eevee

turns out ren'py collapses runs of whitespace into a single space

so not only is it eating all my double-spacing between sentences, but it's eating it so early that i can't even use the double-spaces to detect sentences, and i am gonna have to be real fuckin creative to fix it

gif today

i don't have a full thought here but i'm thinking about the particular subculture that describes themselves in what you might call "carrd form", which is a list of such things as

• triggers
• mental illnesses
• characters they kin

and it was that last one in particular that made a thread start to form in my head, because i've only ever seen this as a list of characters — not a paragraph about what they mean personally or why they are such a strong fixture of identification, just "i kin them", where even the word "kin" seems to mean something different to everyone who uses it. i'm ancient enough to remember when it meant people who believe they have the literal soul of a dragon or fae or similar creature, believe in the sort of way that waves off the many questions that raises as not being relevant to the core idea, which is confusing to me but perhaps reflects a clarity of intention i can respect; on the other hand i don't think too many people are asserting they have the literal soul of elsa frozen, but they certainly intend to convey something, and exactly what that is seems to elude me

so what we have on its face is a list of consumptions, a set of well-known figures from well-known intellectual property franchises, silhouettes of personalities that were designed to be likeable and relatable and whose brands have been fully bought into

but it tells me just as much as telling me you're bipolar or can't handle photos of eye contact; it's a vague blob on the periphery, a category you fit into that might as well be the size of a horoscope. (is this a warning or a proud declaration? both are offered up with the emotional weight of a bullet point)

maybe that's the thing though; maybe it's not a new hyper-consumerist tendency to want to reduce ourselves to a short list of adjectives, maybe it's just the universal desire to be part of something, to find a group small enough that it's meaningful but large enough that we might encounter someone else in it, whether that group is capricorns or INFJs or seasonal depression or jimmy neutron kins. imagine if everyone who's into horoscopes and star signs found out that they were all allowed to make up their own star signs, that it is in fact all made up, that it is the ghosts of the long dead looking up at an arbitrary assortment of twinkling dots and passing the time by trying to find ones that roughly trace out something like a crab, and that you're also allowed to do that for any creature you like and it's no more right or wrong, only less familiar. maybe this is just deviantart likes/dislikes on your ref sheet but as passed through the strange mid-10s tumblr cultural lens where everything was judged on its validity and so you couldn't just have a personality, you had to have a named Thing and argue for its legitimacy so that your peers would not only respect it but consider it a form of bigotry for others to not like you

but maybe also we would know ourselves better if we worried less about external reference points and more about internal landmarks; if we described ourselves less as three adjectives meant to hint at the shape of our inner world and more in terms of the impact we have and aspire to have on the outer one

maybe we should see ourselves as ongoing stories, not a set of ad targeting keywords

and i don't know i'm not trying to pick on anyone here, just trying to get a feel for the shape of the world, because i've had so many moments where i've seen someone describe themselves in a way that seems incredibly specific but which feels like it tells me nothing about them, and each of these moments is its own twinkling dot in the vast expanse of the human experience and i too am just trying to find a crab

i'm no longer on my phone at 5am so now i can amend all the stuff i fucked up

thanks everyone for being thoughtful — i'm well aware this is the sort of thing where i'm prone to putting my foot in my mouth because all i've got to work with in here is a massive jumble of vibes and half-formed thoughts with no obvious place to cleave it off, and trying to put it into words is a process that feels a lot like trying to pull a clump of my hair out of the sink and then sell it as a wig

i guess this post sounded like it was all about kinning but it really wasn't; kinning was the concrete thing that led me off into the wilderness a bit. i'm not trying to like, stop anyone from kinning or whatever. do the things you like. with the obvious caveats.

it's actually about a certain kind of unsettling feeling i get when it seems like someone is trying to communicate something very important about themselves to me, and i have no idea what it is. and not only do i not know what it is, but i don't have even an inkling as to how i could've possibly guessed what it is. i thought we were speaking the same language but all of a sudden we aren't. this is one of a handful of ways that i've felt words stop working, and i don't like when words stop working. i think words are very important in fact.

kinning only happened to lead me here because it stands out to me as distinctly ambiguous. it feels like other kinds of personality categories — astrological signs, chinese zodiac, (sigh) hogwarts houses — except that those are finite and disjoint whereas the set of fictional characters is unbounded and highly intersective, where intersective is a word i just made up that means intersects a lot. because individual characters are (imitations of) people, and people have a lot of stuff to them. maybe when you say "kin" you only have half their traits in mind, or only a handful, or even one specific thing that resonated with you but that may not stand out to anyone else. maybe you have something in mind that isn't even part of the character but was conjured by fandom! i have no idea. like if someone says they kin donnie darko then my first thought is ok you must have picked him for a specific reason, and that seems like it would be the most distinct traits he has, which is his time travel ability. hm, well, that doesn't seem right.

