Would you be ok explaining what the cats & cat tree in your comic was a metaphor for? Assuming it was a metaphor. I really enjoyed reading it and resonated with it but I'm not quite sure what the cats & the cat tree were about, I'd love to understand better :]
My best guess is psychosis (because I'm psychotic so I'm seeing it how it best fits myself lol) but that interpretation is more literal, and I'm assuming the cats were meant to be figurative/metaphorical
This is completely tangential to your question but I do want to express, in general, that while I AM glad that the cat tree comic is resonating with so many people and helping some people put words to feelings, and while it's also nice to have something I'm actually PROUD of blow up instead of a low-effort shitpost for once, it IS a little unfortunate that it had to be the cat tree comic, because it was a very raw and intense and personal thing and now a LOT of people want to talk to me about something that I honestly don't want to spend any more time talking or thinking about. Can you all talk to me about my FUN posts next time? (joking)
Most of the reason I made the cat tree comic was to help sort of exorcise those thoughts and emotions from my brain; I intentionally made the drawings very simple and loose and monochromatic because I was trying to draw it as quickly as possible in order to minimize the amount of time I spent thinking about this stuff.
But expressing myself has backfired because now everybody loves it and wants to keep talking to me about the thing I was TRYING to eject from my head. Oh, well. That's on me! (It's also on tumblr for being the only website that doesn't let you disable or limit replies and quotes on a post-by-post basis)
So, in addition to answering your question below, I will also be rambling a whole bunch in order to try and preemptively answer every other question anyone could possibly have about the cat tree comic, so that talking about this does not become the rest of my month:
The cats & the cat tree are metaphors for lost memories, or false memories, and the house is my brain. I worry that my head is filling up with all this junk, whether it's empty space or things that never happened, and eventually that rot is going to take over everything and I won't be able to stop it. At the same time, I also worry that even if I can somehow get the cats and the cat tree to leave, they're going to take everything else with them when they go (like in the final panel), whether that means my brain just deteriorates to the point where there's nothing left, or whether that means I finally get some kind of treatment but that treatment just wipes everything. (I've taken a lot of medications that made me stop feeling bad by making me stop feeling ANYTHING, so I'm always scared that anything I try will inevitably take something I didn't want to get rid of)
At the same time, the cats ALSO represent me, and my fear and my anxiety and my autistic masking ("I've spent my entire life pretending to be normal in order to survive and now I can't turn it off"; "Did you know that cats tend to hide their symptoms when they're sick?"), as well as my desire to just hide away in a weird soft little space and not have to think or worry about anything.
Also, cats are nice. They made this comic a lot easier for me to draw, and a lot easier for everyone else to look at, dampening how harrowing the whole thing is, and, when necessary, accentuating how harrowing the whole thing is through the dissonance of the imagery and the text. I made a nice and familiar thing kind of unfamiliar and scary to fill you with dread and communicate the feeling of not being able to trust something you thought it was safe to trust, whether that something is a cute cat or your own perception of reality. Classic artist's prank
I chose the cat tree specifically because I wrote the script for this comic immediately after waking up from a dream where I saw a cat tree in my house over and over and over -- lately my dreams have had a tendency to just get caught in a loop until I wake up. I have never had a cat tree in my house, and I have never had a cat, so I felt it was a fitting enough metaphor for a false memory. Because, for me at least, waking from a dream feels sort of similar to how it feels whenever I realize something I thought was a memory actually never happened. It's like waking up and thinking "oh, my reality from a few seconds ago, that I was fully invested and immersed in and completely believed was real, is obviously fake to me now. What else do I need to question? What other junk do I have kicking around up there? What if the rest of the fakes aren't this obvious? What if I won't always know?"
That looping dream also inspired the repetitive structure of the comic; a scene that my mind kept returning to over and over between every other thought.
I've also always had a fascination with things like playgrounds and theme parks; places that are like fiction but tactile. Real, physical places constructed for the sole purpose of transporting you somewhere else. Cat trees have always had that vibe to me, like little playgrounds for cats. So, I think I was drawn to them for that reason, too.
But anyway, all that stuff is just what the comic meant to me. I've seen a lot of other people these past couple days relating to it in a lot of different ways and interpreting it from a lot of different angles and I think that's neat. People who have conditions I don't have but who face similar obstacles are still able to see themselves reflected in the comic because it's so vague while also being specific in all the right ways, and I think that's great and I don't want to take anyone else's interpretation away from them.
