Gotosocial is fantastic, it's super lightweight and the pages look amazing. But in terms of user experience, I tried a bunch of things and I think my favorite user experience so far on the Fediverse has been Wafrn.

Having used it on their main instance for a while, it made me realize that this is what I've been looking for for a very long time without really realizing it.

A lot of the Fediverse platforms are taking a more Twitter-like approach to microblogging, whereas this is taking a more Tumblr-like approach. And maybe it's the fact that I missed out on cohost and I'm still not over that, but... I think I vastly prefer that one. That approach.

The sad part for me about this whole thing is that I can't really explain why. Because that's just the way my brain functions, I guess. But I really feel it.

#fedi #fediverse #wafrn #gotosocial #tumblr #cohost #microblog

Jotting this down: Flarians, an alien species I am making up

I have been tasked with making up an alien species for a sf/fantasy campaign. This is what I have so far.
Variously called twelfors, flarians, or often called "reefers" due to the creches their youngest and oldest live in. These are all exonyms; most flarians use their state or nation as a demonym, so when speaking of themselves as a species, when necessary they refer to themselves using an exonym.[1]

Their homeworld orbits a small, k-class red dwarf star catalogued by humans as 124 Zhou, though the majority of flarians live elsewhere, having colonized multiple other worlds some time ago. 124 "Twelve-Four" Zhou is a flare star, prone to solar storms that bathe the planet in what would nominally be very deadly radiation in not-infrequent bursts. Much of the planet's surface lifeforms have adapted with a strategy not unlike banksia, using the energy and chaos of the flares to flourish at the expense of most of them dying off in the flare and leaving seeds. Life underwater, such as in the seas, is more varied in this regard, depending on the depth it's adapted to.
Flarians generally have two arms and four legs; they are primarily bipedal, using the other two legs only as occasional support or for long periods of standing.
People who have never met flarians, but know of them, almost certainly are aware of their life cycle. The terms "infant," "child," "adult," and "senior" don't apply very well to flarians. If an outsider meets a flarian, they're almost certainly meeting a "youth," somewhat equivalent to adulthood. Infant or larval stage flarians live in creches, and are very much an r-strategy matter; like in sea turtles, most die. Infants who grow to the child/teenage stage and grow limbs for walking on land are cared for to a far, far more significant degree. Most disabilities have their origins either in genetics or from the conditions of the creche. There are differing cultural notions of how to approach this, including augmentation toward a mean level of ability, or simply having an unusually wide cultural expectation of what constitutes able. In the latter case, such societies tend to be very accessible, and not only physically. Such societies are also more easily able to incorporate members of other species, as differences of abilities are already normalized and accounted for as best they can.
The most common cause of disability is various forms of water pollution. The politics of such matters should be familiar to the reader. This is part of why many creches are moved out of the ocean and into other, smaller environments. The quality of these artificial waters and their conditions varies somewhat, depending on means, needs, and motives.
The child stage is a time when they learn the basics of their cultures and is generally when schooling takes place. During that time, flarian hind legs grow bigger and stronger, and the hips and back develop to make them nearly obligate bipeds. Once they have reached full physical maturity, growing in size and usually in lower body strength and endurance, they become what could reasonably be called adults, which is the "youth" stage.
Flarians have a final life stage where they go into a chrysalis, and most of their body turns into a creature that resembles a tunicate. They have a whole set of concepts around the "soul," which is the English word that is closest to how they refer to their blood. ("Internal sea" is pretty clunky, and misses some spiritual nuances.) The final stage is mindless; while flarians may talk to them, and there are beliefs about what happens to the mind, the body has changed shape and hollowed out, and its "soul" has joined the wider seasoul, mingling generally with the souls of other sessiles in the creche. (There is no scientific basis for believing the blood of a flarian carries thoughts and minds, and how a given flarian belief system talks about blood varies as well.)
This sessile stage is also sexual maturity; while younger motile "youths" may engage in play with others, especially with other species, and are functionally what one might call adults in another species, there is no sexual maturity without becoming what amounts to a sea sponge, so the equivalent to teenage years, adulthood, physical maturity and senescence of a sort, and decades-long careers all come before the age when mating and having children occurs.
One result is that flarians are also known for frequently having a rather odd bimboification kink. It's far from universal, but becoming a mindless breeding creature with sufficient intelligence and mindfulness to enjoy it is an appealing fantasy for some.
