exercise to hours on end, with no break at all. The muscles need to cool off and a break prevents injuries.

It's the same with art, only with your brain instead of your muscles.

Ahem. Hope that helped. ^^

[ckret2]

i wish to know about how you characterize amorphous shape. amorphous needs more attention. (same with the other henchmaniacs without lines, but i prefer focusing on the character my brain has decided i am.)

I characterize them as approximately 14~19 separate individual shapes from Bill's home dimension that got combined together into one hive mind. That's why I refer to Morph as "they"—I'm not using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun, I'm using it as a plural pronoun, they are literally multiple people.

How they got combined into one body will get explored later in the fic so I'm not gonna spoil it; but it happened during the destruction of the second dimension.

The polygon parts of them weren't all squares to start out with, but after a trillion years they found that most of the time it's easier for them to simplify themselves into a form that tessellates tidily. They can shapeshift and separate though, so they can return to their original shapes when they want, like:

(that's not literally the exact shapes they were, just concept art of what changing to their original shapes would look like.)

They're Bill's top scientists. Also, his only scientists. Not all of them were scientists, but when you've shared brains for a trillion years, you pick up each other's knowledge, and anyway over a dozen minds working on the same problem at the same time makes brainstorming faster. They're to blame for the interdimensional portal.

Any time Bill attempts to conquer a new dimension, he's gotta try to persuade the people inside that dimension to make him a portal; and in order to do that, he's got to pass those people portal blueprints; and in order to do that, he needs portal blueprints that both, a) work correctly in the physics of the dimension he's contacting, and b) can be built using the technology, natural resources, and construction techniques available to the natives. He wouldn't send portal blueprints that only work correctly with linear forward-moving time to the do-over dimension where spontaneous time loops randomly form, and he wouldn't send a design that can only be powered by nuclear fission to a culture that's barely discovered coal.

For a long time, Amorphous Shape were the guys Bill turned to for all those portal blueprint modifications. Any time he found a promising new dimension with a sufficiently gullible-looking species, he'd go in with Amorphous Shape so they could study local physics and technology and adapt the blueprints to fit local conditions.

By now, Bill & company have made SO many blueprints for SO many universes with SO many kinds of technology that when they find a new universe, they can typically tweak a design they already made rather than start from scratch; and Bill's been studying the blueprints for so long that now he thoroughly understands the science behind them and can draft & modify them himself, so he doesn't need Morph's help so much. He mainly consults with them to double-check the math before tossing the blueprints at a dreamer or to assist on really strange cases like that one dimension with a form of physics based entirely on the letter M.

Right now, Morph's bigger long-term scientific concern is the slow degradation of the Nightmare Realm and finding ways to help Bill shore up the crumbling reality; and implementing emergency quick fixes whenever something small falls apart, like a black hole threatening to destabilize the fabric of reality around several nebulas or knots tangling in wormholes because the ends are fraying.

If Bill is like the self-appointed god of the Nightmare Realm, Morph are something in between a demigod and a high priest: they don't have any reality-altering power themselves, but they do understand and influence reality far beyond any mere mortal and their petitions to the god to do this or fix that keeps local reality functioning.

Talking to them is like talking to a committee or a mob. Most of the things they say are collectively agreed-upon by the members of the hive mind, and so tend to have the careful precision of a department issuing a public statement rather than a regular conversation; but when something happens to get a majority of them mad, they get mad together and egg on each other's anger, and tend to immediately snap into confrontation rather than sit back until they calm down

They don't have a lot of hobbies they all share, so they tend to dabble in and drop a wide variety of hobbies rather than get really deeply invested in any. More likely to spend their spare time seeing what the other Henchmaniacs are doing and tag along on that than try to decide what to do on their own. Bad habit of just going back to work when they're bored since at least they can all agree that's productive.

