Scribbles and Bits

“No! It’s just plain dumb!”: Glass Onion

2026-04-19T17:41:25Z

Rogan: we rewatched Glass Onion with our roomies, because I felt a need to read about an idiot tech billionaire getting his royal comeuppance, for SOME REASON.

( a post about a specific kind of stupid, full of spoilers because we assume you’ve seen it already )

comments

New Poll from Ssspriteee: fictives!

2026-04-18T17:27:42Z

Sneak: ssspriteee told us this weeks ago and we’re late but spreading the word!

Quoth they: “It's about fictives in fandom and what engagement looks like for them. I'm bad at explaining, but here's the post about it that also has the survey link. https://ssspriteee.dreamwidth.org/590.html”

Go fill it out! Give them data! Thank you, ssspriteee! :D (We ourself can’t really fill it out, because it’s more outsourced peeps, which we don’t really have.)

comments

Sensitivity Reads

2026-04-18T17:22:24Z

Rogan: I like doing sensitivity reads.

I don’t get those jobs super often, and I wouldn’t want them to be my main thing (there’s a reason it’s expensive), but I’ve discovered I really enjoy hearing other people’s ideas and acting as a sounding board to help bring out their best! It makes me happy. The people who hire me bring so much heart and hard work to the table, and they often have really creative ideas that I never would’ve thought of! It’s wonderful when that happens.

There can be a lot of anxiety around sensitivity reading, I think. There’s this image of going to some knowledgeable person who tells you self-righteously how wrong and awful you are. But that’s not how I see it; I see it as a collaboration, me working to help someone do what they’re already doing. We state our hard limits on the webpage, and by the time someone’s gone through all the trouble of reading that, contacting us, and paying me, they’ve taken that into account. (And if they didn’t, it’ll come up long before money’s changed hands.) And if it’s not a hard limit for me, my reaction is generally curiosity and excitement. More multi in the arts! Woo yeah!

I definitely used to be more sanctimonious about this, long before I did this for pay. (Indeed, part of why I CREATED that “hire me” page was, I wanted to stop people from asking me to survey their Jekyll/Hyde murderer multi characters for free. It worked!) But I’ve mellowed as I’ve aged, in large part because I have read enough good multi stuff that I no longer feel that starving urge for Perfection Or Nothing. You don’t need the One Perfect Story when you have a bunch of good enough stories already! I have Paprika, and the Book of Autonomancy, and Mefisto in Onyx, and all the rest of it. I’m no longer culturally starving! (It’s also a nice side effect of Sneak running pluralstories.)

I also have more realistic expectations of what fiction can and cannot do in the world. Nobody who has hired me has been a blockbuster creator of the next Sybil. They’re folks who make nice little webcomics or play D&D. They are not responsible for single-handedly removing ableism from our society via the power of story. Come on. They don’t want or need a politically expedient parable of plurality, and neither do I. It’s the friction of our experience and hopes meeting reality that gives stories their charge, that grate of imperfection and frailty that comes with being a being. The agony of the relationships in Pipe Up! make it way more compelling than if the singlet friend was perfectly, utterly accepting right off the bat, or if he was just not worth the emotional investment. But that messiness? Oh man, that messiness makes it POWERFUL.

My job isn’t to remove the mess. It’s to go, “ooooh, you know what would make this mess EVEN STRONGER...”

comments

Comic: GAZONGAS!

2026-04-17T02:57:07Z

This was the winner of this month's fan poll! We appreciate that in these bullshit times, we can bring you the boobs and smoochery y'all clearly so desire.

( Images behind cut! Boobs are a state of mind, really... )

comments

Wake Up Dead Man

2026-04-14T16:29:39Z

We watched Wake Up Dead Man, and we found it a fascinating story about how folks get taken in by culty, hateful people.

( This post assumes you know the movie already. SPOILERS! )

Next time I encounter someone who wonders how people get taken in by hateful movements, I’m gonna point them at this movie. All of the flock are flawed, vulnerable people. Everyone has some weakness that can be exploited, some desire that can be twisted. All of us struggle to grow and change, to realize when we’ve thrown our lot in with a douchebag. That’s human. That the movie works so hard to explain why is commendable.

comments

2026 April Fan Poll

2026-04-09T00:18:43Z

Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!

As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes. (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here! (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.

Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month? YOU CHOOSE, readers!

View Poll: 2026 April Fan Poll

comments

Enormous Old Infinity Smashed Art Dump

2026-04-08T23:06:57Z

Mori: Okay, I kicked Rogan's dilapidated ass off the front and unlocked a lot of our old-as-dirt DeviantArt archive, which was started back in 2003. (We started this project weeks ago, all because we wanted to unearth the twenty-two-year-old fanart we did of Sam Kieth's Zero Girl in honor of Kieth's passing. Rest in peace, old man!)
( Said fanart behind the cut! Seriously, if you want to give someone credit for giving us the idea of making comics, credit Sam Kieth. )
I also took the opportunity to hork up a huge chunk of old-as-dirt Infinity Smashed art and upload it to archive.org. It's about 160 pieces from 1999-2011, everything from little sketches and doodles to full illustrations, all in chronological order. (I guess if folks want newer stuff all in another big dump, I could do that?) It includes the first art we ever did of me, Biff, Grey, Mac, Bob, and the only art we ever drew of Rawlin pre-2019.

