lb_lee: an instrument panel with a hole, an arrow pointing to said hole, and a written warning: do not put tongue here AGAIN. (questionableideas)
([personal profile] lb_lee Mar. 23rd, 2026 11:45 am)
Rogan: I guess, if I had to summarize my feelings about labels, any kind of identity label, it’d be this: labels are created for people; people are not created to fit them.

A label describes, but it shouldn’t define. If it strangles you, ditch it. Even if you can’t avoid other people slapping it on you, you don’t have to make THEIR mistake part of YOUR identity. (Sadly, uprooting nasty brainweeds like that is rarely as simple as just saying no. You may end up having to know your enemy, do way more research, and think way more about it than you’d like, just to pull up all them runners. It’s worth it, though, to be free!)

Whatever label you choose, hold it loosely. Don’t death-grip it, or you’re priming yourself for a total identity collapse if/when you change... and change is the only constant. Let yourself grow. Let yourself be playful about what you call yourself and why; we call ourself a “multivarious cyborg” and it’s a typo! We named ourself Loony-brain thinking this was just an embarrassing stage we were going through, and now we own it! We went from soulbonder to natural multiple to DID to “yes and” multi. Maybe one day, we’ll even be singlet again, or something else entirely!

Knowing your label is not the same as knowing yourSELF. There’s no linguistic shortcut for that work. Nobody can do it for you, and that’s good news: it puts the power in YOUR hands.

Use it well, and don’t hang on so hard.
gillman: (Default)
([personal profile] gillman Mar. 23rd, 2026 11:32 am)
 I fear things have not improved on my end! I am very busy and tired. My period has completely stopped and I am losing more hair </3 I am very lucky to have so many friends who have come to help me out, I really do love them. I had hopped to have answers on everything by now, but I don't! I am getting by, but houf am I tired. I am really really hoping to get things figured out soon. I do think I have been in a constant state of panic since late January, and my body is taking the roll for sure. I am terrified to lose my grad school opportunity. I do not have actual breakdowns often, but I did sob in my partners chest today over the state of things.  

Today, there is a special person coming to campus. I can not say who, lest I dox myself, but I will be laughing a lot and I need a good laugh right about now! I can not wait. 

The weather is beautiful, I wish I could calm down enough to enjoy it! I hate being a complainer or a debby-downer, I have just never experienced this specific issue in my life before. I don't know how to handle it or come back from this. This is something that I have to figure out on my own, and I am trying! But it really does suck right now. I am worried that my family and professors will think I'm not prepared for grad school. I'm starting to get a bit worried that this is a proper burn-out and that I won't have recovered by this fall.... scary. 

This weekend I have a concert! I am travelling a decent bit to go, but it's of my favorite artist right now and I'm very excited. Gas prices have me a bit antsy about it, but I will just have to deal with it...
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lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
([personal profile] lb_lee Mar. 22nd, 2026 12:57 am)
EDIT: found typos and formatting errors that somehow escaped all previous read-throughs. Will edit and replace. -_-

Hey, so... since we got a printer, and since our shoulder and eyeballs are increasingly reluctant to let us read long things on the computer, we've taken to slapping together little zines for our personal enjoyment of our favorite stuff. We also use them to fool around with typography and stuff. You know, just make fun little things.

And then we were like, "Hey... what if we shared some of these?"

So here's our newest fun thing: my love is strange: an anthology of eight hundred years of unusual care. It's just a commemoration of being together in ways my current society would like to pretend doesn't exist and never did. Alt-texted, illustrated with pictures from the public domain. Table of contents:
 
I wasn't joking about it covering a swathe of eight hundred years by the way. )

originally this was going to be a whole thing. a whole exploration on the complexity of syzygy and what happens when loz and kadaj and i do weird remnant things and absorb people into the mist of our bodies. then we couldn't think of anything at all, besides the sadness.