As an aside, though, I've seen a lot of people tagging the comic 'anti-psych' in the reblogs, and I don't know about all that. Seems a bit extreme. Not really what I'm about. Calls to mind memories of certain family members of mine saying therapists are 'evil' because they 'tear families apart' (translation: therapists sometimes help people realize they shouldn't allow their families to hurt them). I've found therapy useful and I've occasionally even found medication useful, and even if I hadn't found those things useful I would never dream of asserting that they can't be useful for others. I'm just saying we have a LOT of work and untangling to do to unfuck every single facet of healthcare in general (not just psychiatry!) before people can reach those useful solutions.
There are WAY too many obstacles in the way of people getting the help that they need, especially for disabled people. I am in a position of extreme privilege to even be able to TRY to get help, and every time I have to go through the gauntlet of Actually Even Making it To the Doctor's Office I am, every step of the way, thinking about all the other people who need help who can't even make it through the front doors. The people who don't have the money, or don't have the time & energy, or don't have a support network to help them through the process, or can't make phone calls, or don't know how to use a computer, or don't know how to schedule an appointment, or don't know how to navigate insurance, or don't have transportation to reach the doctor's office, or don't know how to fill out all the forms on their own, or aren't certain they'll be safe, or can't figure out where to even begin because all they have is a feeling in their head that something might be wrong but have no idea what it could be or how to describe it or who they're supposed to ask about it. A lot of those things probably sound trivial to a lot of people, but to a lot of other people they are a MOUNTAIN.
I am disabled and I am only able to make it past all these obstacles with the help and support of other people in my life. Every time I need to go to the doctor, a lot of people have to dedicate a lot of time and energy and money and resources to helping me get there, and I need their help at almost every single step of the process. To be one of the lucky few who is able to get past ALL of those obstacles, only to arrive at the doctor's office and not be able to get the help that I need because of bad luck or misunderstanding, is one of the most devastating and discouraging things in the world, and THAT is what this comic is about. I just went through hell and came out the other side as one of the few survivors, only to have it be a coin toss whether the doctor takes me seriously, followed by another coin toss whether the doctor and I can communicate effectively, followed by another coin toss for whether I get treatment, followed by another coin toss for whether the treatment I get works for me or whether I have to go through the whole gauntlet again. It feels like I'm wasting all of my loved ones' time, money, and energy, only to die because I can't figure out a dialogue tree or because the doctor doesn't like my vibe or because I was so busy panicking that I forgot to mention some of my symptoms or because of any number of other things that can go wrong.
And that's not even getting into the subjectivity of diagnoses, the subjectivity of what even constitutes a mental illness, and whether some of these 'illnesses' are even a thing to be 'cured' or if they just need to be understood and accommodated and the only difficulties these people face are caused by a world that wasn't made for them rather than something being 'wrong' with them. There are so, so, so many problems we need to tackle. But I don't think we need to burn down the entire field of psychiatry, or whatever it is some of the 'anti-psych' people are on about. idk. It's a mixed bag I don't really want to touch. Some of you seem like you're perfectly reasonable and of the same mind as me and are mostly just trying to fix the most glaring issues while waving around a banner that sounds more extreme than it actually is, but then also some of you sound like anti-vaxxers.
(I had someone accuse me of being 'anti-science' this morning and it's like NO, my whole problem is this shit isn't scientific ENOUGH lol. They literally just quiz you! They just quiz you! There's no scanning or testing or analysis or anything! It's 100% just a doctor making a judgment call based on how well you communicate with them! And they do this to diagnose conditions that often involve impaired communication! And we have to do it that way because we do not understand the human brain yet! I'm not attacking science, I'm begging it to hurry up! Anyway I would appreciate it if strangers on the internet would stop assigning me to teams. Also, stop arguing in my notifications. From here on out if I catch you arguing in my notifications I am deleting your reply no matter what 'side' you're on. I don't have the energy or the patience for this.)
Lastly, I can't tell you which specific medication is the one I reference in the comic, both because I don't actually know for sure which one was the culprit (I was on many different medications and multiple of those have memory issues as a potential side-effect) and also because I am not comfortable getting too deep into my medical history. Also, more importantly, I don't want to scare people away from something that could potentially help them. Medications affect different people differently and something that caused me damage could be a lifesaver for someone else. I'm not trying to make a callout post for pills. Just be sure to always do your research on the potential side effects of your meds.
