anomalymonster: (Default)
We went to a local zine fest a month or two ago and want to get more into making zines. Our dad made zines in the 90s and he's been going back and printing a lot of his old zines, though they're more like comic books. They're actually pretty cool but he (reasonably) does not want to share any of them online and I don't think I could share any of them without risk of getting doxxed.

We have a lot scripted for now and he gave us a large infodump this morning about how to go about laying it out and printing it. We may get around to converting some of our essays into zines, though we may need to make more "new to the concept friendly" essays. There was one we came up with for Trans Day of Visibility but wasn't able to finish in time, but it's far enough along that we may be able to get started on it.


We've also been working on a few homemade TCGs on and off as we get more into Pokemon and also smaller TCGs like Altered. The gimmicks we have in mind is that they can be played side by side, which means that systems can play them without any modification. The idea that is the furthest along is based on emotions (something like Voidpet, but with more monster variety and variations). So far we just haven't been able to come up with a good win condition.

We did play with the idea of making a TCG based on our system but weren't able to figure out a decent execution. There's also the typical monster mechanics which we also had a draft of, but we need to figure out a way to make it interesting.


Then there was also a modified version of the Pokemon TCG we've drafted to be played by a system. We still need to playtest it to modify the rules and erratas, but the idea is that the bench space is cut to 3, there's an added supporter bench of 3 where one supporter in the bench can be activated per turn, and there's a visible "bag" section for item cards. So it's set up like this: 


PrizePrize Active Stadium
PrizePrize   Deck
PrizePrizePokemonPokemonPokemon 
  SupporterSupporterSupporter 
Bag    Discard

Some cards had to be modified with this set up (Professor Sada's Vitality for example would be broken, so we removed the draw engine). Any unused cards at the end of a turn just get shuffled back into the deck. To keep evolution Pokemon from being useless, there's a rule where Pokemon can be evolved when they're placed down, but their abilities are neutralized if they're evolved during set up.

We just need to playtest it, and we're probably going to end up either printing out proxies or trying to find a simulator that will let us do this.


Luckily for all of this, there is a printer at work and our boss is never in, which is perfect for using to print our random neurodivergent bullshit in short amounts.
anomalymonster: (Default)
I wanted to make a post somewhere about our experiences with this and thought Dreamwidth might be a better place to do this.

When it comes to our experiences with soulbonding and what we identify as soulbonds, we've realized it's a lot more complicated than we thought it was. When we were newer to soulbonding and the plural community we thought they had to be spiritual and had to be in our headspace. As we've done a lot more research to the point of me doing a panel for Othercon about soulbonding, we've realized that soulbonding is very broad we more or less have soulbonds all over the spectrum of what a soulbond is.

We have collective soulbonds which exist as presences we feel when fronting. They don't appear in our headspace and most often the resemble "telephone" soulbonds - they mostly do their own thing independent to us while occasionally checking in on us. They might favor certain fronters but for the most part they are a soulbond to the entire system instead of an individual. Even to the point of creating a soulbond-ception if existing soulbonds front.

Archie being a soulbond has been around for a chunk of our life. We just never identified him as a soulbond because for a long time we had no idea what he was exactly, since he just felt like a head presence and not an actual part of the system.

Alpha Sappire came out at a point in our life when we entered an abusive situation. During the time we got into that situation we discovered we were a system, and then shortly after we went through one of the most traumatic times of our life.

We clung to Team Aqua as a whole because of the abuse we went through. They felt like a positive and strongly-knit group, and Archie was the one we felt attached to the most because of the way he treats the player character. On top of that a part of the trauma we went through involved a hurricane, which was thematically appropriate.

The way we've always identified with the player character also added to that. Pokemon Emerald was our first video game ever, and generation III was when we got into the series that would become a lifelong special interest and something very important alterhuman-wise to our system. The player character of the Hoenn games is who we can easily envision as our "humansona". As a result of that, it's very easy for us to get immersed into the world of Hoenn. Team Aqua was also a group we were oddly attached to (one of our earliest sonas was a Team Aqua Vaporeon and playing Pokemon Emerald we'd just "hang out" in the Aqua base).

So as we went through very turbulent teenage years and young adulthood (sorry to anyone who knew us then - we were a mess), we felt a presence of Archie who was helping us get through it and cope with the extreme emotions and turmoil we felt. We both jokingly and seriously called him our dad a few times. Most of this presented through maladaptive daydreaming too where one of our biggest paracosm at the time involved a collective self insert.

This actually amplified after Ultra Sun/Moon came out and we decided to get the boss collection for Team Aqua (basically two Pikachu cosplaying as Archie and a Team Aqua grunt. Also a Kyogre). Having a physical representation of Archie helped and we'd find it easier to talk to him "through" the plush. Especially since we'd bring them for any future hurricanes we went though.

We didn't start to process Archie was a soulbond until recently. As I was working on the soulbond panel and reading through other experiences, my system began to discuss how common the experience of soulbonding might be. That was when we started to click that that's what Archie was. He's just a soulbond in the literal definition of a fictional character that exists in our mind and we're experiencing soulbonding similar to how a singlet might despite being a system. There was definitely a moment of "wait a fucking minute".

We've started to engage with him more openly and embrace that familial connection we feel to him. The headmate group who goes to play Pokemon has apparently called Archie "my dad' before. Either way, I'm glad he actually decided to keep humoring this mess of beings, and I think he's still a strong parental figure for us even as the abusive situation we were in has long passed.

The exact nature of it is something we're still figuring out. It likely involves the actual physical in nature identity we have of the Hoenn protagonist but that's going to be a lot for us to unpack even outside of the soulbonds it granted us.
anomalymonster: (Default)
The name "Anomaly" was picked out when we were still fairly new in our system self-discovery and a lot of us don't feel it fits us anymore. However, trying to come up with a new name with how our system is now is difficult because of how we don't really have a common thread. Outside of our body name, we really don't have anything we collectively go by.

If anything what we'd rather be called has more to do with the region we inhabit, Alcha or Alcha-Tera with something that communicates "Sending/Transmitting/Message from Alcha-Tera". Alcha is the region connected to this body.  Even if not everyone in the headspace is from Alcha, people from say Corotu can't front from there, they front from their own body. So far we are leaning a bit more towards that since if we go with that phrasing it makes it clear it's a place not meant to be a regular name.

We might try it out in a few places to see how it goes. I guess the downside is we went by Anomaly for so long that the usernames for places we can't change as well as our website name might suggest we're still going by it when we're not, but there's not much we can do about that.

Someone did also call out "Ceci n'est pas une nom" or "This is not a name" as a suggestion, which I think is a bit funny.

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The Monsters in Alcha-Tera

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