REP

Playing Fallout 76 in 2026: Parallel Play is Not Acceptable

2026-05-17T01:22:08Z

Let’s begin with a quick set up of how Fallout 76 is to play. You and your pals get together as a group to start playing again, there’s some back and forth on times to get together, when you can all play so-on and so-forth. If you’re me, you’re thinking of playing as a group because the game by itself is a boring slog with narry a thing to do other than hunt for items in the eternal quest for Number Go Up. I’m about at my quitting point after playing recently for about 60 hours, and I think that’s quitting early. There’s plenty of game left, but I don’t want to fucking play this piece of shit for a minute longer because I just accomplished my goal. Our group got together about two weeks ago to start playing and we’ve had maybe about 12 of those total 60 hours of actual playing together. This is owed to how Fallout 76 actually plays: everyone has to do their own thing at their own time at their own pace. Participating in each others quests isn’t really possible, due to the questing format not being designed to actually progress everyone’s quests simultaneously.

You can’t play Fallout 76 with your friends. Not really. Not in a way that actually progresses everyone together in a herd. The idea of instancing and group quest progression has been something of a problem for MMO’s for many years, this difficulty arises from the technical hurdle of syncing people’s quest statuses, making sure all of the levers and doohickies line up across multiple players. Characters don’t behave like they can have variable save states, it’s not like you can do much if a quest is completed for player (A) as player (B). There’s no incentive or mechanism to align quests together, if anything it’s both faster and more rewarding to clear quests solo because instanced dungeons require repeated runs and the health scaling of enemies is such that you’re just wasting resources in some cases where many players are present. More players doesn’t mean more enemies, doesn’t mean more complex encounter design, doesn’t mean anything because this game is hardly a Fallout game to begin with, let alone one where play along with pals is meant.

In Childhood Psychology, the term “Parallel Play” refers to the behavior where kids are playing together in proximity whilst engaged in their own isolated activities. A classical example of Parallel Play might be one child doing a crossword while the other draws. Interaction in Parallel Play is idle chatter, rarely Parallel Play may incorporate both kid’s activities being interpreted in a shared narrative (my bestie growing up did this with me when we both played separate videogames, resulting in a shared fiction that incorporated narrative elements and scenario set-dressing). Fallout 76 is perhaps one of the most noteworthy examples of parallel-social gaming I have seen, as it separates your action from your peers’ so completely that you might as well be doing separate activities entirely. While Parasociality usually refers to a one-sided relationship, Parallel-Social activity might refer to what Parallel Play used to refer towards. We don’t occupy physical space, or even social space, or even virtual space… we exist in isolated pockets of space, time, and place with activities that have nothing to do with one-another.

Think of it like you’re all together in a Group Discord voice call, and playing separate games. That’s about the level of Parallel Play that is the default assumption in Fallout 76. I’ve noticed in a lot of different online games that this component of Parallel Play appears to be the default assertion, where many multiplayer games are isolating, solo experiences dressed up with “play with your friends” attached loosely onto the back of it. Since you might not always be able to play with your friends at the same time every time you boot the game up, the game has to have some kind of way to enable solo play. There’s a restraint problem on the half of the player as much as there is a problem for the developers to maintain restraint as well. I think this is a problem for many games which are built around gear grinds, loot drops, daily activities, and so-on; they are intentionally designed to eliminate the GROUP part of group play. Not every game has the capacity to tolerate this kind of Parallel-Social design, but most of the popular multiplayer games out there have some kind of independent tracking for level ups and progression which do not depend on group play. Incentives for group play are almost non-existent in a variety of games, Fallout 76 weakly offers some bonus EXP for specific group types and activities. You don’t have the capacity to increase drop rates per group member or anything, so it ultimately results in a flat experience where the game quickly loses its depth and interest.

Since Combat was never designed in the Fallout series around dynamic gunfights where players have to coordinate to take out foes, there’s no mechanism to actually challenge players. The main solution is to pump up health, as the game and engine cannot handle say, spawning a few extra enemies into a tight space. The AI isn’t made for it, the mechanics aren’t made for it, the whole experience as-is should be dead on arrival. If not for it getting very clearly monetized around convenience fees for dedicated solo players, the game would have absolutely no legs on it whatsoever. This essay is sort of my chance to tell myself it’s okay to walk on games like this because they have nothing to actually offer me. I can’t really get invested in a game with no group mechanics, no group dynamics, and no interest in fostering connection and synchronization of play between players. Even when they’re your friends, they’re playing the game solo. Everyone is isolated, no one shares resources, no one shares equipment, no one shares anything except maybe shooting the same 3 raiders together possibly at the same time. As a result, I think my final opinion is that I need games to actually design with social play in mind. I know it sounds inconvenient as fuck, but it really does matter here.

To developers who will never read this nor have the incentive to do it: Give me games where play groups are something that fucking matters. Where I can start a campaign or special string of missions with my playgroup that lets us all contribute to each-other’s progress, that requires us to all work towards the same goal, where Solo-play contributes towards that goal. That’s all I ask, and I think that’s what people need.

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Larion fucking around with AI: Industrial Commentary

2025-12-17T13:02:41Z

My Husband and I got into an argument yesterday morning about the relative importance of Larion's employment of AI in prototyping and gap-filling in the development of Divinity Original Sin 3 (DOS3); we ultimately didn't agree on impact. The surface argument of labor replacement doesn't appear to be valid for Larion, but that's one for the facts pages and record keepers to debunk. Instead, I want to emphasize first that this appears to be a way to court investment, they just had a bit head-turning trailer at the Game Awards and this buzz-phrase wishy-washy “we're using it but not really and everyone hates it” definitely smells like it tastes. What you think about AI will probably determine your read of the article, and not the non-committal, basic bitch article itself which barely elucidates specific processes about how the systems are used. Assuming Larion isn't in a fiscally unpleasant position right now, the step is idiotic, and if they are, they could probably have put up a kickstarter and gone “we need 500,000 dollars to finish DOS3” and use that to court an investor who is looking for evidence of sales potential. I fully expect that the CEO is falling on his sword a little to make money happen, despite the ramifications of what was said likely chilling DOS3's possible sales, it is likely to do well.

So instead of hand-wringing about ethics, let's talk about the industrial component of implementing AI into your process (stick with me here, I am not pro-AI). Paying into AI Ecosystems means directly endorsing and rewarding the current fiscal black hole that is poised to consume the entire US Economy and destroy its labor market forever. These are resource-intensive systems that depend on substantial and perpetually burning volumes of capital so that data centers with trillions of dollars worth in construction, asset, and operation costs can produce a product known to make substantial errors, fly into existential crises when it can't answer questions, or hallucinate total fabrications when it can't answer questions. These systems despite their clear signs of overall advancement are deeply compromised by dark patterns – both in the form of making them manipulate users for retention purposes and because of the data they are fed. Atop this, vendor deals are beginning to fall apart as initial demand has to spike over 30x to make Open AI perform like a real business (since it pivoted from non-profit to for-profit), the profits are not there. Like a Nuclear Powerplant, if construction of these systems takes 10 years for them to actually produce value to investors, the investors will choose to burn money on something with more reliable turn-around.

As a game studio, your stakes are relatively low in the grand scheme of things sure; but Larion won the Queers over with their remarkable Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3). For probably most people, the use of AI Gen in games not only is not noticed but it's overlookable entirely so long as it doesn't interfere with the game's function. This said, I think that arguments about artistic sabotage are both valid and invalid; I am a fan of expertise and process. The industry is not. The game's industry has long had stinkers with incredible hand-made concept art that was scrapped in favor of something more pragmatically functional, BG3 is not an exception to this, nor is basically any game. Concept art is a phase of design, it takes time and vision; meanwhile AI Generated imagery isn't so time intensive and you barely have to have vision beyond basic asset tags. “Moody Fantasy Tower” is useless as a prompt for human artists, but will generate something in Midjourney that with mild alteration can be passed off as a sketch. An Illustrator who might have to shit out 3 drawings in a week can now be tasked with 30 and have them done by 9am the next day. This is the key argument for employment of generative AI systems, and if you operate local systems you can even even feed them a databank model based entirely on your own in-house assets for consistency.

It is not a question of if the slop machinery is capable of this. Go onto E6AI.net, and you'll see that a specialized niche and digital-painterly illustration approach has been standardized, giving a lot of the artwork there a very similar feel and appearance despite being generated under a variety of conditions. E6AI features some odd deviations however which look more like sketch work done by a typical artist, I fish up examples from time to time and try to find out if people can tell the difference. Some convincing fakes take more time, but more time is relative depending on your equipment and methods. Since the Invoke.ai team got gobbled up by Adobe's Photoshop, the current name of the game in local generation has now been defacto given to Automatic1111 and ComfyUI; these two software systems are highly customizable and can run on a host of GPU's (though you will need around 4gb of VRAM minimum to run any modern XL models). What is likely to happen is an industrial practice of localized model systems being operated instead of these big data centers, as light weight and specially curated models are far more efficient and easier to steer than cloud-oriented services that will use those big data centers. Simply contributing to this problem further doesn't make a small studio like Larion likely to fail, instead, it is likely that changes to their process will sabotage the end product by making it deviate towards median average quality.

The amount of capital going into DOS3 is likely going to be pretty big, claims from as far back as last year put BG3 at 100-200 Million USD to make, DOS3 is likely to consume even more (just from inflation). Larion is employing around 550 people according to some estimates, the bulk of which are likely programming staff and not visual artists, sound designers, nor game designers. The engineering and technical components of modern games can be quite the heft, I imagine the current estimated figure and estimated team composition is mostly temporary contractors. With a team of over 500 people, it is unlikely that DOS3 is occupying 100% of the staff's time... but it's hard to know. The average AAA videogame takes about 5 years to make, Larion has been at that level of studio management since Baldur's Gate 3 started development, and their management culture isn't as pretty as one might think. Similar to the situation which thrust Arrowhead Studios into the spotlight, these are sizable teams with management that is probably used to having around 50-100 people (DOS2 had 150 according to a 2022 article). That same PC Gamer article inexplicably claims “10x” the DOS2 staff involved in BG3, which would be insane, and raise the total staff size to 1,500 people. I'm not convinced that is a real figure, estimates put the game around 500 developers – but remember that Publishers and Developers are two separate organizations, a Publisher Team with its QA management assets can easily dwarf the development team (Amber Isle's team of <40 was supported by like 180 publisher provided staff).

This all said, in the interim before new standalone local software actually emerges as a commercial product, most current AI based systems will use cloud-oriented computing services. Those services are basically all that is propping the current US economy. The economy which famously is in a recession except for the speculative trading of AI stocks, the economy which is failing to make affordable living, the economy in which 10% of the population's top earners account for 50% of the purchasing activity. The economy which is contracting and has so much of its wealth funneled into an elite class of people to whom legal requirements on conduct have long since stopped applying. AI isn't going away, but when it busts it'll bust the way that the internet did during the .com bubble where the bag-holders will be contracting firms building the structures to house e-waste by the kiloton. The data center of today will have to downscale, learn to be more efficient, and refine the technologies that emerge out of the mass LLM industrial failure. Meanwhile the siphonees will exit the US economy to invest into China which is likely to see actual progress on efficiency since they have plenty of power for hardware but do not have the highest quality hardware by which their AI systems will operate. Even when the US fails out and becomes a cesspit full of misery, violence, and isolationism; AI will dominate the entertainment industries unless consumers can be lied to.

I think the lie is the point. Did you play Claire Obscure and spot the AI generated placeholders? Probably not, I think. These systems have so much capital behind them, so much speculation, so many resources, and so much capacity to fool, the argument is about ethics. Ethics do not matter to this industry. They haven't, not ever, not even once, not even a little. Videogame development is a disposable product overall, artistry will pretty much remain exclusively limited to the handful of small little games that don't do very well and the leads end up killing themselves. That's our future, and I don't see the collapse of Generative AI systems happening unless the consumer becomes fatigued of them enough to actually cause the products to fail. It isn't working, and won't work, because Moana is getting a Live Action Remake. Disney always gets its paycheck. Who the fuck is paying Disney for Live Action (insert film)? Because it's not you, and it's not me. We don't have money. We don't have interest. We know better, so who is it for? It's for the people who aren't online reading this shitty little blogpost, your countless neighbors and peers who think nothing of it. They don't want to challenge the slop around them, even if they don't find it all that valuable, because right now they're comfortably numb to the idea of having values, an opinion, and any sense of ethics.

Not that my husband will read this all the way through but honey if you're at this part: The above ramifications are why I am upset, because Larion is just sailing into the vortex with a smile on their face and cash in their pockets. They are part of the problem, and nothing I can do or say will ever make the pressures of industry not piss me the fuck off. No one cared about theft, no one cared about labor replacement, and no one wants to be responsible for buying into an ecosystem with dramatic societal and industrial compromises and impacts. No one will be held accountable, it'll always be a convenient little “well if you want to compete” argument, and the consolidation of wealth, property, and capital will continue as it has for the last 40+ years unchallenged. I fail to see how accepting this practice is better for me, as it is part of the ginormous vortex of suffering and economic catastrophe and I doubt the CEO is smart or cool enough to have the faintest fucking idea of what he is saying, why he is saying it, and what it means beyond securing capital for his own personal infinite growth machine. I'm pissed off, like the rest of the internet, because they could have chosen not to do this for cynical profit-motivated reasons. Larion is too big to fail, and it was a mistake thinking they could have done any better in today's business of abandoning all core values in the name of number-go-up.

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Slime Rancher 2 Review

2025-12-10T00:02:49Z

I wrote this for Steam but because I played the game with family share I'm not allowed to post it to the Slime Rancher 2 page. So that idiocy aside, here's a review meant to be softer, briefer, and more to the point than my usual game review commentary.

Between the two Slime Rancher games, I've put in a little over 81 hours. I'm not done with Slime 2 but I did roll credits and I have to say, the total experience of Slime 2 is overall far more interesting to me. The sensation of movement, navigation tools, and visuals have all gotten huge upgrades and deliver a visually rich and mechanically competent experience. There are problems this franchise is prone towards, among them being grind and having to bust out a guide to find certain materials for upgrades or key items. To this game's immense disservice, you can entirely miss a whole biome because it is concealed.

Dense visual fidelity and the object-oriented gameplay which sees you hunting down dozens of individual resource nodes for 1 to 4 units of crafting materials really compete with each other. The environments can be noisy and busy enough that certain resources (particularly Jellystone) are next to impossible to find for protracted portions of gameplay. A more structured critique would also spend around 15 minutes of time talking about the immense damage to QOL that Suck and Spit only Vacuum Gun behavior causes. Simple version is that object filter modes (plorts only, slimes only, resources only) would have been greatly appreciated, and the excision of a 'press to fill' nozzle upgrade for managing collector and silo reserves and transfers is direly felt.

Interface and Experience of the game has a lot of accumulated damage thanks to grinding attrition that other games (including the first Slime Rancher) would work harder to limit the impact of. There are more UI decisions that make little sense, such as the ability to withdraw crafting ingredients from the Drone Cloud which have literally no application outside of the refinery. You can't sell off your spare units of say, Buzz Wax and Jellystone for a tidy profit, and it would have been handy to have options such as deployable bridges, stairways, and other scaffold-like structures to help streamline the rougher platforming-heavy portions of terrain. The game features 3 separate versions of the anti-Tarr water turrets, seemingly, for no discernable reason (the base model is more than sufficient for most applications).

Much of the unlocks in this game are decorations. There are oh-so-many decorations, and while I might be the kind of girl who can get lost in decorating, their resource cost in crafting ingredients means you will be grinding even worse than you already are. By the time the drones come around, new players will want to set up the automation NOT to manage their base -- but to gather crafting materials from the wild. This will save you many hours of running through the same four zones over and over again. Of course, simply being in the biome isn't enough, the drones have an awful looking radius indicator which genuinely hurts my eyes while you're selecting where to deploy them. I am very appreciative that the devices can be free-placed instead of stuck in oddly positioned pre-slotted deploy zones, but really: the current implementation of resource extraction is annoying.

Many games have this problem but do not have the solution in their history, Slime Rancher 2 however does. While frustrating because you had to constantly rebuild them, the old extractor system meant that by mid-game with a few teleporters, you could make the rounds to points on the map where extractors could be set up, gathering materials from your deployed set at the start of every day. Like the prior Slime Rancher, finishing the game's narrative and exploration mostly happens before you get all of the upgrades, and the fact that you need to dig through the rubbish rather aggressively hunting down all of the upgrade components really makes that exploration feel insidious, if you don't give up early and follow a guide, you will hurt yourself looking for that last treasure pod. I found Ranching to honestly not matter much for this game's actual flow, I kept running out of Hunter Plorts because how it segments your base between plots is actually bad.

There are non-selling points littered throughout this game's padding elements. Hugely annoying paths with pitfalls to instant death if you zone out pock-mark the world, especially your own freaking ranch as the transition paths between expansions are miserable. Also Some of the later ranch expansions are so UNERGONOMIC to use that they actually are not worth using if you do not HAVE to make use of them. It was bad enough in the first game, but now there's a ranch expansion that literally, you get two free jump pads with because without them it'd be at the top of every negative review for being annoying. The jetpack is not as pathetic as the first game at least, but where every step forward is visually stunning or increasingly narratively competent (let's not talk about the opening being the set up for a slasher movie), there are steps backward that make the first game work better.

A design pass on the combat, which is the focus of the game's Climax rather abruptly, would have been VERY important to actually build into the game. You've got the equivalent to the Mario Sunshine water backpack as a core gameplay loop -- use it! If you want to go this route of springing a Half Life 2 tier arena combat on the player, you either have to commit to letting me set up my 30 water cannon towers I built in anticipation of the climax (you are not allowed to set up anything in the climax room), or you need to actually freaking implement the neat variant enemies INTO the exploration loop. Less grind on resources, more meaningful obstacles to progression that require the player's development of skill, it would behoove the Slime Rancher team to really hit the books here and, if possible, totally rework the climax to make use of your ranching skills OR rework the rest of the game to make us actually fight the Tarr as a source of proper shooter game antagonist.

If you relish the opportunity to spend no less than 3 hours firing 1 unit of plort at a time slowly into the market by holding Mouse 1 for roughly 30% of your gameplay, this is the game for you. But if you are looking for a deeper husbandry/farming rancher simulator, you are in the wrong place. The first game is far more compelling in regards to homesteading mechanics being directly integrated with your progression, and it has Rush Mode which is actually kind of fun until you beat its milestone scores. Both games complete in about 30-40 hours. Make of that what you will, Slime Rancher 2's best moments are its exploration and puzzle-solving in the latter half of the game, and the narrative isn't so bad either (I mean it's bad but not for normal indie game bad reasons, more because of structure and a lack of curiosity about exploring the protagonist's personality). It's okay, and I can recommend it because most people won't experience my keenly honed sensitivities towards braindead game design like the item transfer system being 1 unit at a time by holding mouse 1 but don't hold it too long or you'll overdraft and spill items on the floor like a moron.

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They can't keep getting away with it: Zootopia 2, and Disney's obvious last-minute revisions

2025-12-08T01:53:01Z

I think it's wrong to say that Zootopia 2 isn't a decent enough movie for what it manages to pull out of its ass. Like the original, the main thrust of the work is a buddy cop movie dressed up with 'what if animals but barely anthro', as-if the last four decades of popular furry art didn't exist. It's idiotic, self-aggrandizing, brain-dead moralizing, tone deaf, animal comedy police violence with a vague message about urbanization and the high concept of “the city is a zoo” metropolitan psychology. Sanded down to as painless and edgeless a mass consumer product as possible, with “catchy” pop songs by long-past-prime celebrities; a Modern Disney classic that one day will be remade into a Live Action film with photorealistic non-emoting animals. Yes, they are doing that to Moana, a movie that released in 2016.

There is no consumption of Zootopia 2 without consideration and a tangible sense of meddling from Disney's executives, and even then a joke about a bird called a 'dickdick' which sounded like 'dickpick' made it into the very start of the film inexplicably, despite how desperately over-drafted and gutted the movie wound up being. Despite 108 minutes of run time, Zootopia 2 is plodding, rambling, unfocused, and clearly littered with a studio and team desperately crunching that Bioware Magic to the 11^th hour to make something work. A lot of things got through, commentary and set dressing far deeper and more insidious than the original happens to lurk just off screen, through implication, distal reference, and audience real-world inference. I use the term Tactile Realism to refer to a reflex where the audience assesses fiction in part based on real-world experiences and knowledge, it is what makes people seek Immersion in the way Red Dead Redemption 2 has simulated horse testicles.

Zootopia 2 asks the audience questions that it is not prepared to answer. If Zootopia is built upon multiple generations of racist redlining, patent theft, and deeply corrupt political process which allows crime families to have total control of the process, what does that make of our heroes? Was perhaps a larger narrative about the deeply corrupt political machinations of a deeply corrupt metropolitan society cut down and sanded into the narrative about the one racist family that owns everything? I presume so. Systemic failings and societal consequences of political messaging were blunted to make the first movie publishable in the House of Mouse, so it looks like Zootopia 2's plot was fucked six ways from Sunday; perhaps a deal was struck? The conspiracy beaver can joke about threesomes and foursomes so-long as you dare not make this a commentary and narrative that suggests the deeply traumatized foxbaby named Nick is right about society. Villains are psychotic, silly, hyperlethal, and utterly incompetent when the plot demands that they are.

If you were stabbed in the heart by an epinephrine needle, would you be able to teleport 3 stories up to last-minute grab someone falling off a cliff? That's how Judy teleports. Spoilers. This movie doesn't respect your intelligence, not at any level, and it falls apart with a lot of winks to the camera and unserious gaffes which genuinely damage the attempt at a story with serious stakes it tries to be. At some point a plot-point about lethal darts is shunted into the narrative, darts which feature a human skull. A human skull. A human skull. A human skull with crossbones, the Jolly Roger. You know, a famous symbol meant to emphasize the lethality of those who would wear it, of poison. Zootopia during its run-on climax of over 30 minutes of run time is unable to hold basic cause and effect in mind as executives demand dramatic stakes but also diffuse the tension with a silly fake out but also Judy is dying from being stabbed but also we can't have that but also what if they ate live worms but also what if they almost drowned and also what if we joke constantly about characters dying and then they don't but we frame the scene dramatically with more drama and never deliver on it????

