voxel | Reading

This is the Dreamwidth account of Machina - a very-human alterhuman plural system of three people, plus visitors - and it's a hub to keep and link to our personal identity essays and journaling.

We all prefer to be called by our first names if being spoken about individually, but if you need to refer to all of us together, Machina's the way to go - it's one of our (several, disparate) last names, and it's the funniest one to call us by.

We're all adults, so consider this a blanket warning that our writings will likely contain strong language, which we often use amongst ourselves, and the occasional frank discussion of bodies, sexuality, and kink as it relates to our lives. Writing that explicitly discusses sexuality or kink is labeled as (18+) in the title.

All sensitive content (e.g. violence, abuse, existential dread) that we're aware of is warned for in a Content Warning paragraph before the body of the post, but feel free to contact us if you noticed that we let something slip!

System Members

Max (he/they) - Hey! I'm a wereraptor, AKA a human guy who's also a Velociraptor and sometimes the raptor will be a very annoying bird in my general direction. Check out my therianthropy blog if you want to hear more about that!

Jude (they/them) - Hi! I'm a human android who's also like a very nervous dog who needs so much stimulation. I do bite, but mostly it's for fun.

Gavin (he/him) - I'm the token Normal Human Guy, No Added Flavors, but I have a lot to say about it so I'm sticking around. That, and these bastards would miss me.

You can find most of our personal essays crossposted to our system Tumblr blog or our personal website.

Thanks to Dreamwidth's privacy features, this account will contain more personal writing that isn't posted to other websites - made available to view via requesting access, which we grant at our discretion.

lb_lee

Rogan: got my money from itch.io, which is a weight off my mind! Whew.

There’s been a big pushback against payment processors for this. We ourself are gearing up to send angry letters. If you want to know more about how/who to call, scripts to follow, and ways to badger payment processors of extralegally deciding what you can buy/sell on the Internet, check out https://yellat.money/ and https://stop-paypros.neocities.org/

These links have stuff for non-Americans too! I imagine you guys are EVEN MADDER about a few American companies saying what you can or can’t buy in your own country! Let’s give ‘em merry hell! It worked for the Australian Biblebangers, let’s see if it works for us!

strange_aeons_tumblr_feed

https://strange-aeons.tumblr.com/post/791635425494204416

poetry-written-in-blood:

• On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated. This is the match in the powder keg that ignites World War I.
• Soldiers living and dying in horrific conditions and in close proximity to one another means that diseases spread very quickly.
• One German soldier in particular contracts jaundice and is removed from the battlefield. This soldier is Conrad Veidt.
• Veidt is permitted to act in the army theatre until his condition improves and he is fit to return to battle.
• In 1917 he is deemed unfit to serve and is discharged from the German army.
• Conrad Veidt returns to the theatre and goes on to have an illustrious career on both stage and screen, gaining stardom by playing major roles in pictures such as Different From the Others (1919), the first pro-gay film known to exist, with Veidt as the lead; and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), widely regarded to be the first true horror film, with Veidt as a major antagonist under the villain’s control. He is one of few silent film stars whose careers last through the advent of sound.
• In the late 1920s, Veidt travels to the United States to star in a few films for Universal Pictures. One of these films is The Man Who Laughs (1928), in which he plays Gwynplaine, the titular Laughing Man, who was surgically disfigured as a child to set his mouth in a permanent grin. This film is adapted from Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel, L’Homme qui rit.
• On April 25, 1940, the Joker makes his first appearance in the debut issue of the comic book Batman. It is generally accepted that the visual design of the Joker is based directly on Conrad Veidt’s appearance as Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928). This is supported by the Joker’s creators, although their accounts of the Joker’s creation differ.
• The Joker goes on to become one of the most popular characters of all time, joining the ranks of characters of myth, legend, literature, and modern media whose stories will likely be retold and remembered until the sands of time have buried the bones of humanity forever.
• Enter tumblr user @the-muppet-joker (aka Croaker), who not only kins (mainly) the Joker and Kermit the Frog, but is also in a relationship with both of them.
• Tumblr user and YouTuber @strange-aeons makes a video delving into the twisted mind (and blog) of the Croaker.
• Croaker is angered by this, and so they schedule a duel to the death at @dashcon-two.
• They duel. Strange emerges victorious and is knighted by the Ball Pit Queen. Croaker dies and the funeral process is speedrunned with a heartfelt rendition of “Man or Muppet” performed by The Musical InterDudes. The singers held signs with individual letters spelling “KUNG POW PENIS”.

