From e7125404516b7eb2b712e5c069bcd2bc48ed67b9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Madison Scott-Clary Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2024 22:42:00 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] update from sparkleup --- assets/Loveling.html | 162 ------------------ misc/odists.html | 73 -------- .../3/unknown-things/iyov/workshop-notes.html | 67 ++++++++ .../{pinocchio => idumea}/index.html | 0 writing/post-self/motes/007b.html | 67 -------- writing/post-self/pinocchio/001.html | 49 ------ 6 files changed, 67 insertions(+), 351 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 assets/Loveling.html delete mode 100644 misc/odists.html create mode 100644 writing/3/unknown-things/iyov/workshop-notes.html rename writing/post-self/{pinocchio => idumea}/index.html (100%) delete mode 100644 writing/post-self/motes/007b.html delete mode 100644 writing/post-self/pinocchio/001.html diff --git a/assets/Loveling.html b/assets/Loveling.html deleted file mode 100644 index 6502e4be5..000000000 --- a/assets/Loveling.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,162 +0,0 @@ - - - - - -Loveling - - - - - - - - - diff --git a/misc/odists.html b/misc/odists.html deleted file mode 100644 index 1f7b41ea4..000000000 --- a/misc/odists.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,73 +0,0 @@ - - - - Zk | odists - - - - - - -
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Zk | odists

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E.W.

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Heavily committed to the ranger aesthetic, E.W. is a skunk, standing perhaps five six dressed in a a tunic and canvas trousers. He is occasionally to be found in a cloak as well, a hood attached that he can pull over his head. He carries with him a belt full of goodies — a hatchet, a knife, a few pouches — that all look quite thoroughly used.

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He moves with a quiet grace and simple efficiency through nature. That quiet is echoed in his demeanor as well, preferring fewer words rather than more, an with a countenance that rarely goes north of neutral, and occasionally slips south down into outright dour.

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Hold My Name

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Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know of the Ode clade (or just Hold My Name for less of a mouthful) is a trans woman, standing at about six feet tall. Curly black hair frames her face, though it is often kept up in a bun, held in place with a hair pin of silver, electroplated artemisia leaves decorating the top of it. She dresses casually in simple tees and frowsy skirts.

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She makes little effort to ‘pass’, seeming to revel in the dichotomy of her feminine appearance and sharper jawline, her feminine bearing and more masculine voice.

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Her attitude lies quite firmly in ‘excited’, willing as she is to talk (and talk and talk) about the things that interest her, though she is also quick to fall into that wit and sharpness of her cocladists.

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Slow Hours

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Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress of the Ode clade (or, to avoid the mouthful of a name, just Slow Hours) is a skunk, plain and simple. She stands at about five feet high and has the requisite black fur and aposematic white stripes: a single one starting just beyond her nosepad that runs the length of her snout up to her head, where it ends in a shock of white headfur, longer than the surrounding fur and brushed into something of a swoop to keep it out of her eyes. From the nape of her neck, it splits into two stripes that head down her back to her flanks, leaving her arms, pawpads, and those digger claws all black and the backs of her thighs ghosted with wispy white feathers of fur.

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That fur that covers her body is long and soft, settling somewhere between thick and silky. Thick enough, it seems, that she has chosen a loose-fitting blouse and skirt — white and navy, respectively — to keep from tamping it down too much. These are accented with an hourglass-shaped pin. Her tail bears the longest fur of all, sticking nearly straight out whenever hiked, bristle-like yet still as soft as can be.

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As befitting her mephit status, her face is more plain of features rather than something bound by a well-defined snout and pronounced supraorbital ridge, fronted by a soft, black nosepad and a whole passel of whiskers. Black eyes shine amidst black features, and cookie-shaped ears struggle to poke out from the fur atop her head. There is a slight roundness to the cheeks, the chest, the hips, the belly — enough to suggest an affection for the finer foods in life.

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Her countenance and stance land somewhere just shy of bubbly, upright without being prim, and with a sharp wit that only just manages to veer around goofy or rude. Kind, but not overly friendly; dancelike, but not too bouncy; preferring the sly grins and open smiles and dramatic gestures one might expect from, say, a theatre teacher.

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Collar -Around her neck rests a simple collar of black or perhaps dark gray, a snap-buckle holding it in place around the back. In front, there is a D-ring sewn in place.

