If I'm going to make my Drifter Natah's Champion/Kisser, I thought of mixing Radiant Lotus with Eidolon Natah, so she has this more formal and "armored" look when performing as the leader (Radiant Lotus) and a more personal/intimate look for private moments: less armor and more "skin", scars proudly worn out in the open, tattered skirt unafraid of decay and the passage of time, muted colors and blue energy for the living and repaired rather than edolon's teal, dying energy.
Less obstructed neck muscles, visible collarbones and shoulder blades to shamelessly signal women with homosexual tendencies.
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
Seriously, it's wild how bad things got so quickly. It's like we just completely forgot the last thirty years of social progress and decided to bring back the worst parts of the 80s and 2000s for no fucking reason
By the way it's like. Really fucked how society's thoughts on epilepsy is just "get over it." Seizures can cause permanent brain damage. Seizures can kill people. Seizures hurt like hell. Allow me to reiterate that seizures can kill people. And you're just gonna casually put flashing lights, a common trigger for seizures in your advertisement, in your animation meme, in your edit, on your billboards, without even thinking about putting a simple disclaimer? That's unbelievable. Your little anime edit could deadass cost a life and you're not gonna put a warning because it's "inconvenient" or "people like that shouldn't be on the internet" (ableist) (the problem exists outside the internet also). Or you'll give insufficient ones like putting it in the captions or only giving like one second before the flashing lights appear, meaning that the trigger's already in motion before anyone who needs the warning can read it and save themselves from literal physical danger.
We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.
Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.
Anyways this Disability Pride, and for every month that comes after, think about epileptic people and others who are triggered by flashing lights/eyestrain. Happy pride to those who experience seizures too frequently due to the unaccommodating and ableist societies we live in!
If you treat someone as irredeemably bad or evil, then that's what they'll be. It's only when you start treating them like a person instead of the abstract personification of everything you hate that you'll make much progress getting along with each other.
I don't care if your headmate's done the worst shit I can imagine, traumatized you repeatedly, and laughed in your face about it. They've still got a reason for doing it. And if that reason is "they find it fun," then what's going on in their life that makes hurting other people (and being hated by them) their best option for entertainment? Sounds like they're struggling to feel good at all if hurting people for a quick fix is the only time they're happy, or like they've learned that other people deserve to suffer (and where did that belief come from?).
They think that they're pure evil and act the part? Damn, that's a lot of self hatred they've got going on. "I'm irredeemably bad" isn't really a nice way to see yourself. I wonder when they learned to see themselves that way. I wonder how they learned that "acting evil" was something they had to do. I wonder if anyone ever respected or listened to them when they were "good", how "being evil" might've protected or helped them at some point when all the "good" people were failing them.
They're pissed off constantly for "no reason" and make it everyone else's problem? Where did that anger come from in the first place? Who's helping them deal with it? No one? Being nice and punching a pillow doesn't always make a dent in that kind of anger, especially if it's decades of everyone else's "I can't feel this right now" rage. That sucks to deal with. It's not like you taught them any better coping skills while you were shoving them away for having those feelings at all, though. They're stuck trying to cope with overwhelming rage alone. Lashing out makes it feel better.
They're shredding your body and forcing you to watch? Threatening suicide? It's their body too. They're willing to shred or kill themselves just to hurt you. Doesn't sound like it's just about hurting you for shits and giggles at that point. Lack of control over their own life, trauma re-enactment, self-hatred, overwhelming emotion, terminal boredom, whatever. There's a bigger problem going on.
They're not "pure evil"; every other person in their life is actively failing to understand and support them.
Stop treating your headmates as subhuman to make yourselves feel better about them acting against your personal morals. Start asking why they're doing this shit in the first place.
Grace falls asleep on his biodome beach and learns that the Eridian scientists who made his false sun replicated Sol a little too well because he woke up with a sunburn.
Rocky is concerned. Grace’s skin is the wrong texture and temperature, question? What happened? Is Grace sick???
And Grace has to go, “no I was just dumb, it’s just a sunburn.”
“Sun burned Grace, question? How??”
“Yeah, sort of. I mean, it’s not the same as a burn exactly, it’s…”
And then he has to pause and say, “Okay. Rocky. I will explain to you what a sunburn is and what causes it. But first I want to promise you that I am okay and I am not going to die, and you have to promise not to freak out.”
anyone else notice how when "digital assistants" were just supposed to do specific tasks when you asked for them we had Alexa and Siri and Cortana, but now that they're being marketed as smart enough to take actions and make decisions on their own they've got names like Claude and Devin
There are honest to goodness academic articles about this! I don't have the citations to hand because I'm on the wrong computer, but gendering of real world and also fictional AI is A Thing That Gets Talked About.
Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.
Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"
It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.
If you experience any changes in body control (switching, possession, etc.), then establish some form of consistent, asynchronous external communication with your system. External communication has a major benefit: you can still talk to each other across switches (asynchronously) even if the inside of your mind is a mess.
You might set up a journal, whiteboard, calendar, a "single user, multi-account" app like Mytter or Antar, sticky notes, etc. Anything goes as long as your system knows to check it occasionally (or at the least, in an emergency).
