On Labels

Mar. 23rd, 2026 11:45 am
lb_lee: an instrument panel with a hole, an arrow pointing to said hole, and a written warning: do not put tongue here AGAIN. (questionableideas)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Rogan: I guess, if I had to summarize my feelings about labels, any kind of identity label, it’d be this: labels are created for people; people are not created to fit them.

A label describes, but it shouldn’t define. If it strangles you, ditch it. Even if you can’t avoid other people slapping it on you, you don’t have to make THEIR mistake part of YOUR identity. (Sadly, uprooting nasty brainweeds like that is rarely as simple as just saying no. You may end up having to know your enemy, do way more research, and think way more about it than you’d like, just to pull up all them runners. It’s worth it, though, to be free!)

Whatever label you choose, hold it loosely. Don’t death-grip it, or you’re priming yourself for a total identity collapse if/when you change... and change is the only constant. Let yourself grow. Let yourself be playful about what you call yourself and why; we call ourself a “multivarious cyborg” and it’s a typo! We named ourself Loony-brain thinking this was just an embarrassing stage we were going through, and now we own it! We went from soulbonder to natural multiple to DID to “yes and” multi. Maybe one day, we’ll even be singlet again, or something else entirely!

Knowing your label is not the same as knowing yourSELF. There’s no linguistic shortcut for that work. Nobody can do it for you, and that’s good news: it puts the power in YOUR hands.

Use it well, and don’t hang on so hard.

Zine: my love is strange

Mar. 22nd, 2026 12:57 am
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
[personal profile] lb_lee
EDIT: found typos and formatting errors that somehow escaped all previous read-throughs. Will edit and replace. -_-

Hey, so... since we got a printer, and since our shoulder and eyeballs are increasingly reluctant to let us read long things on the computer, we've taken to slapping together little zines for our personal enjoyment of our favorite stuff. We also use them to fool around with typography and stuff. You know, just make fun little things.

And then we were like, "Hey... what if we shared some of these?"

So here's our newest fun thing: my love is strange: an anthology of eight hundred years of unusual care. It's just a commemoration of being together in ways my current society would like to pretend doesn't exist and never did. Alt-texted, illustrated with pictures from the public domain. Table of contents:
 
I wasn't joking about it covering a swathe of eight hundred years by the way. )

Comic: Sneak Attack!

Mar. 20th, 2026 05:32 pm
lb_lee: a purple horned female symbol interlocked with a female symbol mixed with a question mark (xenogals)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Winner of the 2026 fan poll! All text under this is text-only transcription of the comic.

No Sneaks were involved in this sneak attack. )

Book Spine Poetry

Mar. 19th, 2026 10:31 pm
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
[personal profile] lb_lee
We keep a little stack of books we're reading on the kitchen table and our roommates noticed that the spines lined up in amusing ways. This was accidental, but then we thought, "what if we did that... ON PURPOSE?"

And today, we trashed our room stacking books to make poems. We hope they amuse you!


lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
[personal profile] lb_lee
  • Finally finishing the Reverend Alpert book, which has been stalled at around 80% completion for YEARS now
  • Expanding Quick'n'Dirty Plural History into a proper paperback, because the zine sells shockingly well for such a niche subject, we have a lot more info now (though not on the newest slapfights, ha, no, we're talking older, cross-cultural stuff, and spirit marriage/headmate relationship stuff) (if you want us to wade into the hottest new plural communities on Discord or Bsky or what the fuck ever, you're going to have to pay us real money, and in ADVANCE)
  • Finally kicking Rogan's ass into inking Loyal Forever, a comic that involves the muscle car beloved from Crazy Boys Get Money)
  • Expanding Xenogals into a book-length thing, the Mori and Rawlin version of Alter Boys In Love (Xenogals in Love?)
Oh no, all but Loyal Forever are big beefy books. But well, the Xenogals and Plural History ones would replace their floppies, and Reverend Alpert would probably end up a short run anyway.

Books and Bytes

Mar. 18th, 2026 10:02 am
lb_lee: Rogan drawing/writing in a spiral. (art)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Mori: nobody jumps out of bed going, “Good morning world, today I do my TAXES!” with a big smile on their face, but man alive, is it neat to see what sold and what didn’t, when and where.

Read more... )
lb_lee: a penguin saying "Just because you decide to sell out doesn't mean anyone's going to buy!" ($ellingout)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Mori: Heads up y'all, I'm doing our tax prep, which means I'm going through all our titles, seeing what sold and what didn't, and deciding what gets weeded. In a week or so, I'm going to be removing the following ebook listings from sale, so if you want them, now is the time to get them:
(Rogan's Aphasia is also barely hanging in there, has been for years; for some reason every once in a while people will buy another copy of it, just BARELY keeping it in the running.)

(Also I figure, just as a note, we do this every year. I tally up everything what sold, and shit that sold less than five copies gets weeded. I'm trying to get us more regular about saying when we're removing something from print, since some folks might miss out otherwise. And hey, if enough copies sell, it'll stay up for other folks!)

The Secret Legion

Mar. 16th, 2026 09:49 am
lb_lee: A skeleton wearing a crown of blooming roses (the bony lady)
[personal profile] lb_lee
This is a messy post about death and love.

content warning: abuse. )
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

Plural Death and Dormancy Survey

Mar. 10th, 2026 12:36 pm
lb_lee: A skeleton wearing a crown of blooming roses (the bony lady)
[personal profile] lb_lee
[personal profile] vaguelyautonomous linked us a cool survey Sprites made regarding death and dormancy among plurals: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1wARJSMVDVYhX1v4WKAdrCbS_f6hIdXvpHNw810gSOhA/mobilebasic

Too bad we didn’t know about it while it was running; death is a large part of our inner workings and we have strong opinions on it. (I am also utterly baffled and deeply annoyed that apparently headmate death is STILL considered impossible or an “endo thing”; I guess they never read When Rabbit Howls. I’m sure I could find earlier medical references if singlet death wasn’t currently devouring my attention.)

Very interesting was to learn we’re apparently in a major minority in that we don’t really experience dormancy! (Except arguably Rawlin? But she was imprisoned in the deep bowels of headspace for years, so it’s not like she was GONE, just we lost track of her. She eventually went into hibernation because what else was there to do in solitary confinement for decades?) We lose access to people from elsewhere, but they aren’t dormant; our metaphorical rail just doesn’t go to their stop anymore and their lives just continue without us.