#system structure

[masquerade-flags]

Archsystem flag

Archsystem - Short for overarching system, is a term we came up with to describe all subsystems, subgroups, and layers within a internally complex system. Or simply a system of subsystems, subgroups, and/or layers.

I'm not 100% on the flag I made so I may redesign it later. More less the purple represents the overarching system, the grays and black represents dissociative barriers between that are often between subsystems/layer, and the smaller circles represent subsystems, subgroups, and layers.

[multiplicity-positivity]

So. We've got a new fictive, and it's like our brain looked at what was missing in our system and called him in to fill that hole. He is perfect for our system, we all adore him, and he adores us! The problem is that he formed spontaneously in a system that, up until this point, has been mostly willogenic and built with a careful structure that he does not fit into. He feels... unwelcome, or like the odd one out. I need to reassure him that his presence is wanted, and that he's more important than our previous structure, but I have no idea how. Any advice? - ☀️💐

hey, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a system being mixed origins or having headmates who each formed in different ways. lots of systems out there may find that most of their headmates formed one way, while one or two formed differently.

honestly we feel like the best way to reassure him that his presence is wanted, is to tell him that and keep reminding him when he’s down. also, maybe y’all can do things like try to actively include him in activities, discussions, and general system life in order to help him feel a bit more like he belongs.

if your system has a carefully built structure, maybe it would be worth it to re-examine this structure and see if you can edit or rework it in order to incorporate him in some way. this may take some effort on everyone’s parts, but it may be worth the extra work in order to help integrate him into your system’s structure a bit more purposefully.

and tbh, every individual headmate is unique. as long as he’s not being excluded, cut out, or ignored, there is nothing wrong with being different or having different origins. maybe y’all could help remind him that it’s okay to have differences that set him apart as an individual from the rest of the system. these differences don’t make him any less of a headmate or less of a valuable member of your collective.

we hope something here will work for him and the rest of your system. best of luck with integrating him into your system in a way that works for everyone :)

[the-moonjay-forest-system]

Any other systems feel utterly ashamed of splitting, specifically when whatever caused it seems so small? It partially feels like you must be faking and also like you're so weak and fragile that you'll never be able to live normally.

I'm not even sure if we really split we've had false alarms before (or at least I hope they were if it turns out they just immediately went dormant and will come back in a few years I'll be very miffed) we'll wait and see, I hope we didn't. Especially not over that, we can't be that sensitive..if people knew they'd probably laugh.

I know the pain we felt/feel is real and that's all that really matters if we split then that's what our brain thought we needed but I can't help feel ashamed and embarrassed and bridled with self loathing. We don't split often so I wouldn't say we have a low split tolerance but I feel like when it does happen I/we feel like the most fragile piece of glass to have ever existed.

[fenmere]

A tour of our System's structure

Inspired by a conversation about the word "host" that developed into comparisons of system structures, we thought we'd draw up some illustrations and diagrams to help us talk about how we work!

This is, essentially, how we visualize our psyche. It's effectively unique to us, but probably bears some resemblance to how others work as well.

We have some speculation as to what visualizations correspond to what actual physical parts of our brain (and a little bit of EEG evidence to back it up), but we're not going to really talk about that much here.

Anyway, to begin with, we have our conscious headspace, which we call

The Bridge

We call it that because, stereotypically, it resembles the bridge of a starship.

Anyone who is on the Bridge is part of the Bridge Crew, and that mix can change up fluidly from second to second. It seems that we have a maximum Bridge Crew of 19 members, but that's a little fuzzy and we haven't thoroughly tested it.

We have three subsystems, the Girls on the left, the Dragons on the right, and the Id Monsters below and in the middle. The Id Monsters might not be a discrete sub system, and may instead be a small group that straddles the Dragons and the Girls (we are not positive either way, but they identify as a group). And we can divide our psyche and our body right down the middle, having one Dragon and one Girl cofronting. Any given Id Monster can replace either the Dragon or the Girl in that situation. We have managed to split three ways, with an Id Monster in the middle, but it was extra tenuous and fragile.