Youths sometimes put off becoming sessile, perhaps because of their career, the caretaking of a child, or sometimes personal preference. Understandably, some youths also have a fear of sessility, which is also the end of mindfulness in flarians. Most do not fear sessility, and the fear can be symptomatic of mental illness. Illness or not, that fear has driven some social movements toward actions and policies intended to eliminate the death of the mind. A sessile body is too simple to support a nervous system, much less a mind. One such social movement, Consciousers, intends to utterly remove the brain from infant-aged flarians and replace it with a growing, adaptive artificial intelligence, which might be joined with the sessile form in the creche. The research is not far along in this regard, and it is not a commonly high priority, and many flarians are horrified by the idea, and the movement is sometimes allied with technocratic conservative movements in other, extraspecies cultures.
In terms of general beliefs, the mingling of the internal sea with that of all the other flarians of the creche and of history, or at least with an immediate local sea of an artificial environment, is identified with the dissolution of the mind. Making a mind that has no part in that sea is not an entirely popular idea.
Choosing where to go once sessile is not exactly treated like end of life care; it is an advance directive, but is seldom treated as funerary. Sessile flarians in fact may live thousands and thousands of years. Talking to them may be akin to talking to a house plant, and certain things might be mourned, but by many flarian standards they aren't dead.
Some bodily alterations remain a part of sessile flarians. While augments usually cease to even be attached as the body becomes simple and hollow, tattoos and similar body modifications generally remain discernible, and part of flarian body art is planning for the sessile stage.
Flarian marriages vary in number, but if married flarians become sessile, they usually wish to go to the same local creche or family creche. Marriages into other places, moving to other cities or planets or countries, can complicate these plans. Likewise, the sessility chrysalis can have mishaps or strangeness, including (rarely) bifurcation. In some cases, the actual death of a flarian is handled by simply taking some portion of their blood and releasing it into the creche that seems most appropriate, or even multiple creches. In the dominant culture the main character was born into, intermarriage between states or nations was encouraged; theoretically, it was thought to make it harder to go to war or create conflict. In practice, the main effect of this is that damaging a creche in an act of violence is considered a very heinous war crime. It also helps avoid the equivalents of Hapsburg jaws.
Sessile flarians have numerous sexes, not dissimilar to Earthly mushrooms. What a youth's eventual sex will be is often unknown, as it is not as simple a thing to define as simply a set of chromosomes. (Flarians do have genetic material, but it is not DNA per se, and their genes are not encoded on chromosomes quite like Earth creatures' are. The molecules and structure differ meaningfully. I will not explain further, but those genes are only part of what defines a sessile flarian's sex and sexual characteristics.)
One sessile sex translates to "simply extant," and produces no nutrients for others nor takes part in mating. Some sessile sexes only produce nutrients for infants; some only mate; most strike some balance; and some have morphology that's advantageous in some environmental conditions, such as defensibility.
Some cultures like to keep trinkets made from the bodily fluids of ancestors. Some think that's a terrible idea and complicates the soul's transition and metamorphosis. It is common for those who keep trinkets to speak to them when troubled, and to ask for help with specific known strengths the flarians whose material is encapsulated were good at. Often these ancestors are alive as sessiles somewhere. In some cases, sessiles are kept in large tanks in small numbers, to keep a family close with their sessile members, or to facilitate travel, whether on a planet's surface or in space or to other planets.
On the subject of blood, flarians have two vascular systems, one for carrying oxygen and the other for carrying most nutrients. (Some nutrients are in both systems, and some are in the same system as is used for oxygenation.) They have a single, complex heart. Blood transfusions are a thing, and while there are some subcultures that get a little finicky about the idea, and some social movements which believe the internal sea should remain Pure, mostly blood banks exist, are helpful and necessary, and people in that sense mingle souls without hesitation. Bleeding to death is the soul leaving the body improperly and tragically, with a long journey before it has any chance of joining the greater sea.
Pilgrimages are common, both on a planet and to other planets, and are often not religious at all. They're treated a bit like visiting grandparents, even if the grandparents (that is, the community of sessile elders) is long gone. In spiritual peoples, this often accompanies a belief that the memories and mind of the motile stages lives on in some manner on a non-physical plane.

