Honestly, it was just completely randomly? All of them were through mutual friends on tumblr, as far as I recall. The number of plural systems we've met by sheer chance really make me think that multiplicity is so much more common than they say it is, hah.
Oh god, yeah, they were DEVOTED to trigger warnings. You had to 'splat' out letters of potentially upsetting words like 'abuse' (as 'ab*se'). And one of the regulars reposted the guidelines for how you were supposed to warn and splat and stuff every few weeks so no one could miss them. Most everyone there had a therapist and was in treatment, and there was a lot of talk about trauma and causes. Also, there were a couple of systems with hundreds of alters that didn't bother differentiating themselves--ubiquity is the name of the one I remember most, I think. I remember the rest of us trying to sell them on the oxygen mask analogy at great length at one point and failing utterly because they valued themselves so incredibly little. It was not a cheerful place, but it was the one place I had found at the time to talk to other systems about being plural, so. (And hey, it was a bastion of functionality compared to the shitstorm that was alt.suicide.holiday, which was on fire even when we first ended up there in like 2004. Spam, more spam, legal notices from a couple of members who were suing each other, people wanting help or someone to talk to, people trying to talk everyone out of suicide, posts about methods, random predators trying to get teenagers to hang themselves on webcam, and people posting warnings about the predators. There was a reason I hung out in an associated IRC channel more than the actual ash ng.)
Yeah, we were never in the lj plural community! Or like... any lj community, honestly, we had an lj but we were too shy to try and make new friends on it.
I've attempted to draft a history of how our system's gone and how we/I drifted in and out of plurality and I have no idea if it's even coherent, not least because I think I've forgotten several people (I've definitely lost at least one name) and I can't think where to look up old system documentation. And also because I'm having to work around several names to avoid it being google-able, because we have (had?) stalkers that I have no confidence have given up.
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Oh god, yeah, they were DEVOTED to trigger warnings. You had to 'splat' out letters of potentially upsetting words like 'abuse' (as 'ab*se'). And one of the regulars reposted the guidelines for how you were supposed to warn and splat and stuff every few weeks so no one could miss them. Most everyone there had a therapist and was in treatment, and there was a lot of talk about trauma and causes. Also, there were a couple of systems with hundreds of alters that didn't bother differentiating themselves--ubiquity is the name of the one I remember most, I think. I remember the rest of us trying to sell them on the oxygen mask analogy at great length at one point and failing utterly because they valued themselves so incredibly little. It was not a cheerful place, but it was the one place I had found at the time to talk to other systems about being plural, so. (And hey, it was a bastion of functionality compared to the shitstorm that was alt.suicide.holiday, which was on fire even when we first ended up there in like 2004. Spam, more spam, legal notices from a couple of members who were suing each other, people wanting help or someone to talk to, people trying to talk everyone out of suicide, posts about methods, random predators trying to get teenagers to hang themselves on webcam, and people posting warnings about the predators. There was a reason I hung out in an associated IRC channel more than the actual ash ng.)
Yeah, we were never in the lj plural community! Or like... any lj community, honestly, we had an lj but we were too shy to try and make new friends on it.
I've attempted to draft a history of how our system's gone and how we/I drifted in and out of plurality and I have no idea if it's even coherent, not least because I think I've forgotten several people (I've definitely lost at least one name) and I can't think where to look up old system documentation. And also because I'm having to work around several names to avoid it being google-able, because we have (had?) stalkers that I have no confidence have given up.