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Beholden

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Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps of the Ode clade (or, to avoid the mouthful of a name, just Beholden) is a skunk, plain and simple. She stands at about five foot four, and has the requisite black fur and aposematic white stripes: a single one starting just beyond her nosepad that runs the length of her snout up to her head, where it ends in a shock of white headfur, longer than the surrounding fur and brushed into something of a swoop to keep it out of her eyes. A lock of that fur up near the front has been dyed in a magenta streak. From the nape of her neck, it splits into two stripes that head down her back to her flanks, leaving her arms, pawpads, and those digger claws all black and the backs of her thighs ghosted with wispy white feathers of fur.

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That fur that covers her body is long and soft, settling somewhere between thick and silky. Thick enough, it seems, that she has chosen a loose-fitting blouse and skirt - navy and green, respectively - to keep from tamping it down too much. This is accented with a pin in the shape of a spotlight. Her tail bears the longest fur of all, sticking nearly straight out, bristle-like yet still as soft as can be.

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As befitting her mephit status, her face is more plain of features rather than something bound by a well-defined snout and pronounced supraorbital ridge, fronted by a soft, black nosepad and a whole passel of whiskers. Black eyes shine amidst black features, and cookie-shaped ears struggle to poke out from the fur atop her head. There is a slight roundness to the cheeks, the chest, the hips, the belly - enough to suggest an affection for the finer foods in life.

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Her countenance and stance land somewhere just shy of bubbly, upright without being prim, and with a sharp wit that only just manages to veer around goofy or rude. Kind, but not overly friendly; dancelike, but not too bouncy; preferring the sly grins and open smiles and dramatic gestures one might expect from, say, a theatre teacher.

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Glasses -Ey sometimes wears a fairly ordinary pair of glasses, though often they wind up tucked into a shirt pocket. When ey does wear them, however, ey’s commonly seen fiddling with them or moving eir hands about; clearly they offer some HUD.

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Motes

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Skunk! Smol! Little bundle of excitable, zippy, and fidgety skunk. Like her cocladists, And We Are The Motes In The Stage Lights of the Ode clade (or just Motes for short) is fairly standard as anthropomorphic skunks go: there are the stripes, there is the tail, there is that shock of white fur atop her head. Unlike the rest of her stanza, though, she is a good bit slimmer, a good bit smaller, standing at solid five feet tall. Dressed in overalls and a dandelion-yellow shirt, she looks like she’s regularly painting something, given the splotches that linger on her clothes. She has leaned heavily into the babiest sibling role, owning the identity of the youngest of them all, ready to be doted upon, or hauled up in a hug, or, should she run into anyone so inclined, pounced right into a game of leapfrogging forks.

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Halloween

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Grrr grrarrgh grrgh rrrawrrrrrr rrrwrrr rrrrRRRRrrr grrgrrrrgrr grrf grrawr rrrwrrl awroooOOOOOOO!

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All of that to say that Motes has shaped herself into a werewolf for the season. Big, hulking, slavering thing! Loves bellyrubs, though.

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The look is very clearly a Halloween costume of sorts, for although she is most certainly an eight-foot-tall wolf, she is also still prone to zipping around — or at least trying to — and the excitability of her usual self. The growly voice and affected speech patterns will occasionally slip and the usual Motesisms will peek through once more. There is a reason she is a theatre tech and not an actor!

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Functor

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A Monad Is Just A Monoid In The Category Of Endofunctors, What’s The Problem? is a fisher — that is, the species pekania. It’s just literally that. A regular old fisher.

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Okay, it’s also floating about six feet in the air, dangling as though someone were holding it under the forelegs.

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Well, and also it appears to be a projection offered by a small disk a few inches across that floats a few inches above the ground — careful, this last can give quite the shock if touched.

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Okay and also it can talk. In fact, it seems to have a hard time shutting up, that voice of ambiguous gender offering whatever opinions it may through a stilted, Lisp-inspired mutter.

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Laz and Lilian

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Lazăr — or just Laz — Bălan is is a human of Romanian descent. Ey’s of middling height, somewhere around 180cm, looks to be young-ish at around 20, and perhaps a little soft of build. As befitting someone with the last name Bălan, ey has blond hair. A youth in the tattered remnants of the post-Anthropocene climate has left em with contrasting, darker skin. Ey tends to be seen in natty garb that wouldn’t be out of place on a bookseller or perhaps professor of something bookish — library science, perhaps? — with slacks, a nice enough shirt, a vest, maybe a scarf, or even bow-tie if ey’s feeling particularly inspired.