[1] Usually, if they aren't talking about the immediate culture they're from, and are referring to a mixed group of individuals, they just call them "people," which can be ambiguous when referring to matters such as medical needs; while generally one's home state or nationality is used in place of that term, it can be necessary to be more specific. (This can vary, and is all true only of the dominant languages spoken by most spacefaring flarians; some languages do have species-level endonyms, but as the languages they study to speak with others all do not have native endonyms for flarians as a whole, flarian has become the commonly accepted term.)

Originally posted to Cohost @macksting

Full disclosure, this is gonna be fairly stream-of-consciousness, and is directly reposted from a rant I said in a venting channel. I genuinely don't think any of these takes are dogshit, but am prepared to be called out for dogshit takes from this because I in fact did not carefully think this through. There are also spoilers for RoboCop (1987) and Us (2019), which I can't figure out how to conceal except by warning you now.

Compared to everything else on my mind, it's really very minor, but I suppose after a rough day like today, it's no surprise I'd be thinking about it:

If it weren't so difficult, I don't think semantically I'd bother saying I'm not human. My feelings of kinship with machines, with robots and automata, including with unintelligent machines, wouldn't be so strong if I weren't going through some shit all my life.

It's kind of incredible to me, when I think about it, that there are folks who look at me as if I were unreal, even inhuman, just for having not grown up in the socio-economic situation they did.

It's a minor point, really, compared to all the other ways people are defined or described as inhuman, but that's kind of my point. The concept of human that most folks have is weirdly tight, just this small, rigid archetype with countless exceptions that are, to them, off-model.
It's kind of weird for me to be going on about this, in a way, but like… the question of what is human, with the answer being "more than you think, and yet easily taken away unjustly," comes up a lot in the media I'm fond of. I'm rewatching RoboCop, as I am wont to do, and a making-of I saw pointed out that something that Weller did for the character, demanded for the character in fact, was moving with a dancer's precision. If RoboCop, if Murphy the robocop, moved like most folks do, he wouldn't be uncanny.

That's it, isn't it. There's human, and then there's uncanny.

That comes up in Us, too. Red, Adelaide's double, is a dancer, and uses those same motions, standing on point, pivoting, isolations, etc., beautifully. And it is so beautiful. But she is so uncanny. And it's for the same purpose. Us is in fact incredibly direct about it. Both are, in a way. These are dehumanized characters, and the narrative is sympathetic whether it casts them as protagonist or antagonist.

(Shoutout to Lupita Nyong'o, whose acting in the roles of Adelaide and Red was absolutely captivating, and whose casting was absolutely perfect. All the actors in that film were amazing, the direction and writing were enthralling, and the visual metaphors and implicit historical references are not talked about enough. Folks are sleeping on this entire movie.)

I'm human, but I'm uncanny, so I am often dehumanized.

Well… I actually tend not to call myself human. It's not worth the trouble.

(At this point I would like to bring up a fascinating term, "Voidpunk." To quote a reddit community's description of voidpunk,

[blockquote] Voidpunk is a subculture for those who have been dehumanized to reclaim their dehumanization. Many are told that all humans experience romantic and/or sexual attraction, are binary cisgender, are neurotypical, are white etc. This subculture is for those who don't match that criteria of humanity and don't want to match it.
This may not be helpful or necessary for everyone, but I've had a few folks thank me for bringing the concept to their attention, and it seems relevant here.)[/blockquote]

Semantically it is a very personal thing, I don't expect anyone else to adhere to it. If I call myself inhuman, it's to breathe a sigh of relief, y'know? It's to worry less. It's to give myself permission not to meet expectations.

Maybe that's part of why I get bone-deep chills when I encounter antisemitism. It's not about me, but dehumanization is something I directly experience, so it doesn't take much imagination to see how it plays out, how it applies. And, of course, if it happens to me (not antisemitism but dehumanization), generally it's not that big a deal; it's what happens to others that hurts most.

