Critters System

heya!

.... yeah, we've been pretty quiet on here since early january. oops. we blame restabilizing ourselves after last year taking longer than expected, plus plain taking our time with writing and not finishing anything big recently. we're doing well, if anything! got a busy week ahead of ourselves (getting started with a possible job support program tomorrow, going to nfc the rest of the week), so there's gonna be little writing productivity from us for the next week or so, but otherwise we're doing pretty well, both creatively and as a system. luna's still a little mad a book she bought because it seemed interesting was not what it advertised itself as and was generally a letdown, but otherwise things are good :3

and when we say our creativity's doing well? we mean it! actually crafting the art we want to is still a struggle, but what we're making is stuff we enjoy! after that last big short story, we're finally feeling the drive to take our time and let our stories cook a little, give them some more drafting and rereading stuff rather than dropping our 3 am scribbles right onto the internet. more time consuming, yeah, but we feel what we're doing is working out better than what we did before. it hasn't fixed our main problem (extremely inconsistent ability to sit down and write), but we're hoping that might ease up as spring arrives and we get to stabilize a little mentally. after a longer drawing break, we're even doing some of that again! picked up a budget drawing tablet a little while ago, and after not using one for about 8 years, we're barely even rusty at it! what we're doing with it is rough, yes, but it's no worse than when we regularly used one and we're happy with that, the problem is literally just that we need practice and figuring out what settings work for us!

so, just to give an idea what's actively in the works right now:

three in-progress short stories: we're mid writing these, between a few hundred and a couple thousand words each so far. two of them in particular are stories that take stuff we've been struggling a little with (biid/bottom dysphoria and species dysphoria, respectively), and just turning the vibes happy. hopefully they end up as good as we feel they could be.

one short story (rough sketch): we have a mostly detailed outline written down for this one, but haven't actually started writing it yet. also looking forwards to working on this one, as it takes the struggle of "hey wait, all of us in this plural system want different things out of life and we're struggling with reconciling our wants" and plays it for slight comedy. with a touch of the old accidentally-realizing-you're-plural kinda egg story. plus a lot of horniness.

one short story (loose idea): of course we already have another thing we want to work on too. haven't written/plotted anything down yet, but imagine a lot of therian and post-tf energy. figuring out what in the world your body does now. finding companionship and solidarity in others also forced to ask the same questions. this one might be a couple months out still, if we decide to go through with it, but we like the ideas we're throwing around here.

long-form writing?: okay, we'll be honest; this one's still a bit of an "haha what if". we do have an idea that we could do a novel-length story around, we could probably come up with more if we wanted, but the problem here is the abovementioned lack of consistency in writing. we're thinking of prioritizing writing more in march, try to get things running with some consistency and finishing the other works in progress, so we'll write down what we're thinking and see if we wanna try getting something big running.

there's also one final thing we're thinking about: how to best preserve our old cohost writings and stories.

we did a fair bit on there! some of it rougher than others, and less than we probably would've liked to write, but there's a lot of small stories to gather from there! plus, the multipart story aster wrote that ended up becoming our largest work from there is still good, if in need of a decent redrafting. we kinda want to do something special with all this.

so what we're thinking is this: an anthology collection of the smaller things, and an updated and remastered version of the second person beast story. depending on how we feel about the finished work? we might put both on itch.io for sale (with the anthology as a nyp, and the story as possibly a low price purchase for the story remaster).

we won't lie, the idea of offering our writing for money still feels weird! not just because it was originally released in a very free format (and should mostly still be available for free online too, within the archives), but also because we're not yet used to thinking of our creative work as something we can monetize lol. this too is probably gonna take some time, if we do it! even with a lot of good ideas, some of our late night writing can be... very rough around the edges. we'd have to edit and remaster a lot of things (just of the top of our head, there's at least 15-some things we feel like adding to this hypothetical anthology), and there's at least one or two ideas we had and posted on there that would need basically a new story written for them... but we want to do this? all those stories feel so small when we think of them individually, but there is enough there that with a little extra love, they can be released in this way.

as for the longer story: yeah, we could also include it in the anthology... but with a little love, it can stand on its own very well. we won't deny that we're kinda romanticizing the entire idea of formally publishing these works, but it's a tempting thought! give this tale of finding species euphoria and company, give it a nicer shine (one it deserves), and make it available, albeit possibly at a slight cost? depending on the price, there's a good shot a lot of any theoretical earnings will be put towards commissioning furry art, which probably would be another selling point loao

we don't know. if any of y'all have any thoughts about all this, feel free to share them. we're just rambling a little here, maybe dreaming a little too. we're small creatures in a large world! we can have funny thinking moments if we want to!

so, yeah! we're writing when we can, possibly gonna work on the three larger projects we mentioned above, and things are going well for now!

