Cosimo Galluzzi
EXPECTATIONS
trying on a metaphor
sheepfilms
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
gracie abrams
Origami Around
★
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
𓃗
The Stonewall Inn
untitled
Monterey Bay Aquarium
bliss lane
we're not kids anymore.
noise dept.
🪼
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Show & Tell
Game of Thrones Daily
seen from United States
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seen from United States
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@through-lines
Hi, I'm Sora/leo9ish! (he/him/his & ve/ver/vis, adult) - I'm fictionkind in the "I am entirely this character" way and generally woo-woo about fictionality.
This is a personal blog to post about my experiences and engage in discussions with others in the community. Anyone is welcome to comment on my posts if you have something to say!
Full "about me" • My fictotypes • Other accounts
Are YOU human in an alterhuman way? Consider checking out the #human alterhumanity tag!
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Inky Paws #4
Inky Paws is a nonhuman anthology zine for original fiction writings by nonhumans and alterhumans about nonhumanity, alterhumanity, and similar, related themes. This zine is primarily literature focused, but will also be open to more illustrative methods of story-telling such as comics. The zine’s focus is on fictional pieces that are centered around nonhumanity, alterhumanity, therianthropy, and similar (see Submission Guidelines section for more details).
You are welcome to submit:
Short stories
Microfiction
Satire
Poetry
Song lyrics
Experimental fiction (fake newspapers, fake recipes, fake blogs, fake posters, etc.)
Mixed media
Comics
Minizine pages
And more! If you're unsure, just ask! Seriously, please just ask. I promise I would 10000% love to hear about your idea even if you're unsure about submitting it, there is no such thing as a bad idea and I cannot stress this enough.
How to participate:
You can submit your pieces in this Google Form!
OR
Email invisibleotherkin(@)gmail(.)com with your submission, and please title the email "Inky Paws Zine #4 Submission". With your submission, please include:
The piece's title or name,
A name or pen name to attribute the piece to,
Any content warnings that you feel are necessary for the piece,
Any social media handle or personal website you’d like to be published alongside your name with the piece (optional), and
Any relevant author notes or author biographical information (optional).
Anonymous pieces are also welcome.
Once submissions have been collected and the deadline has passed, these submissions will be put into the zine and it will be posted online as a free PDF. Submissions are due by November 30th, 2026.
Please see the Submission Guidelines, and Submission FAQ, below cut.
It looks like Inky Paws' Google Forms submission folder was maxed out late last night because of some especially large submissions; I've expanded the folder space allotted to it, so it should be working again! If for any reason the form doesn't work in the future, please email your submissions instead.
From Within Our Hearts Zine || Info Doc
There's not nearly enough talk about hearttypes, so we wanted to to get conversations rolling by making a collaborative zine about it!
Otherhearted describes a person who has a strong fundamental connection to a species or character which impacts their core sense of self. This is most commonly described in terms of identifying with a being as opposed to identifying as one, although this is not always the case. - Otherkin Wiki
This zine will be a collection of artwork, writing and more all about being otherhearted. Whatever that means to you - both fiction and nonfiction pieces would be accepted. If you got something you wanna express about hearttypes, we'd love to hear it!
Full submission guidelines below the cut.
Word otherkin will be 22 years old
An upcoming anniversary in the otherkin community: On July 9, 2012, the word “otherkin” will have been coined 22 years ago. It was coined in the Elfinkind Digest, a mailing list which is active to this day. On that date in 1990, one participant, Torin, used the word “otherkin” as a variation on the earlier word “otherkind.” Both phrases were casually improvised as an abbreviated way of referring to people who identify as other kinds of creatures.
(Source: Elfinkind Digest #71. The archive of this document is still extant, and I have read it. Thanks to the mailing list moderator R’ykandar Korra’ti for making this primary source available to me while I was researching our community’s history book, the Otherkin Timeline. Thanks to Torin for permission to share this information.)