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Glasses -Ey sometimes wears a fairly ordinary pair of glasses, though often they wind up tucked into a shirt pocket. When ey does wear them, however, ey’s commonly seen fiddling with them or moving eir hands about; clearly they offer some HUD.

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Michelle, Who Has Reclaimed

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Michelle, Who Has Reclaimed is a skunk, plain and simple. Her time lingering in Netspace and away from what was her body has led to inevitable changes. She is no longer what she was.

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She stands at about five four, a few inches taller than her predecessor. Where once she was defined by the usual black fur and aposematic white stripes, she has opted for more color. Not just color, but a dichroic array that depends mostly on the lay of her fur. Where once the fur was white, it defaults to red, though a breeze or a hand run through her mane might lead to it veering towards purple or even blue. The black fur has headed in the other direction, and when disturbed, it gains an oil-sheen of greens, blues, and violets.

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That fur that covers her body is still long and soft, settling somewhere between thick and silky. Thick enough, it seems, that she has chosen a loose-fitting blouse and skirt — white and navy, respectively — to keep from tamping it down too much. These are accented with an hourglass-shaped pin as a reminder from whence she came. Her tail bears the longest fur of all, sticking nearly straight out whenever hiked, bristle-like yet still as soft as can be.

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As befitting her mephit status, her face is more plain of features rather than something bound by a well-defined snout and pronounced supraorbital ridge, fronted by a soft, black nosepad and a whole passel of whiskers. Black eyes shine amidst black features, and cookie-shaped ears struggle to poke out from the fur atop her head. There is a slight roundness to the cheeks, the chest, the hips, the belly — enough to suggest an affection for the finer foods in life.

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Her countenance and stance land somewhere just shy of bubbly, upright without being prim, and with a sharp wit that only just manages to veer around goofy or rude. Kind, but not overly friendly; dancelike, but not too bouncy; preferring the sly grins and open smiles and dramatic gestures one might expect from, say, a theatre teacher.

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Collar -Around her neck rests a simple collar of blues and pinks in a fractal pattern, distressed by a hint of equilateral triangles. In front, there is a D-ring sewn in place.

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Page generated on 2023-10-24

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Zk | workshop-notes

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  • Who is the I? The I of Matthew, or of transitioning? Who was young, once, and dumb? Not a negative to not know who. It shows time past through that unknowing.
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  • Original pairing juxtaposing these two things, opens to a wider audience. Trans to faith, and faith to trans.
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  • Toying with structure, but torn on it. Like the idea of the footnotes state outright that they are a sign of having done the legwork.
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  • Wanted more space to get into the transition narrative up front before the footnotes come in, because there’s more intimacy there, oriented it much more, and the footnotes gave it much more
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  • (They actually like the footnotes dropping out because then they were excited for the footnotes to come back; cf the amount of space they take up on the page vs Seasons)
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  • Angie: Footnotes within the footnotes added to spiraling nature in Seasons/struggle of ownership, doesn’t work as well in this one because there is less of a struggle in this context. Doesn’t serve the same purpose. Lenore: opposite, more invested in them because it led to more engagement.
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  • If publishing separately, there’s no guide teaching you how to read just this one.
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  • P.3 “The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything.” as anchor point for the rest of the reading
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  • The page breaks are a little awkward because content is gripping enough that then have to turn page back after finishing sentence to get to footnotes
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  • Looking for permission to skip the footnotes for the time being and come back later
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  • Re: justifying myself - It’s really great; it was done well in Seasons because it was very well controlled and gives the reader permission to jump around. Is there a theme beyond Job that would help the reader jump around. Could e.g: the lawyer voice justification to dad be a footnote, or justifying clinical language to myself — I’m really into this, actually; the more cohesive theme of justification works in context with Job, too.
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  • Bits of narrator voice in the footnotes is kind of orienting
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  • Voice is strong, but organization started to falter p.8 (language choice — get rid of pregnant silences, etc), anecdotes aren’t tied together quite as well.
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  • So many asides in footnotes, don’t expect them to be in the main text, too; more signalling on the page to show diversions and deferrals
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  • “Oh! It’s gonna be about cars!”
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  • Wanted more liberties to be taken with the footnotes
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  • First intro to Jill is filled with love; so much drama but we still love.
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  • What measures/passes time? Theme is seasons which meter time, what about this? Age?
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  • Find some themes and ask “is this section touching on one of these? Can I cut it?” Just to tighten it up.
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    • Messy in-between space
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    • Collisions (literal and metaphorical) (we think of it as being negative/destructive, but it can jolt you into awareness and gratitude, memories can be collisions of a sort)
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    • Justification
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    • Passage of time through rites of passage
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  • Maybe more trans joy to counter the pathological nature of identity
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  • It being in the middle does give it more permission to be messier/have lapses
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  • Physicality is welcome, need more especially toward the end (if nothing else, we don’t know who the ‘he’ is) (more about the couch!)
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  • “There are ways around being the go-to person” could stand to come up again later, Job as the go-to person for piousness, me as the go-to person for being Andrew’s foil
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  • “co-text” - “a refrain of deferral”
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Favorite lines:

