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Current Mood: exanimate

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Soulbonding History: "Destroying your soulbonds is murder" color bar

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... for lack of a better word, I'll call it a "meme," even though that's not what they were called then 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. )

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plural:etymology

Soulbonder Etymology: dar'morende and tai'morende

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 )

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Many-Selved Etymology: "Headmate"

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 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 )

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Spirited/Many-Selved Etymological Glossary Index Page (1816-2016)

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 )

Current Mood: enthralled

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Spaceman, by Marc Hempel

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!

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More Neat Finds in the Sci-Fi Library

We're sorting the boxes of magazines now! And found neat things, including...

Original black and white WaRP floppy comics of Elfquest, #9-20. (We put them in plastic sleeves, but them in binders corresponding to omnibus volumes, catalogued them, and added them to the color omnibuses of Elfquest vol. 1 and 3 we already had.)
A card with poem and letter in it from 1971. (Asked the senior members, they figured out who "Chris" and "Wendy" were, and we're mailing it out to someone who knew them, since at least one of them is now dead.)
Some weird anthology of comics from 1971 with Wally Wood and stuff in them. (And Neal Adams who... dude was weird even then. Added to the "catalog me" pile)
A 1999 multimedia e-zine of music, poetry, art, and fiction... on a CD! (Put it in a proper container, labeled its contents, added it to the "catalog me!" pile)
More stuff for the pluralstories catalog, mwahaha!

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Returning Home and Claiming the Center

(all quotes are from Akwaeke Emezi, "claiming the center: Akwaeke Emezi," Locus: the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field #773 June 2025, pg. 58-59)

In terms of talking about my work, people often take the spiritual side as an allegory or a metaphor for something else--sometimes for queerness or transness, but for me, it's not. [...] When I use Western language to describe myself, I'm translating. Even when I call myself queer, or I call myself trans, I'm stepping away from my actual Igbo spiritual center, and using Western language, and translating to make myself more accessible. It's honestly a form of masking, because indigenous spirituality is illegible in a Western context. Because of white supremacy, but also because the West does not acknolwedge indigenous realities as real...

( On returning home, and how the work of Akwaeke Emezi opened the door for us. )

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MST: 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT

Mori: for catharsis and the good of us all, I’m fuckin MSTing Trumpy’s grand, glorious action of declaring the anniversary of the services he wishes to destroy. You’re welcome.

EDIT: I just highlights all the lies or highly misleading statements in red. This is an MST, not a fact-check.

( orphans and widows, orphans and widows )

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LB’s Multi Media

Rogan: since we run

pluralstories, maybe you wonder what multi media we actually own! So here’s a list. All of these we own at least in part because it gives us happy multi feelings. (And we use the term extremely broadly, encompassing soulbonding, spirit marriage, exploring geographies of story and the imagination, and other stuff.) Things labeled “private print” are things we either printed, folded, and stapled from ebook, or collated and formatted and bound from online posts.

( Read more... )

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Essay: Building Headspace, Aphantasia Edition

Building Headspace 2.0 (Aphantasia edition)
Summary: “Most people, perhaps 80 percent, primarily see their parts— they interact visually. […] Between 10 and 20 percent of people almost never experience any internal visual imagery. Ironically, Dick [Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems] is one of these people. All of the sense modalities are ways we can experience our inner world. People feel body sensations, hear voices and sounds, see things, and experience intuition beyond normal sensory modalities. Pretty much everybody is capable of experiencing this inner world except perhaps in cases of organic brain damage, and there I am uncertain.” —Bob Falconer, the Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession, pg. 123
Series: Essay (Bootstrappery section)
Word Count: 2130
Notes: Winner of the 2025 August fan poll, supported by fans at LiberaPay and Patreon! This builds on ideas in Building Headspace and Headspace Discovery and Defense, but it can be read on its own.

We’ve gotten a bunch of comments on our headspace essays that boil down to, “I have aphantasia; what do I do?” Well, I’m Rogan, I made a lot of those essays, and go figure, turns out I have aphantasia, so let’s take the bull by the horns!

( Read more... )

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I Got Paid!

Rogan: got my money from itch.io, which is a weight off my mind! Whew.

There’s been a big pushback against payment processors for this. We ourself are gearing up to send angry letters. If you want to know more about how/who to call, scripts to follow, and ways to badger payment processors of extralegally deciding what you can buy/sell on the Internet, check out https://yellat.money/ and https://stop-paypros.neocities.org/

These links have stuff for non-Americans too! I imagine you guys are EVEN MADDER about a few American companies saying what you can or can’t buy in your own country! Let’s give ‘em merry hell! It worked for the Australian Biblebangers, let’s see if it works for us!

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What Makes an Erotic Book Cover

Mori: After the end of my real-life bar graphing bacchanalia (lying on the floor, surrounded by books with tits and ass on the cover), I found myself having one of those 1AM conversations with my headmates: what makes a book cover truly EROTIQUE? What is that je nais se quoi and other fancy French words that give it the oomph?

( this is the horny comic book equivalent of a bunch of wine aficionados talking in snooty Boston accents about the fine details of their stale grape juice and how great it is. )