Tuesday, August 26th, 2025 06:41 pm

There's a scene in The Thick of It where someone (I think it's either Glen or Alex Macqueen's character Julius Nicholson) is looking for a radio to put the test match on, and Ollie scofffs that they should just listen online, and Glen says listening to radio online is like making coffee in the microwave.

I immediately loved this.

I can't tell you how it's perfect but it feels perfect.

Anyway my radio stopped working so I'm listening on my phone now and I think about this line all the goddam time.

As with coffee in the microwave, I'd probably rather have none at all than deal with this. It's bad because with the radio I could flip an actual tactile switch, I didn't even have to take my eyes off my work, and now I have to pick up the distraction rectangle and tap tap a bunch on its unhelpful featureless glass carapace to get the music back on, and by the time I've done that I am probably playing games or answering messages.

D had already looked up dab radios when mine started dying, but today he just sent me a link to one and said "I can buy this from Argos, we can pick it up today."

I was torn between finding this very charming and worrying that I'd become so annoying he just bought me a radio to stop my whining about it, heh.

Monday, August 25th, 2025 09:33 pm

Hardly slept again last night.

Went for a bike ride and a couple of pints with D this evening so I am actually feeling tired now for the first time in many days.

Really hoping this means I'll sleep. Gotta actually go to work tomorrow, and I have obligations after work too so it'll be a long day if I'm as brainfoggy and exhausted as I was today or especially Saturday.

It was a lovely day: perfect weather. Really glad I got to be outside: we went to the garden center this afternoon too; spring bulbs are in and V wasn't able to get any last year so I'm glad they did this year. We also got tea and really tasty cake as they were having a pop-up cafe fundraiser.

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Monday, August 25th, 2025 06:11 pm
[personal profile] sobqjmv_sphinx expanded on my research and proved it was used by multiples before DesperateFans! Check it out! https://sobqjmv-sphinx.dreamwidth.org/5620.html

We’ve updated our own post adding this note.
Monday, August 25th, 2025 06:10 pm
A rather more contemporary citizenship question here. I’m looking for a resource for Japanese passport and citizenship rules - do they have birthright citizenship, if a citizen emigrates can they retain dual citizenship, is it different if they emigrated as a child etc.

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website is very helpful on the subject of visas and emigration for citizens of other countries so I guess I’m looking for a similar kind of FAQ to this - https://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/ - but for, I guess you’d call it re-emigration? Moving back to the country of your birth as an adult?

Any help, gratefully received!
Sunday, August 24th, 2025 09:23 pm
Hey howdy. Am doing some Martian worldbuilding and wondering about the rarity of some specific minerals and resources on Mars. The list is:
- quartz
- beryl
- bixbyite
- baryte/barium
- vanadium
- aerinite/silicate minerals
- calcite/calcium carbonate
- dolomite
- esperite
- fluorapatite/phosphate minerals
- malachite
- pyrite
- jasper
- celestine
- granite
- obsidian

My question is more on the rarity of these on Mars relative to their rarity on Earth, because theoretically all of these/almost all of these are possible to be found on Mars.

(Also ignore the fact that I accidentally commented on the first post of this community instead of making a post I am still getting used to this site lmao)
Sunday, August 24th, 2025 11:06 pm

...not great but okay. I slept more (again: not great but okay which is a big improvement). The sun came out.

I didn't get to the gym but I did help D do his girlfriend's yard work -- putting vast quantities of a hedge into big bags and taking it to the tip[/dump]. Got home all sweaty and dirty, went right into the shower before helping make dinner, so all of that sounds typical for the gym. My right shoulder and my back are sore.

Before this we went to one of the local community gardens with V, who got to squee at all the native plants and bees and stuff being grown at the allotment.

D and I made pasta and sauce and he made gin and tonic to accompany the cooking of it, as is traditional.