Right now, the word “otherkin” is nearly 22 years old. That means that any otherkin who are currently in their teens weren’t even born until after the word had been coined. There are lots of otherkin who have considered themselves to be otherkin, of a kind, even years before the word had been coined. Detractors sometimes claim that otherkin is merely a passing fad popular among youth, but this is evidently not the case.
Any thoughts on the significance of this passage of time? Where were you at, as an otherkin, 22 years ago? Anybody want to make plans for the 9th, to set it aside as a day for thinking about otherkin things? Maybe a party for reminiscing, maybe even with costumes and artistic “glamour-bombs”?
Here’s the anniversary again. Tomorrow, on July 9, 2015, the word “otherkin” will turn 25 years old.
This year, the word “otherkin” recently turned 32 years old on July 9, 2022.
The top post in this thread from 2012 is where I first proposed observing it as Otherkin Day, unless if anyone can find earlier references to that. The original post is gone, so I was grateful to find this particular post had been archived on someone else’s blog.
And so did the word otherkind, being otherkin’s elder sibling by a a few months.
I’ve now got a page on my website titled A Brief(ish) History of the Word “Otherkind” based on my reading of the contemporary Elfinkind Digest, which talks a bit about the coining, trends in usage, whether it included elves at first, and whether it included animal folk (today’s therians).
Thanks! Folks, Arethinn’s essay is excellent, I highly recommend reading it.
Happy Otherkin Day once again! Now in 2024, the words “otherkin” and “otherkind” turn 34 years old.
Side note, it’s kinda funny looking back at my tags on that post. I’ve more or less come around to identifying with the ‘alterhuman’ label, but I’m still incredibly ambivalent about calling myself ‘nonhuman’.
It’s like, yeah, that’s technically correct, because I am a Nightmare/n and Nightmare/n as a kind of being are not human. Except for me. I’m a Nightmare/n who’s human. A not-nonhuman Nightmare/n.
It’s very Semantics™, but when there’s a lot of emphasis on being completely and utterly not-human in nonhuman spaces, it feels like a distinction that matters and needs to be said sometimes.
Obligatory disclaimer that this isn't in direct response to any recent discussion (and as it stands, I've been OOTL anyway), but this seems to be an evergreen issue:
You do not have to identify with any label you don't want to. Just because you "can" use a label doesn't mean you have to.
But if you're going to explain why you don't use a label, and it involves making sweeping generalizations about what a group does/doesn't or can/can't experience, that group is well within their rights to push back and tell you you're wrong.
Identity labels are coined at different times under different contexts to describe experiences that are rarely exclusive from those described by other labels. If you try to limit which experiences can fall under which labels, 99 times outta 100 you're just plain wrong.
That doesn't mean you have to start using the label. But you do have to stop spreading misinformation about the individuals who use the label.
That's not an unreasonable thing to expect, right?
Heyyy, sorry for the inactivity. Between random health issues keeping me from typing/scrolling too long, and unexpected having to put a childhood pet to sleep this week, I just...haven't really had the will to be active much of anywhere.
I'm not abandoning this blog or anything, to be clear ^^; It just might be a bit longer before I feel well enough to post more.
HowlCon Panelist & Artist Applications Now Open
Artist
Apply Now
Signing up as an artist is the best way to maximize the visibility of your commissions during the con.
Artists are given exclusive access to post their wares in our artist alley channels. And, if they wish, to add art streams to our official con schedule.
HowlCon is not responsible for any sales that take place.
Applications close October 1st
Panelist
Apply Now
Have an event you want to host? This is what being a panelist is about! From meet-ups, lectures, discussions, gaming together, arts and crafts time, and many more ideas we don't have the space to list. Your topic does not have to be explicitly about alterhumans or nonhumans.
We accept panels hosted live, pre-recorded and through text.
Applications close October 1st
Attendee Registration
This year attendee registration will be done directly on discord using the server member applications.
We will be re-using last year's discord server. If you attended last year, and have not left the server, you do not need to apply for membership again.
Register here!
Attendee registration closed October 23.