TL,DR: The Croaker owes his existence to jaundice and the 1914 assassination of an Austro-Hungarian noble.
And also Victor Hugo.

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strange_aeons_tumblr_feed

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it-was-you-all-the-way-down:

me when i need something, anything to get through this superhell

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strange_aeons_tumblr_feed

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witchrealms:

(x)

https://strange-aeons.tumblr.com/post/791634852716888064

interstellersystem_feed

https://interstellarsystem.tumblr.com/post/791625926865764352

We can mainly talk for ourselves here, so others are entirely free to weigh in.

For us (and many others we know), involuntarily getting a fictive from a source or character you love can be a source of comfort--not even specifically for coping with trauma, but just.. In general? I believe (though someone can correct me if I'm wrong) that characters from sources someone is familiar with and feels is a safe escape/comfort area/etc are one of the more common reasonings behind fictives in traumagenic systems. Though obviously not exclusive to them either.

Sometimes it happens just because the brain was already forming someone, you happen to be hyperfixated on a show/game/book at the time and that's what the fragments of a new headmate latch onto. Maybe you've had fragments of an identity floating around in there for a while with no real "shape" to speak of, but a character from a show matches what is there and suddenly, the headmate is a fully formed fictive.

I think in general... Characters that:

Are from something we love and therefore brings comfort and familiarity
Are relatable in some way and therefore can be something to "project" onto
Are something our brain, body or life needs or desires (maybe a safe person, maybe someone with more confidence, maybe someone who looks how we'd want to look, maybe someone who's more apathetic and stoic)
Have experienced similar life events to us
Have any "parallels" we can see between our lives and theirs
Are similar to other fictives we've gained
Are the type of people we'd like to be friends with/have in our life

Are more likely to be introjected, for us personally. To us this doesn't mean all too much though--it doesn't really matter why someone is here--they're here now, and they aren't held to any standard of fulfilling their cause of joining. But these things contribute overall. And being hyperfixated on a source tends to give you more insight and deeper appreciation of characters, so you notice these things more often.

Sometimes it happens for no real... discernable reason at all, though. Are they of any particular origin? Trauma? Comfort? Spirituality? It can be hard to tell and honestly we'd argue that you usually can't tell exactly why someone ended up in a system. It's up to personal belief in the end.

As for the dormancy.... We're not sure. We've been told "because you don't need them anymore" before by others, but we don't like that framework--it's very host-centric (and we don't even HAVE a host) and feels overly medicalised. Our system doesn't experience headmates going dormant often, but we have cycles of fronters where over time, frontrunners are replaced by others. It's.. Upsetting, honestly--we can't control it. It's one of the things we struggle with a lot as a system--adapting to the ever-changing roster of people who live our life and trying not to be sad about the people before who don't get to front as often anymore. So unfortunately, we struggle with something similar ourselves and can't offer help with that.

Really wishing you& the best of luck. Hope this offers some sort of insight, and if not, you can find some.

https://interstellarsystem.tumblr.com/post/791625926865764352

dreamdragon

There is half a dozen question when it comes to dream related alterhumanity. Namely, when one has a dream shift (where you are transformed during or already while within a lucid dream, to be more aligned with or as your ‘type), the question is usually “does that mean something? Is that my kintype/fictotype/theriotype?”

What that question is asking - am I dreaming about being myself, am I getting the confirmation that is indeed what I should identify as.