Anyway, at any given moment, we will have one to two Captains present, one of whom will be the primary managing captain. This switches slowly and fluidly throughout the day in sort of natural way. Usually a managing Captain will remain in place from a day to a week or so, but can usually voluntarily switch out with someone else at any time.

The Captains don't typically front, unless there is no one else on the Bridge.

Anyone else on the Bridge can front, and becomes what we call the Pilot. We also frequently just call them the Frontrunner.

The Pilot switches far more frequently than the Captain, usually depending on what task we're doing, what room we're in, who we're talking to, or emotion we're having, or any number of other variables. But also, we can usually switch voluntarily.

Everyone on the Bridge has access to the Bridge's shared working memory, which we call the Drift (after Pacific Rim). The Drift can be broken and resent by a Pilot suddenly leaving the Bridge, unfortunately.

Everyone on the Bridge contributes to working memory and to accessible long term memories. The Captain sets the tone for that, for the collective identity of the Bridge Crew, and manages who comes and goes. Most of our Captains are pretty lenient and accommodating these days, letting anyone come and goes as they please and only settling disputes.

But, OK, the Bridge is our conscious headspace, which means that it is not directly hooked up to our vessel's senses. It is essentially a big holodeck (ala Star Trek) that is run and managed by the Support Staff, who can be found just below the surface in

The Support Room

We're actually still arguing about what to call this place. Technically, it's part of Engineering? But, when we say Engineering, we usually mean a much deeper part of our psyche that's probably our lymbic system. We also have called it Control, or the Server Room.

Anyway, the Support Room has some untold number of awake system members in it, somewhere between hundreds and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. This is where our Liaisons (factive and fictive introjects) typically hang out waiting to help provide memories of the people and characters we've met and might be trying to communicate with, recognize, or think about.

It's also, we think, representative of all the centers of the neocortex that do the processing that makes the Bridge possible. Like, the visual cortex, the auditory processing centers, linguistics, etc.

And, conceptually, in the center of it is the Auditor's desk. The Auditor is the only "part" that we know of, not a fully member or person, not conscious. It simply counts things, and mostly it is busy counting headmates as they are created. It is because of the Auditor that we know how many headmates we have. And it is probably because of its preoccupation with our population that it gets counts of outworld things wrong sometimes.

The Auditor is, literally, a part of our brain that everyone has. It counts heartbeats, things we see, headmates, everything that needs counting. Everyone has a part of the brain that does this, with varying degrees of accuracy and ease of access. And we've just learned to perceive this part of our brain as the Auditor.

Which looks like this to most of us:

It never, ever leaves its desk. It can only communicate in numbers, yes, no, and silence.

Then, below all that is

Our Inworld

This is a panoramic rendering of the inside of the Sunspot, as we've designed it for our fiction. And it turns out that as we've written our fiction, our actual inworld has come to resemble it more and more.

It's a cylinder, with an area about the size of Oregon and Washington put together lining it, with a forward ice ring, an aft sea, mountains, rivers, forests, and the whole bit.

In this image, the glowing part on the sides is the sun (you're supposed to wrap the image in a sphere for viewing in VR). That would be in the conceptual direction of the Bridge.

The dark hole in the middle is the sun intake of the Aft Endcap, and where the Engine Room is located. In the fiction, it's actually located in the Network and made to look like the sun intake. In reality, it's right there, and that hole is infinitely deep and stretches into our past beyond our birth. It is a way in and out of our system.

Phage, our Chief Engineer and eldest Outsider, lives in there.

When we say "Engineering", we're usually referring to that space, which we also call The Abyss, and its proximity and connection to our lymbic system.

Anyway, there's no point in rendering an image of the Engine room, because it's pitch black.

Our inworld is the shared reality we create when we're dreaming. Sleeping system members are thought to exist here. Awake and active system members who are not participating in Support or the Bridge are vividly dreaming here, usually repeating certain experiences, memories, and visualizations over and over again, in concert with each other, slowly iterating and changing them.

There are entire cultures in our inworld that have developed independently of each other since their creation.

The Auditor reports that we have approximately 4 million people now. Most of whom are factive introjects (what we call Liaisons) of people we've seen on the street, who've since developed their own lives and personalities, filling in the massive blanks that just a face, body type, and posture from a glimpse out of the corner of our eyes leave.