Because we used to draw on enormous sheets of paper, image quality varies a LOT. (If you're dying for a better copy of some of these, feel free to ask, but...) Most of these characters, settings, and plotlines no longer exist and haven't in... shit, twenty-plus years. A lot of it has aged exactly how you'd expect.

I dunno who'd want access to our old juvenilia, but if you want it, there it is. If you want all our archive.org works, here's the list.

EDIT: sure, why not, gonna just upload some of the old doodles here.

( The newest of these sketches is sixteen years old )

comments

Essay: Psychodrama and Realitymashing

2026-03-31T21:18:36Z

Psychodrama and Realitymashing (by Rogan)
Series: Essay
Summary: my favorite genre that doesn't exist.
Word Count: 3114
Notes: Winner of the March 2026 fan poll! This essay builds on my previous realitymashing essay, “All Narrators are Unreliable,” and you’d be best-served reading that first. This essay is dedicated to Sam Kieth, the original champion of comics realitymashing, who died March 15th. Sam Kieth’s work on Zero Girl and the Maxx are what originally inspired us to make comics, and our work as you know it wouldn’t exist if not for him. Rest well, titan.

What is psychodrama?

One of my favorite genres, though it doesn’t formally exist as far as I know, I call psychodrama: a person working through their own (or someone else’s) mind, memory, or imagination, made into “real” places or people. (“Real,” for the purposes of this essay, means, “must be dealt with and taken seriously.”) ( Read more... )

comments

Plural History in Amherst

2026-03-31T15:05:27Z

Two bits of news!

First of all, we will be presenting a shortened form of our many-selved history lecture (along with, by request, a brief talk about how we came to do what we do and what it entails) at a little trauma and dissociation conference, from 3-7 pm on Friday, April 3, at Franklin Patterson Hall at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

The second thing is, the essay I owe y’all will likely be late. Sorry guys. Ny died, Meagan got convicted of first-degree bullshit, this month has been challenging.

comments

Ny Bweek

2026-03-29T23:15:30Z

minoanmiss, AKA Ny, AKA my friend who died earlier this month, is having a fanfic commentathon thrown in her honor for June. If you want to participate or know details, please check out https://www.tumblr.com/rubybweek

comments

I Still Say MPD Multis Don't Own "System"

2026-03-29T04:33:56Z

Rogan: hungryghosts nerd-sniped me with, of course, multi etymology! Specifically, an anthology that looked like it might contradict my previous posts on the history of the use of "system" in plural space! Richard P. Kluft was the editor; it's Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality from 1985!

( Interestingly enough, Kluft himself never uses the term in the book! He might've picked it up from other writers in this book, maybe? Would have to read more of his work to be sure, which... I am in no hurry to do. )

comments

Meagan Morris

2026-03-27T16:23:29Z

Someone I knew from my North Texas days, Meagan Morris, is one of the folks arrested in the Prairieland debacle, which I only just learned about. She is facing minimum ten years in prison (as a trans woman, in Texas) for... I can’t even figure out what exactly she’s supposed to have done!

I’ve been on an antifa watchlist since before COVID because I went to a protest wielding a sign covered in penises and got quoted by USA Today. I guess I’m a terrorist now.

I’ll be at the protest tomorrow. Fuck this bullshit.

EDIT: okay, as far as I can tell, Meagan was convicted for going to an anti-ICE protest (“riot”), helping others there (“providing material support to terrorists,” now that Trump has declared antifascists terrorists), and using fireworks there (“use and carry an explosive” and “conspiracy to use and carry an explosive”).

She is facing 10-60 years in prison as a trans woman for being an antifascist and having fireworks. That’s terrorism now. That’s hitting people I KNOW. (Or knew.) This is where I used to LIVE.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

comments

On Labels

2026-03-23T19:04:05Z

Rogan: I guess, if I had to summarize my feelings about labels, any kind of identity label, it’d be this: labels are created for people; people are not created to fit them.

A label describes, but it shouldn’t define. If it strangles you, ditch it. Even if you can’t avoid other people slapping it on you, you don’t have to make THEIR mistake part of YOUR identity. (Sadly, uprooting nasty brainweeds like that is rarely as simple as just saying no. You may end up having to know your enemy, do way more research, and think way more about it than you’d like, just to pull up all them runners. It’s worth it, though, to be free!)