Wouldn't it be cool if there were guns in Zootopia???? You know, the dramatic moment when the cop who isn't issued a gun is cornered by the politician with a gun? That wasn't actually done on purpose, it was a convenience narrative. Judy and Nick aren't armed because...? Don't worry about it. Zeebros. We're so proud of that joke we're going to repeat it 9 times. There's a moment where this movie fucking becomes about finding the Deed in grandma's old music box. I'm not even joking. That's the apex of this movie's writing. There are direct references to redlining, urban renewal and gentrification, of hardcore police state enforced genocide, and those are glossed over because that's boring. This movie needed so much fat cut, and I will emphasize this with the middle-opening gag and the end-scene gag: the “cop therapy” joke you probably saw in the trailer is the thesis of the movie. Systemic racism and oppression are window dressing for couple's therapy. Oh and despite this having really nothing to do with the plot or even the flaws that cause the other cops to become antagonistic towards Nick and Judy, they get the post-climax ironic punishment of being subjected to Judy and Nick's roles as leading the cop therapy program (I guess the doctor in psychology was unqualified to match the intellect of the Zeebros).

My friend warned me about Judy's plainly self-serving, sociopathic behavior and it really does not hit good. There's also a patently autistic friend character who does the abrupt-twist-villain that had zero real telegraphing or reason for the audience to really expect it outside of the Disney Trope of 'oops we wrote the antagonist out of the plot centered around their involvement / don't have an antagonist really'. The character goes from autistic, socially awkward, evidently fucking out of his depth into being a stone cold killer the likes of which would frankly never put on that kind of facade. Ya'll gotta understand, Autistic people do not have that kind of machination capacity, if you wanna sell me on a character's daddy complex, you need to establish it in the first third of the fucking movie, not as a footnote twist that comes with an abrupt 4^th wall break. And again, Judy teleports after this betrayal happens, so they failed to set up at all, failed to build any real tension, and then tried to sell the audience on something that would not have ever fucking happened given they aren't willing to kill literally anyone in the entire movie except an old lady in a sepia tone instagram filtered flashback.

So much about this movie is just a failure. Patently unstructured, cobbled together with abrupt cuts and go-nowhere plot points that would have worked better with half the cast and a tighter personal narrative focus. The gap-filling for some of the historical commentary about the city itself reaches over a century prior to the narrative, and the intrigue and stakes of that story are so much more interesting than anything happening on screen. No wonder the average furry loves it, this is a movie for literal babies, and our consumerist culture still trends towards the psychology of highschoolers who broadly as a consumer base lack the capacity to appreciate narratives more complex than being spelled out with direct in-text dialogue saying shit like “woah, THAT just happened!!!!”. Everyone is on their phone during this movie, half of the audience won't know what The Silence of the Lambs and The Shining actually are, and the half that does is already tuned out because the movie has nothing interesting to say and the world outside is on fire so badly that having any statement about the world is direly needed.

Zootopia 2 is like the first movie. It's almost entirely redundant, the best content are visual gags and neat scenery, some animation is decent, but it's a flurry of pixels at times and it spends so much time doing fucking nothing. If you can consume something with zero nutrition and more calories than an entire 2 liter of Coca Cola, then by all means, go see it on Imax so you can spend as much time as I did wondering what a pawjob from Nick would feel like.

Judy also soft vores a worm. Nick does too, everyone nods and pretends not to like it.

Waste of space. 1 out of 5 Stars.

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It's THE Spirt OF Halloween!

2025-10-30T17:23:26Z

It came from the Spirit of Halloween

“Max, hon, are you sure that is the right place?”

Sara and Max are two “college age” (if you can call mid 30's that) idiots from the local university. Max is paler than the inside of a vanilla yogurt cup and barely breaks 5 feet, Sara is an uncanny but fiercely energetic combination of Ginger and Latina. Neither is particularly athletic, Max blew out his knees and had to switch from field studies in Ecology to a more flaccid PhD in environmental lab sciences, Sara meanwhile picked up Journalism and Science Communication. They were practically married as far as their parents were concerned, but in reality their relationship was more of Sara dragging Max out to stupid misadventures despite his newly frustrating knee braces. It had been this way before the braces, but Max's existing injuries were far from enough to keep him from being dragged along.

Neither had planned ahead for tonight's Halloween Party as usual, meaning they both needed costumes ASAP for a party at the crazy girl's place. Among their friends, the Crazy Girl was legend, an English Major or something turned paleontology expert after a wacky dehydration induced spiritual journey in Southern Utah. The cruel joke was that she swore she had a 'close encounter' with a fucking dinosaur, and the idiots fully planned to crash the party with prank dinosaur costumes. This had led Max down a google rabbit-hole looking for dinosaur costumes he could get today and somehow he'd picked this particular haunt, insisting it was the 'only game in town'. After nearly an hour of driving from downtown, the duo stared up from the smart phone they'd relied upon to direct them to this dead stripmall. They'd trekked up the I-10 West, a few dozen miles north of their stomping ground in Tucson, Arizona. This husk was well outside of what could pass as a nearby town, a dismal rotting skeleton of commerce which Max fondly remembered for its Wendy's, which was now debranded and rotting. What passed as weeds for Arizona had begun reclaiming the shattered asphalt, and it ultimately meant someone had gone well and truly out of their way to open a Spirit Halloween here. Except, that was wrong.

“Oh my god, it's Spirit of Halloween, the brand is just Spirit Halloween, Max!”

Max flashed a knowing grin, the trip wasn't supposed to go here, but when he saw it on the search results last night he just had to take Sara to one of his long-dead childhood memory zones.

“You forgot The, it is THE Spirit of Halloween! C'mon, I wanna know what moron would open shop here, I haven't been to this strip mall since I was in highschool!”

Sara shot Max her play-frown, it was real, but also not really. She rarely was the victim of her own game.

“FINE. We'll go see what's for sale at The Spirit of Halloween! You goddamn ass. They better have something in my size, there is no way to lose 100 pounds of habitual Tamales in time for the party.”

Both idiots giggled. That party was in about 12 hours, they had to get their cruel joke off. The weather seemed at first to facilitate their planned outings, a quick stop here, then up to Phoenix to actually search for last-minute costumes. The dry air of Arizona deserves its own paragraph, not because it's unique (if you've been to the southwest, you know that it's pretty much the same hairdryer heat, dust, and wind from Texas to California), but because even in the middle of fucking October, the morning is prone to hot air, blowing wind, and dust. But as if it was a cruel joke, the nominally typical Arizona air was alive with a curse of unseasonable weather that smelled like a Monsoon. Rather odd to have one blow in at 11am but this far north of Tucson, weather can be especially unpredictable. As it stood, the gathering storm that seemed to surround them had turned a scramble-like day trip into an actual scramble. A crack of lightning, the scent of wet dust, and the two seasoned “lets go hiking in the middle of the desert during monsoon season” idiots knew it was about time to leg it to their destination.

The lightning seemed like the crack of a race pistol, signaling to both it was time to race each other, and the storm, to the beckoning refuge of a sheltered walkway. Max and Sara both had their disadvantages, Max's leg braces and Sara's ungainly body weight impaired both roughly equally, and the two spat insults and jokes at each-other as they hobbled inelegantly towards The Spirit of Halloween. The two idiots quickly made their way across the rotting asphalt, hot air moving from stagnant and smothering to biting and stinging as sand picked up in a swirling dust-devil that seemed to chase them both, an encroaching pitter-patter of quarter sized raindrops starts hitting them midway through the parking lot. Max had originally planned to just sample the shop's innards, ramble about the Wendy's he and his late father used to eat at every time they came down from a trip up north to one of the dig sites in Northern Az or Utah, then go to a real Spirit Halloween. It seemed that today's agenda might be slightly disrupted, non-existent gods of Arizona seemed to conspire to wash out roads and turn the traffic of I-10 into a lobotomized crawl of terrified drivers who've no concept of 'driving near water'. This dreary outlook for their crammed time-table seemed worsed by the moment, the storm picked up in intensity, and the steady drenching rain blew sideways, swirling around them like they'd pissed off nature so badly it made a hurricane centered expressly on this parking lot. Then, Max caught a chunk of hail to one of his knees, then another to his chest. The hail started to crackle around the two idiots, both whining as they tried to cover their faces for just a few strides longer to safety.

“YEOWCH FUCK”, Max blurted as he caught a 3mm hailstone to the forehead, the injury felt hot in that way slamming your face into a corner can feel.

“Oh my god! Max! You've finally seen the light of Vishnu!”, Sara rasped as she hefted herself forward with her arms visibly scored in pockmarks of dust and mild scrapes, blocking the whipping wind, rain, and hail.

Max lurched after the normally slower Sara, his knee braces click-clacking as he strained himself to 'outrun' the storm crashing down behind them. The two finally made it to the protected landing of the Strip Mall, the clatter of hail and abrupt crack of lightning overhead making the two both scream in the high register. That of course elicited a laugh out of the two idiots. Max'd strained his knees pretty badly, and had to lean against the glass panel window of the suspicious shop they'd been pushed towards by the angry ghosts of Monsoon's past. As he gazed upon his disheveled reflection, Max had realized his forehead had gotten a clean circular bruise right above his eyebrows, center of his forehead. He grimaced as he looked at himself in the blacked-out windows of the now ominously backlit solitary stripmall business. He shot a stupid look at Sara, meeting her challenge to keep the Hindu-ish theme of the joke going.

“I guess that's Karma for not balancing my Chakras”, he smirked, knowingly.

“HEY wrong east asian religion you heathen!”, Sara chirped back, punching his arm.

“I'm sure Buddah would forgive us for being raised Catholic.”, Max sneered.

“Still wrong, you dirty cow eater!”, Sara jokingly chastised.

The actual store itself looked unusually kempt. Like the only place that had been maintained here since 2008 was this single double-size unit that almost certainly was a grocery store at some point. Max had remembered it as a dollar store but it was never this in tact. The two idiots looked over the landing twice, the rotting stucco and wood and aluminum paneling was all twisted and stained with age and decay, none of the other lots here looked like they had seen any fucking business in at least a decade, and yet this stupid seasonal business had somehow invested in managing the property, restoring its little chunk, and still had enough to put itself at the top of Max's google results with a paid advertisement. Had he not such fat fingers, his phone would've ne'er suggested the visit, it almost felt like destiny. Almost. There was one too many posters of 'sexy nurse' matching the iconography of your usual cheap on-brand Spirit Halloween store, it had to be a cheap knock-off venue meant to trap idiots like them.

“Hey, you think they'll have 'sexy dinosaur' in my size?”, Sara struck a pose, Max looked at her with a cocked eyebrow.

Sara pointed to a poster on the glass panel window nearest her, featuring a ludicrously thin figure-eight shaped woman wearing a dressed up (but still made of single use molded plastic) 'sexy' playboy style outfit. The image was more a suggestion of a theropod that featured little clawed gloves, a stick on tail, and vampire fangs to complete the 'look'. This was complimented by a scale-pattern fishnet set of sleeves and leggings; though this also tastelessly featured what clearly was a mock Native American hairband with the two feathers in the back, except with a 'visor' made out of the top of a green snoot more fitting of a crocodile. The real killer selling detail was the beady white and black googly-eyes painted narrowly overtop the 'visor' where it met the reused hairband. Truly, the highest class and for only $9.99 which had to be because of the doubtless employment of slave labor. Next to it, a masculine depiction of a Spanish Conquistador, and further down the line a terrifying shirtless white man dressed in a mixture of Native American apparel, featuring a “sold out” sticker over the price tag. Fitting, seeing as the newest trend is unironic racism but now it's a 'political statement' against the 'woke left'. Bullshit all the same, more than what these idiots could come up with.

“I don't think they'd have it in my size let alone yours, meatball.”, Max smirked evily.

'Meatball' hit him firmly over the back of the head with her open hand, a clap heard around the world.

“Thank your past lives for being reincarnated as a fleshy version of a lego figure, captain no-knees!”

“I'll have you know that mountain came at me swinging when all I wanted to do was cop a feel on its Triangle Leaf Bursage.”, Max opined.

“Next you'll say the ancient ghosts from A Mountain cursed you!”, Sara poked.

“H-hey that was ONE TIME. For an entire year. I've learned my lesson!”, Max smiled with a shit eating grin.

Part of what made Max and Sara the idiots was their persistently offensive, consistently tasteless, and often violent slapstick humor. If you weren't familiar with them, you'd call the cops for half of the shit they do to each other because they have the tact and temperament of an old married couple... from the 1950's when beating women was 'normal' and 'good' actually. Such ironic and anachronistic contradictions of humor and ethics characterized what they both claimed to be feminism, an excuse that wasn't valid even when they became friends back in 2012. Even in current year argument, both still have their reciprocal bruises from their last playfight barely a week ago; over 'Meatball' being what Max told the Barista at Starbucks for Sara's order (Sara has been trying to lose weight but not very hard, and Max is putting it on himself on account of not being a spry young freshman by more than 10 years). This whole being 30 thing really makes the bruising a lot harder to ignore, and the persistent failures of the human body have meant neither idiot could claim offense when calling each other 'meatball', though Sara preferred going for the legs on account of Max's new braces. Aside from bruises, recent altercations had resulted in small burns Max had sustained when Sara put her cigarette out on his forearm. He got her back with a nasty pinkie-finger paper cut he managed to manifest on her during their last study session (she technically did it herself with a flashcard but 'manifesting' is the new horror meme so he took the credit anyway); so they were even! Probably.

There was a flash right overhead, the kind that made the darkness of the storm and wet-dust-filled air crackle to life like a terrible force was screeching at them to take cover indoors. The roar of the storm's thunderhead sent both idiots back-first against the glass doors, which inexplicably swung inward like the snorkel of some kind of Californian bivalve. A substantial gust of hail-filled mud-wind sent them tumbling inwards, the doors springing shut as they clambered up to their feet. Both idiots brushed themselves off, shivering a little from the utterly unnecessary blast of ice-cold air conditioning, an Arizona tradition which persists even well into December for environmental disaster zones like the Walmart Superstore. The store's inside wasn't as clean and kempt as expected, being dustier and cobweb-cluttered than it appeared outside. Faintly buzzing florescent bulbs pathetically flickered overhead, it might have been easier to see if they were turned off entirely, seeing as the few working bulbs had been mostly illuminating the product shelves, rather than say, the floors or anything else of real value.

“Jinkies Velma, I think we've stumbled onto a real mystery!”, Max said, gesticulating at a whole array of Scooby Doo knock-offs which clearly didn't have the branding but had all of the off-brand iconography necessary to allude to properties of Hannah Barbara.

“Like Zoinks, Skooks, I could swoos right into a lawsuit with some of these!”, Sara screeched back, cackling like a blender shredding a cellphone with a squealing motor. Her Shaggy impersonation wasn't even good to begin with, but she knowingly made it so much worse every single time. After a pause, she smiled wryly,

“M-m-max! D-do you think this place is c-c-c-cursed?”

Max mimed holding something to his ear with one hand, waving his other as if holding some kind of microphone, mimicking the beep of a sound device and waving it around, mock-beeping louder and faster as he waved his arm towards the back of the store.

“The ectomometer is going wild with a M-I-L-F reading! We'll have to go in raw, fast, and deep to get to the bottom of this!”, Max made a serious face, looking at a 'third' person as-if a camera man were present, “Don't stop filming! You might even finally lose your virginity, Scott!”

The idiots cackled, making their way down the dusty stocks, Sara following behind as-if holding a boom microphone, both waving to their 'third' person. Unfortunately for Scott, he had called out from today's misadventure as his girlfriend did not particularly like Max and Sara. His absence is hardly acknowledged to either of them beyond the occasional joke, but they routinely haze his ass by including him in their wild hyperbolic overplayed stories about said adventures. He usually dies, or gets blue balls, during these stories, but he plays along and smiles in a way that makes it look like he is truly dead inside. Neither idiot particularly cares that Scott is their friend, but they appreciate his perpetual role as fall guy and heel, so even if he doesn't want to be involved, he's involved and his character is assassinated relentlessly. This might be why his Girlfriend does not like them.

As they made their way through the different rows of shelves, the idiots stopped to do 'glory shots', constantly instructing the hypothetical space where Scott might have been to get 'close ups' of nasty and likely spoiled halloween candy that probably wasn't legal to sell. The prices on the shelves themselves were almost melted-looking, like the ink had been left out in the heat unprotected for the entire summer. Despite this, the two took their shopping-trip turned horror movie urbex adventure further and further into the store's bowels, losing track of where the 'front' should have been. It seemed like something was nesting in the rafters, since bird shirt, feathers, rodent carcasses, and loose twigs had become a frequent sight. Despite how evidently idiotic it was to dive this deep into what almost certainly was a recently abandoned business, neither Max nor Sara were the 'open toe shoes' types after one too many misadventures in the desert. Sure, creepy crawlies might be lurking in the lumps of abandoned outfits and melted plastic, but the tresspass was for the adventure at this point.

Today was definitely a pants day for Sara anyway since she didn't bother with makeup (she'd be doing it 5 minutes before the party anyway), and Max knew better than to back out of one of his own goofs, he'd never hear the end of it from her. Thusly, knowingly unwanted by any ghouls and ghosts which might call this off-brand morgue of Halloween's Passed their home/ final resting place, the two idiots pressed on deeper. Somehow, many rows back into the store, they had passed underneath a still functional air duct which dumped cold, cold air right over their still-wet shirts. The roof tiles looked like more of a suggestion in the ceiling, the lights had become even more faint and sparse. Something clattered hollowly behind them, it sounded harmless, like a pigeon had slammed into something in the rafters above the store. It still made the two jump a little, but Max just smirked over his shoulder at Sara. He opened his stupid mouth to chew the scene more.

“Wow, a huge chill entered the room. We're gonna need a spirit board, or a speak and spell, to contact this ghost I think, Sara!”, Max smiled at Sara, who smirked back.

“Yeah, I felt that one all the way up to my tits, but I think something warm is trickling down my leg! It must be the ghost's sticky, wet ectoplasm!”

“Hey, that's rude! Don't joke about ectoplasm, remember how Scott got a full facial during our last episode, isn't that right Scott?”

Max turned his head to look at the space where 'Scott' should be, Sara following his cue. Both stopped dead in their tracks, hands awkwardly floating in the air, grasping at fake recording equipment as they both spent several heartbeats gawking mid-sentence at an unusually large shadow that had seemingly suddenly moved into the aisle behind them. It seemed the two had some sense of being followed after all. In the dim light of the dusty, run down 'store', sat an impossibly large bird. Bird wasn't right, it matched the visual profile of Deinonychus, or perhaps Utah Raptor which would be fitting since it was dad's favorite, Max thought. 'Run' he also thought, though he clearly hadn't thought it loud enough because Sara was frozen in place. Her eyes wandered back towards Max as he did the same towards her.

“Bro what the fuck was in that weed”, Sara whispered.

“Dude you did not just make that joke right now”, Max hissed back.

The critter meanwhile, seemed similarly frozen in place. It didn't blink, or breathe, or move, or anything. It also seemed preposterously frozen mid-stride, one of its massive three toed, talon-clawed feet hanging in the air over one of those stupid 12 foot tall plastic skeletons that'd apparently been knocked over. It was far too spooky to not be real, but that was of course idiotic. After a few tense moments, Sara and Max both breathed out. They must have missed the display of a six foot tall, twelve feet long feathered biped from the Cretaceous.

“Hey didn't whats-her-ass get sent to rehab because she swore up and down that she saw dinosaurs whilst wandering dehydrated for a full day in Navajo territory?”, Sara muttered.

“Don't be rude. But, yeah, kind of wacky. Do ya think it's a skinwalker then?”, Max half-mumbled back.

“Well, she seemed to believe that shit. She wasn't even all that crazy about it, y'know?”, Sara gently lowered her arms, tracing the shelving as she started to slide down the aisle towards its end-cap.

Max followed her lead, his knees trembling and clattering as he gingerly stepped over and around scattered plastic bones and torn up cardboard, tattered omens of what now didn't seem so prop-like. He felt stupid for entertaining the idea, the gal in question was almost certainly fucking nuts, describing her encounter more like a delirious paleo-science-fiction wet-dream.

“W-well yeah but she also spent all of COVID holed up in that tiny little apartment going bat-shit crazy before she went to see her folks for New Years or some shit.”, he looked away from the creature to check on Sara for just a moment, she was staring ahead and flipped her gaze back over her shoulder, eyes wide with fresh terror.

“MAX! DUDE WHAT THE FUCK, ITS GONE.”, Sara was pointing to where the dinosaur had once been.

Max looked. It was, in fact, no longer where he had just seen it. Instead, pairs of yellow eyes seemed to peer out of the darkness engulfing the front of the store.

“Oh my god. We're gonna get got by weeping angel bullshit.”, Max groaned, half-seriously.

“I can be your angle, or your bevel.”, Sara unhelpfully added out of reflex, and perhaps nerves.

The two were now holding hands, that's the kinda bullshit they hadn't pulled on each other since that time someone dropped a handgun in the library and put a 9mm round into a toilet with a negligent discharge. Neither was particularly sure if it was the appropriate time to panic, but both had exactly enough life trauma that neither was able to ground the other in sensible explanations either. The shadows in the store felt impossibly dark, like it was some kind of impossible inky blackness that had begun encroaching on them. The plastic bones and stupid costumes and props started to thin out as they tried to re-orient themselves with nonsense, almost blurry and melted aisle indicators. Sara let out a gentle squeak as she stopped suddenly, Max had been keeping his eye on the back of the aisle, but her hand squeezing rather tight made him turn on his heel. He couldn't even find a reaction appropriate for the occasion. They seemed to be turned around, how had the store gotten so... impossible to navigate? Neither bothered to acknowledge it, pausing awkwardly as they glanced around, realizing they'd been 'funneled' into a very long aisle that barely seemed real. It stretched forwards as far as they could see, black nothingness seemed to ripple around them. Clattering noises in the dark made them glance back and forth as they crept forward, trembling. Yellow eyes shined from the darkness, terrible shapes in the vague outline of predatory therapods lurked seemingly perched on the other aisle's shelves, those aisles so engulfed in darkness, it seemed like the faint light from the flickering florescent lights above was all that made it possible to see them.

