Stillflight

I had been watching Life On Our Planet with Birch and definitely a lot of the creatures were giving me cameo shifts. But none has stuck with me like the maybe 20 seconds they showed of Anthracosaurus. I don't know why I'm already questioning them. I only just watched the episode that featured them yesterday. But I was just sitting awake in bed ruminating on it last night. Normally, when I get a cameo shift caused by a nature documentary like this, I'm fully aware it's just a cameo. I never questioned dromaeosaurs or Komodo dragons after my documentary binge for my resource post, because I knew my brain was just having a little fun. It wasn't serious. The only time it felt so serious was when it was mosasaurs and look where that got me after a year of denial.

And I feel like I can't possibly be an Anthracosaurus therian but then when I think "Hypothetically, if I was though--" I get like... almost sick with excitement? I LOVE the idea of stuff like announcing it and being one in an alterhuman setting -- if I think about that stuff with other things I get "vibes" from -- say for example, leopard seals or early whales, I dismiss it immediately because I know it's not genuine or true and it feels confidently inaccurate. Thinking about telling someone I am an Ambulocetus therian doesn't make any sense, because I know I'm not, despite the shifts and feelings and even familiarity when I see them. Thinking about telling someone I am an embolomere is exciting. And I know it's not the clout of having a rare theriotype because what could be more impressively out-there than a whale ancestor? But I feel like it almost HAS to just be paratyping out of mosasaurs, right? But there's also all those times I questioned or flickered or cameoed creatures from the Godzilla/The Beast from 1,000 Fathoms genre of sea monster movies and this being the closest real animal to that that's ever existed.

Anyways, I was of course thinking hard about the Carboniferous period and its environments, specifically swamps of course, and whether I would feel at home or was drawn to them. So I made a MyNoise. And I do really like it. But the strangest thing about it is that it doesn't feel accurate -- I can tell it's not perfect.

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.

The site MyNoise has been such an incredible nonhuman resource for me. Habitat longing is one of the biggest parts of my species identity and dysphoria-euphoria dichotomy. I love their custom generator feature and I want to talk about the ones I've made to simulate environments that I dream for. Maybe later sometime I'll post all the ones from the official index of the site that serve that purpose.

Cascadia. I made this for my raven theriotype. Some of the ones kind of worked for a raven shift, like Port Town and Arctic Wolves, but nothing was quite what I really needed: a soundscape of the northern west coast. That is my raven happy place. I have been to southeast Alaska, Seattle, and the Oregon coast, and I went for something that combined the aspects of all three. It needed pines, but also nearby ocean waves, and of course, crows. Well, what it really needs is ravens, but there are none in the index. Crows are also a huge staple of the Pacific northwest soundscape.

Outskirts and Edge of the Lot. Both recreations of times(/places) I have felt the most opossum. Of course, it works just as well for a raccoon shift, but it's really an effort for the opossum m-shift. They're specifically both places where you have natural sounds, like crickets, birds or trees, but also urban sounds, like people, a highway, buzzing lights. Outskirts is based on a secluded little spot behind my last college dorm building where I actually saw a fellow opossum as well as a raccoon, a grassy overgrown area overlooking an interstate. It seemed like a perfect little hub for all kinds of critters that straddle the line. Edge of the Lot on the other hand is more of a deep memory than a recent one. It's exactly what it sounds like, those far edges of parking lots where the cracked pavement ends and the treeline or maybe reeds start, with usually a dry, unmown grass buffer. You can hear one buzzing light on overhead, the birdsong of late afternoon, and the crickets of early evening. Time to approach from the trees and into the sprawl.

Novakid Settlement. This was a soundscape you could not find anywhere in real life. There are many spaceship and alien-futuristic generators, and one old west generator, but nothing I could find that combines both. I didn't know how badly I needed to hear it as though it was real until I heard it. It's hard to put into words what this does for me. I've felt less connected to my Novakid identity lately. But listening to this is such a flood of euphoria and homesickness that it's just as hard to deny what I am as it was on the very first day it started. It's weird to feel so tied to a culture that doesn't exist.

These next two are for 'types that I am stuck in questioning limbo over, both being and not being.
 
Unterrene. I'm not sure where to place myself on the "angel" to "not angel" scale. This was a bit of an experiment. If I am an angel, I'm not a Christian angel. No white feathery wings or golden halo. Perhaps I am something so beyond a human brain's understanding that my own human brain is having trouble comprehending it. Even if it is totally psychological -- I believe in angels very little... though my inclinations with all things supernatural lie in extradimensions, and maybe that's where the inspiration for this generator comes from. Anyway, I have a lot to puzzle out, and this is a step in at least a direction, if not the right one.

AI Dreams/Computer Dreams. I made this a long while ago, the first time I was questioning AI, when I had a very clear image for what kind of computer program I was. This was made with that in mind. I believed I was an IBM-like program in a machine built in the late 50s-early 60s, and this combination of deep electronic information and whir of server fans put me in such a trance that it made me confirm it. It's been pivotal in my questioning because every time I hear it I swerve toward confirmation. I no longer feel beholden to that specific configuration, I feel more general and versatile these days, and slightly more modern, but I don't put away the midcentury IBM feelings in a closet either.