This is with the assumption that dreams can tell you exactly what you need to know.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Location: In the nest

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3127/

Historians: Contemporaneous documentation of the initial events is often sparse, and in fact people often get testy and uncooperative when we urge better documentation for the historical record.

https://xkcd.com/3127/

schneefink

A few weeks ago I was looking for another podcast to listen to and saw a rec for Homestuck made this world: "a show where two cultural critics, one an old Homestuck fan and the other a new reader, work through the landmark multimedia webcomic and discuss it with the intent to critically analyze and contextualize it and its effects on the world with a blend of media theory, game studies, and internet history." I just finished episode 7 part 3 and I've been enjoying it a lot. Interesting, and lots of nostalgia too. I look forward to them getting to the parts where I stopped reading, I don't exactly remember where that was.
As a bonus, I really enjoyed my friends' reaction when finding out about it: Homestuck? In 2025??! xD

So the timing of finding out about the planned animated pilot was especially funny. The trailer is... fine, I guess? I feel fairly neutral about the trailer itself. I think you could probably make a perfectly average, decent, maybe even good pilot (or even season 1, maybe.) But so much of what made Homestuck special relied on its medium and I think any adaption to another medium will inevitably fall short. And that's not even mentioning the scale problem.
It'll be made by the creators of Hellaverse, which I haven't seen but I have friends who are big fans, I'll have to find out if they were Homestuck fans too and either way it'll be funny.

(The announcement coming shortly after the Unofficial Homestuck Collection was taken down because of legal issues and people including Hussie being dicks might have been a coincidence or not, but I'm curious if there'll be an actual good way to reread the webcomic in (close to) its original form by the time the pilot comes out. Not that I want to, thankfully, the podcast helps with that.)

dreamdragon

A while ago Beast got curious when Ryuu was thinking of archetrope, while the memories of reading favorite source fanfic is still fresh. As we often share thoughts simultaneously, Beast got intrigued by the notion of having a Kurama archetrope, or something to that nature.

Whilst this is going on, we are still in the process of figuring out all the details of our Digimon vaguelinktype.

Perhaps it is our medianhood, perhaps it is simply how intertwined our identities are—Ryuu had whined to me about not having a matching Gigadramon to their Megadramon on our evolution line, as they like the balance of things. Beast was not feeling particularly connected to Gigadramon. It was quickly resolved, as I had took up the Gigadramon evolution to my side of lines, I am Ryuu’s half after all.

Feeling the mood to tease, I called them otouto for their whining. Ryuu argues that by technicality, I should be the younger one. A image of Itachi and Sasuke went through our mind, Ryuu joked about me having a Sasuke vibe.

We paused, looking at each other.

It bears a pondering to see if I have any sort of connection to Uchiha Sasuke, considering my colors match his theme, while Ryuu and I are a balancing duo.

Current Mood: contemplative

who_is_page

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

strange_aeons_tumblr_feed

https://strange-aeons.tumblr.com/post/791589064462811136

cuccoway:

What the fuck is mcr about

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do-you-have-a-flag:

spaghetti

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strange_aeons_tumblr_feed

https://strange-aeons.tumblr.com/post/791588721737826304

lipglossgerard:

lipglossgerard:
lipglossgerard:
Imagine ur the mayor of belleville new jersey and there is this band that comes from new jersey and maybe u don’t quite get them or like are kinda familiar with them but only on a surface level. But theyre super popular and their hometown is belleville so like obviously you wanna reward them for being so successful right, so you decide to give them the key to the city when the come home to play a show in new jersey on their new tour. So like you go to this show and then theyre all dressed up and roleplaying doing this like european fascist dictatorship thing and youre watching the lead singer do all this crazy shit and then theyre sat there eating fucking spaghetti while performing and you wonder if youve made the right decision but like you decide to give them all the key anyway bc ur already there and its like too late to back out now or whatever and then when youre doing the handover thing the same lead singer, without breaking character, all while maintaining a super bad european accent is like. here take some wheat and fish from this place i made up. Like youre just standing there in this fever dream of a key ceremony, bewildered and confused and holding a giant fish. Like. ????
Yeah this is MCR. Would you like to know more? It was a real fish too, and it was huge and we know it was real because the mayor told us it stank. Oh yeah and gerard was eating spapghetti while reading a book about quantum physics to a puppet called The Gentleman. And there is also a clown that blows up but that happens at every show.
AND YOURE A REPUBLICAN!??!?!!?!