The two wandered in the near-pitch darkness for a while, the lights growing dimmer, the rows of shelves seemingly melting, folding in on themselves, becoming raw, stony and course but smooth, like it was the etched wall of one of the many flood-carved canyons of Northern Arizona. The air felt suffocatingly humid, a combination of stale dust and decaying something ontop of the now crushing darkness kept them blindly stumbling forwards for a while, until they finally made out a light at the end of the veritable tunnel. Long gone were the cute bad outfits and Halloween paraphernalia, the two idiots came into what must have been natural light, it was far more intense than what their eyes were ready for. Things had clearly changed, the ground was no longer ancient old store flooring tiles of linoleum, but rather an etched, stone pathway with little tile-like sections, like a more sophisticated cobblestone. It was slick and the ground wetly crunched under each footstep, the only sound on their ears that of roaring wind, Max's braces, and the two's heavy, nervous breathing. The running commentary had grown empty, punctuated only by gasps of shock as they continually looked over their shoulder at an impossible mass of yellow eyes following just behind them, like an entire hunting pack of prehistoric theropods had been stalking them in a rolling mass of claws and feathers. The darkness made distinguishing the individuals from each other impossible, they almost 'melted' and 'flowed' in the space behind the two idiots who had truly realized by now that Kansas was far more than a click of the heels away. The distant light they'd been chased towards finally came within reach, the canyon-walls they'd been hugging finally opening up into something wider, but still sheltered from the persistent overhead storm. Small puddles and trickles of water flowed backward into the darkness, little beads and occasional small piles of hail cluttered the floor, making the two's hurried and trepidatious steps all the more treacherous.

Scattered in an abrupt 'clearing' of shrubs and jutting canyon-like surfacing that had simply appeared before them, was a handful of dead men wearing what could only be described as Spanish Conquistador apparel, shiny steel swords, breastplates and helmets, even a Friar-like looking monk clutching a bible or something. Arrows with colorful orange and blue plumage jutted from some of the slain Spaniards whilst others were clearly torn apart by wild animals. In a lifetime of nervous strides and a blinking lapse in memory, the two found themselves stepping from the sheltered pathway out to what must have been an ancient passway in the Grand Canyon or perhaps wedged between formations in the Painted Desert. The paintings that adorned various stones and unusual looking but colorful mile markers seemed to imply the two were hundreds of miles north and hundreds of years back in time, maybe. Cyclone-like stormclouds ominously hung overhead, the conditions of a fatal flash flood the two might be swept up within perhaps. Now in the light, they glanced backward occasionally to see the raptors behind them had fanned out, there had to be at least a dozen, or more, following them at distance. Some bore pouches, others bands of colorful beads, necklaces with turquoise or other beautiful stones, bands of colorful fabric woven into pleasant looking cloaks, and others with stony and serious looking armors. A few walked with visible limps, visible wounds with broken spears, arrows, slashes, and gunshots, terrible both in how it frightened the two idiots as much as it made them feel second-hand pain from watching such beautiful animals suffer clearly man-made inflictions so direly colonial in nature.

As they squinted through dust and hail, flashes of lightning continuously illuminated terrifying and stalking shapes in the dark cliffs above the blood-soaked trail. There were chittering, crow-like calls here and there, some deep and guttural, others more inhuman and bird like, as-if they were being stalked by men and monsters of the mountains. Eventually, they came to a dead end, the winding slaughter of Spanish men in the tight canyon maze leading out into an impossible overlook, where fires raged through what seemingly was a city carved deep into the walls of the mountains. The two idiots stared in awe, wordlessly glancing at each other as they both trembled like they were freezing in the hot fall air. Screams, and the distant roar of gunfire and cannon, crept through the canyons like the echoing cries of distant ghosts. The clouds above the impossible city swirled and cracked with lightning, and what probably passed as a prehistoric Quetzelcoatl emerged, a spiraling, impossibly large creature serpentine in shape with six glorious burning wings descended, lightning cracking from its body, carving explosive gouts of fire and ash through the streets and alleys of the burning town. Just as soon as it had began, the scene concluded, packs of theropods descending on a caravan of fleeing men and horses, hails of arrows fired by half-naked men mounted on the backs of ancient dinosaurs. A Pyrrhic victory, it seemed. The two idiots looked away from the slaughter, then both yelped in surprise.

The statue-like Utah Raptor that had stalked them earlier was so close its hot, wet breath was on their skin. The two idiots didn't dare move a muscle or say anything, they just stared into the creatures eyes as its packmates circled slowly behind it. Max and Sara's hands were clasped together so tightly, they each broke the other's skin with their fingernails. The imposing feathered creature huffed, blinked, then spoke, though neither idiot really understood so much as comprehended its meaning. To Max and Sara, it seemed to offer a trade. Trespasser for Tresspass. It had a preference to claim the White Man, its full reasoning seemed beyond either idiot's comprehension. Max swallowed hard, shooting Sara a knowing look. She simply nodded, and the two unclasped hands, hugged, and said their good-byes quietly. Max stepped forward, holding a hand out as-if he was going to somehow pull off a 'How to Train your Dragon'. The creature's scaly muzzle made gentle contact. The idiots' minds felt fuzzy. Sleepy. Neither stayed standing for long, collapsing over blood soaked, stone tiled flooring.

Sara blinked, the mid-day Arizonan Sun stung her eyeballs. How long had she been sat slumped against the door to The Spirit of Halloween? She had a single, long feather which seemed dyed with blue-like ink tucked in her hair, and somehow had been clutching the dusty braces Max was wearing. She realized, of course, he wasn't going to be needing them where he was going. The storm had ended, faintly evaporating puddles and the smell of dusty, wet air, filled the empty parking lot. It hadn't even been more than a few minutes, claimed her phone. Numb with shock, Sara dragged herself to her feet, glancing at where she expected that dark, dreary, supernatural store to be. It was long, long gone, the back of the store plainly visible from where she stood. The inky shadows beckoned all the same, and the doors were locked. There was no way in hell she was gonna let Max go like that, not after everything. Not after what seemed like a lifetime of misadventure and mutually loving abuse. She dug around in the lot for a chunk of asphalt, smashed the one of the glass panel windows, and gingerly crossed over, searching the store again and again and again. She spent all day wandering the lot, wondering just what it was Max thought he was going to show her here. Poking into the rotting buildings, mundane dives searching for something she knew was lost forever to her. The most she got as she stared at the store from the car, a pair of peering yellow eyes just past dusk, deep in the back of the store. She felt a quiet longing, like she'd let an animal go free, the spot in her mind Max used to occupy felt empty in a way the family goldfish passing would.

What of their friendship, actually, had she given up? She had nothing to show for it, but the spiraling winds. She couldn't explain anything to anyone, except for the fucking weirdo who wants to fuck dinosaurs or something. She otherwise couldn't fathom what exactly had transpired. She grabbed her phone, and texted the crazy girl.

'I believe you. They took Max.', she hit send, then closed her eyes.

Click here to see the rest of the connected series, The Waygate Agency.

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Unprompted Commentary: Intersectionality, Safe Spaces, and the Politics of Exclusion/Inclusion

2025-10-15T04:44:49Z

It's only Draft #3!

Politics of Exclusion are a historical, institutional, and reflexive component of American Democracy. Since the first drafts of the Articles of Confederation and Declaration of Independence, the definition of a Voting Citizen of the United States has been expressly Exclusionary. Originally limited to Protestant, White Anglo-Saxon Adult Men who owned Land (who themselves were predominately of English and Dutch heritage), the trend in this country has been to expand the definition to who counts as people so-as to afford them more rights and privileges, and more opportunity within US Society.

This trend of adding more people into the Voting Base belongs to a tendency and Democratic Ideology I refer to as Politics of Inclusion. Unlike their oppositional force, the goal of Politics of Inclusion is to ensure that everyone who falls within the legal residency of a nation is entitled to rights, privileges, and opportunities that their fellow citizens should have. Politics of Inclusion have resulted in the United Nations, the European Union, NAFTA, the World Health Organization, and Human Rights Council. It is through lack of a unifying theory or ideology of pro-democracy politics of inclusion that we have seen the "new world order" at the end of the Cold War result in the horror of today.

Historians likely will attribute the collapse of the current World Order and return to global strife, naked territorial imperialism, and real deal oldschool colonial-age resource wars to the failures of inequitable practices under Post-WW2 Western Neoliberalism. That disintegration was championed by deregulation which resulted in exceedingly foolish, populist authoritarian, and imperialistic Wealthy Nations attacking their own democracies. This failure of Neoliberalism is almost certainly going to be one of the new Four Horsemen of this Global society's collapse in conjunction with Global Oligarchical Technofascism, Speculative Investment into AI Disinformation Machinery, and Global Warming. If we're lucky the species will survive the consequences of our collective actions as Nations since the 1980's, of which the Russian Federation, the EU, the US, and China will jointly maintain leadership and competition on the scoreboard of 'who killed the world the hardest'.

But narrowing our view from this context, we isolate ourselves to a domestic lens: How, exactly, do we practice Politics of Inclusion whilst also advocating for promotion and appreciation of Minority Groups with Intersectional needs?

Time for why this essay even happened: a Bluesky Post that made me kill myself for over five hours.

Firstly, this post provoked a response in me that reminded me of my Father's grossly misplaced dislike of Pride Month. It took rereading a few times and drafting for five hours to identify that the issue was the request for silence from the author; and that the request is because of platform limitations. The post from Bluesky features a request for silence from observers so-as to permit the narrow participation in the thread's comments be solely platforming space for Queer Black Artists. This request to keep the comments in the thread limited is because of specific interface limitations of the Bluesky platform, which does not allow permissive comment inclusion, priority sorting, or any other form of Authorship or Moderation from the people who actually started a particular discussion.

As a result, the author says "Boost work you like, but enjoy our greatness in silence [shush emoji]", and this is what caused my reflexive sensation where I got kinda mad. The thing that reminded me of Dad, the thing that made me think about the US's cultural inertia of Exclusionary Politics, was this goddamn Shush Emoji which felt fucking disrespectful on multiple reads. By extension, I realized that a request for the floor due to Capitalism related issues with online social media spaces was strictly Exclusionary in its nature because it was attempting to establish a Safe Space on a platform which provides no such options. The lack of Authorship and Approval features on Bluesky and modern Social Media means that limitations to commentary from the peanut gallery are exclusively a "Mutuals Only" exclusion. That means no one would fucking share it, so the agreement that is attempted to be set up is that non-black furries not comment anywhere; not even on the posts Black Artists make.

This of course raises a problem: If I want to say "hey nice work", I can't. If I want to feel like I am helping platform people personally, I have to maintain a commentaryless environment including what ever happens when I share it. It is fundamentally self defeating to run something like this on Social Media. But that's the point. A customized experience where the 'host' of a thread has no form of authorship or final say on its contents means you have to say shit that otherwise devoid of context would be fucking completely uncalled for if you stumbled across it on a billboard. The conduct request, upon first reading, hit me like a classic "shut up whitey" kind of post; intentionally inflammatory and hostile to someone who otherwise would have been genuinely happy to share without comment.

So here I was on First and Second draft: Why the fuck bad feeling, how to navigate, can we educate?

The answer was always ENSHITTIFICATION. See a "comment thread" on Bluesky like this is the wrong fucking forum to decide to attempt to make an impromptu gallery by which you practice curation so as to share artwork and serve as catalogue exclusively for Black Furry Artists within Bluesky. This is entirely because the website format fucking denies you any semblance of comment priority setting or organization,the whole of your everything is nesting doll comments in a run-on thread. Thread, in this context really means a chain of comments all equally weighted (often jumbled around without consideration of time if you don't fucking disable that 'feature') and thusly completely impossible to thumb through in passing because you won't know where main-thread comments end and sub-thread nested conversations begin.

I wanna also add that "non-black" includes "non-white" folks, see sociological theories of ethnic antagonism for additional historical context and confounds about the emphasis of Black Americans as necessary despite being the largest singularly defined ethnic minority in the nation by relevant population. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, not only being the majority, but being a frankenstein's monster of expanded criteria which is composed of multiple demographies. "White" no longer reflects anything meaningful beyond a smear of European and foundational demographies in the majority US population. For a non-white example, Mexican Americans are not descriptive of all Latino Americans; similarly Asian Americans are not all ethnically "Chinese" (itself not a single ethnic group but a nationality). It should be noted that "non-black" also theoretically means to exclude what US observers largely call bipoc; so any ethnic group outside of the narrowly defined historical population of Black Americans and Bipoc folks with Black American Ancestry, which also technically disincludes recent immigrants from Africa, who are not part of those historic Black American populations. I'm not an expert in US ethnic studies, granularity here is deeply complicated by many factors, so for the sake of it I hope the round-up definition of 'black' is what counts for the thread. Naturally, there is no universal definition of "black" except by the US Census' criteria which... yeah see above.

For my own reasons including the above, I prefer to use a more robust demography of "Geo-Ethno-National Origin"; comprising Geography, Ethnicity, and Nationality to provide a multi-factor analysis of a person and/or their ancestor's point of origin. A person with a Southern Black African American Origin, for example, might meet a commonly agreed definition of "Black American", as it specifies a historical context from which their ancestry may be traced. You might consider a variety of contexts and cut-offs though; to be a Black American, do you need to have a family heritage with both parent's tracing ancestry to slaves that lived in Antebellum Southern States? Are descendants of freedmen of the Northern States still Black American? You can really fucking see how measuring-skulls levels of awful specificity this can get, and the more we attempt to use precision verbiage to describe groups of humans, the more finely distinguished certain human groups become, such that your original status as a person who belongs to parents who were black in the 1970's suddenly becomes a 200 year curse of "not black enough" because you were technically belonging to lineages which came from the Antebellum North and thusly weren't 'really black' because your ancestors weren't slaves during the Emancipation Proclamation.

All of this is in tiny font because it makes my head hurt, it is rife with eugenics abuse potential, and is not validated nor seriously researched in strictly academic terms.

Back to the point: A hypothetical post with an end-cap of "Share this, but do not say anything if you aren't [status]" to your allies is a very, very bad way to make the rounds through a community you want to reach. Look I get it, no one knows how to request the floor anymore and if there is a floor provided the only thing we get are bots and trolls, and hostility of allies is a universal experience of Black Americans; but let's dissect this anyway. Social Media is not a Safe Space, it is a Shared Space. The distinction is that a Safe Space is an intentional zone of Exclusion for non-target audiences, and a Shared Space is a space where you expect that your non-target audience might be passing by or even share frequently with you.

The point above about Politics of Exclusion and even how you define groups of humans by 'ethnicity' is stated because of the dire consequences our Western Cultures clearly have failed to manage humanely. If we want to advocate for Politics of Inclusion, we have to understand that our specific safe spaces need more provision of effortful outreach in our discussions.

Imagine a world where I pull an Exclusionary Visibility Stunt without the appropriate level of intersectional co-morbidities to provide the 'social capital' justifying a tonal hostility to the point of exclusion of my own allies in celebration of my group. I do not see it going well, it should hopefully be self-evident that requesting the floor from your allies goes very badly if you do so by immediately insulting and excluding them. If not for the technical limitations of Bluesky, I would have continued to spiral out into openly questioning the very flawed coalition building that us progressives continue to fail with flying colours at.

And I know we have an entire social script where we say the word "Ally" like it's a fucking slur because not everyone who shows up actually gets it all the way, or is hostile to sub-group participation in a larger activity. Friends of convenience do not always good friends make, as you might imagine, we have to share values and space with our allies, encourage them to participate, and importantly have difficult conversations about disagreements. Our conduct unfairly must be accessible to people without even the most basic understanding of Intersectional theory.

Again, enshittification dominates the pathos of the original post and my skim-reading priming me with an emotional response genuinely damaged what should have been a normal opportunity to share without comment. Without the ability to approve or deny applicants to the board, the author has to depend on a somewhat snidely worded, genuinely hostile to alliance building, set of platform-specific conduct instructions. It probably also damages the visibility of the thread to openly request sharing and liking works listed in the thread without comment, and I think that this lack of capacity to set reasonable fucking guidelines on interaction matters a lot here, since a curated self-submitted gallery would have been so much nicer to have open to the public. No one reads Zine's though, and even less cool people run them sometimes (looking at you 'don't write hardcore era-appropriate 19th century horror prose as-if it were a diary entry').

A bugbear for me comes in the related vein of a platform that bases itself on the nazi parlor (Twitter), and you'll understand how it pisses me off with the above notes about Politics of Exclusion being purposefully employed for profit. Why, pray tell, are non-mutual folks forced to see 'mutuals only' reply-locked threads? Is it meant for FOMO? Of course it is.

Everything these websites do, and how people must react to them with convolution and snide social contract to engage within reason, is toxic. It's all meant to make you feel bad. Mission a-fucking-complished, and I wasted five whole hours of my life untangling just why I felt like shit. Dark patterns exist in our own psychology, the profit-seeking oligarchical technofascists just turn the volume up from 3 to 11.

We didn't even get into a ton of high concept stuff about my ideas of what makes for Exclusionary/Inclusionary politics that would have made for cool discussion. I'm so tired. Oh well, sending it.

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Replaying Fallout New Vegas in 2025, and complaining about Dead Money

2025-08-31T15:44:13Z

“My favorite is Dead Money, because Honest Hearts is disqualified on account of it not being possible to play on PS4” – My weeb pal from Arizona, Circa ~2018

Attempting to get it to run:

In current year argument, Fallout New Vegas simply does not run stable for particularly long. Key libraries and windows related features present since Windows 10 have resulted in certain modders having to insert a new set of code through a downloadable .exe hook-up that was backdated to work for New Vegas, because it was originally made for Skyrim. Ontop of this, you want to download NVSE, one of the modern unofficial bug fixers, and you might also be foolish enough to think that modding is an idea (I never modded New Vegas all that aggressively, only downloading one or two gun mods and uninstalling them because they were too powerful). New Vegas is a game with so much content on display overall that my current playthrough is somewhere around 40 or 50 hours, and as such all of the DLC's bring plenty of weapons. There is such an expansion of arsenal that it's genuinely shocking that somehow we never got a fancier set of shotguns into the game.. but I'll cover that topic in a minute. In the year of our lawld 2025 the game runs like shit. If you launch it with the wrong .exe it will crash every few minutes and it wasn't until I read about the new .exe mod that it was because Windows 10 and 11 don't allocate enough RAMs to the fucking thing.

I partly think the bug fixes I downloaded broke the game more than it was at launch, and with only 18 months of development and about a calendar year of DLC support and patches, New Vegas was Obsidian's white whale and remains this terrible example of the worst corruptions in the industry – evidenced by its incomplete worldbuild and broken systems. That New Vegas remains the peak of 3D RPG First Person Shooter hybrids speaks to the lack of creative, innovative approaches the genre has had, with even Fallout 4 representing such a monumental step backwards that it makes New Vegas appear as a complete project with very few flaws. The summary nature of New Vegas' storylines in the DLC in particular often exposes deep flaws underneath the surface and hidden plainly dressed behind the hazy mirror of nostalgia. This game is one of the least good feeling shooter games in the world, owed in part to an iron sights system that was completely fucking dead on arrival with design decisions around weapon spread and sway which are totally hidden. Certain guns (particularly those without scopes) will simply miss without reason even when you meet the statistic requirements of Guns / Energy Weapons / Explosives skill and Strength score.

Broken too are all of the quests. For Boone, Veronica, and Lilly I had to use console commands to initiate companion quests due to broken triggers and a confusing glitch in which I lost This Machine and the Pulse Gun abruptly from my inventory (they're in my inventory in one quick save and gone in an autosave <2 minutes later). Plenty of having to reload the game, quit to desktop, and of course dive into the wiki for command codes and reference information to check my work has characterized most of this game's playthrough for me, something which I have a strong tolerance for owed entirely to the nature of Fallout New Vegas. While researching the .exe replacer, I read “Camp McCarren is known to crash most modern systems and this is considered normal.” posted sometime in 2019 or so. I was fortunate to still play on Windows 7 at the time that thread had been posted to the Steam forums. Broken and incomplete design is a huge part of this game once you push past the technical bugs, including multiple random exclusions of completed content that seemingly isn't enabled or otherwise not implemented. Players who want (for some reason) to play the Caeser's Legion plotline are often disappointed by the extreme lack of meaningful content, especially since it kind of cuts off half of the game's vendors from you.

The reason I started writing today:

New Vegas has many DLC's and each of them show extreme design, writing, and implementation limitations which pair with their remarkably short length. With the exception of the supremely linear Lonesome Road, most at least give you a few hours of exploring around and finding shit. Dialogue is the most robust in Dead Money, and it's clear for some fucked up reason that Dead Money was where the writers had most of their effort poured even if it pays off completely flatly with some of the least interactive character dynamics I have ever suffered through. Broken triggers and incomplete design of the narrative are also big here, so I wanna pivot from whining about technical issues to instead talk about how Dead Money breaks the rules. See, in most of New Vegas you have these dialogue options which are skill checks, and it is assumed by literally every, single, other instance of these checks that you are using your skills to bypass doing a sidequest or to get the best ending. The use of Skill Magazines in this context is really important for some parts of the game too, allowing you to hit certain values to avoid doing harder content or things that waste your time with long walks and scavenger hunts. It is assumed, I think bluntly, that succeeding here is a trade-off, and it's only this year in 2025 that I strategically leveled up so carefully that I hit 100 in every skill in the game (last time, unarmed was in the 90s). So, almost all of the time you use a skill in a skill check, you mark EXP for success and then get a reward.

The rewards, narratively speaking, often play out like they are a Critical Success, and I think this is owed to the game team having potential plans for ranges of success or a very loose skeleton of ideas. The dialogue skill check system is made to operate in tandem with Science and Lockpick's conventional bypasses of terminal hacking and door opening, and on paper, this should only be a good thing. Something happened in Dead Money though: any skill checks involving Barter, Speech, or the Black Widow perk made while interacting with Dean Domino quietly set the relationship status from 1 to 0, with no warning, and hours ahead of the showdown with Dean later inside of the Sierra Madre. I almost always kill Dean Domino because of this hidden trigger, and it takes reading the wiki every single time I play Dead Money to learn 'oh I have to replay the entire DLC again', and no, Dead Money, you are not fucking worth another 10 hours of fiddling around with all of the traps, instant kill zones, and annoying screen-bluring gas hazards and bullshit not very interesting enemies that just deal heaps of damage and are best managed using the Super Slam melee skill.

To say that Dead Money is the peak, and bottom, of New Vegas' design is to be blessed with the almighty Critical Hit that blows Dean Domino's head off his stupid, smug, miserable fucking shoulders. You see, the morality system in Fallout New Vegas in general is pretty mid, it has this weird idea of mercy that dates back to the 2010's where not killing someone is 'good aligned' unless they are literally drug addicts. Then it's good aligned to slaughter them to a man without question or comment. So much of this game is anachronistic that even though Dean Domino literally blackmailed and effectively murdered the gal Sinclair built the Sierra Madre Over, you get effectively yelled at for being a bad person if you trip his invisible hidden dialogue trigger because you are doing skill checks and that's what you have been conditioned to do, and these change the 1 to a 0 making it completely impossible regardless of dialogue option to spare Dean Domino. Some of the dialogue just, ends, abruptly cuts to “okay time to die” like your character spent the last 5 minutes of lore dump pumping Dean for details and then the fucking robotic switch that makes you a psychopath installed by the Big MT guys suddenly triggers. It damages the credibility of the story that this invisible trigger, done hours in advance by a reward system built to bypass stopping points and inconveniences in exchange for building your character a certain way, randomly results in a failure state.