People who are in our greater inworld generally are not available to provide the Bridge with memories or any kind of support, unless the vessel is dreaming. When the vessel is dreaming, Support then feeds the Bridge visuals of what's going on in our Inworld and allows us to interact with the people there. Inworld people can, however join Support or the Bridge any time they want, but usually lose all working memory of what they were just experiencing inworld when they do so.

And all of this can be put in a diagram kind of like this:

[atlas-sys-archived]

A Quick Visualization of our System Structure

This is our attempt at a simplified diagram depicting how we understand our system structure. Each large circle represents a member and the smaller circles represent facets (excluding the three circles in the bottom right corner). We have way more members than this but this is just for visualization purposes. The identity of our members tends to be "blurry" at the edges, often bleeding into nearby members. Yellow and green (representing theoretical system members) may fluctuate between feeling very separate or feeling more blurry, but for example the yellow and blue circles are always completely separate members. The pink circle with smaller pink circles inside it represents a median subsystem, of which we have several. We also have several facets that exist mostly on their own. Then there are our soulbonds, represented by the less-fuzzy circles in the bottom right - they have their own separate identity because they are separate beings from our main system. Our structure is a lot more complicated than we could probably illustrate in a drawing but this is roughly how we visualize our system.

[amorality-flagz]

Schrödibased refers to a system and/or headmate based around schrödinger's cat, either metaphorically and/or literally. But this is not inherently an origin. Schrödinger's cat theory could affect system functions, headspace, headmates, their roles, or other parts of how the system functions. In simple terms, it is a base that could be one thing and another thing at the same time until observed otherwise.

[fragmented-artist]

Inner structure

Angel

[chronicbitchsyndrome]

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

[communistkenobi]

the crazy thing about systemic oppression is that it actually doesn’t require the active conscious participation by millions of random individuals all spontaneously deciding to be bigoted for oppression to work

[knifearo]

being aromantic is like. hey btw you're going to live a life that is the culmination of most of society's worst nightmares. sorry lol ✌️ but then you turn around and take a really good hard look at it and it turns out that living in that nightmare is fucking awesome and you get to wake up every day and take that fear that other people have and laugh and hold it close until it's a great joy for you instead. and being happy is a radical act that you define instead of someone else. and you're sexy as fuck that's just a fact of life i don't make the rules on that one

[vaguely-concerned]

I think it says almost everything you need to know about varric that his reaction to the blackwall reveal is like... 'oh thank GOD you're a child murderer. for a hot second there I thought you were something much much worse' '.......like what' 'boring to me personally'

[thestuffedalligator]

God do I think a lot about the bit in Monstrous Regiment about old women.

"Women had to cover their hair on Fridays, but there was nothing about this in the Book, which was pretty dar—pretty damn rigorous about most things. It was just a custom. It was done because it had always been done. And if you forgot, or didn’t want to, the old women got you. They had eyes like hawks. They could practically see through walls. And the men took notice, because no man wanted to cross the crones in case they started watching him, so half-hearted punishment would be dealt out. Whenever there was an execution, and especially when there was a whipping, you always found the grannies in the front row, sucking on peppermints."

I can't explain why, I just. God this bit haunts me. This is the most resonant idea that's lived with me for months after I read MR.

[wonderhorror-sys]

my biggest advice for (especially but not exclusively new(ly discovered)) systems is... to take everyones advice with a grain of salt. whats good for one system is catestrophically bad for another. a lot of posts frame their advice as perfect and infallible (which i doubt is intentional on the posters part), but it really isnt. just do what works best for your system.

[qwantzfeed]

oh i'm just laying down a tarp in the living room for - yeah, exactly, for board games night

[raayllum]

I get that in general a lot of kids shows do utilize the protagonists ('good guys') in ways where they're supposed to be role models, particularly because some do have a "lesson of the week" where the character does bad things, then clearly learns and explains what they should've done instead by the end of the episode.

That has just... never been how TDP has operated, and I don't get how and why people think we're supposed to take what anyone does in the show as being unilaterally good or evil. Particularly in arc 2; any moral simplicity that was hanging on by a thread in arc 1 has been taken out back and shot numerous times by now.

