RE: Birdthing

Now, some of the electronic ghosts, viruses, webpage cookie codes, and FBI agents who read my blog may be wondering.

"You just said in like the last paragraph of the post that you're not a bird therian. And then you immediately went and tagged it 'therian.' What's up with that? What the fuck huh?"

I am a creature of confusing contradiction, cope.

Work: Cento

The following is a piece of creative writing which I submitted on 8/15/2023 to the therian site Radiant Obscurities. It uses some wording found previously on this blog.

( See: 'Cento' )

MyNoise/Dream: Attic Observatory

I had a... strange dream a few nights ago and it's been stuck in my head since.

I was in this huge skyscraper tower building thing. Like fuckoff massive with hundreds of floors. But not in a city, it was the tallest thing around so you could see for miles. For most of the dream, I'm not sure I even remember, I was going up and down these floors and everything was hectic and busy. Running errands, getting hounded by people, laboring, fucking side quests, all this shit -- and it wasn't very all written out, it was just a general vibe "oh my fucking god this is so chaotic and I'm so busy." So many people I have to talk to and things I have to do. Going up and down the floors but steadily making my way up.

Then I get to the very top floor. It's just a single room. A small room. Tight furniture, some low lighting, blankets, pillows. A window looking out. Like a little attic space. It's so high up it's almost like you can see the curvature of the earth and where the sky becomes space. There are these.. creature robot plushie things?? Two of these sitting at the window looking out together. They're having a conversation. They're talking about the endings of stories. Like as a concept. There is no one else in here but me.

I can't stop thinking about it. I made a MyNoise custom gen to try to recapture the melancholy yet whimsical feeling.

Work: Voice Against Value

The following is a piece of creative writing which I submitted on 05/14/2021 to the therian site Radiant Obscurities and was posted to the site on 07/22/2021.

( See: 'Voice Against Value' )

Intense wing shift

Always starts with my arms feeling kind of weird, stiff, heavy, and uncomfortable like they're bending in the wrong position.

Probably the strongest wings shift I've had. This time I could even feel the primary flight feathers -- that never happens, usually the illusion is too distant. I felt uncomfortable to be holding anything, or even just to be walking along on foot, because I could practically feel flight. I could feel air currents above and below me, lifting and pulling, and streaming beneath the undersides of my wings. There was an occasional passerby and it took everything in me not to flap.

It was strong enough for me to tell what species. Not osprey or raven, to my disconcertment, but rather a shorter, broader buteo or parabuteo wing. Harris's or red-tailed hawk. Shifts like these do not help my questioning.

Reading about pulp magazines

My main special interest is weird. It's broad. I got told once it was even too broad to be a special interest and that I obviously didn't know what one was. And I guess that's fair. It doesn't make sense to most people, not just because I can't articulate what exactly it is, but also because it's hard for even other autistics to imagine that, for example, my fascination with Edison cylinders, my knowledge about Shakespearean English, and my love of art deco come from the same special interest and not three different ones. But to me, it makes perfect sense. Even still -- I often surprise myself by what I take fancy with.

I clicked on a Wikipedia article about the pulp magazine cultural phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century. And it quickly became clear it was not a mild curiosity, it was yet another facet of my compound eye special interest. It's very cool stuff. They're considered the predecessors to early superhero comic books -- so I guess we have Argosy to thank for Chris Pratt being in everything, in a way. Pulp detective stories reached their height of popularity in the 30s because it was one of the cheapest forms of entertainment during the Depression. Some of the novel we now consider classic sci fi or classic detective novels were actually originally released serially in magazines.

Part of my special interest is the cultural and even personal implications of artistic and technological shifts. I wonder deeply about the people they affect and how their daily lives were altered. One of the most popular magazines, Street & Smith, discontinued their pulp magazines in the 40s to start producing more high quality gloss paper magazines and market to wealthier audiences. I wonder about individuals who were lower class during this time who were upset by this the way we get upset these days about like... the price of Spotify Premium going up.