https://strange-aeons.tumblr.com/post/791588721737826304

liondrakes

Imagine that you're a student. You go to a nice school, but the school is known for its controversies. These controversies get a lot of people hurt, including the students. You've witnessed and dealt with things that a teenager normally shouldn't have. A classmate dies. Multiple classmates die. Your school is put on lockdown because it’s been targeted. You and your friends are supposed to carry on like none of it happened. You hardly have a moment to grieve before the cycle repeats, and it's taking a toll on you. You fall into the wrong (or right?) crowd. Your trust in the adults and authorities around you is reduced to zero. Most of all, you’ve grown rebellious. You're not a bad kid, you tell yourself. You say it not out of comfort but out of defiance. You know you don’t deserve what you’ve been given, but life seems to work against you at every chance it gets. The whole world feels out of your grasp, but you're not helpless. You refuse to be helpless. So what do you in a world that doesn't give a shit about you? You get up and do something about it.

Now, imagine you've made your mark. You gain a reputation among your peers. You're a menace to society in the best way. Maybe the worst way, too. But as the years go by, there's no trace of you. You're not shown in the yearbooks. You're not listed as an alumni. There's no reference of your existence whatsoever. It's like you weren't even there.

That's what it's like for me, a non-canonical character from Marvel Comics. I'm not an original character (OC) nor am I a self-insert of sorts. I’m a member of Homo sapiens superior (mutants), but not in the general sense. I’m aware of this because of how different this fictotype feels compared to experiences where my fictionhood ends at the species. I‘m someone who was a consistent part of my source's narrative. I am an X-Man, and I come from a specific era of X-Men comics. My fictomere is New X-Men, specifically Vol. 2/Academy X. Published in the early 2000s, this series geared its focus around a young generation of mutants. My fictomere bounces off of the original New X-Men run, which focused on our teachers and mentors. You'll likely recognize them more than us. Cyclops, Wolverine, White Queen, Beast, etc.— you know ‘em! That said, they're not my class. I remember my class clear as day. Prodigy, Hellion, Surge, Dust, Wind Dancer, Icarus, Gentle, those goddamn Stepford Cuckoos— these kids were my friends. Well, some of them were my friends. My memories are foggy, to say the least. I remember my code name, my friendships, my plurality in that world, and my attendance at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. What I don't remember is the events that happened in the comics associated with my fictomere.

( Lookin' for adventure? Click here! )

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Morning Glow (Ft. Nicholas Mangiafico) - Bomb Rush Cyberfunk OST

interstellersystem_feed

https://interstellarsystem.tumblr.com/post/791535392204750848

infinite-curses:

More people should really at least consider otherlinking to be a thing they themselves can do. The community is quiet and the tags tend to be overrun with crossposting, but I think it’d be a lot louder if people actually considered it as a genuine possibility a little more often. ‘Linking is usually seen as an afterthought you tack onto the end of a list of alterhuman terms and not usually discussed too much more than that from what we can see. Which is sad because it really can be beneficial and it absolutely has a place in the broader alterhuman community.
You really want to be an animal, or your favourite character, but you know you’re not? You can do that–you can just.. become them.
You have a hearttype but it feels kinda weird and it feels like you should have been that thing, but you’re not? You could always 'link it if you’re dysphoric about not being that thing.
You have something that was–or you thought was–a kintype, but now it’s not, and you miss it? Just link it back into yourself.
You think [thing] is really cool and it’d be cool to be one? You can!
You want to incorporate an aesthetic of [thing] into your identity and it’d work best if you just became that thing? That’s absolutely a thing you can do.
You think it’d be fun to identify as something other than what your body is? You can make that happen.
Being [thing] would help with something in your life? Go ahead, you can do that.
You can mold your own sense of self an identity however you see fit, and that’s really cool. Honestly it comes across as a power move. You get to make your own self, no matter what came before it.

https://interstellarsystem.tumblr.com/post/791535392204750848

schneefink

Getting some

battleshipex recs out before the anon phase ends soon.