We recommend choosing an analog method for your fallback communication method if possible, as a power outage could take out a lot of digital methods. A spur-of-the-moment piece of paper left on a table is better than nothing, but it's less likely to work than a pocket notebook or bulletin board that every system member knows to use for communication if needed. You can always add an app or program once everyone knows where to go for your analog fallback.
Discuss how you want to treat each other. Keep it loose and informal for now- don't make any absolute Laws just yet. Think of it more like the quick agreements that roommates make with each other for practical reasons: "I'll do the dishes if you do the laundry".
A few classics: "try not to die, don't kill anyone else, don't get any tattoos as an impulse decision, and don't throw out things that don't belong to you."
Don't force agreements on anyone. If someone disagrees, then stop and discuss their concerns to find a better agreement. See: Consensus Decision Making.
Map your system, if it feels right. This can help you learn about each other, but it can also be soothing to feel like you have some understanding of who's in your head when you're being flooded with new system members.
Again, keep it simple. What do you actually need to know? What would help you in a practical sense? Start there, then branch out if you'd like to get to know each other better.
Consider making a simple guide to your life. If someone had to handle a day in your life with little to no prior knowledge of it, then what would they need to know?
Where should they check to see if you have any appointments? Are they responsible for feeding any pets? Where can they find money if they need it, and how do they know how much to spend? Do you have a job, and do they need to work it? Etc.
Hopefully you never need this guide, but it's a lifesaver for any unexpectedly amnesiac system members.
Focus on building bridges and trust. Get to know the folks in your head. Find ways to talk and just get to know them. Listen as much as you talk, if not more.
Learn to lean on each other for support, if you can. Trust is one of the most valuable things that you can have in a system. Trust gets you through a lot of tough situations. Give your system members every reason to trust you, and try to learn to trust them in turn.
If someone is hostile, then ask what's driving the hostility. Do they feel under-represented in your life? Does peace make them feel unsafe because they don't know where the threats are? Are they bored, scared, frustrated, or routinely unhappy?
What can you do to support them? What do they need to feel comfortable?
Don't worry about knowing everything. You're just figuring this out- give yourselves some grace for not knowing as much as everyone else seems to. (Besides, they know less than you think. I've yet to meet a system without a single mystery left in it, including folks who've known for decades, and many systems are forever figuring things out in one way or another.)
Ask for information when you need it and let your system explain itself over time; let your system set the pace. You'll get better information that way, and your system will learn that they can trust you to respect them when they say "no, don't touch that yet."
Screw plural community labels for now. Seriously. Screw figuring out origins or consciousness or whatever the linguistic dividing line of the month is. Don't worry about it. These words come and go. Get to know yourselves first.
Why am I suggesting this? Community labels will still be there when you've figured out how to work with each other in a practical sense, and your stronger understanding of each other will make it much easier to find whatever words you wind up needing. Hunting for words now is likely to get you stuck trying to cram a bunch of shifting unknowns into someone else's categorization system, and it might cloud your situation more than it clears it.
Given that you're still settling into the idea of sharing a head at all, getting into the nitty-gritty of labels is probably going to be less helpful than figuring out how to handle doubt and denial issues (or getting communication going, or learning to manage switching, or...), hence the recommendation not to worry about it.
That said: do use labels if you need them. Just remember that labels are tools. Don't let the tools use you.
Also, screw the discourse. If you listen to any one item on this list, make it this one.
Plural community discourse tends to be a little bit rancid in the "debating whether your experiences exist meaningfully in our spaces" way, and it will fuck you up as a new system. Get past the worst of your denial or doubt issues first to avoid worsening the "oh my god, am I faking without knowing it" hell brainworms. Please. I am actually begging you. Avoid the discourse until you've dealt with your own existential doubts.
None of these things are obligations, nor is there any rush to do them. It's just a cluster of things that I tend to suggest to newly discovered systems, and I realized that I don't think we've actually rattled these off on this blog yet.
"Waah waah but what if I don't like it when my intended-as-apolitical work gets analysed and people start claiming it has reactionary politics" so this can be avoided by developing a better understanding of politics
Metahuman with super healing powers whose entire job is that once a week they go to a nearby hospital and are put into a medically induced coma for 24 hours while all their organs and blood are harvested, and kept there until they've healed up again.
They get paid a small stipend by the Heroes Council for this, and they live off that.
No crime fighting, no obvious heroics, and they only took a Super Identity because it's technically hero's council policy. Nobody's ever seen them in a cape.
Every so often the Heroes council will release an official report to the public, and there'll be another bunch of news articles wondering how some unknown super calling themselves 'Meat Factory' somehow consistently holds the record for most lives saved across the city.
It is essential to my vision that they are not at all sanctimonious about this.
Like, they regularly act like they're getting away with something. They joke about how they get to earn money in their sleep. They show up to their hospital visits in deliberately ridiculous disguises, on the excuse that they need to 'protect their identity'.
Part of their employment contract is that they get served the same post-operation vanilla ice cream that they normally hand out on the childrens' ward. Also a sticker. Their overnight bag is covered in stickers.
Okay, Meat Factory is awesome and hilarious, but if they're being harvested for and regenerating absolutely everything, may I suggest an alternative super name: Theseus.