Had a surprisingly painless conversation with my parents this evening. Mom had had good results at her yearly kidney check-up so she was happier than she has been lately. She also said that my fictive cousins couldn't say enough nice things about meeting up with me a week ago, which was nice. I enjoyed the time too and, as D said when I told him -- because the praise was as much for him as for me -- he's glad they didn't receive reports about men in dresses [because I'd worn a overall/dungaree skirt last Sunday] and us being weirdly affectionate for "housemates."

Sunday, August 24th, 2025 07:02 am
Yall, the bowed musical instruments have finally made it to the electronica party. This is the coolest damn thing. Audio required, video also extremely worth it if accessible. 3 min 17 sec.

2025 Aug 11: Open Reel Ensemble: "Tape Bowing Ensemble - Open Reel Ensemble":
磁気テープを竹に張って演奏する民族楽器「磁楽弓(じがっきゅう)」三重奏による調べです

This is a trio performance on the “JIGAKKYU,” a traditional folk instrument made by stretching magnetic tape across bamboo.


ETA: I want to state for the record, contrary to what a lot of commenters on YT are saying, it is not that what is cool here is just how wackily innovative it is to use a reel-to-reel this way. The only reason this is going viral is because of how musically good it is; nobody would care about it otherwise, and I submit for evidence the half century plus of prior art of abusing reel-to-reel recorders in the name of music-making you have probably never heard of, because a lot of it wasn't very compelling as music so nobody ever brought it to your attention. What's most shocking here is how musical it is, and how they use the innovation to do something new in music recognizable as such. It isn't good because it's innovative; it's innovative because it's good.

As far as I am concerned, the great problem for electronic music has always been what I think of as the Piano Problem: the music is made by operating a machine, so there's a machine between the performer and the music. Great pianists master operating the machine so beautifully they make the machine disappear. But this is what makes piano playing hard. So much of what we love in music is its organicness, the aspects of it which are so beautifully expressive because of how intimately the performer's body interacts with the instrument.

Heretofore, the only ways to bring that kind of sound to electronic instruments were to use breath controlled midi controllers (electronic woodwinds), use an electromagnetic interface (e.g. theremin), or get really fantastic on keys. Or give up and embrace the mechanical nature of the instrument and use it for repertoire the excellence of which does not rest in expressiveness (q.v. Wendy Carlos' Bach recordings).

This instrument conclusively brings the organicness of bowing and all its delicate expressiveness to electronica. The result is simply gorgeous and I hope this creative vein is further mined.
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2025 09:01 pm

I slept ridiculously badly last night.

In one way this wasn't as bad as it might normally have been because today there was no lift club to get up for.

But in another way it was extra miserable because it meant that even when I did wake up I felt so awful that I wondered if I could join D's group of people going to the rugby (group stages of the Women's Rugby World Cup happening in Salford) this afternoon. After an hour lying down -- I didn't sleep but I tried to rest -- I felt enough better to go. I enjoyed the first half (except the score) but really flagged at halftime and was barely aware of the second half (beyond the howls of misery from the loud Scottish fans behind me, who screamed every minute or two about how awful the referring was even though they were winning the whole time).

When we got home I was so tired I tried again to sleep, couldn't do it. I'm now sick of my books and phone games and everything I use to pass the time when my insomnia is bad.

It feels like a real waste of a day, which makes the bank holiday weekend into just a regular weekend.

The weather has been cooler and the sun isn't shining; the light feels weird, it feels like the day never gets going properly. Day after day all week.

I hope very much that sleep is kinder to me tonight. But I don't feel tired now: I didn't do anything; I'm uncomfortably aware that I didn't manage to exercise more than the minimum this week when I'm trying to do more. And I'm not sure about the direction that circuits is taking under its new trainer; it's not working up a sweat in me in the same way.

So between that, a day on trains to and from London on Tuesday, not managing to go to the gym Thursday night when I really wanted to...it's been a whole week of blah (except Wednesday night it was fun to go see To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar which we'd never seen before and then have a lush meal afterwards, the first time in ages I actually felt like I ate too much but it was pleasant).