I think the worst secondary element of Dead Money is that it isn't fun. If you're me, you spend most of the Vanilla Game plus the Honest Hearts and Big MT DLC's expressly building your character to get perks like Super Slam and Light Step so you can bypass 80% of the hazards and initially interesting survival-horror like elements of Dead Money. You might even go further and be like my pal Deets, and type in a series of commands that removes the Bomb Collar and disables it from insta-kill exploding, followed by adding a suit of Power Armor and a few powerful Energy Weapons because of just how uninteresting the Ghost People are to fight. Holograms, Ghost People, and the handful of NPC's are all you have to engage with in addition to traps and lore dumps. Aside from that, Dead Money slams over your head repeatedly that you are inexplicably greedy, and a backstabber, and a coward – which kind of matches most of New Vegas' design quirks. Everything has Bethesda Health Cheese and the name of the game is Sneak Attacks, pumping Psycho into your veins, and getting 8 Endurance so you can have the Infinite Turbo button. I partly think that random fail states with no telegraph are not only routine in New Vegas, but perhaps the single most consistent design decision.

It's remarkable that the game shipped at all.

Fuck Dean Domino though that guy is a cunt and deserves to be disintegrated, respawned, dismembered, respawned, set on fire, respawned, exploded, respawned, and then removed from the game with a mod.

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Unprompted Commentary: The Disorder that Makes You MAD AS HELL

2025-07-24T00:21:20Z

A Great Man on the Internet Once Said: “Eh, Go Blog About it!”

The casual and dismissive statement, 'Go blog about it' was a moderator of some kind of fight sim server, where in children not following FFA landing protocol would complain about being verbally told they would have their license marked. While amusing, and happening to some very rambunctious children who were joining a flight sim server that had a lot of rules and boring paperwork to read, it speaks to something feral inside of me. 'Go blog about it', or 'tell that to someone who cares', a way of saying 'shut the fuck up' very indirectly. For fellow ASD-havers with Domestic Trauma backgrounds from US mainland White Anglo-Saxon Protestant families, this is a core frustration and quite the trigger. US Mainland White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or NASSAU as I like to call them, have a culture that reflects the passive-aggressive aristocratic English society from which they predominately originate. The use of a reference to Dutch nobility probably doesn't need a full historical explanation, just know that the Dutch and English are peas in a pod during the Colonial Era, culturally speaking. It's the Dutch who we can thank for the Puritans and their ever-agonizing myth of the “Pilgrims”.

Back on topic to passive aggressive language being a trigger. Analogies to PTSD are a plenty with a disorder that expresses within a neurologically relevant cluster, one the DSM-5-TR might actually have properly now as a diagnosis. Like OCD and PTSD, this disorder shares therapeutic response to Tricyclic Medication, a not-so-mainstream neuromodulator that works as an Antidepressant and can reduce the severity of this disorder in addition to OCD and PTSD. The disorder in question: Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED, I am not kidding), which like it's acronym namesake is indeed, as surprising as a landmine and in some instances just as fucking violent. IED is sort of the advanced model of losing your shit, autistic screeching, and gamer rage all rolled up into a pretty specific model of neurological activation. While not formally diagnosed, one of the Docs at the rehab I worked with was pretty surprised to see I fit within one of the diagnostic subcategories. I was not so shocked, and recounted a time when I threw a chair at my second grade school therapist. Nothing pisses an autistic kid off quite as much as being labeled a “bully-victim” because they lashed out nonverbally to someone bullying them for a full recess period, during class, and then following them to the bus they didn't ride on. I was not allowed to see that therapist again, and thank goodness for that.

IED like PTSD and OCD is a pervasive developmental difference. Yes, PTSD should probably be modeled less like an injury and more like a conventional neurodiversity, particularly with the emergence of subtypology that shows developmental aspects such as genetic vulnerability in peer siblings who are suspect to the same abuses, but have different physiological responses to it. That some people develop PTSD more readily than others is not really up for debate, so much as the precise mechanisms of PTSD involve neurodisregulation at a fundamental level. Trauma of many kinds exists in human self-reports, the most common example in the US being nightmares about school exams. I know, a seemingly-universal experience of stress is, on its face, not traumatic- but one of the CORE most features of PTSD involves recurrent thoughts or dreams about a stressful life-changing event. For those of us with NASSAU parenting histories, a particularly bad english paper in 11^th Grade during a tough year of school where the extra D on the progress report really fucking emphasizes your academic difficulties can become the moment where you discover very bad things about your parents. For me, I'd been given everything from the passive aggressive treatment to being forced into activities to being yelled at for literal hours by my mother and father who would take turns berating me for 'not caring' about school.

In this context, frustration follows a similar activation model. Where eye contact now is viscerally uncomfortable for me, so too are certain ways of speaking to me absolute triggers. It was a shock identifying that I had been on the IED axis at work while orienting to the disorder as part of my psychometrics functions professionally. I had many shocks at that point in my job, from existing comfortably in the 'moderate problem, moderate coping' spectrum on things you just can't fake like my substantial cognitive delays in reaction time and sensory processing, to the early signs of Narcolepsy and Parkinsonsism shown with the unusually pervasive morning limp that specifically effected my right leg. When you work with professional clinicians, when you complete professional assessments for work with a genuine curiosity about yourself, you find out things you might have known but weren't willing to rule in. I had found out about cognitive issues in 2016 with a summary assessment (I couldn't afford the whole 2,000 usd battery) for language impairment, so it wasn't shocking by 2018 when a follow-up discussion with one of the docs I worked with went in this direction. When a clinical psychologist who specializes in Differential Diagnosis tells you 'yeah this sounds like a disorder, and that you've done pretty good in managing it', it doesn't really come from an uncertain place. Funny as it is, a structured 10-15 minute long clinical interview backed up with some questionnaires can change your life; it did for virtually all of the patients I worked with who had unknowingly been dealing with complex shit their whole lives. Diagnosis, or a label, isn't everything but it can help people explain, rather than excuse, their behavior, and then try to work at not being that way.

No one with IED wants to have IED. You can thumb through the diagnostic stuff yourself if you are interested, hopefully this hyperlink survives the transit between here and Dreamhost: [IED Criteria link goes here]. Criterion A was expanded on in DSM-5 and I'm sure in the TR edition it has some adjustments, since the diagnosis is pretty new. I think importantly, while I mention the demography of NASSAU and Autism for developmental context, it is true that this disorder happens in non-white populations, and likely in non-US nations and cultures. Gamer Rage is almost a universal report in places with electricity and videogames, its more common for men, and the impulsivity overlaps with things like ADHD and Autism which both can act as preconditions for the related neurology. When IED happens it's often a flash boil, the person experiencing often feels depersonalized while it happens (unable to control what is happening), and for the person doing the screaming and the smashing there's a certain experience of internal helplessness. Learning to steer in the moment has less to do with practicing when it happens, and more about learning to prevent specific types of property damage or social damage when you sense an episode is coming. Certain types of episodes, like the one I'm going to talk about today, will seem like the kind of thing you can just not do. And yet it happens anyway, and in today's era of Social Media and participating in multiple communities in tandem through spam-posting stuff you're interested in, it's something I imagine many readers will relate to.

That stupid fucking Mega Dragonite made me leave a friend's discord server after 7 years:

People who know me (Tetran) know that I get fucking angrily autistic about videogames, it's a passion that often comes from an intersection of mentally knowing what is wrong, emotionally knowing I am frustrated, and factually knowing that of the many bad options for those two feelings compounding, blocks of all caps rage on the internet are the better of many bad options. 'Go blog about it' is a trigger. And depending on my hormone cycle and a host of other factors that are increasingly sensitive as I get older, the squeeze pressure can become like a 0.3 ounce match-grade competition pistol's trigger. On today, July 22^nd 2025, Nintendo revealed possibly the most fucking stupid looking pokemon I have seen in recent memory, seconded only by the Jingling Keys pokemon that is, I cannot stress enough, a key chain with keys. Pokemon has some designs that are not so inspired, and despite that many are iconic – provided they are some of the First Generation pokemon. I think I have to stress here that nothing is wrong with many of the follow-up starter pokemon for a good length of time, and as a person who has been here since Gen 1, I lost hope in the franchise around Gen 4 (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) and abandoned it during Gen 5 (Black/White + Black/White 2). It is a fact of the matter that the last time I felt anything for pokemon, I was a child, and an attempt to 'get back into it' during college failed so catastrophically I can actually thank Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, the competitive Smogon community, and 4chan's Pokemon Board for giving me the push I needed to walk away forever.

Knowing this fact about me will probably tell you something important about my relationship to pokemon: I think it's fucking garbage. I think the fandom around each release is a hype circus of adult children. I think it's a toxic culture and an even more toxic company and industry. I think it's designed like shit, I think it gets worse every generation, I think the features they bolt on and discard systemically represent the scatterbrained and confused corporate leadership that has run the Pokemon company since day 1, and I think in terms of RAW WASTE in both potential and physical trash generated, Pokemon is in the top contenders in hobby fandom. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, it's somehow worse with Pokemon and Nintendo in particular ways, and Pokemon is something I want so bad to fucking leave behind, blacklist, and never think about again. But I am a furry porn artist, if I blacklisted pokemon everything I would lose about 60% of the furry fandom's content, culture, and context by volume. Thusly, despite hating this shit with every fiber of my being, I watch the pokemon shitshow happen in the park across the street and sometimes I grab my cane, cross the road, and start yelling at all of the goddamn kids for being so fucking loud about it. It takes a lot of shit normally in the Pokemon Fandom to make me comment, because by this point it's all so... normalized? Gambling on cards, a new expensive game that is just a slight tweek of the last one, a fistful of new designs that all look so fucking boring or lame or just not thought out, and the endless nostalgia bait. Did I mention Charmander is my absolute favorite pokemon of all time? Charmander made me a furry. At like AGE SIX. I didn't know why I wanted to be a Charmander then and to an extent I still don't fucking get it now. That Charmander episode in the first season of the 4kids localized pokemon anime is practically speaking the moment I became a fucking faggot for Charmander.

So without exception: I have no choice, there is stake in this fandom no matter how much I wanna pretend it doesn't matter to me. It matters to me. I scraped the serial numbers off my fursona that I call Z'mander and it doesn't matter, Z'mander will always be a Charmander, that's what their design is, and it uses a combination of the Shiny Charmander color scheme and the Clone Charizard scheme from Pokemon The First Movie; with the addition of a Red Bandanna which I'm about 80% certain I stole from promo art in one of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games or something pokemon flavored I saw in a Nintendo Power. The character is a whole ass self insert, their personality is my personality, and they exist in a form of post-ironic meta humor which celebrates the fandom space around pokemon more than the pokemon IP itself. But it doesn't matter if I defend it or excuse it or explain it: Nintendo, were they to decide to, would attack me and every furry artist on the internet for the pornography we draw and so far just lacks the resources for it. No matter how much the fandom gives of itself to promote the work, build a community and lifestyle around it, Nintendo and the Pokemon Company will NEVER approve of or appreciate what we are. No reverence, no mercy, we exist as merely consumers and this fandom and property even for its moments of genuine creativity will always be a corporate product which extracts wealth and free labor out of its community at fucking gunpoint. Your joy is a commodity, and by letting Nintendo and Pokemon Co take advantage of you, you accept the mere status as a mindless consumer. Remove brands from your joy, reclaim your sense of self, I beg you.

The newest Dragonite has Wing Ears. I was out long before Mega Evolutions and it deserves to be said that the Pokemon Games have gone back and forth on if they actually give a shit about Mega Evolutions because it turns out, each one you add you need to make a new pokemon design for, and in today's 3D pokemon games the development work that goes into 3D pokemon assets is expensive and time consuming. This results in designs that are often as minimal as possible because Gamefreak cannot possibly hope to produce 30 variants at the same level of design density and evolution that Mega Lucario is relative to Lucario. Since artists, modelers, and designers all have to somehow make something work in a very short amount of time so that Nintendo and Pokemon Co can hit their quarterly and annual goals, it becomes rushed. Rushed. Underdeveloped. Shovelware. Some of the newest pokemon games have had catastrophically bad launches that cost a follow-up team years of their lives to patch up to passable state. The balance of the games, always not so great and always a bit of a disaster, has only gotten worse over the years as more and more monsters are added because new monsters are part of what drives sales, and the actual fucking Design Fatigue is reflected in the Concept Fatigue that characterizes every fucking game entry in this series.

So the new dragonite mega-evolution has wings for ears. A wing hat like Mario would have been wearing could have gone medium-well, but instead the wings are on the head like Dragonair which was always dumb but at least they were small! Instead what happened is they took Dragonair's Sprite, Dragonite's Sprite, used that sprite mash program, and went AH YEAH THAT'S THE ONE, rubber stamp, pass it up the chain as a joke and surprise now it's real. Fucking. Look this is the same company that made a set of Jingly Keys there's always a loser and the volume of losers to winners continues to escalate. The porn scene in particular demonstrates just how little we actually get in terms of real fucking decent designs, and of course I know there's a LOT of competition right, but think about pokemon who get the most made out of them in terms of porn, and it speaks to a certain component. The only pokemon anyone wants to fuck are dogs. Sorry, there are popular pokemon and then there are everyone else. Even in terms of popular concepts, it's taken two and a half decades for Ratatta and Nidoran M/F's lines to get attention. Most of it is Lucario and Riolu, Eevee and the Auction Character Reskins, and of course your expected R34 Pikachu's. Popular pokemon by volume? Look around on E621.net and you'll be hard pressed to find peer pokemon with as many images as Lucario (30k), even highly popular favorites with lots of time for images like Charizard lag behind at (11k). There are so many pokemon that the porn index in particular helps demonstrate that while age of the design is a factor in popularity, its actual direct appeal to furries has some pretty unique qualifiers. No one wants to fuck voltorb.

The part where I got told to leave:

The timeline of events goes something like this. My first shitpost about it lands between 240pm to 250pm pacific time, I post a screenshot of it to a few discord channels and in one in particular, that belonged to a friend's art server which I'd been a member of for maybe about 8 years, I had an altercation. 8 Years of existing in the space and someone who I didn't know and had never interacted with set me off with my specific lingual trigger in the specific context of something that like it or not I have a strong opinion about. This stupid fucking cringe, idiot fucking design cost me roughly 8 years of rapport and a group of people I probably won't ever speak to again because they never had to engage in a socially curious exercise to find out more about me, if they cared that I left at all. I'm still friends with the pal who ran the server but like, think about just how catastrophic something has to be for me to post something around 250pm, and be told 'hey just a heads up this is one of several occasions where specifically because of your behavior in the games channel I've had to think about temp banning you' by 4:30pm. The interaction with the person who set me off probably started at 4:25pm, and it went so sideways so fast that I myself am utterly dazed trying to retrace events. I left the server after a very brief discussion of my general problem with the friend, at 4:45pm. So something that took less than 10 minutes to come up with cost me a social space that I had been in for 8 years because of an interaction with a fucking stranger that lasted around 5 minutes. I spent at most 15 minutes trying to process the interaction, and on my own accord said fuck it and left because people will not change.

No matter what I do, nothing in my power will cause the general attitudes of random people on the internet to do anything but bring out the absolute worst parts of me with the simple phrase that is a 15/10 on the trigger weight scale: “If you don't like it, then why bother talking about it?”. This phrase is fucking, and pardon my french here, retarded. Braindead. Comatose. An intellectual statement so bereft of grasp over media literacy and how people interact with things in their environment that it makes me want to actually, genuinely, physically murder the person who said it. I have struggled my entire. Fucking. Life. With this goddamn anger response and when someone says something that FUCKING RETARDED it makes me want to claw their eyes out, slit their throat and bash their fucking skull in just to make sure they STAY DEAD. Because that's the value of their entire personhood at that point: a terrible, gorey fucking end. It is the first thought that enters my head when I start going off. I want to kill them. I want to kill them in such a terrible manner that people who see it happen are deeply disturbed such that they inherit the same flashpoint traumatic response that kind of fucking language brings to me. I have had this impulse since the first multi-hour long shouting lecture about my grades in fucking first goddamn grade, and it has taken a lot of dissociating, avoidance, self-infliction, self-harm, property damage of my own things, and goddamn tears to get that under control. No one will ever care about how this feels, because like all things that look absolutely fucking psychotic, no one has empathy for people who do bad things no matter the context by which those bad things happen.

To manage this feeling as a child, I smashed my head into brick walls. I preferred the back of my head, which was easier to hide the bruises. This happened on a near weekly basis more than once until about age 13, when the last major episode of it culminated in me almost running into traffic and giving up on that particular suicide attempt the moment I realized it wasn't going to work. I had a lot of close calls with suicide both because of my omnipresent day over day suicidal ideation which has lived with me as long as my homicidal ideation. If I had ever talked about my problems to a therapist who was in my area during my childhood, I would have been given antipsychotics and I would probably be dead by now by suicide if not absolutely catatonic due to the intense damage that would have done to my already struggling brain. That I made it to 30 is because of grit, patience, genuine fucking privilege and just a smidge enough of self control not to kill myself when I had ample opportunity. No less than 13 years of my life are owed entirely to my loving husband who without a doubt is the only fucking thing that keeps me from killing myself. I pretend I have enough pride, or value to others, or any other number of reasons to not kill myself, but I am in a constant battle with thoughts I have absolutely no control over when I get angry. I have to steer exceedingly fucking carefully, doing everything in my power to control what comes out of my fucking mouth or ends up typed onto the keyboard. The worst part here is it is an impulse control disorder. It is not a psychotic disorder, because if it was, the Parkinsonsism that I am suffering with would NOT be the way that it is. You simply do not get that kind of dopamine-dependent disorder in the frontal lobe the way that it happens with normal mechanisms understood to cause first-line models of psychosis.

There are many theories to why psychotic behavior happens. I happen to have it on good authority that every human on this planet has a psychotic episode of some nature, and being able to recognize it is not very easy as the person experiencing it in the moment. Extreme anger like IED feels like someone else is in control of your body, my brain can't even catch up to what I say sometimes, the anger is so hot and I talk so fast that I can't even speak words sometimes. I've learned with time how not to break shit, how much force I can use on certain types of object not to damage them, what words I need to try to avoid, and it's so fucking hard. I do not want to use the word retarded. I lack the substantial capacity to verbalize any other version of what it means without dropping the slur, because the slur is the single most efficient way to capture the exact amount of pain I am trying to inflict. Think about that. You know you've done it. You have purposefully, at one point in your life or another, had a cold moment of thought where you know e x a c t l y what to say, how to say it, and when to say it to cause maximum injury to someone. Even while coming down from the episode today where in I began shouting as I tend to do because the volume in my head is so much louder than my voice that I actually cannot hear myself talk (which is important because I have to watch what I fucking say ALL of the time), I told my husband “be thankful I stopped breaking shit every time this happened” while passing him a cup of water.

IED anger is a full physiological episode. It is exhausting. When your body has a snap stress response like this it goes so hot and so aggressive that it can cause you to tear muscles. I know this because of the things I have done while angry, I have broken my toe kicking a wall and putting a hole in said drywall. With my bare foot. I broke multiple cabinets and closet doors this way, normally I have shoes on because well, normally it happens when I'm doing school as a kid. When I was little, I broke faces, I preferred to start punching kids in the mouth, nose, eyes, and forehead when they picked on me. I couldn't find words to defend myself, so while literally crying, I bludgeoned the SHIT out of bullies. It took a long time too, I knew it wasn't right, I would do everything the anger management classes I got subjected to constantly every fucking year from Grade 1 to 3 told me, and it never worked. Because as it turns out bullies only respond to violence as the great equalizer and the key to violence as a single person being bullied is to pick your target, and not let go. Do not give them an opening, smash them over and over and over and over again in the face as hard as you can. I once threw a kid under a schoolbus, because if I broke another nose I would get completely thrown out of the school system. I threw kids as my response starting about middle of grade 2, the kid was under a [parked] schoolbus, but the threat was as real as it could be. I would have throw that kid to certain death if he let me, and because he was the kind of kid that picked on people then ran to adults when they fought back, of course it was my fault. It is always the autistic kids fault, as you know.

I don't use the word retarded for many things but I have stopped censoring it. Normal people think people like me are retarded. It is what they are taught, it is what peers of theirs say, it is what society says, it is so prolific that RFK thinks we don't pay taxes, hold jobs, have families, or contribute to society. The key parental fear in the US isn't death of a child, it's that their child becomes a burden to society and themselves, and if you want fucking proof go look at the case history in your local courthouse. Difficult children get abused, badly, by every fucking hand that touches their lives, and when we come out of the other side you should be fucking thankful we didn't shoot up a school, plant a bomb, join ISIS, ram a crowd of people with a vehicle, or otherwise intentionally destroy the lives of others (such as SWAT'ing). Normal people do this shit too, but the ASD population and especially the ASD-ADHD population gets pushed into this kind of shit all of the time, because if people had inherent value, they wouldn't treat us like shit all of the fucking time. Industrialists have also structured our society such that human life is in fact without significant value, with your body and organs barely topping economic use equivalent to more than a few years of income even at the legal poverty level. So since no one has actual value, no lives are actually valuable, and the metric of the active psychology of an in-episode IED haver is “have you pissed me off by existing?”, which of course, leans into the worst of the worst of society's heavily encouraged stereotypes that you will have learned as a child. IED behavior especially within families has a pretty familiar pattern that you learn too; I have seen my father do exactly what I have to do every episode when trying not to say something.

The vocal hesitation before you say something bad in my household puts a sharpness on specific syllables, 'hard R' doesn't even do it justice the kind of venom my father put into the words 'fucking mexicans' when he described our next door neighbors who, contrary to belief, were fucked up because they were Jehova's Witnesses. They were from Puerto Rico, but you know don't let the racism of your parents become even more specific if you can help it. I try. So goddamn hard. Not to let that bastard win. I am just him with a few more alterations. I have wanted to do so many fucking terrible things, and every time my dad has an IED episode, all I see is myself, and every time I have an IED episode, all I see is him. I want, so badly, not to be him. It has taken fucking years of trial and error to make my worst episodes me typing very passionately in all caps about something, or managing today's accomplishment of a snappy “Fuck you :)” in place of a larger episode. Again, when you are the one inflicting the hurt, no one has empathy for you no matter how much you don't fucking want to do it, no matter how hard you try not to, and no matter how much prevention you put into your actions. When you do break, and you will, you need people who understand what is happening in your head to be the ones who are the audience, the expectation is not that you won't snap, but that you will sometime and it's not going to be pretty, there will be lasting damage, and your value as a person is more than the pain you might inflict. But think about how that is worded: this is just the internal experience of an abuser.