They haven't gone on a date in billions of years and are not happy about this. They don't even have all the same sexualities, much less the same types. They need to go on a date with like a minimum four people simultaneously to balance out the fact that they'll be variously attracted to/repelled by any one singular date. Finding four people who cover their separate tastes and are all willing to go on a single date with "the same person" is pretty hard, especially when you're workaholics living with the most hated person in the multiverse and don't get out much.

Zealously, desperately loyal to Bill. They've spent a trillion years telling themselves that Bill's gonna rescue his devotees from the Nightmare Realm and claim a new dimension for them. By now it's become easier to pretend he's a flawlessly honest leader who'd never lie to them (unless he has a very good reason) than to grapple with his massive failings as a person and consider that maybe they made a mistake older than universes in following him. Any time one of their components starts to mentally doubt one of Bill's decisions, they're shouted back into conformity by the rest who are ready to offer justifications and explanations for anything he does. Can't do deep thinking on a difficult topic if you don't even have privacy in your own head.

If Bill ever wants to screw with them he can say "Morph, you're four of my best friends" and leave them going crazy trying to figure out which of their components he likes and why he doesn't like the rest. But Bill doesn't mess with the shapes much. Only if it's, like, really funny.

There used to be more surviving shapes in Bill's social circle, but over the eons they left one by one, until now it's just down to Morph, Kryptos, Hectorgon, and Bill; each time the shapes lost another member, it became harder for the remainders to consider leaving. Morph are no more capable of contemplating lives without Bill, Kryptos, and Hectorgon than you are of contemplating a life without bones. The feeling is mutual all around.

The rest of the Henchmaniacs could get fucked as far as they care.

[ask-postcrash-curly]

Man, you have gotta stop being so relatable.

Yelling has always been overwhelming to me, always makes me shutdown. Wasn’t even necessary cuz of trauma—I remember my mom once saying I’ve always reacted badly whenever people raised their voice or yelled at me, even when I was like, a toddler or something. That’s why she always tried to never yell at me… not that it worked. Cuz she had a lotta unresolved issues, and when things built up and her emotions boiled over, well… yeah. She didn’t yell at me often, barely ever, but each time it happened, well. Very unpleasant experience, as you can imagine. Of course, this made my issues with it even worse, and well. Yeah.

But anyway. Recent events have made me realize just how bad the issue is. I thought it was just yelling and raised voices that got to me, and it wasn’t that big a deal because people almost never get mad at me since I’m a very agreeable person, but. Lately it’s been causing problems. Turns out even if someone is being calm and reasonable when they’re confronting me and just wanna work things out… if there’s any way the tone can be perceived as aggressive even if the tone isn’t actually aggressive…for some reason my brain interprets it like an attack and just… idk it’s frustrating. Because I want to be able to just work things out with people like good functional adults and whatever but instead every time I gotta talk things out it’s this whole… agh. And like, I don’t want people to feel like they can’t confront me about stuff, y’know? I don’t wanna be the person who turns into a mess even when reasonably confronted about reasonable stuff. Confrontation can be good and healthy when everyone is being respectful and it’s just part of life but…idk.

Anyway. Sorry to dump all that on you. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a therapist that can help me with that. Haven’t found a good fit yet but… just gotta keep trying, I guess.

And…

Something about the way you say “be better than me” kinda bothers me. You’re not just some cautionary tale or tragedy, y’know? It was one thing when we all thought you’d be stuck on that ship forever. But… things are different now. You’re going home. And it’s not easy, things are still really tough, and the road to recovery is gonna be really hard and difficult, but… you’ve got your whole life ahead of you now. (I don’t care that you’re in your late 30s, you’ve still got so much many years left to live.)

You’re not just… some example of what not to be like, y’know? Over the months I’ve watched you get better and standing up for yourself and reflecting a lot and… even if it hasn’t exactly been linear, sometimes there’s setbacks but… you’ve still gotten better and you’ve grown as a person and stuff. Despite everything, you’re still trying.

So… don’t put yourself down. You can get better, I can get better, and we can inspire each other, yeah?