New Essay On Dreamwidth!
The Self-Discovery Ouroboros: My Journey With Mythic Alterhumanity is an essay that discusses my relationship with mythic alterhumanity and my progress with questioning, dropping, linking and even reclaiming some species of mine! I also discuss the importance of being both human and nonhuman in my alterhumanity!
CONTENT WARNING: While this essay is mostly SFW, I briefly discuss kinklinking (otherlinking for the purpose of sexual kink) and kink in general. This is all in relation to a couple of experiences. With this considered, 18+ readers only.
There's so much misanthropy in the alterhuman community and it sucks to see.
Just a reminder to any alterhumans who are still partially or fully human; your human nature is not evil. You are not a disease that needs to be wiped out. You are not irredeemable. You are still alterhuman, and your human aspects are beautiful too. You deserve to be here just as much as those of us with little to no human identity.
I do actually need singlets to understand that joking with a fictive about traumatic events in their canon is something you should ask for permission to do before assuming it will be a Funny fandom joke haha
Let's exercise our imaginations and think about what actually experiencing the events in the show/game/book what have you would be like and then ask ourselves critical questions like "would I appreciate it if someone made a joke about the worst thing that ever happened to me without seeing if I was cool with it first?"
my stance on the subject
There's no right or wrong here, but here's my spin on it. Let me know what you think! And if you haven't done it yet, vote on the poll I created!
Human: homo sapiens. genetically human.
Person: psychologically human. displaying the characteristics of a person, like a personality, interests, emotions, etc.
I rather strenuously disagree with including "human" in the definition of a person as anything but an example thereof, honestly. A person is any sapient being - the only reason it's sometimes treated as synonymous with human is because broadly speaking humans are the only demonstrably sapient species we currently know of (nonhumans born into humanity notwithstanding). All humans are people, because all humans are sapient beings, but not all people are humans. Look at any fictional media with multiple sapient races - elves are people, Twi'leks are people, dragons who can talk in a way we can comprehend are people, and the vast majority of people will include them in the word "people" without a second thought.
Wikipedia defines person as "a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility," which I think is more complex than the average discussion requires (typically "a sapient being" gets the important parts across), but is nicely descriptive if you really want to get into the weeds about it.
The goal of this survey is to gather information of on incidences of species-based misgendering within the Alterhuman community. Please do
Introducing a survey on Species-Based Misgendering, hosted by Duranos of The River System.
Species-Based Misgendering: the assumption of one's gender and/or pronouns based on the expectations of one's species, stemming from biases, when the expected gender does not match the individual's gender. Gendered Expectation: the expectation set for a species' gender, whether this bias comes from a cultural or folkoric background, establishment in a media, a linguistic framework, etc.
The survey is open both to the identities underneath the alterhuman umbrella, as well as nonhuman/human+ folks within plural conglomerates. While this survey is primarily looking for responses from those who have been misgendered based on their species, those who have not experienced species-based misgendering are welcome to complete the survey as well. Interpretation of what counts as species-based misgendering is open to interpretation by each individual, and there are long-form fillable responses throughout the survey to accommodate this.
The survey is set to close on July 31st, 2026. I welcome folks to share the link to the survey wherever you are active in the alterhuman community.
More stamp shenanigans 😵💫 Trying to fit the otherhearted symbol into a tiny stamp is rough because all the little details get completely garbled when you scale it down. This wasn't my first hearttype stamp idea, but it's a decent compromise.
Image descriptions because alt text button is obtrusive:
It's great to get validation and confirmation that you're not alone in your experiences, but you also need to remember this: If you experience it, it's your experience, you don't need approval from others to prove it to be real. You don't need to ask everyone "is it possible to [experience]" because if you experience it, then it's possible. You experienced it, after all! No matter how uncommon, your experiences hold value, and that value isn't up to the community to decide.
Spontaneous stamps or whatever for my Website Shenanigans. Image descriptions under the cut because the alt text button covers up most of the images ._.
