Lightning Paw, Sacred Scavenger @Kyresti@vulpine.club

So, I've had a hell of a past couple weeks and feel the need to spill a couple things in my own personal style.

I am not the me I used to be, but not even the gods know why I've reeked of coyote so long - not most of them anyway.

I participate in magic while knowing it has no scientific basis, yes I believe it can change my life, and no I do not dismiss the science. There's a few threads involved, but note how the implied correlation between placebo and lack of any effect from any source is as foolish as it is dismissive.

More than one thing can be true at a time, and if you don't believe I can give you new limbs, new realities, change your image and form for even a fleeting moment... then damn do I have some surprises to show you.

I accept friends without causality and stories without sense, because hey it makes sense to someone in some language.

What I don't accept is riddles caged in sadism and abuse, even and especially if they're spoken as a grave warning for me to not do something I'd already decided against the year prior, from someone pretending to be one of my headmates (yes this actually happened.)

But if a predator tries to name and claim me, it's a simple catch to flip the tables and claim it for my own. Don't underestimate a fox in a labcoat - we got a strong pull.

I want to be transparent about this since it might otherwise appear superficial in who I'm willing to associate with on social media. Also because I'm finding little stirrings of the same stressors that led me to ditch Twitter.

So hi. I'm queer, trans, furry, and jovially eccentric. So are a lot of y'all. I like that. I'm also open to a good conversation outside of that with good faith and acceptance.

But there ARE some social media trappings I judge (and softblock people by, minimum).

-Constant negativity. Keep a surgical mask on that shit, it's infectious. If that's the *entirety* of your life it has no place in mine.

-Anti-left hate. We're not perfect by any stretch, but if your only words to/about us are complaints I'm going to assume you're fash.

-Social policing as a way of life. If you're literally just interacting to tell me you think I fucked up, fuck off, plain and simple. You're a school bully.

-*Boosting* social policing as a way of life. You're not fooling anyone. Again, fuck off. (I know PSAs have merit, I'm talking about the types who do this more often than they actually post.)

I'm super chill 99% of the time, but some of this is trigger, and most of it's been a really good gauge of temperament for me.

So, a little background about me:

There's a few things that don't change.
-I'm on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum.
-I've been a furry since 2000, otherkin since 2002, though the minor details went through a laundry list of changes.
-I'm pansexual and a devout relationship anarchist. In more confining/conventional structures I lean almost entirely aromantic.
-I'm post-traumatic on multiple fronts and coping in strange but effective ways. The species stuff is at least partly connected, and yes I'm open about that. 💚
-I'm demifluid with my resting state trending towards androgyny.
-Collectively we're a median system with expression thereof varying markedly (think Garnet from SU but somewhat less stable as a fusion). As Kyresti I'm the hypervisor, permanent observer, and near-permanent body controller.

And here's the more contemporary quirks-mode aspects.

-As of last year? I am post-GRS, outie to innie but with complicated feelings on the outcome and a frequent desire for 'mixed characteristics' (Yes it IS possible, I think for all but at least for pre-op AMAB types. Message me and I can refer you to surgeons who know that technique.)
-As of about the beginning of this 2019? I'm half gray fox, half coyote, therian partly by choice.
-Devoutly transhumanist and a vocal proponent of morphological freedom. Your body, your wants, your business, and fuck the haters!
-Actively trying to self-teach from a wide swath of science and engineering disciplines to help make that real (It's gonna be a while though, this is kind of a lot.)
-Lover of academia as a haven for progress and research, sworn enemy of academia as an institution of gatekeeping, debt-slavery and corporate cronyism.
-Semi-solitary eclectic pagan, moderate intensity chaos mage, childe (in the Vampire sense) of Coyote. And yes I DO mean that clever yet often careless, no-shits-given oversexed asshole of a trickster god.
-Student of Fox (predominantly Red) for his light-heart and razor wit, and yes there IS a spiritual component to my therian crap why do you ask. XD

Fox here should be mostly benign, a lot of those traits come from the British Isles.