-🌃🌠🌌

Sorry...?

Ah. Yep. That's how it is.

Hmm... Maybe you've got a dissociation problem too? Can't say for sure, but hey, it might be worth checking out. It's frustrating, I get it. Would be wonderful if I could have a disagreement with one of you without feeling like I've catastrophically ruined things. (Exaggerating for effect, I'm fine.) Yeah, I... I admit I'm worried about becoming that person too. Gets to a point where the smallest sign of anger feels like a threat. Thanks for that, Jim. And I think you'll agree: That attitude causes problems more than it solves them.

C'mon. Don't apologize. I really don't mind. Best of luck with therapy.

...Oh. Didn't... didn't think of it that way, if I'm being real. Thank you. (What do you mean late thirties? I've been thirty-five for half a year, for fuck's sake.)

Mm... Thank you, again. Means a lot that you'd say that. I'm not... I'd rather others learn from my mistakes than not, though, you know? If I can... Not a cautionary tale, as you said, but if I can use what I have learned to help other people avoid the same path, I want to. Least I can do.

Hah. Yeah. Cheers to getting better together.

[rin-and-jade]

Hi. This is more looking for advice than anything.

I am a suspecting system- I have almost all the symptoms. But what's really, really distressing is the memory problems. I don't really 'forget' things- it's more like the memory itself becomes disjointed (fragmented amnesia). And the memories basically tie themselves together- and it makes it really, really hard to understand what happened and what is happening.

How do I make that easier to manage? (I journal- like a lot. I have a memory journal now, and although it's helpful I can't really bring myself to trust it? Like I know that I (or an alter I suppose) wrote in it- I don't understand why I irrationally do not trust it.)

and then how should I bring this up to my therapist-(the memory problems. not the DID, I'm not gonna bother with that yet haha)?

I have a guide of amnesia including their possible fixes right here!

And for advices that is not listed in either posts (since the guide and fixes are considered as two parts of one), fragmented/disjointed may have a deeper issue with being grounded in real life,, since your brain must intake external information and convert them into pieces of mental data, which then will be consolidated as memories,, pieces that you can revisit whenever you need.

Now the thing is, many factors can contribute to poor consolidation or recollection of these memories. Things from focus, attention span, how grounded and connected you are with the external world can be described as general guidelines to what could be causing the issue.

So let's do some checklist that helps you find out why your memories were not linearly recalled:

Do you find it difficult to be aware of time progressing? What does it feel like? This question helps you understand wether you could percieve the passage of time, which is one of the important things in preventing disjointed memories.

Have you been mentally cluttered or physically busy? Due to how your brain could only keep up with a few information and external activities, focus becomes scarce which leads to slower memory consolidation, if not partially successful. A more relaxed mind can extract and consolidate memories better.

Are you physically present and grounded with your 5 senses? Or are you more detached and things feeling less "real" oftentimes? Outside of internal workings that creates a functional continuous memory, it is also heavily dependent on how well you could be aware of your surroundings and what activities had happened. If someone is dissociated throughout a time period, then it'll result in poorer memory of that time period. This can be done with ground techniques.

That's all to it, i hope these questions help you reflect on what could be improved next or give more clarity to your situation if journaling doesn't appease you on what actually happened when you struggle to recall them!

--

Now, on how to bring up the memory issues to your therapist, you could use this conversation starter sentence:

"Is there any solutions for disjointed memories? if that's the word for it; as i am now more aware of how i couldn't recall them in a linear timeline and unable to tell when or where things happened?"

- c

[elwenyere]

hey! this is more of a general question, do you have any book recommendations for someone who wants to start writing and get a better handle on language? if that’s too silly of a question, can you maybe just list your favorite novels/non-fiction books that influenced your writing? :)

Hello Anon! Thank you so much for this great ask: I think reading is an essential part of growing as a writer, and when I'm feeling blocked or dry or burned out, there are very few things that refresh my mind like spending time with beautiful, startling, upsetting, moving prose and poetry.