hi everyone! yeah, i got permission to do a post here. technically beryl bullied me into writing this, but that's details. gonna keep this short, hopefully; the others just got ready to put on some nail polish for the new year~

so, happy new year to all of you! at the time of writing, it's about an hour left here, and the banging has already started. unfortunately, it's not the fun kind of banging, so we're not quite vibing with it. we're also feeling a bunch of things about the past year, and anticipating the coming one. i'm gonna get us to do something more fleshed out with our goals and such later, both here and... well.

somehow, we ended up the kind of system where everyone has very separate interests. this is a problem in some ways, slightly less so in others, and something we're looking to tackle better going forwards, but in my case i ended up the computer toucher. with how things were between me and r2 a good while there, that's both meanings of that phrase c: specifically, i've developed a rapidly growing interest in html stuff as we've started setting up our personal site (cough cough critterssystem.neocities.org/ ), and now i'm debating if maybe, once we've fleshed the other parts out a little... what about adding a longer form blog there too?

it would be good to have our personally written stuff all in one place that's also relatively ours, considering the closest we've had to that kind of setup, aside from here, was cohost (rip). the arc of "eh we don't need a website" to "maybe having somewhere neutral to drop stuff is good" to "aaaaa this is fun" was a ride. however, what i (and the others) are thinking is to use that as something parallel to here.

this is, as of now, our official "write way too long posts" spot on the internet. the website league's competing, but that still feels way more daily drive/small scale compared to here. it means less posts here, yes, but longer ones when we do write. and if we combine writing for here with writing for a blog page on our own website...

look: i just really want to do websitey stuff when possible, and the others are positive to it, so we'll probably be cross-posting a bit once we get that set up. hoping to get it done in the near future; we have more words we wanna write on the new year, and i think i just successfully
convinced everyone that doing it like this will be great~

so yeah! might mean slightly more stable activity here, will mean some crossposting between here and our own site when that comes up, and an even cleaner place to store our own work as time goes on too!

anyway, gonna end it here for now. we were hoping to finish a story by the end of the year, but we've just barely been able to write the last couple weeks. technically started what might hopefully become a novel, though! and gonna go do some body-attached art now.

happy new year, all you wonderful creatures!

“Tell me... Did it hurt?”

It was the smaller of the two who’d asked the question. Both of them sitting in that forest of greens and purples, dark in the late red afternoon, on the old wooden pier. The lake below them reflected back a city, one painfully familiar to the speaker. The smaller of the two looked like an ordinary human girl aside from the dyed purple hair. The larger of the two had skin the same color as the other’s hair, six muscular arms, and a heavy crown of antler-like horns.

“When?” the demon responded. “When I changed like this?”

“No. When you realized you couldn’t go back.” The girl was barely holding back tears now.

The demon stretched and sighed. “Yeah. That last night at my parent’s place got bad.”

“But not after your change?”

“By that point I knew there was no home left there.” A moment of quiet, only the wind brushing by the leaves made a noise. “And I think... Anyone who gets here has their mind made up. They know where home is, and where it isn’t.”

The girl broke into sobs now, and the demon gently hugged her. Comfort it had needed too, when it sat in her place a lifetime ago.

The skies dimmed. Gentle ambiance of unnatural insects swelled through the air. And as the reflection of that city in the lake dimmed and became a distant memory, the demon walked away from the pier and down the dirt path into the forest. Above it, a winged creature flew along on unfamiliar wings. There was joy and freedom in her motions.

Hello, everyone! It's been a little while, hasn't it. Sure hasn't helped that we technically procrastinated on writing this for like 10 hours either. We've been alright.

From what I can tell, it mostly seems that the last few months caught up with us here for a little. Between the apparent events of the latter half of August and that emotional spiral, then the stress with Cohost, and then spending most of October and November focusing extra on job searches... A couple weeks ago, we got almost shocking confirmation that what we believed to be the situation in August not only didn't happen but was not a problem at the time at all, and it's just been. I wanna say weird, but everyone else is gently nudging me and saying that weird is what we'd be if all this other stuff didn't take our energy away from being it. We've been on survival mode again, I think. At least things are currently stable and improving slightly. Which means that instead we're having almost daily rounds of both dysphoria (Gender and species!), as well as the BIID-related thoughts hitting hard at times. It's fun. /s

Anyway, between all of that and our time getting swallowed by other distractions, we've kinda neglected this site a little in that time. Technically we're most active at the time on Bluesky (For now, at least), and somewhat active over on Mastodon too, but not so much elsewhere recently. I blame the (For us at least) lower barrier of entry and larger number of old acquaintances and friends. We're thinking about how we want to change that. 300 characters is almost nothing, especially when, as I believe this post so far is proving, we have a tendency to get perhaps overly verbose at times. The vibes there have also shifted this last week or so. At the start of November, we'd probably still call it "Twitter with a healthy dose of the internet weariness that became worn into the healthier habits and patterns of Cohost". Now? There's some of that still, but you can feel the extra buzz in the room. Things are louder, busier. Way more Twitter. And we're currently following just over 130 people on there, most of which deliberately chosen as generally slightly quieter posters too (We need more than one paw to list the people who're cool, but post and share way too much and would blow up our timeline if we followed them.) We're thinking of perhaps dialing that back.