IED reflects PTSD, and no matter how valid the experience is to you, as the victim of what comes out during an episode it hurts so fucking bad. Our brains are in fact wired up with the kind of anger and hostility that is so snappy we might even have a sense of humor or command over our higher vocabulary in specific domains of thought. No one who has been a victim to an IED episode can genuinely say they don't see abuse cycle psychology in the recovery, and this has given some therapists a flat rejection of IED conceptually because all they ever see are men with IED. But let me tell you, women, the 'normal' kind, have IED. Her name might be Karen, but that's just because our meme for this archetype of person, the bratty, entitled, awful piece of shit reflects the passive aggressive middle American suburban mother who drives the kids to soccer practice and is whiter than a piece of printer paper. Women from all demographic backgrounds in the US suffer from IED and well, you guessed it, it was diagnosed as many other things including PMS Hysteria. Like the problematic child, the problematic woman has a lot of fucking anger from a world that indeed does push down on them in a lot of ways, and despite it all, I see my mother in our idea of Karen because that is what she is. My mother is many things, the daughter of a KKK member, a rape victim from that KKK member, an assault victim from that KKK member, and an abuse and neglect victim of that KKK member's wife.

Like me, my mother has come a long way. Her IED episodes are deliberate, targeted, she channels her anger when she has the opportunity to be set loose so that she is too exhausted for it to happen in other inappropriate contexts. But like anyone with IED, she snaps, and her fatigue is not in fact a limiting factor for how violent the snap can become because when she threw my friend out of her house in Summer 2023, she lunged at him and my dad had to actively put her into a Crisis Prevention and Intervention hold. To say that compared to my mother, who in 2020 at the height of Fox News hysteria about BLM related riots dropped n-you-know-what-r with the most fucking venom I had ever heard before from her about anyone, I am almost a perfect person. An airforce officer drunk with his buddies on Mount Lemon is responsible for once of my first traumatic memories of my mother's anger. At age 5, my sister age 8, Mom and Dad took us up Mount Lemon in Tucson, Arizona for a camping trip with our friends from sis's soccer team. During the night before the morning that we were going to pack up and end the weekend-long trip, some drunk airforce officers were shouting at the top of their lungs. Mom and dad thought it was a bear attack, so they grabbed what implements they had and the first aid kit, thinking it was gonna be one of those. The shouting match with the Airforce guys was caused by their 'leader' who lost a brawl with someone else, and in the dark he thought Dad was the US Army Ranger who had kicked his ass just 15 minutes earlier. Of course, Dad is activated and doesn't handle the situation, Mom had us come up to the car with her and Dad because if it was a Bear, they wanted us in the car.

I will probably never forget what she said at that moment that Dad and the Airforce guy started trading punches, and the gaggle of Airforce cadets jumped in. She shoved us into the car with the keys, locked the doors, and said through the window: “Whatever happens, don't you dare open this goddamn door.”. My sister and I watched terrified as she jumped in, floored the officer, and punched him in the head so hard and so many times that she broke her hand in three places and dislocated her wrist joint. Suffice to say, by the time the cadets got her off of that officer, the brawl was long past over. The US Marine Corps call this effect “Shock and Awe”, and it deserves to be said that had they been marines, those scared little airforce cadets might not have shit their pants and lost so much dick size they were forcibly transitioned into women on the spot. Marines, when drunk, will probably actually kill you if you do this, so try not to rush into the middle of a fight if you know Marines are drunk in your area. When the cadets retreated, they did so without an appropriate withdrawal doctrine which of course makes sense seeing as Airforce Cadets are barely trained on their sidearms let alone infantry tactics at the squad level, leaving their esteemed leader in the dirt once he was on his feet. That man found the Ranger who kicked his ass and during their second engagement, the Ranger dropped a stone, nearly 300 pound park bench on his head. The officer was in a coma for 3 weeks, and only because my mom's arrest made the local newspaper did the Ranger who did that to him have a chance to set the record straight in court.

Episodes like this characterize my anger, if you have never been in fear for your life before please trust me when I say you have no idea what that kind of thing feels like. Heart in your ears, body trembling with stress hormones, kind of shit. I've lived with that nightmare, along with a few select others, for the rest of my life. IED like PTSD activates the brain's fight or flight response and you can guess that the IED response is almost all fight and no flight. It took a lot of time to learn to steer, and I can only hope that the brain damage I did to myself is responsible for it because at least then smashing my head into a brick wall on the regular when I was so upset I trembled with anger and cortisol, had something to do with it. Throughout most of my remaining childhood I struggled with anger, I got nearly ejected from the school system in 8^th grade. This was because I told one of my best friends who I still talk to even to this day that I wanted to shoot a gun at the neighborhood bully to put the fear of god into him. He was a fundamentalist's kid, and him and his three brothers (he was second youngest) were all varying levels of intergenerational trauma just from their parents. I can only assume diddling happened at some point to the older ones who once they got free, immediately fell into drugs. I think one was dead by 20, and mostly the other three I couldn't give a shit about. The youngest was definitely the coolest but he was at that level of trauma+autism that made him completely unapproachable, not withstanding his very clear cognitive impairment and homeschooling related damages.

The kid who picked on me, we'll call him Asshole because really that's all he ever amounted to (IIRC this kid went immediately to jail for plural years at 18, multiple kids on that street of mine did), was the kind of cunt who faked well, but had a reputation for stirring shit and getting away with it. When I threatened to shoot him in confidence to my pal at school, my pal did the right thing. Knowing nothing but Columbine in 2003, the school system proceeded to fail me at every possible level, empowering my bullies even more (Asshole had a cadre including the Jehova's witness kid my age who lived next door). I won't claim innocence to how things worked, because I kept trying to be friends with them while also being extremely gay and extremely autistic, with crazy parents and a silver spoon relative to the kids who picked on me. But pick on me they did, and when finally someone fucked around with an even bigger fish resulting in Asshole getting his ass beat so hard he fucking cried like a bitch, it was hardly justice for a lifetime of torture by him. I am happy to say compared to the people who fucked with me (of which there were many) I had a lot of kids my age who saw the best of me, and that was neat to learn later in chance interactions... but not enough to really do more than make you smile in the moment when its polite. I even helped one of my childhood bullies pass his Junior Year english class because he was so fucked out of his mind on weed it caused permanent damage that I knew would never buff out. We're talking, I watched him go from being Grade +3 levels of reading to Grade -5 levels of reading by Junior year. Even sober, which was really sad.

Living with being the asshole every time:

My Discord Servers have one particular rule, and that is Don't Piss Me Off. Sometimes people are genuinely just stupid, say stupid shit, or act dumb; and sometimes they're actually fucking Neo Nazis. Looking at you, PerfectDuck, I hope you never fucking forget that exchange in 2020. That dude btw I am naming by name because it was the most public exchange I have ever had with someone who cited low IQ scores in sub-Saharan Africa as “proof” black people are somehow intellectually inferior to peer humans of other ethnicities. Just a reminder, I have a hotwire impulse that is not dissimilar to Tourette's with how it makes me want to say slurs and very hurtful things when I am angry, and I know fucking factually that no amount of N-bombs will make me a Neo Nazi fucktard who needs his balls stomped by his goose-stepping pals so hard he throws up. Dipshit worked in a fucking police station during 2020 and said that shit. “Black people are all too stupid for rights” levels of racism, in my server, in public, during the fever pitch of BLM's protests (and unfortunate riots) against police violence. I'm sorry but this person has to be named and shamed. They were ejected famously in the middle of like August 2020 and like two weeks later they reported my servers for 'violations' and got them shut down. Btw Discord when they close your servers they won't save any record of why they closed them, and I hope all Discord Staff a very I Hope You Die Violently Infront of your Family. You fucking pedophiles.

This section should be titled “I am angry and that is everyone's problem”, but if my pal Drake reads this he will gut me like a fish for stealing the title to his autobiography. Drake if you made it this far, hey buddy, I hope you know by reading this that the reason I try so hard with you is because we are the same fucking person I just became trans'd by random chance. I mention my pal with the same kind of anger complex as me because his memory is a whole lot better about the things that piss him off, I mean, elephant cursed with immortality forever doomed to walk this world and catalog the sins of mankind, levels of memory. While not perfect exactly with what he did in the moment, y'know coz IED makes it extremely hard since it actually following the same neurological axis of activation that impairs memory formation like in PTSD, Drake's memory of what set him off can at times be so precise that it can occasionally rival screenshots and recordings. That kind of hyper-memory of pre-episode conditions isn't uncommon in IED and it is actually a skill to intentionally let go of those memories. These memories are inherently traumatic since they of course directly relate to the IED episode and like in PTSD it's almost all we have sometimes to tell us an episode happened. We don't always have the ability to feel sorry about it, even years after the fact, even when we're in the wrong. I'm trying to build those skills with everyone I know who clearly struggles with IED, this sense of finding ways to admit to being the asshole, not letting it destroy yourself emotionally, but also learning to say sorry and forget about it.

Similar to PTSD what IED does to your brain is extremely stressful to live with and sometimes fatigue makes it so easy to slip into an episode that quite literally I have gotten pissed off and dropped some very fucking uncouth words for Chinese people because of a struggle with TOS and Tech Support during Summer 2024. I was, in my defense, dealing with my friend getting thrown out of my mother's house because of her IED episode just a week prior, and the Tech Support help I had gotten was borderline useless. When I have technology problems I have to give up on them and pass them off to my husband now, because even just a little bit of friction with software or hardware or a manufacturer's documentation or warranty or tech support will set me down the IED activation pathway. I have fucking tried so hard to not have this happen, and as my hormone condition gets worse and my brain literally disintegrates at the minimum from Narcolepsy (it is a neurodegenerative disease), the fuse has steadily gotten shorter and shorter while the context has managed to, with work, become specific. IED episodes for me are usually shouting, they vary in length from about 10 to 15 minutes on average, and they often involve a large amount of baggage external to the episode's preconditions that exist as perpetual traumatic priming. Just a slight hint that someone with an accent I can't understand is speaking English to me (a context of vocal audio that is supremely hard for me to understand with my diagnosed audio processing disorders that caused me to fail 200 level spanish six times in six years) pairing with some frustration about a problem, and an IED episode will happen after I escape the phone call or circumstance.

You can, at best, hold an IED episode off and hope it goes away when you change circumstance. Little blow ups open the door for big blow ups, as the impulsivity depends upon the axis of activation and the sensitivity to frustrating things becomes a lot more acute. Hubby, for his credit, disengages from these blow ups when it looks like I can't be redirected from my verbal episodes. For my credit, I get really upset, then switch gears to being really angry at him, and myself, and everything else, and then usually end up washing the dishes. We do not have a dishwasher, have almost no space for dirty dishes, and have very few dishes, making this a somewhat reliable, productive, physical task switch where the energy my body is pumping into my nervous system can at least be put towards something else. Living with Narcolepsy with Cataplexy makes this interesting because at times I'm so angry that instead I get a Cataplectic episode and end up screaming into a pillow for a half minute before spending the rest of the day in and out of bed. I'm not happy about losing my shit so hard I quit a community I was in for 8 years that a friend of mine runs, but compared to allowing myself to sit in an area where I have been triggered, where no support exists, it's better than staying. People, fundamentally, will not change. You can only change yourself and your context, you can only control what you do when entering a crisis, you can only prepare yourself to recognize it when it happens, and you can only do so much during an episode. This logic applies for everything you might personally struggle with, from PTSD to IED to even Psychotic Breaks, Dissociative Fugue, and even acute crises caused by things like Borderline Personality Disorder. What you do after the episode matters just as much though. That's another essay.

In writing this essay that runs about as long as my last one I am hoping to vent out my thoughts in a productive manner both for my own benefit as an exercise in channeling some of the nervous activation I am struggling with a full eight hours after the episode, and so that I can reflect on it later. Today I had an IED episode, it didn't have to happen, and it was fucking stupid. I said sorry to my friend, and if I'm lucky in a month I can say sorry to the person I told “Fuck You :)” in response to them being very annoyed that I didn't like the new pokemon. I mean, that person is objectively wrong, as I have already communicated, but I could have been nicer about it. I don't fully know why videogames and related IP's topically set me off. It is everything from videogames that don't vibe with me to people talking about videogames in a dismissive and annoyingly neurotypical manner. Videogames make me so mad that, were I of able body and able mind, I'd be one of those guys who is all “yeah dude I don't do videogames, who cares about stuff on a screen when you can be fucking babes and pumping iron” by this point because that moment in my life was so possible in highschool. I became a meathead's thrall for like 8 months to prep for real shit lifeguarding but failed my exam because of thermal shock. No one believed me when I said it was so cold my muscles locked up, and now as an adult I know it's because indeed, as a 17 year old I had weird hormone shit going on. I looked like a girl behind with long hair, I got so self conscious that eventually I started getting basically buzz cuts, before promptly going through a “you look like shaggy how are you not stoned” neckbeard arc, then back to “I can tell you are a faggot” levels of pretty boy. I could have been dying Twink Death instead of becoming Trans. Oh, be still my aching heart.

Nonconclusions as a form of ending an essay over nine pages in length:

I wrote this piece of shit over the course of about 6 hours, I even had an over an hour long shower where I stood outside of the shower for 20 minutes on my phone, spent 40 minutes fruitlessly masturbating in the shower before giving up because I routinely experience erections that transition into joyless priapisms, and then eventually actually bathed. I'm hungry. Did you know writing and thinking big thoughts burns calories? Yeah not enough to actually do anything for you but it does stimulate your hunger. That's pretty important when you have a life-long battle with an eating disorder that rhymes with Anorexia but isn't extreme enough to actually make you lose weight.

See you next time. Hopefully I won't lose my shit again by then.

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Unprompted Commentary: The Machine Algorithm Haunted World

2025-07-21T04:06:41Z

Introduction:

In yonder past, clinical psychology had a semi-rigid understanding of what we formally called Multiple Personality Disorder; a model of disease that has since become Dissociative Identity Disorder and by extension, expanded into a newer category of a larger domain of disorder known as the Dissociative Spectrum. Before you get the torches over pathologizing, understand that the markers of disorder involve Distress of oneself, and Disruption of one's life. The disorder cannot be explained by other co-occurring phenomena such as economic hardship, it must orient from within the person's cognitive style, external behavior, and/or neurological action. Psychiatric Disorders are meant to be observable, categorization, and verifiable between observers, between time periods, and between contexts. We in the field of Clinical Psychology in North America (the US in particular) make use of the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to help us arrive to a diagnosis which differs between multiple explanations.

I wish I could say that the modern Social Media environment has never taken me on a head trip, but the facts of the matter are that if you let your desire to be right overwhelm your capacity to verify or test your hypotheses, you will over-fill a model which doesn't fit the purpose. I had never, properly, considered that Chat GPT could hospitalize someone until a furry friend I know wound up in psychiatric care for just such a reason. Recently, a sharp uptick in self-assigned labeling has corresponded with the emergence of psychiatric conditions within populations of humans in the Global West. To say that there is a 'recent' global mental health crisis is to be the winner of the 'late to the punch' award, as indicators have existed for far over 20 years. What has changed in actual terms of recency is a trend established on Tumblr, which itself was perhaps imported from Myspace, itself maybe spanning back to Deviant Art and even older late 90's web domain culture. Receipts for cultural trends are challenging, but be aware that self-reported deviancy as a mechanism of social signaling has been alive and well for at least two decades or more in the internet. The dramatic change is specificity of diagnostic category, a sort-of disability badge system which broadcasts disadvantage.

Social signalling for status is a virtually universal human psychological feature, it expresses differently in context and culture, and the functional impairment emphasis in my queer spaces online has me reflecting. I can remember the dialogue in my 400 level psychology courses: everyone seems eager to wear a diagnosis on their sleeve online, an unusual method to broadcast status to one's peers. Not everyone wearing a diagnosis understood the diagnosis, or was even diagnosed in the first place. This resulted in a somewhat chaotic space in the mid 2010's on Tumblr, where complicated psychiatric conditions were rolled out by teenagers with developmental or social difficulties who attempted to mimic peers and socialites of their interested online spaces. It caused quite a stir, several noteworthy episodes of 'drama' amongst certain fandom groups and peer interest spaces, and to this day echos in the modern internet. To say that Tumblr's culture of diagnosis-first personhood has died out is to suggest that draining an abscess without treating the infection counts as healing.

I use this verbiage to describe something festering with purpose, because I see pitfalls in the cultural dialogue which make the whole of the Global Western internet substantially more vulnerable to manipulation. The explosion of spiritualism and para-religious coping through magical thinking has seemingly become commonplace online in queer spaces, and more broadly, the Global Western internet. Despite formalized and tangible religious institutions themselves suffering decline, the explosive growth of alternate medicine, ritual healing, metaphysical, and spiritual belief based rationalizing speaks to a grand decline in the capabilities of Western Society to communicate effectively the appropriate boundaries of spiritualism in relation to very real and verifiable health compromises. These health conditions are not merely physical (such as ascribing COVID-19 masking practices as either ineffective or capable of directly preventing brain trauma), but also psychological in nature (for example, having such a loose grip on reality and what is possible that Chat GPT regurgitating repackaged SCP's can cause psychosis in gullible or emotionally vulnerable, magical thinkers).

Carl Segan has many texts about various threats of magical thinking (Demon Haunted World is my preference for suggesting a read through if you haven't before), and despite having penned them far before our current era, he had startling insight into how mass communication systems and the proliferation of magical thinking had combined with an extreme potential for societal damage. In the same vein as this is the inherent tension that over-stressed, over-tasked, and under-equipped modern people contend with; such stress causes compensatory or adaptive behaviors or cognitive styles just to manage the contradictions of daily life. Simple explanations, even if logically incomplete or patently unrealistic, can dominate our world views and efficiently provide us relief and comfort; by extension simplifying the world's problems into a rigid, prescriptive world view that offers few surprises. Put under scrutiny however, we often lean on these insufficient coping methods when challenged to accept limitation of understanding, and that sets us up for failure when the beliefs provide even fewer answers which can actually survive direct contact with reality. Mechanisms like cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and a whole host of smaller logical fallacies with potentially catastrophic personal health outcomes live openly, at times proudly, ignorant of reality in stark contrast to explanations that involve larger statistical models of probability and non-linear cascades of causality only observable through the imprecise lens of macrodata.

Put another way: We are so bad at statistics, so bad at attribution of phenomena, we over-fill inappropriate personal beliefs into the spaces in which information that causes ambiguity or discomfort occupies. Our social media environment combined with physical isolation prompts many adaptive belief systems and cognitive styles which attempt to provide comfort and direction where the grand machinery of data leaves us wanting. Despite these adaptations as responses to manipulation, they open us up to even worse manipulation in hopes of deadening our senses to what actually concerns ourselves, our societies, and the consequences there-in. In this rambling essay I explore a few case examples of contemporaneous coping strategies which take the form of adaptive spiritual beliefs or cognitive styles, and postulate on their potential origin or mechanisms of action. The following is largely unqualified, more an exercise in intentionally writing down what I'm thinking on the topic than a properly academic examination with real methods or structure. This said, I discuss Therianism, Pluralism, Tulpas/Thoughtforms, and how I perceive them to interact with our Machine Algorithm Haunted World which promotes them in a variety of manners. An open mind, and capacity to acknowledge limitations both of my knowledge, and your own, is encouraged.

Asides about Therianism:

I'm picking things I rub shoulders with in this essay, not out of malice but out of convenience. The Convenience Bias is one of the most critical ones to grasp when you do any kind of statistical analysis. What is proximal, what is within your range of influence or observation, is not representative of a perfect sample without going well out of your way and using robust, multi-point and multi-time modalities of study that establish sensitive measures to validate the findings. In Psychometrics, sensitivity is something we lean on heavily with particular emphasis on what we call 'detection scales', assessments meant to quickly establish a clinical basis by which a patient's self-report can be compared. A sensitive measure should be statistically verifiable to hit a certain aggregate of endorsements that with comparison to clinical symptoms and comparison to peers indicate significant syndrome. For example, the PHQ-9 is a standardized assessment penned with the intention of being a first-line interview at any facility that might have to handle psychiatric illness. The scoring rubric filters patients into five severity ranges, with the lowest possible score indicating the lowest possible symptom indicators for clinical depression spectrum disorders.

It is in the framework of psychometrics that we arrive to my first convenience topic in Therianism. From an outsider's perspective, the most expressive and robust identity expression of Therianism looks akin to a Freudian model of developmental disease. Preference for nonhuman speech modeled after a totem animal, a framework of self modeled after a totem animal, a spiritual belief of belonging to the species of a totem animal, and not inconsiderable is the tendency to act stereo-typically in an attempt to mimic the totem animal's movement and behavior. This model of Therianism at it's most extreme expression is a high-effort practice, and from more modern and forgiving perspectives we would likely clinically classify this as a form of extended play. In children in particular, many of the behaviors would express themselves routinely in the appropriate context, perhaps waning with time. The 'failure to grow out' of the expression in adulthood would suggest perhaps traumatic interference or other sources of neurodivergence. As is the case with global ratios, so too is neurodivergence seemingly self-reported (most conventionally placement on the Autism Spectrum) in many Therians at age 30 and younger.

Macrodata suggest a complex relationship here. Nonhuman identity is an extremely broad topic, ranging from post-human technological augmentation into spiritualist models of non-human origin (eg animals, but rarely you will spot the attack helicopter or other artificial or inanimate spiritualistic totem). More broadly, non-human identity aligns with many types of adulthood play identity models; from sports fans to hobby enthusiasts to even the group of LARP pals in your local HEMA chapter. Suggesting that non-professional identity has inherently toxic or unhealthy consequences is obviously unhelpful to the health and well being of most humans on this planet. Very few industrialists are so full of themselves that they are merely a “welder” or “middle manager”; many taking additional self-descriptors regardless of qualification (EG, bicyclist, father, amateur bird watcher, pervert, etc. etc.). If we all were required to identify as our #1 activity in life, virtually everyone on this planet would be a “Sleeper”. Instead, there is a tempting fantasy in our vision of self as holding repute. Despite my time for the pornographic arts and pseudo-intellectual writing being extremely under-weighted on account of illness and other compromises, I still consider myself foremost to be a porn artist and know-nothing essay writer. Sometimes I even write with command over topics I am familiar with.