If you'll permit a momentary digression, I think one of the key parts of reading like a writer, no matter what the text, is to develop your sense of what you can pay attention to, in order to understand what the language is doing and how:

What effect is the text having on me? Is it disorienting me or producing a sudden sense of clarity? Revolting me or seeking to attract me? Asking me to make a connection or to draw a distinction? Drawing me in for a closer inspection or obscuring something in distance? Cultivating intimacy or refusing disclosure?

How is the text doing that? Through the way words are used (familiar or unusual, concrete or abstract)? The way sentences are put together and sequenced? The way the narration shifts (from a close focalization to a distant one, from present to past, from a blow-by-blow account to a summary)?

These are questions that help deepen textual analysis, and they can also be used to enhance your ability to riff on what other authors do that you dig - like disassembling a machine to see how the parts fit together, so that when you build your own, you have a wider array of components to draw from and functions to employ.

Beyond that, which texts scratch our brains in the most inspiring way probably depends on a number of things - like taste and prior exposure and what styles open up a new way of looking at the stories you need to tell - so your mileage may vary. But here is a non-exhaustive list of texts that have taught me something about various aspects of craft (revision, setting, plotting, narration, etc.). I've tried to pick some different options than the ones in this list from a while ago, but feel free to check those out as well!

Kiese Laymon, Heavy: a memoir that combines gorgeous writing in its own right with incredibly compelling reflections on revision and the work of memory. I love the way Laymon talks about revisiting and rearranging words as a way to revisit and rearrange thought patterns.

Patricia Lockwood, "Malfunctioning Sex Robot": Lockwood (of Miette internet fame) is one of the funniest people alive, and this review essay (about John Updike's writing) is one of the most remarkable examples I've seen of joining uncompromising clarity with capacious generosity in reflecting on another author's work.

Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars: Smith described this poetry collection as an elegy for her father, who worked on the Hubble Telescope, and it also explores how we represent/picture space in other forms (in the family home, in racial segregation, in the sci-fi cultural imaginary). I love the way the poems play with scale and the way they mix kitschy particulars with existential abstraction.

Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones: Borges collections are master classes in what stories can do, in part because they are often meta-explorations of storytelling (like a review of an imaginary book or the description of an infinite library), informed by the incredible amount of literature Borges read. Layered, allusive, and genre-bending, each story is like trying to see language with an extra dimension.

Ling Ma, Severance: a fascinating novel in many ways, including a non-linear plot, an uncannily prescient speculative premise, and a deliberately elusive narrator, Candace, about whom I change my mind every time I reread. Ma creates one of my favorite examples of what sometimes gets called "an unreliable narrator," and a strong contrast to the omniscient style in the next entry.

George Eliot, Middlemarch: in my heart of hearts, the greatest novel ever written. There's so much to admire in Eliot, but in terms of narration in particular - and the narrator's movement from tracing the contours of a particular fictional mind to knitting together reflections on the web of human connections - she has very few peers.

I hope this post is helpful, Anon! Thank you again for the wonderful ask, and happy reading/writing. <3

[call-me-rucy]

law anon here (off anon for pictures!) (get some rest lol answer me whenever)

i feel like video games and fair use is soooooooo weird, because intrinsically, no two playthroughs of a video game are the same. a playthrough in of itself is transformative because the player is interacting with the world and affecting how the story is told. that's one of the reasons why no commentary playthroughs typically stay up on youtube and don't get copyright striked, technically they fall under fair use. just because layton as a series has a more linear story doesn't mean each playthrough is the same.

what's weird to me is this highlighted section:

it's so vague that, legitimately, i have NO idea what they mean by "other means". this could also be an error of google translate, regretfully i cannot read japanese. my brain immediately goes to like, pirated software or unauthorised screen recordings.