TDP very rarely calls anything Evil or Good, and when it does, it's always filtered through the characters' biases, and rarely does more then 2-3 characters ever have the same opinion on something for the same reasons. Soren and Rayla, who have inverted character arcs, are some of the only characters to ever use the term villain / good guys or bad guys, and are two of the most staunchly black-and-white thinking characters, heavily to their detriment, I might add, in terms of coping with the increasing complexity of their lives. They have cognitive biases. They're not always right, and are frequently wrong. This is true for everyone in the show.

The show refuses to condemn murder, indirectly and directly condemns the expulsion of humans from Xadia routinely (Evrkynd being a city for everyone, Ezran arguing with Karim, who is the most wrong about the most things), and shows a variety of viewpoints on all things.

The show understands that the choices people make—whether the same character trait is a flaw or a strength—as well as 'moral' choices are all circumstantial.

Are you wrong to burn people alive? Mostly yes (2x07, 6x08) but also no (3x09). Are you wrong to kill people? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes whether it's 'wrong' or 'right' doesn't even factor in. Are you wrong to use dark magic, or use the dangerous Staff of Ziard, or coin someone and condemn them to a 'fate worse than death'? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Is lying or hiding the truth to protect someone wrong? Sometimes yes (1x06, 2x03, 3x03, 5x01, 7x04, 7x06) sometimes no (1x02, 2x03, 6x06, 5x08, 7x08).

Are you doing the right thing?

Do you have no choice? Is that true, or is that just what you think, or how you rationalize it yourself?

When is it right or cowardly to leave (Viren, Lissa, Rayla, Callum, Ezran, the Cosmic Council, the offer made to Karim's troops)? When should you stay? When do you decide to share resources (2x05) to your potential detriment or withhold them in the name of protecting yourself and your own people (Xadia and magic)? At what point(s) do you prioritize your own pain and grief, or someone else's (i.e. the Keeper vs Callum vs Ezran)? At what point is someone too dangerous or 'too far gone' to keep alive (Runaan about Harrow, Ezran about Aaravos)? At what point do you decide someone cannot change? When do you refuse to change (Karim, Terry) who you are no matter what happens, and when do you decide that you must (Ezran, Soren)? When is it wrong to use illusions to trick someone (3x09 and 7x06) and when is it more reasonable (2x03)? When should you be willing to sacrifice others (Rayla with her family, Runaan and Rayla with Callum, Soren with Viren) and when should you refuse? When should you sacrifice yourself, and when it is wrong to? Did you betray them, or did they betray you, or both (usually both)? When should you betray or stay loyal to your family? What is the right thing to do?

The show, tbh, doesn't know, at least 90% of the time. It's not interested in knowing. It's interested in exploring. That's the whole point. At most, it says you should work towards harm reduction, but what constitutes harm, and what peace looks like, is also something that greatly differs for all the characters.

Rayla is willing to sacrifice the love of her life, Ezran is willing to create weapons of mass destruction and wield one, and Callum used a torture spell on someone when he absolutely did not have to. The idea that any of the protagonists are meant to be paragons of unblemished virtue who are always 100% right, or that any of the antagonists do not canonically have a good point of contention with anything that's happened and are always 100% wrong, is reductive to everything the show is and explores, because it is Quite Literally not what the show does, ever tbh.

They literally spelled it out this past season as a core theme; I don't think they needed to have a character directly point it out every time a main character did something that was Kinda Fucked Up or Complicated But Understandable to know that the show knows it was Canonically Fucked Up or Complicated But Understandable.

There is not a single character or action in TDP that is always right, and there is not a singular character or action in TDP that is always wrong. Hell, even narrowing it down to "this is 'right' or 'wrong'" feels counterintuitive because it's so subjective within the narrative.

Every choice the characters make is often well reasoned, aligns with their values and world views, and fits into how they work through problems. Every choice has benefits and consequences, for them or for others. That doesn't mean it's Right for everyone involved. That doesn't mean it's Wrong for everyone involved. That's what makes the show interesting. Everything has nuance. Everything has Complexity. I'm not interested in a simplified version of TDP. I'm interested in the show as is.

I hope you are, too.

[roridomyces]

Triptych