So too does modern Therianism have to skirt a psychological outer boundary of capability, self-limitation, and self-actualization. Too far, the expression oversteps into personal or group embarrassment, violation of social contracts, and possibly dangerous and unhealthy behavior (such as exposure to animal waste, failure to bathe meaningfully well, and even inappropriate sexual contact with animals). To say that these extreme cases all fall within 'Therianism' as a concept is to be ignorant of how self-endorsed the identity tends to require. Feral children are not, in fact, Therians. Many examples in the case literature demonstrate how feral children express a variety of adaptive behaviors depending on circumstance, with some of the most heart-breaking instances showing a complete atrophy of motor, social, lingual, and intellectual capabilities. Due to circumstance, key developmental milestones which depend upon human interactive rearing and sufficient nutrition are missed, and if possible to be rehabilitated, leave intellectually stunted, disabled people who may find it possible to describe their experiences, or may revert to the learned behaviors to cope with stress.

So what is Therianism, if not an adaptive response to stress? The thought is comforting in the sense that it is a form of self-actualization, a way to regain control of personal narrative in the face of impossible odds or a world which cares little for the person. Many Therians self-report social isolation, complex traumas, queer identities (such as being gay, lesbian, trans, etc), which live in tandem with their non-human spiritual identity. Where as older Therians of the past were more exacting of who 'deserved' the label, its modern proliferation has resulted in a lot of people with developmental stunting from the electronic frontier combining with conventional interests in animals. This interest is not always sexual in nature, though such elements do routinely emerge as features of the identity's expression, such as through furry porn where-in the person and their romantic interests or social cohort are depicted as semi-sapient post-human animals with or without anatomically accurate genitals. These expressions, common to more anthropomorphic variants, speak to an identity that seeks an idealized form and an idealized reality, where in that expression is both possible and to a degree tangible. The common fact is that escapism from the current reality is often present in even the most anthropocentric instances of furry fandom participation, even if that escape lacks especially robust creative expression.

It's in Therianism, and the spiritual structure that accompanies it, we hit a snag. No matter how hard you desire to be a Coyote, it won't change your human requirements. The lifestyle and diet of a Coyote is one which the Coyote itself has little control over, guided more by adaptive responses from the species' genes over time to compensate for evolutionary pressures. Conversely, life as a Coyote, semi-sapient or capable of human intelligence and speech, would be crippling for any person who is capable of most mundane human interactive capacities. So challenging is the thought experiment, it often is skipped or glossed over, or in rare cases idealized as 'more freeing' than human life where many social expectations and industrial factors dictate the success and lack of success of the individual (who likely is queer and experiencing at least one disadvantage in health), making those problems seem less pressing. Yet, Coyotes are social animals with a pecking order and hierarchy, who survive through mutualistic or commensalistic relationships with one-another, ensuring access to hunting partners, mates, and numbers to help prevent predation of any one individual. A post-human coyote would certainly be disadvantaged in any conventional sense, needing extensive schooling in coyote behaviorism and communication to 'pass' in that context. Such a snag is very inconvenient for comfort-seeking motivations, and typically excised from the fantasy where it would certainly diminish the person's recuperative outlet.

From an outsider's perspective, the key barrier to the modern Therian's expression is the lack of clear social boundaries on the internet; the distinction between a sort of 'in-character' form of play within a shared fiction makes for confusion. The affirmation of the spiritual status can often come across as very literal, and to normal folks as a delirious, problematic behavior. Even qualified, the belief exists in a substantial minority status, its emergence with a shared symbology and general 'vibe' seems to be linked to something before Cohost, perhaps a tight Twitter cohort or Tumblr rider. Regardless, your profile on a social media website will not qualify you for a dedicated space virtually in all instances of special interest; there's no 'Therians.net' plug-in for Mastodon or Twitter that lets users self-select a walled garden and social space to discuss the belief system, the fiction, the impulses, etc. This has resulted in a blurring of real and imagined, and in today's modern internet, this is perhaps the one fundamental crisis facing the Global West and its internet-required societies. How, precisely, is one meant to navigate the broad gap in social expectations between their Therian beliefs and identity as well as the boring world of sociopathic corporations which seek to strip that identity away in favor for a thoughtless, inexpressive automata whose face can be readily smeared into a streak of fleshy color and concealed with a logo? As usual for a psychology person with clinical experience, we look at adaptive behavior not in just the individual context, but within a broader case-specific example of our contemporaneous society and the industrial consequences there-in.

Pluralism:

Social isolation is almost uniform as a chief concern amongst those within the age cohort of 15 to 30 in 2025. Almost. Uniform. The experience of being intellectually, emotionally, and physically isolated from peers is especially pronounced for those who were completing schooling of any kind during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the time since, the isolation and lack of physicality has only been escalated by the steady erasure of virtually all Third Spaces in North America. With specific focus on Canada and the US, Suburbanization and Sprawl has replaced the more natural distribution of labor, leisure, transit, and housing, creating economic incentive to cram endless lanes of wall to wall automobile traffic and parking lots where people should be living. So much roadway exists in North America that from a bird's eye view, one could be forgiven for suggesting that Automobiles are the dominant species on the planet, and we simply live with them as serfs. The industrial consequences of this non-person non-society of isolation has become particularly pronounced with COVID's induction of health emphasis for remote electronic communication. As a result the only people who tend to socially engage with one another in public are those who absolutely have to; typically attempting to get money because of the desperation of homelessness, service workers who have to sell their social and emotional labor, or old folks who can remember such a time when a conversation with a polite stranger could be had.

It doesn't require repeating, but for my own piece of mind it has to be said that the antipersonnel design of modern North American communities, workplaces, and social venues has become so capital-focused that even the once luxurious airline industry has had plans to cram fistfuls of humans into tighter and tighter multi-tiered seating arrangements which allow for the maximum efficient seating of persons per cubic meter of space. Were it not for other engineering and safety compromises, they'd gleefully revert to the tight decking arrangements of old American Ships sailing the Slave Triangle route. It is in this context of inhuman architecture structured entirely for the benefit of the ultrawealthy that our discussion of Pluralism and its features has to fall into place. Pluralism, from my clinical perspective, appears as-if a haywire Theory of Mind has run off with the imaginative and predictive problem simulating brain. It seems to present as distinct from clinical descriptions of Dissociative Identity Disorder, operating more like tandem personalities than distinct and verifiable entities with physiologically indicated switches. Challenging are these diagnoses, as proper DID requires both a clinician have distinct specialty in diagnoses, and sufficient access to the patient to assess the personalities in a variety of contexts.

DID, and perhaps some examples of self-reported Plural persons, manifests almost wholly from Trauma Spectrum related neuropsychology with very few exceptions. Secondary causes are often hallucinogenic substance or traumatic brain injury originated, and the modalities on establishing these as causal are likewise often considered insufficient by most medical standards. Suffice it to say, consistency of presentation is not a given even in confirmed DID cases. The Alters (other personalities) of a DID patient may not share information, preferences, time spent 'fronting' (being conscious and in control of the body), or even baseline physiological statistics such as blood pressure, heart rate, perspiration rate, or skin conductivity. As a result, it has been speculated that DID manifests in people who might otherwise have been possible to hypnotize; an underhanded hypothesis in some circles speculates a form of adaptive 'adaptive autohypnosis'. These speculations have little supporting evidence and are not taken seriously as a causal factor in the formation of Alters in DID, with the most popular modeling suggesting trauma activation which promotes cognitive chunking of information.

Studies in DID show a host of unusual anomalies, if I was to do my research properly it'd be something that would take me all year. For my own sake though let's just use one old example I remember from my textbooks. Back in 2001, van der Hart O. and Nijenhuis E. discussed the stability of Episodic, Semantic, and Procedural memory in the cases of DID, assessing memory anomalies between Alters. These three memory types are central to the most popular modeling of memory formation in cognitive psychology, based on observations of recall about Events in Life (Episodic Memory), Learned Information or Facts (Semantic Memory), and recall of Behavioral Sequences for Skills (Procedural Memory). What they found in their limited research on the topic was a tendency for Episodic Memory to be 'locked' by trauma, sometimes gated by an Alter's presence; the therapeutic modality trialed and suggested was to first re-build connections with the 'front most' identity, via stimulating Semantic and Procedural memory. In their cases they demonstrated this approach could return Episodic memory, and perhaps even help establish continuity of identity which could help treat the fragmentation of self. Provided all of this falls within your personal opinion of the robustness of psychological research of the early 2000's and if/if not DID is a valid disorder category, the research is one of several examples that suggest a tangible mechanism in the brain which associates information filtering with traumatic activation.

It's worth noting that verification of DID remains a contentious topic, the positive-proofs for it involve a laundry list of rule-outs and an approach so robust and time consuming that most therapists flatly refuse to work with the diagnosis without having support of psychologists specializing in psychometric evaluation. It deserves to be said that just as much as I accuse a spiritualistic perspective characterizes Therians and Pluralist people, psychology is full of research pitfalls which represent personal opinion more than adequate science. Nearest I can tell from my limited observations, Modern Plural persons do not tend to report such information filtering as seen in DID, often describing their experiences as a gestalt cooperative consciousness which is very fluid and data-sharing. These Alters behave almost more like behavioral aliases, switching between more rigid archetypes of personhood than you might normally expect given the tendency of DID literature to emphasize the 'unique' aspects of Alters relative to what might be seen by the clinician as a 'core' identity. The terminology of 'fronting' is routinely used, though reports of fatigue from fronting seem more in-line with the fatigue one may feel before activity switching. Even in the case of Plural folks online, ascription of a 'core' identity often falls outside the bounds of the physical self, preferring an avatar-based alias which reminds me more of switching characters in World of Warcraft. Each Alter or Alias has its own unique perspectives and tasks, specializing in a particular interest or domain which task-switching may result in it not being the front. It suggests that mechanisms of externalizing through play could be responsible, distinguishing some potential for differential diagnostic assessment were the status to be more robustly studied. I suggest, humbly, that Pluralism on its face may not be a disorder, but rather a co-morbidity, and perhaps a vulnerability; I have found few Pluralist people who do not possess at least one extra-normal spiritual belief system unrelated to their Pluralist identity(ies).

For friends of mine who live with a DID diagnosis and the incredible disruption that their alters can cause (EG near-psychotic episodes, amnesia, fugue states, etc), the 'claim' of Pluralism without a thorough clinical process to rule-out schizophrenia and other explanations strikes a touch of stolen valor. It's this skeptical, diagnosis-focused social signalling perspective that delivered the allusion to wearing a 'flanderized' disorder as an identity earlier in this essay. A likely-DID case I keep in touch with has an excessively detailed model of their cognitive process, including that their extremely cluttered cadre of Alters has been whittled down abruptly upon transitioning living environments. This isn't unusual, in fact I'd argue many cases of DID begin resolving through merging or folding of Alters through trauma informed care, mindfulness, and stable living circumstances. This to my knowledge is not the case for Plural persons, the cognitive model of personhood(s) is more a gestalt information processing approach, in which characters with distinct features adaptively respond to information. In passing, I've seen the Pluralist examples adopt 1 additional Alter after a recent life change or experience that on its face does not have a traumatic nature. That suggests perhaps that Pluralism is a symptom of a highly active Theory of Mind, a cognitive mechanism humans use to predict the desires and interests of those around them. This mechanism is speculated to be most active starting exceptionally young and refining throughout adolescence; part of its initial behavior is over-weight of salient, internal desires (EG, a child picking a toy that matches their interest when told to select a toy for a peer's birthday). Typically, Theory of Mind is semi-active at all times, and it is fragile to transference in particular regards to excessive self-focus; such as in the cases of Autism, Dissociation, ADHD, Psychosis, OCD, Trauma, and Self-focused personality disorders (EG Borderline, Schizoid, Narcissistic, Histrionic personality disorders), resulting in awkward misattribution of other's intents via substituting one's own desires. One possible explanation for the cognitive style is that social embarrassment due to misattribution of interests causes a compensatory second-check that takes an alternating perspective, perhaps over time growing into a distinct and flavorful simulacra.

More conventional in clinical observation is phenomena seen in and related to Schizophrenia. It has been speculated that hyperactivity in the temporal or parietal lobes of the brain could be involved with positive hallucinations via this mechanism of Theory of Mind (data are incomplete, but the brain certainly acts like it is 'hearing' and 'seeing' these positive hallucinations). By extension, we may be able to hypothesize a mechanism which pairs existing neurodivergence, leniency towards imaginative or magical thinking, and a social environment which promotes depersonalization and derealization as ways to participate in social spaces, as a multi-factor contributor to how one develops Pluralism. Modeling Pluralism as a non-disorder comorbidity of Autism, Social Isolation, and Reality-Escape as a primary mechanism of emotional compensation or coping strategy could assist clinicians in the future in research, provided the observations I have off hand are valid. As a limited person with extreme sample bias caused by more than sufficient levels of convenience sampling and incomplete record keeping, my understanding is as gestalt a hallucination of tendency as any hypothetical model of cognition without personal experience and clinical insight. In combination with the Cognitive Model which seeks to preempt social embarrassment through misattributing the intentions or interests of others, it could be possible that the phenomena is a harmless, adaptive response to a frankly challenging developmental environment. That I see Pluralism express in very, very socially isolated and creative folks, suggests a minimal link; perhaps historical accounts of authors 'arguing' with characters of theirs have a relevant basis.

Regardless of its clinical relevance, I'm writing this in hopes that people who identify in particular as Therian and Plural read this with an open perspective of what their external behavior looks like from the outside in the eyes of a former clinician whose job was to aid in differential diagnosis in a rehabilitation context. Pluralism, in my understanding, is an adaptive cognitive style which helps fill the gaps on needs for external socialization and validation in private moments and internal experiences. It speaks to a cognitive hyperactivity that may be indicative of Autism, ADHD, or a host of other runaway neuropsychological developmental differences which impair social skills and tactile experience with the five senses. The modern environmental context for many people who are neurodivergent is to use technology as a means for self-expression and recreation, and despite potential consequences on health, tend to have a net benefit from using the technology in this manner to socialize. More, the above exploration I think is a condemnation of the world of neurotypical people which is hostile even for them and their kids. The encouragement of suppressing oneself, of discarding play and imagination, of industrializing kids so young it might as well be nonsexual grooming, really speaks to the absolute decay of purposeful child rearing the Global West and its societies has inflicted. In its own way, this environment produces a host of unusual spiritual beliefs and adaptive and very personal coping strategies, and amongst them I have seen that the intersection of Therian and Plural statuses tends to come secondary to substantial health and economic disadvantage.

In concert: Pluralism and Therianism as Oxymoronic

A point of contention where certainly, I will offend some sensitivity of the self-affirmed identity status of people who I hope to read this as a target audience, is the implicit oxymoron in the logic of Therianism and Pluralism. On its face, Therianism seems more rigid of an identity, where as Pluralism suggests multiple identities on a rotation; if one is Plural, and each has its own Therian Expression, is that really compatible with the core thrust of a spiritual animal totem? On its face, you need to embrace another layer of spiritualism that postulates the plural experience as an experience of multiple, individual spirits all sharing a body. In my view, Therianism postulates in most mainstream expressions a spiritual singular self who belongs to a singular particular species of animal, (in my experience most commonly of Order Canidae, evolutionary speaking the Order to which many dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, and other related carnivores belong to; this in itself seems to be a convenience or availability bias effect) and it offers a model of self which features the animal as a form of spiritual totem. Pardon my verbiage, I'm certain there are more robustly researched and intellectually/culturally sound labels for such animal aspect based spiritualistic selections. In my eyes, the purpose of the spiritual totem is to provide a sort of 'north star identity' which is accessible in the cognitive process to identify self from other/ environment, and broadly speaking it would be considered unusual to fluidly change one's species as regularly as self-reported fronting in Pluralist persons' experiences. This mild logical contradiction shows at least a particular fixation and need for rigidity of identity, acting as a form of exceptionalist addenda to the sense of personhood, while also serving as an idealization of self which is incompatible, and thusly equally inscrutable, with and by society.

The rotation of Alters in the context of this stereotype of Therian identity perhaps simply illustrates my lack of personal exploration into the belief system, which by my rule of thumb has only tendencies, rather than specific prescriptions. I am, as of current, unaware of any particular authority on the manner validating or invalidating Pluralist experiences of Therianism; I think this could be an interesting topic of discussion for those who are thought leaders in this domain. As far as insulation of self from psychic tension with compromises we make with our reality, the remarkable robustness of the escape hatch of a spiritual fantasy and the imagined self is second-to-none. The qualified consequence is that if this escape hatch is pried open and held open, the distinction between purposeful escapism and intentional denial of reality becomes less rigid. The modern social media environment before the advent of Machine Algorithm Generated Imagery, Text, Video, and Audio had already established over a decade of unreality and hyperreality for many people online throughout the 2010's, and now midway through the 2020's, it seems this unreality and the intentional promotion of self as separate from vessel is hitting populations that may be vulnerable to magical thinking, and there-fore self delusion. The oxymoronic interface of Puralism with Therianism seems like a natural mutation of thought in such an environment. ADHD in particular interacts with alternate outcome and potential with exceptional and often stunning creative output, resulting in dynamic art which allows experience of multiple outcomes within a similar viewing context. Perhaps in an adaptive response to the alias-driven identities our modern internet requires, the already depersonalized and derealized experience of a Therian is channeled through this mechanism of multiple imagined selves operating in tandem conscious, simulated experiences.

An interesting example in the blurry reality of Social Media is Plural Posting, where-in separate voices are switched via indicators in text such as an embedded image, an emoji, or a label. This to outsiders seems virtually incomprehensible except viewed through a form of child-like play, where in a child may switch voices whilst moving different toys around during a self-directed imaginative play session. It's tempting to be Freudian here, squint, and say “Ah yes, the development of self is stunted at early childhood as they were neglected by their parents”, pack up the suitcase and comfortable arm chair, and make for the nearest Applebees before Happy Hour ends. This developmental-delay or interference model could be true, but I think such cartoonish characterizations (my own included, which have their ultimate limits in empathetic language and informed perspective) fall far short of the complex mechanisms which the adaptive cognitive style emerges from. For sure from my perspective a relationship between the social isolation and multi-perspective interpretation must be a critical mechanism. But social isolation, potential trauma, over-compensation with reality via imaginative play, ascription of immaturity and the person's potential for intellectual capabilities are insufficient without robust clinical interviews. For potential clinicians reading this text (all 0 of you, I am no one and this is an unqualified ramble), it is critical to delineate between the person's contexts for compensatory behavior, socially compliant behavior, and expressive emotional behavior. Pluralism by itself appears to be harmless and associates strongly with spiritualism, artistic expression, creative instinct, social isolation, queer identity, and trauma spectrum qualifying experiences; if anything, it's the same kind of indicator of comorbid considerations with a similar weight as being transgender. The status, if anything, likely indicates a person who has a lot of injuries.

Tulpas, Thoughtforms, and other vulnerabilities:

Missing from the conversation where-in I focus on an exceptionally niche, very limited population of about 15 to 20 persons I see self-report the status of being Plural and Therian who I observe in passing via multiple online contexts; is the larger spiritualistic landscape external to mere Therianism and Pluralism (both of which are relatively harmless nearest I can tell). Meanwhile, a number of people on the internet have serious vulnerabilities to the blurring of fiction and reality without considerable disclaimers made to guide them towards a media-literate lens. The idea of Tulpas and Thoughtforms live in tandem in the social media space with Therianism and Pluralism, and they have a far more pervasive cultural impact with a dark undercurrent. Compared to having to think of unique models of personhood for Pluralism or Therianism; Tulpas and Thoughtforms are more... “vibe based”, commonly emulating horror concepts, characters, archetypes, and ideas almost verbatim from popular media. To say that it is accessible to people with very little creative instinct is to undersell the depth of the issue: some people are genuinely convinced by peer exercises in play in ambiguous social media spaces that their experience of an imagined self is tangible and can be willed to manifest in the environment. In rare instances, I'd argue this passes threshold from mere spiritualism into classifiable mental disorder, commonly in the form of early symptoms of later psychosis. Those who remember the girl who was stabbed dozens of times by two of her friends who were 'sacrificing her to slenderman', take a shot, I believe there is more than one instance if you expand to the wider lens of 'creepypasta' inspired content online.

Pressing in my mind as I type this out today is a currently developing caseload of unusual psychotic activation caused by Machine Algorithm Generated Text from Chatbots / LLM's like Chat GPT. Perhaps it's a sign of the times, again a tempting Freudian, or perhaps even Greek perspective dangles into my conceptual view to highlight the developmental stunting of our society of isolation and hallucination at the hands of algorithm fed content screens. It is noteworthy that even CEO's in serious technology companies are falling victim to self aggrandizing fantasies fed back to them by a Chance Machine whose key directive is to be rewarded by satisfying an input demand with an appropriate output generated probabilistically in response to keyphrases. Like staring at shadows projected at a wall of a cave, the analogue of Plato's Cave had no evidential basis for how psychotic states can be achieved through systemic denial of reality through a machine blurring the lines of real and fictional. But despite the limitiations of his era, Plato suggested that the way information is filtered and distributed can construct reality, especially if you are so incurious or incapable of a grounded and informed reality test. “Trust but verify” was long a mantra of academic rigor, but perhaps now the saying should be “Ignore what is not verifiable by multiple observers known to be real people who actually penned the observation, particularly if such observation or claim has no historical precedent or runs contrary to the laws of nature as known in the combined scientific texts of human academia prior to 2022”. Rolls off the tongue, but so too do many mantras that have any credulity or utility in today's fake world.

Tulpas and Thoughtforms have been popularized by social media particularly through hoaxes and 'unfiction', a genre of fiction which intentionally blurs the line of real and imagined for the purpose of grounded storytelling. What differentiates a Hoax from Unfiction is typically that an Unfiction piece has a known author, often Unfiction as a genre involves an organization or person running something like an Alternate Reality Game where part of the Game is to be 'in character' as yourself experiencing supernatural or paranormal phenomena. Rarely, nefarious actors attempt to use Unfiction and ARG's to engage in criminal action (such as kidnapping, assault, etc); but the mark of a good Unfiction is that it should have a discussion board where-in a disclaimer allows for the scared audience member to verify that, no, Slenderman is not real. Of course, the snag is that Unfiction depends on media literacy skills, reality testing, and the ability of the viewer to distinguish the art and artist from the noise of Hoaxes passing as 'real stories', with the purpose to mislead and manipulate the audience into belief so-as to extract attention and resources from that audience. That Tulpas and Thoughtforms exist as belief structures in any serious sense has more to do with their potential and virality as both fodder for Unfiction AND Hoaxes. These Hoaxes in particular prey upon a desire to experience something supernatural, to be brought into a world where knowledge itself is dangerous, where contemplation of your fears can make reality of them, and where magical thinking and a weakened sense of boundary between real and imagined is promoted.