i think it's in level-5's best interest to rerelease these guidelines in other languages so there's clarity. i think you're right in not wanting people to panic, it's really just cracking down on a formerly very weak copyright claim. it's like when nintendo randomly took down thousands of OST videos; they're just getting their shit together.

tl;dr - video game playthroughs are nebulous but ultimately transformative, level-5/google translate is vague, and if you're really, really curious or concerned, ask someone who's actually in the business of international copyright!! it never helps to be too informed

Ooooh, hey there, nice to meet you, vinnie! <3

Yeah, it makes sense that playthroughs are transformative, although I had never thought about it like that. Lucky us, I guess! :D

From the part you signaled as weird, from my understanding, it's less a "we know you're illegally recording" and more of a "we know you can upload to twitter a clip from your switch directly". So what I think they're saying is that using the console functions exactly how they're supposed to go is allowed, even if the resulting product is a non-commented video.

But if you're recording the screen by other methods that's not just the one built in the console (which is all of gameplays, I guess, cause what did the switch allow, like 60" videos?), they ask that it has commentary.

I guess it's understandable that they want to be a bit harder on copyright and spoilers now that they expect NWOS to blow up. But yeah! It would be best if this were translated, because if not we're left in a kind of limbo state.

If there's any person who knows in international copyright reading this that wants to weight in, please do so! :D

Thank you so much for your asks, they clarified a lot!!

[nhaneh]

Looking at all your programming posts, I don't even want to ask you when you sleep, because I feel like you don't. Rather, what I want to ask is where do you get extra ten hours per day.

xD

This is very funny to me because the truth is I actually sleep a whole lot? I've been having chronic fatigue issues since a year or few before the pandemic hit so I'm generally always kind of tired, and my periods of activity are often punctuated by just going to sleep for 1-3 hours afterwards. Like, I currently work 5 hours a day for 3 days a week, and the first thing I do when I get home after work is sleep. Then on the fridays after my three day work week I typically sleep something like 12 hours or more because at that point I'm just deceased, a literal zombie with a hunger for naps instead of brains.

So no extra hours here I'm afraid! I also don't really get anywhere near as much done as it might sound like?? My brain just overthinks everything all the time and so I'll spend a week or few idly thinking about stuff like optimizing a blitting routine or doing FFXIV an outfit mashup or gpose or doing some electronics or retro computer project or the like, occasionally looking things up online or such to feed the rampant trains of thought and then maybe eventually reach a point where I somehow manage to condense all of that down to something that actually kinda works over one or more periods of a few hours.

Like, as much as I occasionally talk about the whole doing 8-bit indexed palette graphics in software over Windows GDI thing, I actually still haven't really gotten around to doing proper functional triangle drawing yet because I keep distracting myself with other stuff like SIMD tile blitting instead of getting around to figuring out how to best do bounds checking for fast bresenham lines in a way that also allows for filling the pixels in between them through integer linear interpolation. And instead of doing that, I'm distracting myself by thinking up ways to write a python script for converting 32-bit ARGB .png files to some kind of simple binary 8-bit colour format consistently, which in turn means thinking up structs to define the layout of the binary file headers and so on.

all while I still also have plenty of work to do at, well, work, haha.

honestly I wish I had an extra 10 or more hours a day - I constantly feel like I'm barely getting anything at all done because everything takes too much time to do and I just never seem to have enough energy for barely any of it.

[caffeineandbullshit]

As someone who used to measure productivity by how much I accomplished in a day, I came to understand that sometimes, being productive means simply allowing yourself to be still. Physical and mental progress are deeply connected, so when you are mentally disconnected to your goals, your physical effort won't be as productive.

I was humbled by the reality that progress is unpredictable, inconsistent, and often nothing like how you imagined it.

In trying to manage all that comes with being a working mom, my way of coping is to run on autopilot. Thankfully, not emotion-wise, though: I'm self-aware and very perceptive. But in order to get my work and chores done, I thrive on repetition. Yep, like a robot. My brain functions best when every day looks the same. I need that structure to stay grounded.