Ok, I think that about covers everything. Thank you all for reading my comic and especially thank you to the majority of you who are being normal about it. I will not be answering any further questions about the comic and I will especially not be answering any further questions about my stances on the field of psychiatry or healthcare in general. I'm not interested and I'm not qualified. I just think that things should be good instead of bad.
Close! That would read more like "Fuck bit chess, goat mini". You wanted to write this:
despite having an 'I' and an 'E' in it, both of the vowel sounds in a typical English pronunciation of 'bitches' are a 'short-I' sound, so it's closer to use the eastern 'I' for both vowels. Also, the 's' in 'bitches' is voiced, so it's closer to use the 'Z' instead of the 'S'.
As for the rest, I'm pretty sure you just accidentally lost track of what column you were in, because you were only one column off in both cases.
But you got 6/10 characters correct! That's gotta be at least a D-
In my head I pronounce myrrh like the sound cats make when you wake them up. I hope this is correct
'Myrrh' the character is pronounced the same as 'myrrh' the tree resin, which is not dissimilar to a sound a cat might make, which I imagine is half the reason why I named her that in the first place back when I was 14 or whatever, but I actually don't remember for sure.
I think I might have also named her that because originally she had a sister who I named 'Nepeta', because she's a cat and 'nepeta' is the group of plants that catnip is a part of (I didn't -- and still don't -- know what homestuck is) and for some reason at the time I thought that the 'Nepeta' and 'Commiphora' (myrrh) genuses were really closely related (I'm pretty sure they aren't)
As for whether it resembles the sound of a cat being woken up specifically, I haven't actually spent enough time around cats to know, so I don't have enough data; I would need to go be impolite to a bunch of sleeping cats to verify
Would you consider selling your cat comic as a physical zine?
I'm not really set up for printing and shipping anything, and I have no experience doing that, and I don't think there would be enough demand for it to justify the effort of figuring all of that out, but if people want I can always throw a pdf of it on the itch store for people to print themselves. It wasn't really formatted for printing, though. I'd have to fiddle with it a bit, and people would probably have to trim the pages down to size themselves. But if that's something people would be interested in I could do that
↑ Inquiry from a respectful pirate who did not read my bio
(It says "any pronouns" right there!!)
(also, for clarification, "Aesungaia" isn't my name, it's the name of the fictional country many of my characters are from, and I named my website and my blog and the series and stuff after that. MY name is chirp I mean chips I mean chirs I mean chris. But if you call me 'aesungaia' I will not be upset with you because I feel like that's my own fault)
I hope your OC and world building is getting more attention after the cat comic blew up!
I try not to think too much about things like this (I actually use extensions and userscripts to hide metrics on social media sites in a lot of cases) but the little graph on my notifications page has been going nuts for a month, and I'm also pretty sure that like a third of my followers on here arrived in the past month, so I can only assume that if that many people looked at my blog after reading the cat tree comic and then decided they wanted to stick around, it means the standard Aesungaia stuff is still getting plenty of love too. Half of my notifications are still about Comprehension Castle and I'M AN EXPLORER.
In general, though, I actually kind of consider huge bursts of online 'attention' to be a neutral-to-bad thing; it's not really something I seek out or hope for. Like, sure, The Number going up means a lot more people are connecting with my art, which is obviously awesome, but on the other hand, y'know, the comments get really stressful, and I still haven't made a single sale all month. Which is not to say that my only goal -- or my primary goal, even -- is to make money. Hell, my goal isn't even necessarily to make art that connects with millions of people.
I just want to express myself and have fun and make art that I like, that connects with people (the number of people is not important), and can make someone's day even a tiny bit better, the way so many other people's art has done for me. And, if possible, I would prefer to be able to achieve financial stability and financial independence through doing that.
And, unfortunately, Doing Big Numbers Online doesn't really serve any of those goals especially well, if at all, so it's hard to see it as a positive. It mostly just increases your risk of getting yelled at, lol
(Being real: the response to the cat tree comic has been as stressful and scary and irritating as it has been positive. I'm glad I made it, I'm glad it resonated, I'm glad it's helping people articulate their feelings. But if it weren't for the fact that it seems to be helping people, I probably would've deleted it by now, at least on tumblr. Every day for a month I have had people venting in my notes, people arguing in my notes, people venting in my ask box, people putting suicidal ideation in my ask box. It passed the threshold of blowing up (good) into blowing up (bad) almost right away.)