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  • Lenore, p9 - “I don’t imagine this was actually true w conversation with gender, every time got close, close to the wrong me, remember as story, etc”
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  • Angie, p16 - “I can’t even seem to write about this without leaning heavily on the clinical.” (just how much justification I feel the need to put in there)
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  • Jenny, p13 - “I felt the way it ground up against me, a sort of road-rash of the self”
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Page generated on 2024-02-11

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Beholden — 2362

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Beholden never quite understood play.

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She played, that was for sure. She played with her music, her sound design. She played with people’s voices, recording them for later and slicing them up into bits and bites, rebuilding them into some work of eerie or jittery or calming beauty. She played with the sounds around her house, her studio, the whole of the world. She played with acoustics. She played with spaces. She played with echoes and reverberations and dead-zones and cones of silence. The played with soundscapes and world-soundtracks.

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She hummed and sang. She played the piano, the drums, the guitar. She played the clarinet badly and the flute worse. She played with A Finger Pointing, their own little jazz trio, their own little big band. She played with her friends, jam session after jam session after jam session. She played her own sets, forking countless times over to play at however many clubs or venues. She played at The Party — several instances thereof! — running now for the last century and a half, a party that never ceased, attendees sleeping wherever, in beds or where they had fallen, with each other, alone. Beholden To The Flow Of The Crowds existed for a reason, yes?

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She played as she danced. She played with others, dragging them home for a one-night stand, a few-nights fling, a relationship that lasted a month or two, but so rarely any longer.

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And she played with Motes, too. She really did! She played with her little Dot, tickling her until she said she was going to be sick, or pretending to pick her up by the ears as the skunklet clutched at her forearms. She played dead for Motes when she grew too exhausted to keep up. She lay there, on the floor, eyes closed, breathing turned off, while her charge scampered around, leaping over her, triumphant, hollering about victories, or wept over her unalive-yet-souled body at the tragedy — oh, woe! Such tragedy! — of a fallen comrade. Less mother than cool stepdad, she played with her kid.

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But she did not understand it. She did not really get it. She rarely thought about it, but when she did, it was more baffling than it was natural.

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Beholden was not stupid. She was not an idiot. She could conceptualize things around her, and in all the many ways the rest of the clade was, she was wickedly intelligent in her own area of hyperfixation, hyperspecialization. When it came to emotions, though, when it came to instincts and base responses, she could not quite understand. It was not her fixation, her specialization.

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She did not really know why she played, because she did not really care to know why.

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She did not know why she loved, why she loved A Finger Pointing or Motes. She did not know why she loved so few others. She did not know why she felt such devotion to her boss — “not your boss” the common refrain — and her Dot in a way that she could not muster for anyone else. She never bothered to question why.

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She did not know why she rose so quickly to anger. She did not know why she and Motes fought at times. She did not know why she got so mad when she saw Motes die on stage. She did not know why, when she and Slow Hours fought, usually about Motes’s various deaths, it hurt so much. She shied away from ever trying to figure out why.

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She just knew that she played, that she loved, she got stuck in her big feelings.