So when a couple of family vacations disrupted that pattern, I didn’t just take a break. I fucking spiraled. I stopped going to the gym for a few weeks, and started staying up late once again with my brain split between half-watching movies and doom-scrolling through my social feeds. My guilt was eating me up. It feels wrong to not be doing anything meaningful, or to simply give up on one thing I kept preaching about just a few months ago.

I realized how much I relied on my daily routine—so when my flow was disrupted, that really threw me off. 

So with a renewed faith and more intentional morning prayers, I gave it another go.  

Progress really is non-linear, but with every setback, I keep discovering something new about myself.

[therpistlr]

🌟 Does Your Brain Feel Like a Glitchy Computer? Let’s Reboot Together! 🌟

Hey FND warrior, if your body’s playing tricks on you—sudden tremors, wonky walking, or limbs that just won’t cooperate—I see you. It’s like your nervous system threw a tantrum and now you’re stuck troubleshooting. But here’s the truth: Your brain isn’t broken—it’s stuck in a bad habit loop. And the way out? Retraining, redirection, and a whole lot of self-compassion.

Why Daily FND Work Matters (Even When It Feels Silly)

Your brain is incredibly adaptable—it just needs the right cues to rewrite its wonky code. Think of rehab like:

🖥️ Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL on faulty movement patterns (goodbye, glitchy gait!).

🧠 Teaching Your Brain New Shortcuts (so "stand up" doesn’t trigger a system error).

💪 Building Mind-Body Trust (because right now, your body feels like an unreliable roommate).

Skipping days? That’s like unplugging a computer mid-update—it’ll just freeze again. But showing up daily? That’s how you defrag your nervous system and reclaim control.

Your Game-Changer? This FND Workbook:

📘 The FND Workbook: Techniques for Overcoming Functional Neurological Symptoms

This isn’t just exercises—it’s your symptom-busting toolkit, with: ✨ Neuroplasticity Hacks (to rewire faulty signals without freaking out). ✨ Stress-Resets (because anxiety + FND = a vicious cycle). ✨ Baby-Step Wins (like "walked to the mailbox without my legs forgetting how").

Healing isn’t linear. Some days you’ll feel like a puppet with cut strings—and that’s part of the process. But every small effort adds up to big change.

💬 Tell me below: What’s the funniest/most absurd thing FND has made your body do? (I once sneezed and my arm waved like I was royalty. 👑) 👇 Tag someone who gets it—we’re all debugging our systems here!

[blooming-basil]

Finding out where you exist in your system's lifetime is... strange. Like, well, I found out that I probably formed during our preteen to early teen years! Hence my, you know... being twelve.

My system has a tendency to "recycle" the consciousnesses that no longer serve a defined purpose... so while it's true I wasn't always "Basil", I was always... me. This pocket of memories and functions just got a new coat of paint (identity). It all kind of fits into place, you know?

I feel like I like a lot of what we liked then, and dislike what we disliked. I have a lot of vivid memories of things like summer camp and school that blend in with my source memories very easily, to make up for the things my brain forgot about or dissociated from (such as going on camp trips and, instead of sitting next to my friend of the day, I'm next to Sunny... or instead of our past campmates, I'm playing dodgeball- and dodging for my life- against Kel and Aubrey... or Kel getting banned from the fire pit for obvious reasons... or the snapping turtles! I know Sunny loved them; he'd just stare into the water looking for them, and I- wait, okay, this isn't memories story time, I'm sorry!).

It's all really light and nostalgic. I don't have everything from back then, of course! I know others in my system have things that just don't fit with my "lore" (our brain loves very neat categories, so anything that doesn't really align with the experiences I most relate to don't get given to me; it creates a very linear, separated narrative where nothing can be out of place).

... that was also when we started realizing we were not cis. Or straight. Maybe that's why my whole deal is just... sheer panic right now. What am I? I have no idea! Haha... ha... h..........................