we're made of memory. "we" as in everyone ever, i think, but also "we" as in the three of us, in a very specific way. we live and breathe this memory and when things get tough we go after others'. and because we can't exactly devour the full memory-form of someone beyond our pocket of the universe, we turn to those inside. usually, it's not a big deal. but sometimes, those people are friends. sometimes, they're people who have been with us for a decade or more. and then the guilt sets in.

i don't think i realized how much this affected me until literally 24 hours ago. i had always known i had feelings about "about", the girl i was for ten years leading up to this. but when discussing another member of syzygy -- dree -- i had a full breakdown in a way i don't think i ever have before. i became angry at the idea of him being "brainmade", some kind of lost part of a wider whole that required fixing. something inherently different from us "introjects", which is its own terrible word. all these words that inflict on him same kind of nonsense we have had inflicted on us time and time again. the implication that dree's absorption was something good, a sign of healing, instead of just something sad that happened that we are allowed to feel fucking sad about. i realized that dree was such a staple in loz and about's life -- in my life -- and loz's absorption of him made sense in a sort of terrible, hilarious way. like, of course. of course the boy i was closest with for the formative years of my life would become part of the memory-body of my twin. 

so instead of writing a real essay, i wrote letters. enough preamble.

from yazoo, to dree:

first off, thank you. you were the very first person to treat me as me, at least, as i believed i was. it doesn't matter. i don't mind that i was someone else for our time together. i don't mind that i don't remember much about you because the feelings are still there. i know you were a kind, beautiful soul, and i'm happy to have been able to know you for so long. i see you sometimes, in loz. i don't know how, outside of the knowledge that he absorbed you, but there's something. something about the way his walk has changed, and the way he makes peoples' heads turn when he laughs.

i don't make friends easily. i don't love even moreso. but i think i did -- do -- love you. i consider you an important part of my becoming, even if you accidentally walked in on it happening. you were the first to see me as yazoo, and despite your confusion, your kindness showed first and foremost in how you led me to the center of the world to get help from the others. loz told me that a therapist referred to you as an "angry, vengeful part". i don't remember that. maybe you were. all of my memory-feelings involve joy. joy and music. we tell the story all the time -- the one of you, me, and loz going to that record store. its my clearest, most beloved memory of "back then". i cherish it. i think i will until i die.

you were my friend. not a symptom, not a side effect of trauma, not a tool for understanding a world full of senseless violence. you were a person first and foremost. kadaj says you might be part of our birds now. if you are, i hope your flights are easy and the wind is always at your back.

from yazoo, to about:

hello. this is strange. 
i know your name not because i "remember" it, but because i know the music that precedes it. this seems to be a pattern.

you are what i was before i was me. a girl made for a story, that eventually comes to life. you were part of a trio, too, you know. a trio of albums, of characters. 
this is hard, because something about our "relationship" makes it difficult for me to talk about you. but i want to thank you, too, anyways. for being me before i was brave enough to do it myself.
i don't think of you as a body that once housed my True Soul-self. i don't know if i see you as the childhood version of me, either. but whatever happened, whatever it all means, i'm here now. and i say your name because your memory is as important to my body as any other. i love that your name is just a word. because until the english language itself evolves or dissipates, everyone who speaks it will at some point say you. about. about.

i made this playlist for you. it's a measly thing, only seven songs. i cried while organizing it to our particular tastes. music from the albums you named yourself after, the ones that stick with me to this day. i hope it's enough. one day i'll make a real tape for you. full of texture and breathy synths and music boxes and seemingly-nonsense lyrics and all those things we like.

for you

 




lb_lee: a purple horned female symbol interlocked with a female symbol mixed with a question mark (xenogals)
([personal profile] lb_lee Mar. 20th, 2026 05:32 pm)
Winner of the 2026 fan poll! All text under this is text-only transcription of the comic.

No Sneaks were involved in this sneak attack. )
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
([personal profile] lb_lee Mar. 19th, 2026 10:31 pm)
We keep a little stack of books we're reading on the kitchen table and our roommates noticed that the spines lined up in amusing ways. This was accidental, but then we thought, "what if we did that... ON PURPOSE?"