Friday, August 22nd, 2025 02:46 pm
When we joined the soubonding comms on Livejournal in 2007, we often saw the following bar in people's profile pages:

     
They're people, friends, lovers. NOT Satan.
Destroying your soulbonds is murder.


(Color bars of this type were common things on Livejournal at the time; I expect because it wasn't an image and thus didn't require imagehosting, saving bandwidth and work.)

Because it is in danger of being lost, I want to credit the originator of this. I also want to talk about some of the context around it, and why it got made.

This is a post about death and murder. )
Thursday, August 21st, 2025 09:03 pm
Doing these together because their histories and citations are identical.

tai'morende (noun)
Meaning: 1: originally intended to be “an alternative version of [a] character's entire world inside your head” (Eclective, 2002), but due to misunderstanding apparently became 2: a fictional character who takes on an independent life, but who doesn’t stick around for long (ibid).

dar'morende (noun)
Meaning: 1: original meaning: same as soulbond. Due to misunderstanding, it became 2: a fictional character who takes on an independent life to their creator or audience and sticks around.

Coiner: soulbonder Catherine Rain (Eclective’s 2004 glossary) on the soulbonders' Just For Writers (JFW) AOL mailing list (Eclective 2002).
When: by 1999-9-17 (Lyn)
Where: Soulbonding term, never went further.
Their rise and fall. )

TL;DR: The only reason anyone these days knows these terms existed is because of Eclective. I can’t find anyone else using it except Lyn, once; all other citations go to Eclective's 2004 glossary. These term are the least-known a term can be and still justify being in the glossary.

Citations )
Thursday, August 21st, 2025 07:41 pm
EDIT: [personal profile] sobqjmv_sphinx expanded on my research and proved it was used by multiples before DesperateFans! Check it out! https://sobqjmv-sphinx.dreamwidth.org/5620.html

Hungry Ghosts have discovered they can nerd snipe us by asking us, "Hey, we heard that 'headmate' came from soulbonders, is that true?" We honestly didn't think we'd discover it, but thanks to the amazing power of ljsear.ch, we got a really good start!

Meaning: 1. (RP, original term) the relationship one role-playing character (AKA a sockpuppet or "pup") had to another, as opposed to their relationship to their player (AKA "typist"). 2. The relationship between any tenants of the same vessel.
Coiner: the DesperateFans roleplaying community on Livejournal? (First used by Pollution/mr_p_white?)
When: by 2005/4/18
the rise of headmate )

TL;DR: the term was coined by 2005 by roleplayers (who, if any of them were soulbonders, they sure didn't fess up to it anywhere I saw) and spread through Livejournal into plural comms like plural_living within three months. It also spread via RPers, muses and muns (2006-01), soulbonders (2006-05), before finally getting picked up by multiples (2007-02). With the fall of LJ, the term spread to tumblr, where it became so widespread that even Urban Dictionary heard about it.

If you manage to kick the can back earlier than this, please let me know! RP was never my realm, and my trail goes cold there.

Citations )
Thursday, August 21st, 2025 06:14 pm
Sneak: This is a (forever IN-PROGRESS) hub page for all our deep dives into the origination, rise, and fall of terms used for what we loosely call "spirited" or "many-selved" folks from 1816-2016, including: various forms of medical multiplicity (dual consciousness, MPD, DID,etc.), medical backlash multiples (empowered multiples, natural multiples, endogenic multiples), plurals, soulbonders, and whatever else we trip over, just so we can have it all in one place.

We are cutting it at 2016 because that gives us a good 200 year window going back to our earliest medical multi records in English, and also because we do not want to dig into the microlabel boom. Pluralpedia is better for things like that. We might later kick the earliest year back, but I doubt we will go any further into the present than 2016.