My experience with Coyote, on the other hand, comes from a convoluted mixture of First Nations stories, contemporary media (in particular Gunnerkrigg Court), some intense and frankly terrifying spiritual experiences with him over the past two years, and most importantly my own personal interpretation.

I'll make all the effort I can, to the best of my ability, to not be disrespectful about it (for instance eschewing the obvious shit like calling them 'spirit animals' as someone born with the whiteness infection). If there's something I CAN do better to balance this, I'm open to hearing. However, I'm not willing to give up my spirituality for it, and in particular, I have no patience for whiny Twitter-style callout cultists and social rent-a-cops with nothing better to do.

If I end a toot in :p, it means I'm speaking in jest, whether it be sarcastic or just plain silly.

I feel like I should pin this, I've had people miss it and mistake me for angry before. :x

Tonight is definitely shaping up to be a screm night.

Not even an upset or fight screm night. Just... AAAAAAAAA!

...Fuck there's a leifmotif. That's... gonna give me nightmares. o_o

It's like ten thousand spoooooooooooooooooonnnnnnssssssssss...

...That was the quite possibly the most powerful lead-up to a *rickroll* I've ever heard. XD

Niel, you are a beautiful chaos elemental

(Not CWed because on top of importance, this doesn't contain any direct references to anything egregious)

I've got a suspicion here.

If you're voting in WA, I'd advise you to drop it in an actual ballot box rather than trying to mail it.

They're everywhere, thankfully and it's likely a more secure bet.

If your product is adorned with pictures of smiling cookie-cutter white bougies, it's probably shit.

https://twitter.com/AmazonChique/status/1309972709657341952?s=19

A list of tips to heed, if we were to be forced underground again (which is entirely possible under a fascist regime)

Well... I'll say this much. If we ever go to war with China it'll solve the whole climate crisis bit in under a week.

Just cancel everything out with another little ice age.

Also, this is one of these things that's technically a subtoot but I want it open as a catch-all PSA.

If you're a plural system and each member has their own account, I'm strongly disinclined to follow more than one member. The reason for that is the more syntactically differentiated systems are generally the loudest.

No offense intended, but beyond a certain point it becomes difficult to keep up and I risk having a single body near-monopolize my timeline.

You know what? I'm also going to share some wisdom because this has -literally- been one of the Refrains in my life.

If someone's trying to restrict or punish you and their phrasing is any permutation of "We need to keep you safe/we're here to protect you", etc.

At minimum, in that moment, they're a cop. No one who says this is acting in your best interest. No one.

Foxes. We are, to paraphrase from the former keeper of Loki The Red Fox.

Like if you took an 18-pound ferret that could jump 6 feet in the air, gave them the aloofness of a cat, the playfulness of a dog, the attention span of a squirrel, and there's still a good half leftover that's straight-up fox.

Thank the rains, the AQI's sub-100 today.

I can open my windows again. I can fucking EXERCISE again!

Ok real talk the 1k+ character limit helps -a ton- for actual discussions. Those who gripe about the 500-as-default kiiiiind of have a point.

(Yes I'll do positive subtoots almost without a second thought)

But seriously, there's two things we need to get a handle on if this species is to survive with any semblance of dignity.

First, and prolly most important, is to figure out how to handle "power paranoia". See there's this weird phenomenon the richest and the 'elite' start seeing everyone else as both inferior and threatening, and, well, there's a reason the abuse only really stops when the sword of Damocles falls from it's threads. Fuck I'd advocate for Maoism without a second thought if it didn't just herald more of the same filling the vacuum.

The other is "breaking the cycle". I know it best from a broad swath of things that include corporal punishment and carcerial logic, but the single biggest thing abusing someone does to their mind... is it makes them about 4 times more likely to abuse others. Or to be more specific, what's intended to be 'positive punishment' (adding noxious stimuli to discourage a behavior) is... reinforcing positive punishment more than it is extinguishing other behaviors no matter HOW well-targeted it is.

I'm not sure what that takes on a grand scale, and I fear that first one may be hardwired (has anyone -studied- billionaires?), but that second one is -absolutely- societal/normative, and norms can be shifted.