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And so when she found Motes huddled in the middle of her studio, all but curled into a ball as she crouched on the floor, when she found her bloodied beat up, Beholden panicked. She kept it together long enough to help the little skunk to her room, to fork, to bed. She held herself in one piece as she told Motes time and again that she loved her. She held the panic at bay until she made her way to her studio, locked the completely soundproof door, and crumpled to the ground, screaming and wailing and sobbing. She tore holes in the couch cushions with her claws. She ripped acoustic foam from the walls. She threw the table hard enough to shatter it.

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And then, when sobs settled into simple tears and not great, heaving things, she waved her paw to unwind the tantrum. She brought into being a glass of water to set on the once more intact table, sat down on the un-torn couch, and moaned through her tears, letting the replaced acoustic foam absorb the sounds.

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When she was next able to speak, she began a sensorium message to A Finger Pointing. “Dot is overflowing, love. She–”

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“I know,” her partner interrupted. “I am here.”

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Quelling her shame, she straightened herself up as best she could, deciding not to fork away the mussed up fur or tear-stains on her cheeks, letting some of that trauma show for reasons she could not explain, and stepped back out of her studio to find A Finger Pointing pacing back and forth in the living room.

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“I came as soon as– oh, Beholden…” Her cocladist’s shoulder slumped as she trailed off, putting a halt to her pacing so that she could wrap the skunk up in a hug. “Are you okay, my dear?”

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Despite the stinging of new tears in her eyes, she nodded. “Not particularly, but I am here. How did you know that Motes was overflowing?”

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A Finger Pointing hesitated, frowned, and pulled a letter from her pocket, handing it over to the skunk. “This. I did not know that Dot was overflowing until I got here and saw her door shut tight. I was not at all surprised when you told me.”

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As Beholden read through the letter, her lips curled up into a snarl, and she could feel a low growl build in her chest. “‘I expect better’!” she muttered darkly, stamping her foot. “Jesus fucking Christ. ‘Grounded in reality’ indeed.”

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Smiling humorlessly, she nodded toward the letter. “I am assuming that this mention of a letter is what took Motes down.”

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“Took her down?” Beholden cried, then quickly tamped down the flare of anger, returning the letter to her partner. “She was covered in blood when I checked on her. Someone must have hit her hard enough to give her a bloody nose. She was all scraped up.”

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A Finger Pointing blanched stiffened for a long few seconds, then nodded. “Did you get her cleaned up?”

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“Yeah, I brought her to enough to get her to fork into her PJs, but she is out hard right now in bed.”

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She sighed, shoulders slumping. “Thank you, my love. I had assumed the last bit, at least, and have left her be. I did not wish to add to her stress at the moment.”

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Beholden nodded. “What do we do?”

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“Protect our own,” came the immediate answer. “Protect ourselves. Protect our Dot.”

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And so they did. They circled around each other, brought Dry Grass into the fold as officially as they saw fit, providing her with a house. They set up a gentle watch on Motes, set up alerts throughout the house for when her door opened from the inside, for when the bar or kitchen were entered by her. They sought out Slow Hours for a meeting seeking her premonitions, such as they were. They sought out Sasha for a meeting to confirm that there were no existential threats. They sought out Waking World for a meeting to get a better sense of Hammered Silver’s intentions.

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All the while, Beholden did her best to remain calm, or to at least tamp down expressions of overwhelming emotions. There were walks. Many walks. Many excuses to step away to the auditorium or to get fresh air or stretch her legs.

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She went always alone on her walks, pacing out along the deer trails or walking the loop of the neighborhood time and again, poking her way among the seats and catwalks of the auditorium.

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Or tried to go alone, as always there was someone willing to go with her, asking gently if she needed company, even if that company was silent, or if she needed instead to talk. Slow Hours volunteered. Unbidden volunteered. A Finger Pointing, having spent so many years, so many decades with her, did not volunteer, but did look after her with a mix of worry and understanding in her face.

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The only time she accepted the company was when Dry Grass did not so much volunteer as, wiping freshly-shed tears from her face, ask Beholden if they could go for a walk together so that she could talk. That Beholden had already slipped on her hoodie, had already drank a glass of water, was already heading towards the door suggested that this was a form of volunteering, but Dry Grass did certainly deserve the chance to talk through the position she had found herself in.

