Spirit of the Wind

I said I'd post my thoughts on OtherCon 2021, so here they are.

I did enjoy it. I didn't do much socializing with other people, but I found a lot of the panels interesting. Page's talk (on the broader social patterns influencing attitudes towards us) was by far the most interesting; if you missed it it's here (I have permission from all involved to post that link).The talk itself is about thirty minutes; there's a Q & A that's about thirty minutes more.

I think the central thesis--that part of the scorn people hold for therians stems from people feeling threatened that the line between human and nonhuman is getting blurred, and that a Christian supremacism (that has been sufficiently embedded into society that it doesn't read as religious anymore) is one of the reasons why this line is so important to people--is a really good one. I'm heavily simplifying, of course.

But I'd never really considered things from that angle before. I'd considered how our existence as therians implicitly threatens the division between human and non-human animals, but I'd never linked that to Christianity as such (really, Abrahamic religions--I can say that we Jews draw the same lines, even if we didn't invent the ideology Page talks about around it). And I especially hadn't considered how even secularism would react in the same way to us for the same reasons.

I knew all those facts in isolation, I just... never drew lines connecting them.

Thinking about it now, I can see how if anything, thoroughly secular people would draw even more on the infantalizing tropes Page mentions. Fundamentalist Christians have a hard time, at least on the larger Internet, throwing shade at other people's religious beliefs. Overtly secular people have a way easier time of it, because they can cast themselves as defending Reason and Logic.

I may have missed something when listening again, but I did have a hard time understanding why non-monotheistic faiths, specifically, were viewed (by anti-otherkin) as being tied to us. I know a lot of people have various supernatural beliefs regarding their nonhuman status, and that anti-otherkin are scornful of such beliefs, but there are monotheistic people who believe in reincarnation (though they're not orthodox).

Aside from Page's talk, I only listened to a talk on science and spirituality and species euphoria. I liked the talk on species euphoria, though mentally tuned out for a pretty big chunk of it because they spent a lot of time talking about things you can wear. I definitely get how wearing a wolf tail and wolf ears could help alleviate a wolf therian's dysphoria, but the thought of wearing a cheetah tail definitely doesn't do anything for me. It can't move, and it can't feel.

The science and spirituality talk... it tried to unite theoretical physics and otherkin. This never goes well, and I wish people would stop doing that. Multiverse theory does not mean that there is a universe for every possibility and the laws of physics varying between universes does not mean that magic could exist in one.

Moving away from the talks, it was kind of cool seeing so many people gathered together, and seeing people just... doing so much stuff. Watching movies, doing various party games (I think someone started a CAH game)... even though I wasn't participating it was just kind of nice to see.

Been a month since I last wrote anything. School has been difficult, to say the least. My brain feels like it is full of fog, and doing anything not school-related that takes actual thought and willpower is hard. I could be doing worse, no question about that, but I have a good deal of inertia keeping me in place. The more I'm inactive--anywhere--the harder it is to get the ball rolling again. I'm a creature of habit, after all. And currently the habit is "crawl into bed, blow up enemy ships, and do absolutely nothing."

Which I hate.

I did get a review paper on isopods done, which was interesting to do. Had to do a lot of reading, and learned a lot as well. Among other things, I learned that Bergmann's rule has a long and checkered history, that most people think giant woodlice are cool, and that deep-sea isopods are not nearly as terrifying as old nacho cheese Doritos.

Other students in ZOOL 215 are doing their projects on feral cat colony management, the role of venom and bacteria in Komodo dragons, and turtle evolution. The first and last did fairly well, the middle one did not do enough research. I say that because in the question-and-answer session I asked about a possible test for bacteria uptake that seemed sort of obvious, and she said that that would be a good idea and someone should do that test. When I got back to my dorm, five minutes on Wikipedia linked me to a paper that had that very setup.

Despite the season, it's been cold lately, and it rained heavily today. I was caught outside at the beginning of it; I let volunteer hours slip away from me and I'm having to do a whole bunch at once. And because I'm an idiot and I suck, I missed the bus, so tried to walk over to the Science Center to volunteer. Naturally I got completely lost, but ultimately I did manage to get there... so good for me, I guess. Even if volunteering at the Science Center isn't the most pleasant task, what with all the loud children, it's something.

Formally changed majors from architecture to zoology, and have an appointment on Monday to talk about the possibility of doing field/lab work for graduate studies. I'm skeptical of my chances, given my lack of training, but it can't hurt.

Read some good books lately. The Virals series, which I've always liked, had two books I hadn't read, and some guy named Charles de Lint wrote a trilogy called Wildings which was pretty interesting. Also found some pretty... interesting... music by a person named Vertigo Fox. I usually hate the genre he works in, but the lyrics and general feel are interesting enough to overlook it.


Oh, and apparently we have MRAs on the Werelist. Granted I wouldn't expect anything different from the person who believes that plants "evolved beyond the use of brains," but still, it's rather frustrating.

Some people have had questions over what exactly constitutes a "personal essay," since I asked that people not submit them. This was poor phrasing on my part, I intended to discourage people from submitting works that were written in an academic tone and either about their own generalized experiences or how they thought therianthropy worked (or to make a comment about the community, or something similar). This was not intended to discourage someone from writing about something that actually happened to them.

My apologies for any confusion.

My grandmother died, which actually is one of the least bad things to happen to me this week, since I wasn't that close to her. If anything, I'm upset because I'm not upset, which is something I swear I am one of the few people stupid enough to actually get upset over.

Random Person: "Are you upset?"
Me: "No. So actually kind of yes."

Wasn't a big deal, though, so I slept it off. Worked like a charm. I will have to miss classes this Friday, though, to go to the funeral.

More problematic is, well, school--Pyramid Guy's teaching methods are as arcane as ever, and appear to be based off some bizarre wizardry that I don't understand, since the questions he gives us to answer during the lecture aren't all answered by his lecture, and he goes over important stuff not in the questions.

Also he spent a lot of time on the test on things he didn't really go over or emphasize in class. When he gave us a copy of the test to study, several of the questions were worded differently (which doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize that the questions on the copy included bits of information that weren't in the test) and the questions were worth different point values.

I have an eight page essay on Cahokia due Monday, for the same class, I might add.

Made a campaign homepage at Obsidian Portal; I'm officially calling the campaign (and the game setting) Terra Chronos.


Oh, and started a writing contest with Mobius on the Werelist to try to pick up activity, because the site has been growing less active recently. There's information here. Essays are accepted... but honestly I, personally, would be more likely to vote for fiction/poetry/similar stuff.