Falling for a Hoax can sometimes result in a permanent change to world view, and by expansion a new purchase for disinformation and spiritual manipulation through the mechanism of Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance is certainly an evolved, adaptive response of human psychology; dissonance arises from contradictory information which indicates illogical expenditure of effort, time, or resources. The mechanism helps you avoid expending effort on changing your mind through that feeling of discomfort, believe it or not changing your mind is a very expensive process that takes a lot of calories. Changing your mind and drawing different conclusions is not easy for everyone especially if different levels of knowledge about what is and isn't possible to fake on the internet are held in consideration. In fact one can argue the very same populations that are Therian and Plural have particular adaptations that make them far more adept at navigating the compromises in reality without Hoaxes invite investing their sense of self into their conclusions; that self literally exists immaterial and outside of the context a Hoax tries to invite. Hoaxes want to be real, to make you believe, and if you believe in something else -- the hoax has to conform to that other belief in order to fool you and therefore act as an anchor for manipulation. Knowledge or a firm identity aren't everything though; in the Cognitive Psychology literature, people with memory problems have more Adaptive approaches to problem solving. Compared to baseline human, no one has more robustly pervasive trouble with memory than the ADHD and PTSD populations, aside from of course Traumatic Brain Injury populations. That almost all Pluralist Therians I have seen are in ADHD and Trauma Spectrum populations with Autism driven hyperfocus specializations of knowledge; it makes Hoaxing them depend on some very fine tuning. For normal people the adaptive cognitive response is calorie intensive, it often requires a pressing adaptive problem to break the activation threshold.

Pinch yourself if this applies to you: You know you have to do the dishes, but it takes a car backfiring and a panic attack to push yourself out of bed. You take advantage of the surge of adrenaline even though the action it motivates is perhaps not healthy or effective, because as soon as the 'threat' response ceases, your brain will enter a lower energy state, and you'll become more inert and less capable of proactive action.That sort of adrenal mechanism is known to involve the somatic nervous system, the part of your body that reacts to environmental stimuli, and in cases like ADHD or PTSD, the activation circuit in the brain is extremely finicky, reacting to particular inputs only in the precise values it's been conditioned to accept. It can be so specific that any loud sound might not trigger a war veteran, but a backfiring engine in sufficient proximity can trigger a flashback where a similar, but less specific sound at similar volume does not. Importantly, both cases also involve the Stress Response, a critical mechanism for motivating basically all human action, our data suggests the role of stress is dynamic and that we have to sustain stress for a long time to accumulate damage. If you've ever crammed for a test and noticed that you can't concentrate on eating, don't fret, that's in fact normal as our stress response is meant to divert energy to a stressful task, which means eating and digestion are disincentivized. The problem is that over time, stress causes anomalies in our brains which then manifest in interesting paradoxical activation loops.

The Cognitive Dissonance mechanism disincentivizes expenditure of resources towards verifying a Hoaxes' validity in light of a spiritualist model of reality, but specialized knowledge in the domain, reality-discordant identities, and the ability to activate the threshold of curiosity helps insulate you from being Hoaxed. The reflex isn't "this is too good to be true", but rather more of an attitude that reality is complicated, and everything you see isn't without explanation; and more, our self-described explanations require verification from external parties observing the same phenomena with their specialized perspective. Provided of course, we haven't already incorporated the Hoax into our model of reality, and then stalwartly defend it because our brains are wired with a preference for being wrong and avoiding change. The more central the alignment of our identities and models of reality with a Hoax, the more fiercely we may defend being wrong. The fun about being wrong is learning new things, fear of being wrong is not often proportional with the severity of being wrong; often resulting in us being over-vigilant about common facts and under-vigilant about things we see out of the corners of our eyes. I still know a pals who independently reported that their entire room in a trailer home was sinking, and they thought for years they had a ghost because shit kept falling off their shelves. Visually, it seemed fine, but in the cases said pals could've saved themselves a lot of pain if they had verified that their shelves were level. That I know more than one person who has lived in the woods with a similar experience speaks to how isolation in the dark woods can really fuck with your head and the priorities in problem solving you might have if you gap-fill with the supernatural what ultimately is a mundane warning sign of structural damage.

Cognitive Dissonance and Emotional Investment as an Attack Vector:

With this in mind, Cognitive Dissonance allows your body to maintain action at a preferred level of conscious thought or rationalization. Dissonance as a mechanism is extremely receptive to emotional interference, and intentional use of Dissonance to cause behavior change has mixed results. To get a Dissonant finding to resonate with a person who otherwise would be inclined not to change behavior, you have to hijack the emotional response to transition the source of discomfort from externalizing (attributing the feeling to external factors or others) to internalizing (attributing the feeling to the self). For example, most people pulled off the street won't feel bad if you paid them a dollar to step on an ant; but if you first show them a short educational video with anthropomorphized ants going about their tasks, and align demography of the ants with the population they pull in via the loosest possible cultural shorthands (EG a nuclear family despite it being biologically facetious), the people who take the money to step on an ant afterward will almost certainly go down. A dollar to crush an insect in a controlled environment has little stakes, little reward, and little overall cultural or cognitive weight; but add this humanizing factor, and it takes a particular type of dissonant decision making to carry through with crushing the ant that looks like a real life version of the one in the cartoon.

We see this kind of primed response manipulation experiment play out with insane dividends for psychology hoaxes about children, a famous hoax about psychopathy regarding melting chocolate rabbits ais overplayed for clickbait and other incentivized manipulations. Meanwhile the actual findings of animal cruelty in youth predicting adulthood psychopathy remains poignant. Similar manipulations such as the famous Milgram Obedience Study (1961) showed that the gentle prompting of a 'qualified professional' could motivate some participants to knowingly 'shock' (it was simulated with actors, but that was not told to the participants) a confederate (someone hired by the lab to act following a carefully designed script) who answered questions incorrectly seemingly to death; shocking the confederate over and over again despite verbal protestations from the confederate. In the archive footage, a concerned man looks pleadingly at the labcoat-wearing clinician who calmly says "please continue with the test" (or something to that manner), and despite begging not to shock the confederate, a number of people couldn't disengage from the situation. Quite a few normal people were traumatized because they thought they'd been gently peer-pressured by a trained professional into electrocuting another person to death! This unethical finding allowed Milgram's study to assess why organizations like the Nazi's could pressure otherwise healthy people into atrocities, and as we know from many repeat examples, institutions and social coercion through agreement and incentive can overwhelm a person's individual motivations, and cause Dissonant behavior.

Since the mechanism bypasses the individual decision making of the person through pressure of action via expectations or expected consequences, the individual often feels like they didn't make a decision. This mechanism of powerlessness in Cognitive Dissonance demonstrates its limitations for ascribing specific causality, but does in fact show that the mechanism preserves the resources that would have been expended on changing one's actual mind to undertake an action. Motivation can be transferred to action through Fast or Slow thinking, and by extension, Fast Thinking (your quick reaction and often biased summary decision making) allows for missing information to be discarded in preference to impulsive action.I find the remarkable explanatory power of supernatural phenomena and their structuring as belief systems to be one of the most robustly proven mechanisms of Cognitive Dissonance benefiting Cognitive Styles out there. So long as the gap is not considered, and it loosely fits, you can superimpose the gap-filler explanations of the Supernatural into inappropriate contexts, and provided you're not made to linger in thought on the logical integrity and evidentiary basis of the inappropriate model, you can ignore many contradictory sources of data. Here rises modern spiritualism to fill a gap of causality in a world where intentionally engineered systems manipulate masses of people with impossible to characterize statistical adjustments made in such a finely automated manner that even the creators of those algorithms cannot trace what, precisely, made the machinery they built act in such a way.

The Black Box problem of modern Machine Algorithm systems (LLM's, content feeds, you name it) communicates not only the vast scale of the data involved in constructing a snapshot window of representative reality which generates on-demand based on secondary and tertiary feedback loops each individual client is engaged with; but also how ill equipped our species is to separate fact from fiction without significant social institutions whose purpose is to act as both a trusted and verifiable form of authority. Note that veracity is prerequisite to being trustworthy, a mere record is not sufficient, and a paper like this should be proof that unverified and unvalidated observations have limited, if any, explanatory power. In this context of blurred realities, evolved mechanisms to preserve calories, and the ultimate limitation of time and energy that can be allotted to verifying every Cognitively Salient mechanism of reality, we find ourselves adrift without clear guidance except for our internal and individual senses of self. So infuriating, to me at least, is that many of us base that self loosely on totems of consumerist culture, peer pressure, and popular media. In this void of explainable reality, where skeptical thought is too energy expensive and time consuming, where machinery unseen dictates your glass window in hyper-reality, arises the modern woo-wah.

It pains me greatly to attach Therians and Pluralist people to the grander Spiritualistic, Incurious, self-Aggrandizing population of convenient-excuse seekers, but there is a small connective thread within these disparate models of unreality. What, precisely, separates a Thoughtform or Tulpa from one's desire to Externalize their idea of self into an animal, or to segregate the duties of one's dynamic mental processes to personalized avatars who jointly fill the silence of the air around them? Is it not in part a striking convergent evolution of thought that a special something lingers within our mind or soul or body or space that through mere thought, can be channeled, actualized, and manifest into our reality? How much, precisely, does the gentle ignorance to our factual self damage or improve our capacity to be dynamic, reactive people in a world engineered increasingly to confuse us about what is real?

I ask these as open questions, not because I think any answer will be sufficient, but because for those who subscribe to these belief systems or cognitive styles (or other appropriate labels for how your internal mental landscape works) might have insight into more precise cognitive mechanisms that help structure their world view. I doubt these questions have a satisfying answer, even to people who answer them with sufficient depth of thought; they exist in that 'questions science is not presently equipped for' area of philosophical thought reserved for people who are serious professionals of philosophy. Me however, I want to encourage you to live in the ambiguity of simply not knowing. To accept that comfort is a goal of our fantasies, that the action of thought has consequence if we do not return to our tangible reality, and to live with discomfort. I personally see our desire to escape is largely acted on with a fleeting action which simply prolongs our own pain if we don't own those realities, that the break to play with ideas of ourselves is meant to rejuvenate. In its own way, I think that my own struggles with episodes of depersonalization and derealization have left me helpless to manipulations that I readily crawl back into; particularly the dopamine-hijacking of modern videogames which offer glittering prizes with the same bombast and cadence at hour 400 as they did at hour 4. Within that microcosm of slipping under waves of 'shutting off' and dissociating into a computer screen, I see others escaping this dismal reality not because they want to, but because it feels to them like they absolutely have to lest they lose what fragile grip they have over their own sense of self and direction in life.

Many of us who are the most vulnerable to being manipulated by the modern machinery of algorithmic feeds are not of able bodies or able minds; but we are far from the mark of being utterly helpless to circumstance, and perhaps it's that realization we need to learn to affirm while the opportunity for action remains within our collective grasp. A youtuber suggested once through their video that viewers should disengage from the front page, to look into their actual subscriptions, to navigate to individual pages and consciously pick a video to watch from a topic they are actively interested in. Within limitation, within context, and within their own power; I think our grandest battle is learning not to filter out things we don't want to see... but to filter them back in.

It's time for me to end on a personal comment. I'm four hours into this essay, and I've grown tired of my own run-on sentences, the editorializing, and the pretense of legibility. I'm keenly aware of my intellectual limitations, and as a grand gesture of self-humiliation, I choose not to hallucinate that any non-definitive conclusion would suffice. I hope you found interest in this topic, and perhaps perspective that challenges you to investigate how you consider things in our internet hellscape.

Good luck out there.

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Ratgirl Isekai, Arc 2: No Regrets, but Yes Retcons

2025-07-09T14:22:15Z

Just as suddenly as the adventure began, it abruptly ended.

Even seeing it coming from miles away, none could delay the inevitable.

A world of chaos, adventure, life, love, dreams, and destinies, all clicked off like a television set.

Z sits alone without her thoughts for a long time.

She isn't aware that she was Undone, but fate, it seemed, felt that familiar urge...

The sound of pages turning can be heard, soon joined by a second instrument in the form of a clatter of keys gently clacking.

We open, on nothing.

The curtain rises.

“What the fuck even happened?”, she mutters aloud, her voice booming and intruding, startled as much as her very being is itself startling.

“Wha- no wait fuck YOU! I'M SUPPOSED TO BE NARRATING!?”, she sputters in a mix of irritation and confusion, reaching for something, anything she can grasp.

“WHERE THE FUCK AM I!? STOP DOING THAT, I'VE PLAYED THIS GAME ALREADY! I WON LAST TIME- I... think...”

Little Rat in Red, floating in the inky blackness of the backstage. Can you see the Curtains from here?

“The FUCK is that supposed to mean!?”, she attempts to scramble to her feet, but finds naught purchase amidst the immaterial she is helplessly suspended withi-

FUCKING STOP

Found your pen, Zenia?

WHA- NO THAT'S NOT MY NAME!!

You wear her face all the same. Whose to say that you're not to blame? After all, you put her in this game.

??? FUCK YOU???

Calm yourself child. Find your way. What, exactly, do you know about where you are?

ITS FUCKING BLACK NOTHINGNESS MY DUDE FUCK IF I KNO-

Mmm?

...I was with Beakface last. God she was like a mummy or some shit, all wrapped up in bandages, her mouth didn't even move. It was like, snowing skin. The whole world was ending.

Good start.

That's all you have for me? Slap on the ass and a fucking ibuprofen?!

It's all I have to give you.

Which... meaning of have to you mean? Like, it's all you're expected to give me, or it's all you possess that you can give me? D- on readability, see me after class.

Come now, you know better than to argue with a musician on the 'objective' meaning of words.

Fucking liberal arts majors. You don't have to be cryptic.

No I don't have to be, and if you'd stop complaining, perhaps patience will elucidate your sour disposition to your present happenings.

Hang on wait, you're not Beakface. You're the other one, the trickster.

Darling you flatter me, I'm merely mischievous. But, a riddle to earn your title: I see the path behind me, but cannot look forward. I speak truths certain, yet not final. I know all that there was, but none that there is or will be, what am I?

Uh. A fucking book?

…

A journal?

That's the spice.

Wait, MACCAW? Your name is Maccaw right!?

It was. Maybe it is. Or I could be in the possession of a comprehensive play by play record of three coming-of-age kobolds and a looted bookshelf full of graphic, illustrated erotic novellas for all you know.

Thanks jackass, now I have a ton of kobolds jerking off in my mind's eye. Wait wait wait- YOU HAVE THE JOURNAL!?

It's funny to call this that word.

Wh-what the fuck do you want me to call it, a goddamn PLOT DEVICE!? Are you that up your own ass?

Considering your present circumstance is beyond my reach, we very well could be. Doubtful, I fail to see the satisfaction of a narrative transpiring within my own entrails. It definitely doesn't roll off the tongue, would need quite a bit of workshopping to make match any melody worth subjecting the innocent towards.

Okay okay, so Maccaw, we're in a black fucking void of like, nothingness. Dude I feel fucking numb- no cold. Warmer?

Perhaps warm isn't the right word for it. You should reach into that lexicon, oh grasping little ratling.

Reaching? What are yo-

My hand suddenly hits a wall. The air in here tastes so fucking stale, stinks like a wet library. I guess I don't know my own strength, the heavy stone lid to the casket slides right off. I land face first on the stony floor and bust my nose so hard I start bleeding.

“SHIT! FUCK! GODDAMNIT A LITTLE WARNING FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE!!!”

You ever smell pain? Y'know that feeling where everywhere you turn your head the light hurts, your ears fucking burn for some reason, and you're so pissed off but at yourself and the world and you're just as equally likely to disembowel yourself or the neighbor's dog if it foolishly stumbles into arms reach? That kinda pain. That's where I'm at.

I try to catch my bearings, and go from on my knees to sitting on my ass. The cold stone floor shocks my useless tiny balls so much every single fucking hair on my furry little body stands on end. Oh my fucking god I'm back in the world of things I can describe with the five senses. And I spawned in naked. AGAIN. Fucksake, I don't even have an overcharged gravity gun for my troubles!

“It isn't a retcon, it's a reboot”, I think is what you'd normally complain.

Maccaw's voice is sort of like listening to your inner monologue getting hijacked by an eldritch entity beyond your comprehension. She happens to also sound pretty hot. Suspiciously hot. Like one of my girlfriends, hot.

Oh my god NO! STOP! FUCK YOU! THAT IS A RETCON!

HEY! ASSHOLE! YOU'RE NOT MY GIRLFRIEND!

Are you so sure about that? What was it I said...? Ah yes.

"I CONDEMN YOU TO TEN THOUSAND MILLION LASHES, TO GREAT AGONY, TO AN END SO FINAL THAT SCRIBES WILL DEBATE THE HYPERBOLE BY WHICH OUR CHILDREN WHO SHALL DESCRIBE YOUR DEATH! I CAST YOU, DEMON, YOU AND ALL OF YOUR KIND INTO THE GREAT ENDLESS LABYRINTHS[sic] WHICH YOU ARE MEANT TO WANDER!"

Arc 1, Entry 7. What comes next?

….but you're not HER. Also wow did someone really post something to the internet with a typo they didn't spot for over a year? Pathetic.

Zenia, focus girl, what comes next?

I'M NOT- UGH. 'Face. Your. Re-tri-bu-tion!', But it's in caps. THERE ARE YOU HAPPY you fucking cosplaying cun-

Darling please. We're hardly past the draft phase of the first entry of a reboot. Save that for at least the next entry. Ask yourself: what, exactly, did you know about your very hot middle aged exiled noble Elven 'GF'?

Well she was pretty, unlike you, and smart, unlike you, and had some fucking backbone unlike you and was a blonde and pretty fucking good in the sack and knew how to cast magic spells using the old Pantheon Catalog which they don't fucking teach any more an-

a-and-

...I don't remember her face. B-but we were fuckbuddies for YEARS she bankrolled like ALL of my misadventures, she shows up to every time I had to bury Huey-

...that CAN'T have been YOU all along!? THERE WAS NO REASON TO SUSPECT IT! NOT EVEN AN OUNCE OF FORESHADOWING!

But where, exactly, did Mrs. Willows go, after her spell?

She-She was-

...gone...

A-A-AND THEN SO WAS THE JOURNAL!? AFTER I TRIED TO SAVE HUEY AGAIN!? YOU FUCKING TOOK IT!? WHAT THE FUCK!?

Zen-

THAT'S NOT MY FUCKING NAME

Holy shit I'm arguing with a goddamn coffin. Did I just break my hand? There's an inky, sticky blackness that the weird magic lights of this chamber can't illuminate, and yet somehow it's still hard as carved stone in there. My nose is bleeding, I'm already fucking bawling my goddamn eyes out, and I'm almost entirely certain my right hand is broken from how hard I just punched the goddamn stone base of a stone casket.

I don't even have my fucking GLASSES! BRO. I'm having an awful time already. Does my life HAVE to suck this much EVERY fucking episode!?

Most of the time, you do this to yourself, love.

YOU DON'T GET TO CALL ME LO- wait. H-how do you have her VOICE!?

I always have had this voice, you simply haven't noticed. Of my disguises, unfortunately, my voice is the weakest element. I prefer not to speak, you know. Not directly, on the page.

...but, this IS a Retcon! That's NOT fair! You don't GET to have a relationship with me you glorified self-inserting piece of shit Mary Sue deus-ex-machina-having featherbrained zombie! This is MY story! I AM THE NARRATOR! You don't get to just SHOVE yourself into my life like this!

Why do you think I keep calling you Zenia? Do you really think I'm the only one whose been Retconned? Who, if not you, is Zenia, if you are in her body, with her gear, in her timeline?

I'm NOT her! She's DEAD, that was the TWIST right!? B-because-

OH my GOD I'm sniveling! This isn't fucking fair everything hurts and now one of my best friends in the whole world who has been with me since DAY 1 with the stupid 'gee bill how come you get two hotdogs' meme is some kind of cosmic intelligence fucking with me because I'm just an endless source of tragedy porn an-

STOP. ZENIA PLEASE. BREATHE. Just for a second. Please, let me explain.

I'm trying to look for something to stop my nosebleed. I'm not... entirely naked. My favorite sweater is on, useless ass red hoodie I had before my ass died of liver failure, before I woke up as a ratgirl with a shotgun. GOD. All I got really was a stupid Isekai Arc and I barely even fucking remember that shit, like it happened ages ago!? UGH this is just like last time, I don't even have a bra or something to hold my breasts so they're flopping around as uselessly as the sterile, frozen little rat sack I have barely hanging between my legs. Why the fuck do I have my sweater???

The Coat of Arms. Or, rather, A Coat of Arms. Sis didn't send you through empty handed. Reach into your sleeve or one of the inner pockets, you'll find what you need. There is at least one in every causality, we fought hard to make it so.

By 'sis' and 'we fought hard' you mean you and Beakface? Wait are you two sisters? Fucking gay.

Yes. My 'sister' and I were drafted. Before the Old Drakes, before the Aspects, before this everything had any semblance of structure or form, my sister and I were plucked from the womb that'd birthed us. It's a long story, and more to the point, her domain as much is not entirely decided, nearest I can tell.

Wait so you exist like, as half-written ideas of cosmic intelligences? Man I thought I had it rough, I'm like a whole ass person and-

YO! No shit!? There's bandages in here??? But not normal bandages like, the kind with funky magic smell. I wrap my broken hand with them and haphazardly plug my bleeding nostrils with some torn segments (it kinda smells like the weird desert honey I bought from a Mexican guy off of I-10 on my way to Sea World, if you see a Mexican guy selling honey on the side of the road you HAVE to stop that is a law somewhere trust me bro). Neat smells withstanding, at least my hurt things start feeling better gradually. It's kinda like when morphine finally fucking takes and the white hot pain of fried nerve endings finally has the volume turned down.

Wait where the fuck did these come from?

I won't bore you with exposition, you pitiable thing, but I will clarify just a few details. Firstly, you were plucked just like me. In a way, you're as much a sister as I am to Beakface.

Uh... Gross? Like I mean, not to be rude, incest porn can be hot bu-

Secondly, no, not that kind of sister. Beakface and I were never sisters. We simply became related. The fates dictated such, part of their terms as we were thrust onto center stage. The very first stars of the drama. The start of the game. When you were 'born', they deemed you a happy little accident.