I've thought about that sometimes, that unhealthy traumatized mindset that I sum up by saying, "if someone else falls down the stairs, it's a tragedy. If I do, it's a comedy." I think part of it is, I live with me. I live inside me. So I know what I can handle, and also know that if I can't handle it, that's okay too. Other people, I cannot know how they feel, I cannot know their limits. To me their pain is limitless, their durability unclear and potentially nil. There's no sense of relief, of "it's okay, I'm still here," because I do not know what they can handle. I have heard it said that laughter is a relief, a sign that everything's actually fine; that it often comes from a moment's distress or wrongness, that is responded to with the knowledge that no harm will come of it. A fellow monkey falls out of a tree. We worry. The monkey gets up and walks it off; we laugh because they're okay. (Sometimes, it is that we laugh because they aren't okay, but it happened to someone else, so it'll be okay for us. That's kind of horrible, but demonstrates the concept nevertheless.)

The last time I watched Us with somebody, I had to hold my tongue when they, not knowing the big reveals of the story, began theorizing that the Tethered weren't human, including Red herself. That Red is simply Tethered by circumstance rather than birth is the point. It's why there's that incredibly raw exchange: "What are you people?" "We're Americans." (Which is a whole fascinating conversation all its own; that's not liberation. It's a good point about rights unjustly denied, but -- I'm getting off the subject here.)

It's shocking how little it takes to be uncanny.

Me, performing humanity:
![media-1]
[ID: Scene from RoboCop. Murphy as RoboCop holds a drill. Looking away from Lewis as he prepares to remove his damaged exterior armor, he says to her, "You may not like what you're about to see." /end ID]

It's extremely significant to me that, as we are sold that these uncanny characters are in fact human, and deserving of human dignities that they are denied unjustly, they do not stop moving like dancers. They continue to isolate, to pivot, to move beautifully. When RoboCop realizes he is Murphy, even though he cannot remember who Murphy was, he does not suddenly, magically begin to move fluidly like Lewis and other humans do. He still moves with a dancer's grace, even after much of his armor is removed and his tightly stretched human face becomes the face people see.

Likewise, Red never exactly stops moving with a dancer's grace. It's far more deliberate on her part, not the result of her body being a prosthesis but rather because she is an artist, so it comes and goes, but she never stops being uncanny.

It would have really undermined the rehumanization of these characters if, upon their repatriation to humanity in the viewer's eyes, they suddenly became reliably fluid, no longer uncanny, no longer strange. In the end, they still move like dancers, with uncanny precision and isolation of motion, one voluntarily and one involuntarily.

I don't exactly know where I'm going with this. It's entirely possible I've gone out of my lane, which would not be ideal nor would it be my intention.

There's a whole unwritten chapter of this about Amalthea the unicorn in The Last Unicorn, by the way, about how her uncanniness gave her away to King Haggard and captivated Prince Lir, and how she became less uncanny as she lost more of herself to the enchantment of a human seeming. Or to the voices we put on when working at call centers, to warp ourselves into something acceptable to people on the other end of the phone line, a phenomenon apparently with overlap with White Voice, and played with to create a distressing, uncanny effect in Sorry To Bother You. I'm white, and I still had to warp my way of speaking in strange ways in that job, and that kind of masking makes me feel genuinely nauseous, as does when I see alienation that produces a self-hatred of one's natural body or of harmless distinctions, like when a friend of mine talked about their mother getting rhinoplasty decades ago to make her Persian nose more white because it was fashionable and considered desirable at the time.

A lot of Sorry To Bother You made me nauseous, actually. The second half was almost a relief, as it brought the satire around to its natural absurd conclusions.

(By the way, don't spare me such things; I can't fight what I can't see, and I can tank a little nausea if it helps me identify what needs destroyed.)

Honestly, other than encouraging everyone to read The Murderbot Diaries, particularly the first (and sufficiently standalone) novella "All Systems Red," I think I've said more than I should on this subject, so I'll close here by saying that my lovely wife took ballet when she was younger, and watching her in a boffer fight pivoting and gracefully flowingly dodging and parrying was always such a joy. She remains the light of my life, and always shall be.

A guy on tiktok just reinvented #lovehonk like from #Cohost

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8DyVYtr/

When the priest arrives to perform the exorcism, but the demon has started dating your polycule.

Eggbug, but what if they wanted to sell you pastries.

#eggbug #cohost

love that people will never forget that website or its silly mascot

https://bsky.app/profile/adelair.cool/post/3m3ikbrqmpk25

#cohost #eggbug

my contribution to the cohost legacy is that i will never stop referring to funnyposting as "chosting". its just such a fun word to say.

#cohost #meta