Quick Alphabetical Index:
A ~ B ~ C ~ D ~ E ~ F ~ G ~ H ~ I ~ J ~ K ~ L ~ M ~ N ~ O ~ P ~ Q ~ R ~ S ~ T ~ U ~ V ~ W ~ X ~ Y ~ Z

Previous Glossaries Used in the Making of This Document

A )
B )
C )
D )
E )
F )
G )
H )
I )
J )
K )
L )
M )
N )
O )
P )
Q )
R )
S )
T )
U )
V )
X )
Y )
Z )

Previous Glossaries Used in the Making of This Document )
Thursday, August 21st, 2025 06:44 pm

We're going to be on vacation from the 16th to the 25 of September.

The other day I blocked this time out in my calendar. The most accessible way to do this involves inputting the start and end dates.

Today I was asked about a meeting for a random Tuesday in October and when I went to see whether or not I was free, I saw that whole day I was showing as "on leave." And the Monday before it. I'm not aware of any reason I'd have time off then!

Zooming out and every day was showing as on leave. Every day that month.

I investigated and, instead of making the vacation last until the 26th of September, I'd somehow gotten it to be the 26th of December.

My burned-out brain just wants an extra three months off, heh.

Thursday, August 21st, 2025 01:30 pm
Screenshot of survey stats behind the scenes. Completed: 38,000. I have added many silly excited lines and stars for a celebratory effect.

The response rate is slowing, but we're still getting a few hundred per day.

9 days remaining. Did you put your gender on top of your car to get your keys out and then forget and accidentally drive off? THIS SURVEY IS FOR YOU!

https://survey.gendercensus.com

Thursday, August 21st, 2025 05:10 am
Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

Hwaet! The saga continues... )
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Thursday, August 21st, 2025 05:02 am

5am and I'm awake from bad dreams. My brain is being a jerk...

Or, it's tired, I've been pushing it too hard for too long. It's trying to take care of me. It's trying to identify potential threats and think about what to do about them.

It's not its fault that the "what if there's a tiger after me" adrenaline and cortisol-based hardware is the only response available to the "complicated family and memories and bullshit email job" emotions that the software is currently running.

I got back to sleep, yay, but I very convincingly dreamed witnessing an accident and having to accompany family members (D and his sister and then somehow V as well) to A&E. I had every detail: bad phone signal when calling 999, not being able to get an ambulance, waiting all day, seeing excellent and nice clinical staff who are very busy)... I stayed with D and knew to look away when they did something that I know in real life would freak me out.

We were just getting to leave, both of them patched up, when my alarm went off.

If I didn't have such a busy day, and a deadline that depended on me doing something not just today but first thing this morning, I might well have called in sick. I never do that, but I honestly felt like I'd just spent a long eight hours looking after severely injured loved ones. It felt unfair to have to go to work too right after that.

But I did.

Wednesday, August 20th, 2025 07:37 pm
While doing sci-fi library magazine organizing, I found this short comic, "Spaceman" by Marc Hempel, that does realitymashing in a really effective cool way! He needs barely any dialogue or text to express the visual concept of daydreaming; it's so good.

And someone on Pillowfort kindly digitized and uploaded it!

Wednesday, August 20th, 2025 04:45 am
Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:
I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?
I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:
From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.
So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:
Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.
I got this response:
Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]
Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.
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Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 03:38 pm
"Each vehicular AI derives its own sense of satisfaction from establishing a routine. I've found that my persona and speech are influenced by my pilots in a way that is... enjoyable to me, for lack of a better word."


Blurb: A cyborg pilot and a giant hexapod robot tank go searching for their lost cyborg boyfriend together and get busy!

Why is it worth your time?: The art and story are glorious, but there's also a fascinating interplay of bodysharing; Morelos pilots Gam and can somewhat control his movements, while Gam borrows Morelos's prosthetic arms. The way they trustingly share each other's bodies is unique and beautiful!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, bodyhopping (for lack of a better word), cofronting, identityblending, nonhumans (robot/AI), intimate relationships, teamwork, setting-specific

Content Warnings: Explicit gay robosex. It's porn, it's what you're here for.

Access Notes: Not screenreadable, available as a print floppy comic from Jon Cairns, or in the Iron Circus anthology Smut Peddler:Sex Machine, which is available both on paper and as an ebook.