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(( A walk with Dry Grass to calm down the next morning after their meeting ))

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(( Confusion and coming to terms with Motes in the family ))

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(( Caring for A Finger Pointing ))
-(((( Pointillist sighs wistfully. “She has recorded me doing all sorts of things in my day-to-day as well. There is a recording of my heartfelt laughter turning to dire sobbing after a really rough day. She chopped it into little slivers of half-recognizable samples and haunted an entire album with it like the world’s longest “Chihuahua or Muffin” slideshow.” ))))

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(( The origin of struggling with emotions, tamping down grief in order to work with sound, ever AwDae’s thing ))

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End Of Endings — 2403

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Once upon a time there was–

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“A king?” my little readers will immediately say.

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No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time, there was a woman. She was not a fine woman, not a prize to adorn your arm or to set beside you at the head of a grand table, but a simple woman — the kind we pass on the street and imagine some plain home life for. She has a house, one might think. There are floors and walls and windows, there are tables and chairs and sofas and beds. There is a shower and a claw-footed bathtub. There is a creaky step — the eighth — that she always swears she will fix.

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We must imagine such a woman happy. We must imagine that she has friends and that she goes and drinks okay wine or maybe strange cocktails with them at the most absurd bars. We must imagine that she comes home, wobbling slightly with each step, with some other simple woman on her arm. We must imagine them kissing.

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We must imagine these things because they are not true.

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I do not know how it happened, but one cloudy day, she was asking after her friend and then her mind was turned all in on itself, was wrapped and folded three times, turned, and then wrapped and folded thrice more. Some malicious baker kneaded and kneaded and kneaded, and when next she woke up, sixteen hours and twenty three minutes later, her mind remained in some unknown, integral way tied up into knots.

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But that was three hundred years ago.

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The woman wanders the world some few times a month, stepping out into unknown nowheres and known somewheres to be seen, to be perceived as still existing. I do not know why she does this, but it is important to her that someone witness her existing. It is a ritual she follows around like a little puppy: she will not know what will happen when she first does it properly, but she hopes it will be something wonderful.

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The woman has many rituals.

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She has rituals for eating food, for feeding the vessel in which she makes her home. There is no order in which she properly consumes food, she may consume it in any order, but there is an order in which she must appreciate food. You must understand: she must do this for everything she takes into her body. She must look at it before she touches it, must touch it before she smells it, must smell it before she eats it, and before all of these she must say a prayer.

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She has rituals for getting dressed, for clothing the form with which the world sees her. She must choose a garment that fits her body and one that fits her mood. You must understand: every time she gets dressed, there is a moment of scrying into her deepest self and estimating how it is that she feels that day. And should her mood change, should those feelings shift, she will find her clothing itchy and uncomfortable, and if her form becomes not what it once was, her clothing will become uncomfortably tight or perhaps she will disappear down into the folds of fabric.

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She has rituals for entering a room, for passing through a door. She must touch the door frame beside her shoulder, must brush her fingers against the wood or stone or metal or some more abstract substance. You must understand: she has to do this for every door she walks through, and for this reason, there is a door in the house where she lives that was built by a friend of her friend that leads directly out into a city. She opens the closest door and steps out onto a concrete sidewalk lined with trees and passers by, where the sun shines bright and the air burns cold in her nostrils and the dry leaves skitter anxiously about her feet. As she steps out, she can brush her hand to the door frame.

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I do not know where these rituals come from, and perhaps some of my readers will immediately say, “OCD? Does the woman have obsessive compulsive disorder?”

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No, friend, I do not think she does. I know that there are obsessions within her, yes, and I am sure that these rituals feel compulsory, but there is something different about the woman. She is too present. She is too much herself, too human, too embodied within her vessel as it spirals out of control, too stuck in her mind as it twists in on itself. She is not struck by a disorder, she is struck by a constant overwhelm, a constant overflowing.

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The woman uploaded when she was overflowing. She lived within that overflow for years, for seven years she was overflowing, she was trapped within her mind and within the vessel of her body, and she lived as best she can as her body spiraled out of control.

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Readers, you must understand that she was in so many ways whole still!

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She campaigned for herself and for the others as damaged as her, but I think this was borne out of trauma and desperation as much as it was care for her loved ones lost and found.

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She campaigned after uploading for individual rights for uploaded minds, before they were even cladists, before forking and sensorium messages and all of the other benefits that the System has to offer.

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She was whole because she maintained — even while overflowing, I think! — so many deeply held convictions that those around her need not suffer, even if she herself did. Especially, she would say, because she herself did.

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Page generated on 2024-02-11

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