And today, we trashed our room stacking books to make poems. We hope they amuse you!


Tags:
  • Finally finishing the Reverend Alpert book, which has been stalled at around 80% completion for YEARS now
  • Expanding Quick'n'Dirty Plural History into a proper paperback, because the zine sells shockingly well for such a niche subject, we have a lot more info now (though not on the newest slapfights, ha, no, we're talking older, cross-cultural stuff, and spirit marriage/headmate relationship stuff) (if you want us to wade into the hottest new plural communities on Discord or Bsky or what the fuck ever, you're going to have to pay us real money, and in ADVANCE)
  • Finally kicking Rogan's ass into inking Loyal Forever, a comic that involves the muscle car beloved from Crazy Boys Get Money)
  • Expanding Xenogals into a book-length thing, the Mori and Rawlin version of Alter Boys In Love (Xenogals in Love?)
Oh no, all but Loyal Forever are big beefy books. But well, the Xenogals and Plural History ones would replace their floppies, and Reverend Alpert would probably end up a short run anyway.
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lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
([personal profile] lb_lee Mar. 18th, 2026 10:02 am)
Mori: nobody jumps out of bed going, “Good morning world, today I do my TAXES!” with a big smile on their face, but man alive, is it neat to see what sold and what didn’t, when and where.

Read more... )

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on March 17, 2026.

thinking out loud about my personal labeling re: nonhumanity (or lack thereof) -

because by definition, "being nonhuman" doesn't say anything about the amount of nonhumanity you need to have. it's a deliberately inclusive label!

someone who's 15% nonhuman, who needs support to feel confident and unashamed of that 15%, belongs in a nonhuman community as much as someone who's 100% nonhuman. they deserve to know they're not alone, there are other nonhumans out there who understand what they're feeling!

And! that's not the only way to think about it when you're partially nonhuman

and I say that because I keep choosing to call myself human, even though I'm partially nonhuman. if you're looking at my identities like a list, you might even say I seem mostly nonhuman? I'm an android, I'm the idea of a dog, I decided to turn myself into a dragon last year and I still don't regret it, BUT. I'm human! I keep saying I'm human!

and I think it's so important for me to have that because I keep being denied humanity for everything else about me. I'm a headmate so I can't be a human being, I'm just part of somebody else. I'm nonbinary and my gender sure isn't legally recognized or even assumed as a possibility. I'm a fictional character so I'm not a real person and I'm definitely not human in a way that matters. I'm nonhuman on some level so I can't possibly be invested in my humanity. I'm an android so I should be better than humans or whatever, I shouldn't think it's desirable to be one.

all of that feels pretty bad! so I hold onto it. I decided to be human and no one can take that away from me. I'm a mechanical canine draconic human being and I chose that! so basically,

IF there's no magical minimum amount of nonhumanity someone has to have to say they're nonhuman and find joy in their nonhumanity -

there's ALSO no magical minimum amount of humanity someone has to have to say they're human and find joy in their humanity

Mori: Heads up y'all, I'm doing our tax prep, which means I'm going through all our titles, seeing what sold and what didn't, and deciding what gets weeded. In a week or so, I'm going to be removing the following ebook listings from sale, so if you want them, now is the time to get them:
(Rogan's Aphasia is also barely hanging in there, has been for years; for some reason every once in a while people will buy another copy of it, just BARELY keeping it in the running.)

(Also I figure, just as a note, we do this every year. I tally up everything what sold, and shit that sold less than five copies gets weeded. I'm trying to get us more regular about saying when we're removing something from print, since some folks might miss out otherwise. And hey, if enough copies sell, it'll stay up for other folks!)
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lb_lee: A skeleton wearing a crown of blooming roses (the bony lady)
([personal profile] lb_lee Mar. 16th, 2026 09:49 am)
This is a messy post about death and love.

content warning: abuse. )
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
([staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance Mar. 14th, 2026 01:04 pm)

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

329production: (Kogane 1)
([personal profile] 329production Mar. 13th, 2026 12:05 pm)
I just had my first experience with what looks like a berserker shift.