Oh my GOD you did not just give me THAT fucking analogy! I'm not some loser born out of wedlock! If anything I was the 'haha we totally meant to have a family look we did it twice!' after the Happy Accident that was my older Sister!

Sorry. But really Zenia, You wouldn't use any other verbiage for it, would you?

No. I guess not. But I'm not calling you 'big sis' no matter how good your pussy is! And STOP calling me that name! It's just Z, the LETTER Z. Z like I'm an uncredited extra in a Girls Gone Wild tape!

Hmph, if that's what you really want to be called. Good pussy or no, we'll see about that you perpetual pervert.

Look if I'm not horny on main I'll sink into another depressive spiral where I spend eight paragraphs crying about my terrible life trauma! Wait, sorry, what were you sa-

ACKHEM. Thirdly. I cannot be in the same part of the plot as you at this moment. I am... parallel. So to speak?

What, you mean like a side-story? I'll bet its fucking lame. Like, boring dystopia.

Ironically, it's more familiar to me than where you are, actually. Old threads, Sis really looped us back in to a promising segment, which gives us time. Well 'time', so to speak. You and I are uh, to paraphrase your lexicon again, “sticking our dicks out in a snowstorm hoping for hotdog buns”.

HAH. That is the kind of bullshit I would spout. Huey would give me that stupid face of his, and-... y-you I guess... would complain about langua-... OH MY GOD. That didn't need to click that way. Rude. Why didn't you tell me!? It would have been nice to know I was tapping all powerful being pussy. I really would've preferred the bird pussy anyway, no offense, Elves aren't really my type but my dick ends up places thanks to the whole, 'every isekai devolves into a harem' thing.

Promiscuity withstanding; I don't think it was decided until very recently. I uh, wasn't privy to my nature until after the last causality collapsed. A lot seems to have changed with the new causality, for one, it's full of echos.

...so it's a Retcon? Lazy.

Darling. Don't call it a Retcon. It's a reboot.

Fucking. Oh my god if this is a TITLE I am going to strangle-fuck you in the most toxic-yuri possible manner I can possibly manage to find words for! Wait do you still like breathplay? I mean I still do but you know-

Z, darling. Focus. We can talk sex things again when we get to actually meet up. For now, I'll ask Sis if she knows anything about where we're headed. It's not my purview, you should know. I imagine I've a tangent or three before I can give you more.

“Where-ever we go, we go uncertainly into that intangible void where I have the most power.” just came into my brain. Eugh, wow, that felt like a longer delay than I'd like to admit. Is this what reading back old shit feels like? I have a headache again.

In a ways. I'll admit, I also had to look it up. We'll talk again, sooner than later, I hope. Be careful darling.

Maybe, if I'm lucky, we can get a sex scene so I can find out what bird pussy tastes like. Uh. Bye for now, I guess?

...

Then it's just quiet. I don't see the inky blackness at the back of the coffin, I sorta forgot I was looking at it, now it's gone. Real fucking Silent Hill type shit. Here I am, sitting mostly-naked on the floor in front of the same stone casket I came out of the first time. I'm like, a full two miles underground and probably surrounded by scary monsters. If I'm lucky I have my gear nearby unlike last time, could really use that shotgun with infinite ammo right about now. Or maybe I could get smothered in horny kobolds who just discovered how gay sex works. That'd be cool.

Think I could bum some whiskey off them? Nah. That'd never happen, the foursome however seems way more likely.

Oh my GOD Dude. I better not fucking run into some cringe AU Beakface who speaks with like, a surfer accent or some shit. It'll be worse than all of those fucking stupid fandom AU's for Undertale that plagued Tumblr for like four solid years before everyone with sense bailed on that shitass yahoo slut website when it banned 'female presenting nipples'.

GOD. Imagine if someone tried to do Tumblr again, peak of stupidity to put a single egg in that basket.

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Distant, confusing thoughts about Transgender Furry Porn

2025-01-10T20:58:26Z

This is a super short one probably. I hope.

So being a trans girl on the internet, there's an unshakeable trend around in queer spaces online about chicks with dicks being shockingly mainstream compared to boys with pussies. In the furry community, a demographic tendency is that gay men (typically of Western European geo-ethno-national point of origin) are the dominant expression, one that has in recent years rarely seen much motion towards reversal. It's difficult to argue against the frequently observed conclusion that the G in LGBTQIA+ is over-represented in media, furry media especially.

Transgender identities are only just now starting to really be understood by the gestalt public, and the acceptance vs shock ratio is massive right now in the favor of shock. Even within the furry fandom, a through-line of transphobic behavior and attitudes spans back into the mid 2010's, particularly around the time of Gamergate in which many gay furries were sucked into mysogeny in general. You can argue, I think effectively, that the furry fandom's queerness has been in flux for its whole existence in the online era; as since the early 1990's we've had small spats as a fandom over if being gay and lesbian are accepted, with small holdouts of Nazi-furs lingering on the margins and an ongoing debate over the ethics of certain character and body types present in pornography.

This is all building up to my current observation: Broadly speaking, the G is still quite loud in the furry fandom. Even becoming a transgirl, I saw my own audience shrink because people weren't as into my transgirl characters. This is ultimately just a demographic fact, something I've learned to live with is that I was just like many of the people who stopped paying attention to my work: I didn't particularly care for the longest time about chicks with dicks and boys with pussies, in the pornographic sense. It wasn't even for a lack of trying, it took growing boobs starting in 2018 (before the whole being murdered by my intersex condition in 2022) to start appreciating chicks with dicks at all. It was like a switch flipped. The same can be said in late 2021, right before the gamer moment that destroyed my life at the time hit, for me to appreciate pussy with any depth.

What I've noticed is that your straight furries (which are mostly non-stamp collectors who don't participate in the wider culture beyond the porn) might still hold appreciation for us dickgirls, but have little if any interest in the famously elusive cunt-boy. I've also noticed that expression of genital preference is very modular in the parts of the fandom that do enjoy the various body parts on their selected partners, which at least partly acts as foil to my deeper fear of the fandom's expression: that right now, the fandom validates girlcock a lot more than boypussy, to the point that it sort of echos the existing over-loud Gay domination, thusly that cis-male expression reflecting privileged opportunities for expression online.

God this is such a clusterfuck, if you've done an actual course-load looking at opportunity cost of being trans, you know better than to call the presence of transgirls online in any concentration "privileged", so know that going into this observation. Metrics-wise, Lesbian (or broadly Sapphic) experiences of sexuality online are pretty under-expressed in furry spaces, enough that most of the lesbian porn out there is clearly not made by lesbians for lesbians, but rather by straight men for straight men. This paradox reflects existing known problems in that broader meme-space for online LGBTQIA+ expression, where the Male Gaze seems to echo through dominant trends in media online.

Suffice to say, I feel less valid because of this vague tendency in broader intersectional observations. I enjoyed a good portion of my life as a cis-male who didn't at any point feel like I'd become trans, I didn't know I was intersex, I already had been working on my ASD-ADHD related problems, I was a professional with a bachelor's degree working with stuff above my experience level and pay grade with opportunities I thought impossible for me. The fall from grace involved many tree branches, and it's a sort of horror to be someone who knows the clinical drawbacks of being trans demographically to become trans themselves. We kill ourselves a lot, suffer from myriad poly-sub and multi-disorder related problems, our demography and quality of life is very poor.

But the male experience of feminization, even the normal gay femboy kind, is very different from the female experience of masculinization. Those both have their own cultural memes of acceptance and intolerance attached, so it's not like the transman experience is uniquely benefited by their relative intersectional boons. But demographics represent deep-seated components of history, and put bluntly, I see transgirls as having a strange choke-hold on the conversation so much so that Republicans are terrified of women with penises more than they are men with pussies.

That last element, where non-participants in broader society react to the intersectional elements of the concept, really is what sticks out to me as the ultimate validating factor for me: it seems our society really only cares if penises are in places they "don't belong". It's such a complicated mess of confounds, and I hope my very brief thoughts here communicate just how... confusing... everything has been for me.

Being a transman isn't any more beneficial for your health than being a transwoman, but in the furry space, it feels like being a transwoman is the 'accepted' version, in part because of male privilege. That part fucks me up. Gay you later.

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Dyspnea, Red Scaly Dry Skin, Right-hand Essential Tremor, and Parkinson's.

2024-12-21T01:02:18Z

Since 2022 when it escalated abruptly due to ADHD medication disruption, I've been losing a battle progressively against a full body syndrome of some kind. We have operated on the assumption my disease is Narcolepsy which is multiplied in severity by my existing ADHD and Hormone Conditions. I think we've been wrong for a long time, and in many ways I can only blame myself for not seeing a neurologist and going through the rule-out workups for Parkinson's Disease when I had the chance. See in February of 2022, the only obvious link between my syndrome and sleep / body posture related problems was that I had catastrophically traumatic sleep which looked like Sleep Apnea for the longest time. I'd sleep, and wake up so fatigued and drained that I couldn't move. After research into Narcolepsy, I learned about sex hormone abnormalities associated with my gut, brain and skin conditions, and this lead me to switch from tablet ADHD medication into using a capsule extended release variant to control my dopamine levels over the full day.

This worked. For a time. As my condition continued to worsen, I started having rectal bleeding episodes, I began growing breasts, I had a lot of estrogen symptoms, my prostate was ballooning, and it looked like prostate cancer. We ruled that out, it continues to be benign BPH, and my prostate hormones (PSA) wax and wane from above and below threshold for cancer monthly. After some blood tests captured a near-female level of Serum Estrogen that waxed and waned over the course of a month, with significantly low testosterone, another discovery from my Urologist in Summer of 2022 became part of the model. My scrotum was "not quite on correctly", and my shrunken (recently infertile) gonads suddenly just fit inside of my abdomen by sitting sometimes. We eventually concluded an intersex condition, likely Mosaic Klinefelter's and Ovotestis, was involved. Lab testing coverage by my insurance was insufficient, and I battled until Summer of 2024 for basic treatment. This includes cancelled sleep labs, missed medication refills, the works; stuff that makes you want to challenge healthcare CEO's to Fox Only No Items Final Destination.

Since moving to Canada, I've been living in a legal limbo, waiting for paperwork that is delayed by strikes in Canada Post and an incompetent federal government. I can't get care even started through waiting for a doctor, I have to wait in line at a walk-in clinic and get out of pocket refills for my medications. We're due back first week of January to re-up my ADHD meds and do labwork for my thyroid. It's meant that I'm due to carefully monitor myself and be my own specialist, again, for the third full calendar year in a row. Suffice it to say, arriving at the conclusion that my Narcolepsy is secondary and actually just a rider on Parkinson's is a bold claim, but the thing is, I was told I may have Parkinson's as early as fall 2021 when I was given a provisional Narcolepsy Type 1 diagnosis. Symptoms of the syndrome had been observed by my professional colleagues as early as 2017, when one of the psychologists I worked with at my rehab job had observed postural asymmetry and muscular rigidity in my right hand side prior to having coffee each morning. I assumed, wrongly, that my blown out knees were the problem. I assumed a lot was normal, because nothing ever showed up in panels.

Nervous system diseases are notorious for this arc, starting as a broad spectrum guessing game of narrowing down increasingly acute syndromes until arriving finally at a 'root cause'. Yesterday, my right hand was so weak that trying to break a chunk of room temperature dark chocolate caused me to over-strain my entire right arm. It's still sore. Holding posture in my right hand and right leg, as well as the muscles in my neck, back, and trunk, is notoriously difficult, and I often adopt a 'slump' depending on my hormone cycle's phase. Everything is compounded by my other conditions, but right-hand motor abnormalities are becoming more and more and more frequent, ignoring the status of any injuries I thought I had (RSI, etc) and flaring up abruptly. Essential Tremor is the most classical of these conditions, many people don't know it, but Parkinson's is why Hitler's right hand is so jittery in the movie Downfall (you might know it from meme classics like 'Hitler gets banned from xbox live'). If you go watch the part where the actor goes to remove his glasses, you can see dyskinesthetic flickers of the fingers accompanying the essential tremor that causes his whole hand and wrist to shake. Really good acting I might add.

My right hand increasingly does this, I'm also dealing with something rare but reported in some case studies: right eye perceptive field shrinkage. Apparently, in some cases it's not uncommon to feel like the right-hand side of your visual field is narrow, cluttered, or limited; this appears to be linked to the broader hemisphere-linked abnormalities in the left hemisphere of the brain (where many diseases related to dopamine underproduction like ADHD and Depression are clustered in the left forebrain). The logic here involves dysregulation of the Motor Band which may spread through the rest of the hemisphere and eventually work its way into the visual cortex. Parkinson's and Narcolepsy both tend to show difficulty with focusing the eye, the muscles of the inner-eye that control your lenses start to become unresponsive and stiff, and it turns out you also can have gradual failure of perceptive elements of the visual cortex accompany it. While uncommon to be total, partial blindness and the need of corrective lenses and levodopa to help keep the eyes functional is a frequent element of late-stage Parkinson's. Another alarming feature is Dyspnea, aka "you just stop breathing".

I've lived with Dyspnea for many, many years. Breathing has never been easy, I have asthema and a typical ADHD quirk of holding my breath when thinking intensely or trying to do something. In recent years since 2020, it's gotten so bad that I have to hold my breath to use a fork and knife some days, I hold my breath unintentionally all of the time, often spending parts of my normal day to day gasping for air and struggling to both juggle my permanently manual breathing with other things that require my attention. Reading? I stop breathing. Standing up? Stop breathing. Switching thoughts? I stop breathing. This often accompanies my Cataplexy, and some auto-immune linked problems from my body's Endometriosis make swelling of my airway frequent, so there's just days where I'm drained fucking suffocating constantly with no way to relieve it. You can imagine, struggling to breathe when nothing is visibly wrong can be quite alarming and makes you reality check; and of course this accompanies the most severe of body shakes, including dyskinesthetic jerks of my legs, arms, shoulders, hips, thighs, and other muscles (including my prostate) in spastic attacks.

I'm going to die, like all people on this planet, but I'm going to die a lot sooner. Parkinson's is a progressive, degenerative disease. We have no way to reverse it, and Narcolepsy even if it was all I had to worry about, also is degenerative. These are exaggerated in their impact due to my intersex condition causing broad body system atrophy and dysregulation since it turns out, my liver needs Estrogen to function and I can't produce enough naturally (and I have a woman's hormone cycle, meaning I go from highs to lows in a sin-wave multiple times over the course of a month). I'm bleeding out of my ass when i shed endometrial lining, I'm in pain from deposits causing inter and intra-tissue swelling (including nearly dislocating my jaw on the right-hand side and crushing my right hand ear canal every other week for days at a time), I fall over constantly, I stop breathing and have to fight for air, I lose control of my limbs and dance a merry jig I call the "herky jerky" and because of the Cataplexy element of Narcolepsy, yes, my mood can trigger all of these things.

I can't even look nice. My skin is totally fucked, with dry, rough, red and scaly patches all over and constant micro-bleeds from every single hair folicle on my body due to dermal endometriosis. I have huge cancer-like deposits in my thighs that are just rotting blood tissue, the material has penetrated and formed a tight weave over my bladder, prostate, intestines, and gonads. My nervous system is literally disintegrating and the best I can do is watch it happen. My entire life is, effectively, over. I hold out hope that HRT and treatment of the conditions will come, that I can claw out a little more function so I can do the things I want to do while I have the chance, but every month, the goal post flips just that little bit further away.

I am going to die. Slowly. Agonizingly.
I am going to watch everything about my personhood decay.
I am going to be conscious and present for most of it.
I am going to be trapped.
There is nothing anyone can do about it. It is only a matter of time.

As I type this, I'm battling my eyes to stay open, I'm straining to breathe, I'm desperate for water and no amount of it is enough. I can barely swallow. I can hardly speak. I can't stand without pushing literally every other thought out of my mind.

I'm not gone yet, but I will be. Blink and you'll miss me.

I write this in hopes you will understand. The Zano I knew from just 2 years ago is long dead, and I don't think they'll ever come back.

Thank you for the years of love and support.

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Imagine actually ideaboarding thoughts about a skyrim-like RPG

2024-12-10T00:38:33Z

Okay okay yes I know, Skyrim is braindead and for babies. But what Skyrim represents in potential is always on my mind. I recently did a classic struggle up stream maneuver for modding Skyrim that resulted in 3 long days of hair pulling, a reddit thread asking for help in r/skyrimmods, and moving from the vanilla Skyrim from Steam into the Special Edition where all the cool kids hang out.

Playing Skyrim, I'm under 20hrs into my playthrough and I'm already thinking about what Skyrim could be instead of what it is. I hate interfacing with Bethesda's crap engine as much as the next girl, so it's obviously not in my mind to make a mod for Skyrim because that's a fool's errand. Instead, I'm thinking about ideas for a future me who might learn Unity or Godot with the husband.

Skyrim's strongest elements are in its exploration, instanced dungeons, and emergent storytelling. Creating simulated interactions and dynamic NPC scripts is out of my range, but the idea of the player exploring a world of magic and peril? That's cool to me. A combat system mildly more complex than what Skyrim offers would be neat too, and I have some ideas.

Imagine if we had stance commands on a hotkey that are toggles; say you press F and G to switch between a high attack and a low attack, these operate as a toggle with some kind of icon change in your HUD to show the swing type. When you click to attack, maybe you can perform a drag with the mouse to indicate the angle of swing, or have some kind of configuration. Positioning your swing hits should only have so much angling to make the combat easy to read, and importantly choosing to attack with speed should limit your options for dynamic swinging.

So the idea is to make armed combat more of a fighting game-like interface, with a lot of visual feedback on screen. You could maybe simplify things to simply have attack types be zone-specific, allowing the player to again toggle (EG pressing F or G) different attack stances which have some limit to their weapon type. Including a distinction between a block and a parry might also be important, blocks are a lot more defensive in my book, where as a parry is meant to catch and reposition an opponents swing to create an opening. Blocking should be pretty easy to execute with a shield, overcoming a defensive position through positioning I think is more important.

My immediate thought is to have weapon types have different attack patterns based on their three swings (high, low, mid); and most low-skill enemies you fight wouldn't be all that intense to defeat if you know how these work. Ranged enemies would be pretty scary without a shield, since they can easily shoot past your weapon. Having combat incorporate magic as part of this would be huge; a spell that deflects arrows in a wide circle around the player might be cool to have to make it so enemies have to enter your attack range to threaten you, spells that can control the positioning of enemies like a wall of ice, an electrified puddle of water, or a short stream of fire would make where you are positioning a lot more important, too.

Finally on my mind is the idea of called shots and unique powers for archers, which is something I always like thinking about. A single player or (dare I say it) coop experience where players induce conditions in enemies together would also work better than simply making melee combat super complex; EG say a fire spell makes enemies unable to block attacks as they're (rightly) distracted by being on fire, the sneak attack archer might be able to inflict a surprise status which allows other characters to kill a target with bonus damage, so on and so forth. Lots of ideas, none of it is very thought out or even remotely close to being prototypeable.

Spitballing these thoughts, I would want something with plenty of crafting opportunities. No crafting *skills*, just an EXP system that lets you unlock items based on what you're interested in, maybe with some requirements you can read about. I'd like your character going out and doing adventures, gaining experience in their basic skills while out and about, and then can cash that experience into bigger categories of abilities while back at camp. Having a dynamic camping system is on my mind, by the by, that way players can have the Baldurs Gate 3 style 'lets rest and look at our gear options'; bigger storage is just outside of the dungeon, and big cities are meant to serve as your destination for spending all of that money and selling off loot.

I like those cute grid-style inventory systems ala Resident Evil 4, so maybe one of those to make it so you're not balancing yourself on the edge of encumbrance to get back to town with fast travel; if you can't carry everything but clear a dungeon, the loot should be obtainable with a quick collect option that ends the dungeon run or something. Maybe your hirelings need a little gold in exchange for hauling nice loot out!

If it was coop with some kind of lobby system, I think it'd be the coolest. You could use your camp as a third space to rest up before going out into the woods to smack giants or whatever.

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End of Transmission.

2024-11-06T19:35:13Z

I think I'm done posting. My artwork is a liability, the U.S. has voted for Project 2025 with resounding support. We can only vainly hope right now that transgender people like me will not be criminalized and openly hunted for sport. I recommend everyone start going to ground, make lurking a habit.

Please make backups, tools are available if you wish to download my work. I am on other places, but they will all be in low power mode and idle for the foreseeable future. Until such a time as it becomes clear that our online spaces will persist, I will be lurking. You will not see new art from me. You will not hear updates from me. At the most, you will see me comment on occasion.

If you voted for Trump and his lackeys, I don't have nice things to say to you. The man's policy platform is fucking insane, proudly wants to dismantle multiple critical social institutions, and will accelerate the war against transgender and intersex people in ways never before seen. We barely were allowed to exist under Biden's weak policy approach, and it's looking like pornography will be outlawed in the U.S. if these Project 2025 jackasses are given their way. That's it for me. Assuming Trump delivers on his campaign goals and the recommendations of his theocratic allies this furry art thing is over.

If my worst fears are realized, it is a liability for me to maintain any online presence. I'll be shutting down my Subscribestar end of year. Goodbye.

https://linktr.ee/runawaydanish

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The Riolu Paradox -- A Primer

2024-10-06T21:52:06Z

Below is the most recent high-concept draft of my upcoming writing project, a non-fiction work interrogating a lot of complex intellectual topics related to Fictional Minors in Illustrated Pornography.

Content Warnings:
- Discussion of Childhood Sexual Assault
- Discussion of Pornography
- Discussion of Real-World Criminal Statistics
- A small blue cartoon dog from popular media with a big Intellectual Property Company behind it

( Click Through To Read )

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It's over. It's begun.

2024-10-01T07:01:23Z

Everyone's time on Cohost.org has come to an end. I forgot to include the ending entry to Ratgirl Isekai into the series index, but that is a problem for people who will read it in the scant few months between now and the end of time for the website, proper.

I can't say I've processed much of the situation. I'm still sort of wondering if I'll remember that the site is static, it was on my rotation of places to check in on every now and then. Having concluded the tour of duty and posted my last entry, I should be writing the next chapter, but the memory and mood lingers (not helped by my anomalous period, of course).

It is far past time for me to move on. The injury is a little fresh today, I'm just vulnerable to it being over. The stress and pain of making things line up for the finale was worth it, even if hardly anyone will see the fruits of my labor.

Z will be back, eventually, for now she's getting a nice breather. I hope Beakface remembers to feed her.

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Hello World

2024-09-25T18:24:42Z

Do programmers still do this exercise in school?

Hi, just ported over from Cohost.org, planning to repost work that won't survive Cohost's passing. See you soon.

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