I got two great gifts:

Next Time, Hermitcraft
0.6k, Etho & Decked Out 2
Summary: Prickles made it to the new season. Someone else didn’t.
The worldbuilding in this is fantastic, and I also love Etho here. Rusty <3

The Dead Hills, Hermitcraft
0.9k, Joe Hills/ZombieCleo, fantasy AU
Summary: Prince Joe of the Hills travels to meet his new spouse, Cleo the Zombie Queen
Great Joe voice, very him, and a very fun scenario.

And I have only read a small fraction of the other works in the collection, but under the cut are recs for some I especially enjoyed.
11 fics: Life Series, Dungeon Meshi, Naruto, Murderbot Diaries, Cthulhu/Taskmaster, Star Trek, Pirates of the Caribbean, Hermitcraft, Nirvana in Fire, Dream SMP
5 artpieces: original work, Murderbot Diaries, Spirit, Pokémon, Temeraire

( 15 fanworks )

mackerelgray

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on August 8th, 2024.

A vent piece.

Transcript:

( Read more... )

dinocanid

Pup felt sick. Really sick.

Attempting to move turned his stomach, so for his own sake he tried to stay as still as possible. He couldn't even make a sound loud enough to reach another room, the slightest movement felt too risky.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed, he found himself dozing off from the stillness. He felt slightly better, but also as if the illness could reactivate he wasn't careful. After long enough, he heard the front door opening and the sound of the boys' chatter as they returned home. He let out the best bark he could, which caught their attention and brought them into the next room.

"Pup!" "Puppy!" They both called out.

The two of them rushed to his side, where Pup laid listlessly on the floor. He groaned, not daring to move, and the boys pet him comfortingly.

"Dad!", Sans called, rushing into another room.

Gaster appeared not too long after, following his son into the room. His eye-lights scanned over Pup thoroughly as he gently examined him.

"What's going on, Pup?", asked Gaster.

"My stomach feels sick...", Pup managed to respond.

"Hmm... Give me a moment," Gaster says, leaving the room for a moment before he returned with a medicine bottle.

The medicine tasted foul, but if he said it would help then he was grateful for it. Pup's head was also propped up on a considerable stack of pillows.

"It's nothing serious, although when he's better I'll have to see what caused this... He should be fine in a few hours, or at least by the end of the day. You two have to let him rest, understand?"

They nodded, and their father returned to his study to work. The whole time after, Papyrus hadn't stopped petting him. Endearing, but a bit much.

"Don't pet him too much, Dad said we had to let him rest," Sans reminded.

"Oh..." Papyrus replied disappointedly. He paused for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, before perking up. "Puppy, can I read to you?"

Pup wagged the tip of his tail against the carpet; it was the most he could comfortably manage.

"Ok! I'll be right back!"

Pup didn't pay much attention to the story. He was already tired, and listening to the reading caused him to drift closer and closer to sleep.

The sickness was gone by the time he woke up again, the room was quiet aside from the soft sound of sleeping. The boys had both fallen asleep snuggled into his fur.

interstellersystem_feed

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artisticdysfunction:

actually.
hey when someone is describing how their system functions, you should probably know how they feel about it BEFORE you start saying youre sorry and sending your sympathy.
i dont care if they split a lot, if there’s a lot of dormancy or system resets, if they have thousands of alters, i don’t care.
you should learn if that’s a bad thing for them, instead of assuming it’s a bad thing and expressing your sympathy.
i know people have good intentions when they do this. it still makes people feel like their system functions are inherently shameful.

https://interstellarsystem.tumblr.com/post/791444817587650560