it's all very darmok and jalad at tanagra, which is, of course, a star trek reference that conveys nothing if you aren't familiar with it, and which ironically has nothing to do with what "darmok and jalad at tanagra" actually means. except that even familiarity with the source material doesn't necessarily help because it's really about someone's experience with the source material, which i guess is a lot like darmok and jalad at tanagra actually

but all of those groupings feel like that to me, because they're all very fuzzy, so that everyone can fit themselves in somewhere. like sometimes i catch a glimpse of the subculture that is very much into western star signs, but those are assigned, so they all have to be broad enough that literally anyone could read a description of their sign and think "oh yeah that's me, nailed it". so what are those people actually saying when they bring their sign up? i don't know. how do they think someone else is supposed to know? i don't know that either

that isn't to say they shouldn't do it. i don't know, maybe this all makes sense to everyone else and the problem is just with me?

of course the elephant in the room is that i am eevee from pokémon

the funny thing is that i don't even remember why. i adopted eevee on some whim over 20 years ago and just never put it down. i don't even know that eevee is my favorite pokémon — maybe now it is, having grown on me for a long time, but for quite a while i would have no answer if someone asked me the question

and i'm not trying to tell you anything about myself by being called eevee. it just is my name. my spouse calls me eevee. almost everyone has called me eevee for more than half my life now. occasionally someone who's known me for ages admits they forgot eevee is also a pokémon. sometimes i forget eevee is also a pokémon.

and lately i've even been referring to myself as a fox more, which bridges with lexy, the floraverse character i spend the most time with. but i don't expect it to put much in particular in your head. maybe you'll think about a time you saw a fox, and smile because foxes are cool. that would be good.

meanwhile i don't really emphasize any of the typical bio labels — i have adhd, i'm bi, i'm probably autistic, i'm trans, i'm even lactose intolerant. but i feel like at best those don't tell you anything that i find most interesting about myself, and at worst they might give you the wrong idea. like it's statistically reasonable to assume that any given trans girl's endgame is estrogen, but i tried it and we didn't get along. (and now you know a concrete thing!)

and i know to some extent this is all cultural handshakes, that it's less about communicating "i am trans" and more about spotting other trans people from across the room who you are perhaps more likely to get along with. but even then i've found that kind of demographic matching to be a huge gamble, and i'm not even sure how well it applies to groups that aren't... shall we say, frequently heckled

meanwhile the things i do are rambling and making little toys and games and puzzles and whatnot, and while it is very hard to compress the precise vibe of those activities into a few words, i do want to at least try

as i write this i'm reminded that there's been an uptick in folks calling themselves therian recently, and i have the strange realization that seeing "i'm a fox therian" in someone's bio feels like it tells me less than seeing "i'm a fox". because the former is using a common label, which feels like it carries the expectation of being understood. but i'm vaguely familiar enough with the therian community to know that it could mean almost anything! it could imply a lot of metaphysical backstory about the nature of the soul, it could mean deep and troublesome species dysphoria, it could mean they like foxes a lot. i feel like i've just been handed an ambiguity that wasn't there before.

but merely "i'm a fox" is unusual enough that i don't feel like i'm supposed to know exactly what it means; it simply means something to them. it feels like a hint, a breadcrumb for putting together the jigsaw puzzle that is someone else. ah yes, now when you toot "arf arf arf", i see how that fits. ok. i'm on to something here.

there's something in this about building up from a minimal starting point, versus chiseling down from a big clump of all possible interpretations. it feels related to why i especially shy away from labels that have a lot of ambiguous baggage.

and maybe you could argue that i shouldn't feel this expectation from the "therian" version, but i don't know how you would justify that without suggesting that labels don't really mean much of anything. a common recognizable label carries a certain level of formality with it, i guess. it's like i'm being introduced to the Cheese Czar. is that an important thing? am i supposed to do or say or think or feel something when i hear that? is there protocol? am i the only one who doesn't know it?

and none of this means that it's bad to put "therian", or anything else, in your bio or carrd or forehead tattoo. on the contrary, i guess sometimes i just wish i understood other people more, and sometimes i feel like i don't know how to make much sense out of the most common types of clues

i am going to create an eporn gament that is so full of worldbuilding