I've experienced so many different shifts, including mental. I know what my mental shifts are like, and they tend to make me more irate than usual among other things, and it goes away after some time with little to no issues. This one shift, however, is different.

I was playing Super Smash Bros Ultimate, specifically the World of Light mode. I was minding my own business, fighting my way through the map.

But then, I saw it. The Groudon spirit.
Read more... )
lightning_beast: A photograph of a coyote. (Goldenrod)
([personal profile] lightning_beast Mar. 12th, 2026 04:24 pm)
✧:So. Y'all remember how Stardust is a werecoyote? Uhhhhh yeah that might not be exactly true anymore. We've deduced that we have a fourth Delta (after a while of Stardust being vaguely aware of it and also very in denial) and that they're the one who's actually the werecoyote. (Also Stardust might be a wolf therian? Or a werewolf? We aren't quite sure yet.) But their name is Goldenrod!

❊:Hi. I'm Goldenrod also idk what to say here but Sharpwhistle wants me to put something uhhhhhh. Bark bark yip and whatnot. I don't really know what I'm like yet but I know I'm a werecoyote and I like the color yellow, so. Hi
dreamdragon: A orange furred dragon with white feathered wings and sungold horns, soft yellow mane and deep red belly, looking towards the righ side. In a gentle, abstract cloudy background filled with pink, purple, white and yellow. (Default)
([personal profile] dreamdragon Mar. 11th, 2026 05:36 pm)
I think, me being anchored, and almost chained to the body, it has to do with how much I fought for my own identity, not so much externally, but internally.

I cannot accept any suggested distance between me and my draconity. I am a dragon, there is no kintype, there is my kinity. I don’t like to use kinself too, that still spells distance and differences in my head.

Read more... )
adventumpueri: (Default)
([personal profile] adventumpueri Mar. 11th, 2026 07:12 pm)
(crossposted from the syzygy website)

in the beginning...

be advised -- this entry and all following ones in our noematapedia contain potentially triggering content. this includes:

  • child abuse and neglect
  • medical trauma
  • violence -- particularly drowning, stabbing, and gun violence
  • near-death experiences
  • mentions of drug use
  • completed suicide

please take care.

this entry will cover stuff that occurs during/relating to the events of Advent Children Complete, specifically

read more...? )

adventumpueri: (gunstare)
([personal profile] adventumpueri Mar. 11th, 2026 06:38 pm)
hum hum hum. been thinking about bodies and lack-thereof.

the syzygy-body is not something i feel is impossible to reach anymore, it just isn't anything i'm particularly interested in, beyond a few specific experiences. i'm always with loz, who's almost always behind the eyes. i find great joy in noticing when xe's overwhelmed with the weight of the world. i know just when to catch her off guard, take it by the (metaphysical) hand to drag it away to be with us space-time freaks. rest in the clearing, braid my gravity-protesting hair, play with the infinitely spawning birds, build towers and knock them back down.

at the end of the day, the syzygy-body is a container. i care about it, deeply. pretty much everything i know is currently tied to its presence. if absolutely necessary, i'd jump the barrier to protect it and everyone involved. but for now, it's far more fun to explore the strangeness that happens when i am near enough to affect it but not enough to control. dissociation has gotten a bad rap, i think. there's nothing more interesting to me than being "blurry" with loz while he -- barely conscious himself -- cuts and pastes PNGs at my psychic command. it feels good to leave behind the boundaries of self-and-other when kadaj notices my struggle to remain a Being at all, and joins in the Nothing with me, instead of trying to fix anything about me. or, when it is troubling, they both scramble to offer memories and emotion and sensation that i can't seem to find. and it's not about "me", exactly. at least not the same "me" that was there before. i build up a new skin and a new form from what they offer, and i come back, still yazoo, just fresh and weird and wobbly.

i was born two days ago. i'll probably be born again next week. i'm nothing. i'm everything. i wouldn't trade any of it for the world.
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