I could talk about all this stuff until the sun comes back up and sets again, but I don't think it'll change much right now. So, what's the plan?

First of all, a bit of a stretch goal. Three new stories before the end of the year. If possible, not counting the one that we have 95% finished and ready to post after a final look-over to fix any last issues. We have *plenty* of ideas for stuff we wanna write (Including, but not limited to: BIID/gender dysphoria wish fulfillment, getting funny with body mods and doing a kink we're not sure has a proper name, some plushie-powered "Oh just confess already", a silly winter holiday gift-mixup, and others), so the main issue will just be writing. I think we can hopefully manage that, even if our little taste of editing from our current WIP is already somewhat addicting.

We also want to push ourselves to be more social. Not just a half-there presence on social media pushing the thumbs up button, as we've primarily been for years, but social. Actually talk to people. I'm gonna leave that part to the more outgoing members of the system.~

And between that, taking care of our body as we're coming out of this funk, and having to put some extra effort into our job hunting stuff going forwards (And the others pointing out multiple non-overlapping grinds they want to do in FFXIV) we have plenty of stuff to do. We just have to try and do it. And fight a little against the AuDHD along the way. I think we can.

Basically, I'm pretty sure next post on here will be sooner than a month from now oops

The following story was started on the eve of Cohost entering read-only mode, as an attempt to summarize our emotions, build hope for the future, and make sure we could keep our creative energy going past the end of that site. Please enjoy.

The door was locked, the apartment all cleared out, and the woman watched as one of her friends drove away with the last load of her things. Two years. Two long years of making it to the first apartment she could get with a terrace (The one thing she was constantly told she needed), of finding new friends and community... And now, the place looked as barren as the first day she stumbled in.

She looked at the kitchen, and the scorch marks on the wall from whoever lived here before her. She’d sworn since day one she’d paint over them, and still they persisted. Maybe the next inhabitant would do something. She looked at the half-open door to her bedroom. Her safe haven. The place where she finally invited someone in to know her, and found a companion who saw her for herself. Who, despite all her fears, found a way to love her.

As if on queue, a loud howl rang out from close by the apartment block. The woman smiled.

( Read more... )

🦨 First of all: Hi everyone, it's Beryl here. System emotes seem to function on our end (At least through use of the preview function), so if you see a skunk at the start of this paragraph, it worked! If not, whoops. Also, in case anyone is wondering what this entire thing is about and don't know us through Cohost, we're a plural system behind this page. It basically means we're a bunch of different people (Or, in our case, creatures; Long story) sharing a single body. We wrote that previous blog entry collectively, but this one is one I wanted to write individually. If you want more information about this whole plural thing, morethanone.info/#home is a great overview of what it is.

(And before you mention that icons can be applied on a per post basis on here, perfect for situations like this... Yeah, I know! It's actually one of the features we're the most interested to play with eventually! It just so happens that I don't have any good art of myself, and the skunk photo I use for my Pluralkit proxy is on a different computer at the moment. So.... Please imagine that the plushie shark on the side there is a skunk instead!)

But, to get back to the title of this post... The fact that Cohost, our primary online spot and in many ways our online home for just under two years now, has literally 15 days left of life only fully hit us now this morning. Or right at the end of last night, we're not sure. But the last several days with its enthused flurry of activity as we first made our plans on where we desired to move out to, and then went through to share our love with as many of the fellow creatures on that site as we could manage... That burst of energy quieted down today, and in its place was a longing for more time.

The last month has been... Rough. First we hit a moment where- You all know how there are those moments in your life where you look back even five minutes later, and you can immediately tell that your decisions have just changed the course of your life, in some way? It was perhaps a very mundane example of those moments in retrospect, but those first days felt like we'd just made a mistake that led us down a possibly worse branch in the tree of possible futures. Then a tragedy we won't get into right now struck, and left us in a fugue with 2 1/2 - 3 weeks of the worst depression we've had in years. We had barely started to rebuild our mental stability when the Cohost news came.

And now? Without both the shock and pain of the announcement fresh, or the burst of energy to grab the future by the throat and reclaim some of the home that we are losing? It's emptiness, it's longing for waking up and seeing everyone being silly creatures on main again, it's... Fuck. It's the unfortunate situation where two of the places we felt some sort of stability (Online and IRL respectively) are either disappearing or are way worse at providing what we need than first presented, and we just feel lost right now. We just feel so lost.

We're gonna figure out stuff these next weeks. The hardest part is that even if we'd love to use this chance to spend all our energy and push ourselves towards becoming a more social and talkative creature, we have to try and spend some energy to do things away from our social network too. Right now, we're just small creatures that are way too lost and tired in this world. We hope we'll find some sort of home out there, but right now.... We need to keep walking, we want to rest a little. Perhaps we have to do both.

We have no bloody idea anymore.