But, at the end of the day, I am always glad to see people enjoying my art, whether it's one person or ten thousand, whether it's Aesungaia stuff or Myrrh stuff or one-off things like the cat tree comic, whether they paid for it or not, I just like to see people enjoying my art.
good evening, i need to check my work so far - is Aesungaian using a pigpen cipher for the diacritics?
If you're asking for path-of-the-white-mare-related reasons, Aesungaian isn't a cipher, it's just a regular old conlang that I created LONG before I started putting this puzzle together.
I feel like, in general, my policy on puzzle-related inquiries should be silence/non-interference so that I don't spoil the fun, (which is why I haven't answered some other previous asks) but in this particular case you've barked so far up the wrong tree that I feel like I should probably clarify that Aesungaian is not currently a component of any puzzles (though, now that you bring it up, I kind of like the idea of integrating it into future puzzles in some way...)
Since this is NOT part of the puzzle, though, I'm gonna use this opportunity to infodump about how Aesungaian works and how I use it:
Right now, the way Aesungaian works is I have an ever-growing list of Aesungaian words (created as needed), which vaguely follow a set of rules for the language (it's phonetically consistent, is limited to a specific set of phonemes, certain syllables appear more commonly than others, there are sometimes root words that I have related words share, etc.). And, for the most part, whenever you see Aesungaian in my work, it DOES actually mean something and isn't just gibberish (with a few rare exceptions; I'm not perfect)
But even though it does actually mean something, you wouldn't be able to actually translate it, because nobody but me has my translation list and the Aesungaian script isn't just a cipher for English in the way, say, Hylian works in some Zelda games.
For example, this sign at the beginning of The Earring epilogue says 'teishuvi naemase' (Though it's a little stylized). Using the Aesungaian syllabary, you'd be able to know that it says that, but you wouldn't have any way of knowing that 'teishuvi' means 'to identify or appraise' and 'naemase' means 'magical artifact'. Fortunately for both readers and for non-Aesungaian-speaking residents of the area in-fiction, there's also English on the sign lol
(though, technically, the language spoken and written by humans in this setting is 'Luchtefian', as the story does not take place on earth and English therefore does not exist; English writing and other references to earth constructs like days of the week or whatever are to be interpreted as a sort of fictional 'localization' -- The sign doesn't actually canonically have English text on it, I've just localized the Luchtefian into English.)
Anyway, the most current iteration of the Aesungaian syllabary (which I've posted before but I don't think I've put anywhere on my site because the syllabary+script is quite old and I've been meaning to give it an overhaul for some time now), looks like this:
Pretty much all existing occurrences of Aesungaian script in my work use this iteration of the syllabary+script, though sometimes the unaccompanied consonants in the leftmost column will have their triangle parts omitted. As I said, though, I'm not entirely satisfied with it, so it may change in the future.
I think the only fun little unrelated easter egg you could have discovered by using this is that, in the "Three Different Languages" comic from last year, I DID just get lazy and write out lorem ipsum in Aesungaian script instead of using actual Aesungaian words. (I probably didn't even transcribe it correctly; I'm not sure if lorem ipsum, being gibberish, even has a proper pronunciation but if it does I absolutely do not know it)
wait you're writing books? thats so sick is there a timeline whats the deal with them
I've been writing these books for over a decade! There's like 5 of them that are basically already done, and a few more that are in varying stages of completion. I've kinda just been sitting on them this whole time for a variety of reasons (insecurity, fear, self-doubt, wanting to go back and improve them before I release them, the publishing industry being The Way That It Is, thinking I might do the story in some medium other than books instead, etc.) but after all this time I've sort of reached the point where I'm ready to just bite the bullet, do one more editing pass on the ones that are basically done, and start self-publishing on itch or something.
The problem is, long covid has almost completely annihilated my ability to write (along with destroying my energy levels + a variety of other things) so it takes me a very long time to get anything done. I've been dealing with this for almost two years now and it's showing no signs of going away.
If by "is there a timeline" you mean "when will the books come out", the answer is "I don't know" (see above). If by "Is there a timeline" you mean "Does the story have a sequence of events that can be arranged in chronological order", then the answer is "yes but you can't see it".
Either way, thank you for your interest! I hope I can get these books in people's hands soon and give people something more substantial to chew on. I feel pretty bad whenever people tell me they're really into what I'm doing and want to know more about these characters and this world and I have to tell them "Oh 99% of this does not exist in a place you can see it yet"
Hopefully, all the drawings and comics are enough to satisfy people's appetites until then!