Whatever label you choose, hold it loosely. Don’t death-grip it, or you’re priming yourself for a total identity collapse if/when you change... and change is the only constant. Let yourself grow. Let yourself be playful about what you call yourself and why; we call ourself a “multivarious cyborg” and it’s a typo! We named ourself Loony-brain thinking this was just an embarrassing stage we were going through, and now we own it! We went from soulbonder to natural multiple to DID to “yes and” multi. Maybe one day, we’ll even be singlet again, or something else entirely!

Knowing your label is not the same as knowing yourSELF. There’s no linguistic shortcut for that work. Nobody can do it for you, and that’s good news: it puts the power in YOUR hands.

Use it well, and don’t hang on so hard.

comments

Zine: my love is strange

2026-03-22T05:03:00Z

EDIT: found typos and formatting errors that somehow escaped all previous read-throughs. Will edit and replace. -_-

Hey, so... since we got a printer, and since our shoulder and eyeballs are increasingly reluctant to let us read long things on the computer, we've taken to slapping together little zines for our personal enjoyment of our favorite stuff. We also use them to fool around with typography and stuff. You know, just make fun little things.

And then we were like, "Hey... what if we shared some of these?"

So here's our newest fun thing: my love is strange: an anthology of eight hundred years of unusual care. It's just a commemoration of being together in ways my current society would like to pretend doesn't exist and never did. Alt-texted, illustrated with pictures from the public domain. Table of contents:

( I wasn't joking about it covering a swathe of eight hundred years by the way. )

comments

Comic: Sneak Attack!

2026-03-20T21:40:24Z

Winner of the 2026 fan poll! All text under this is text-only transcription of the comic.

( No Sneaks were involved in this sneak attack. )

comments

Book Spine Poetry

2026-03-20T02:40:40Z

We keep a little stack of books we're reading on the kitchen table and our roommates noticed that the spines lined up in amusing ways. This was accidental, but then we thought, "what if we did that... ON PURPOSE?"

And today, we trashed our room stacking books to make poems. We hope they amuse you!

( Seven book poems! )

comments

Potential Future Projects We're Kicking Around

2026-03-19T04:09:07Z

Finally finishing the Reverend Alpert book, which has been stalled at around 80% completion for YEARS now
Expanding Quick'n'Dirty Plural History into a proper paperback, because the zine sells shockingly well for such a niche subject, we have a lot more info now (though not on the newest slapfights, ha, no, we're talking older, cross-cultural stuff, and spirit marriage/headmate relationship stuff) (if you want us to wade into the hottest new plural communities on Discord or Bsky or what the fuck ever, you're going to have to pay us real money, and in ADVANCE)
Finally kicking Rogan's ass into inking Loyal Forever, a comic that involves the muscle car beloved from Crazy Boys Get Money)
Expanding Xenogals into a book-length thing, the Mori and Rawlin version of Alter Boys In Love (Xenogals in Love?)

Oh no, all but Loyal Forever are big beefy books. But well, the Xenogals and Plural History ones would replace their floppies, and Reverend Alpert would probably end up a short run anyway.

comments

Books and Bytes

2026-03-18T17:29:58Z

Mori: nobody jumps out of bed going, “Good morning world, today I do my TAXES!” with a big smile on their face, but man alive, is it neat to see what sold and what didn’t, when and where.

( Read more... )

comments

Last Chance for Ebooks; get 'em before they're GONE!

2026-03-17T03:40:12Z

Mori: Heads up y'all, I'm doing our tax prep, which means I'm going through all our titles, seeing what sold and what didn't, and deciding what gets weeded. In a week or so, I'm going to be removing the following ebook listings from sale, so if you want them, now is the time to get them:

The Homeless Year (sells great on paper still, that'll stay)
Alter Boys in Love
Coming In Or Staying Out (also sells great on paper still, will stay on paper)

(Rogan's Aphasia is also barely hanging in there, has been for years; for some reason every once in a while people will buy another copy of it, just BARELY keeping it in the running.)

(Also I figure, just as a note, we do this every year. I tally up everything what sold, and shit that sold less than five copies gets weeded. I'm trying to get us more regular about saying when we're removing something from print, since some folks might miss out otherwise. And hey, if enough copies sell, it'll stay up for other folks!)

comments

The Secret Legion

2026-03-16T18:00:53Z

This is a messy post about death and love.

( content warning: abuse. )

comments

Plural Death and Dormancy Survey

2026-03-10T16:36:28Z

vaguelyautonomous linked us a cool survey Sprites made regarding death and dormancy among plurals: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1wARJSMVDVYhX1v4WKAdrCbS_f6hIdXvpHNw810gSOhA/mobilebasic

Too bad we didn’t know about it while it was running; death is a large part of our inner workings and we have strong opinions on it. (I am also utterly baffled and deeply annoyed that apparently headmate death is STILL considered impossible or an “endo thing”; I guess they never read When Rabbit Howls. I’m sure I could find earlier medical references if singlet death wasn’t currently devouring my attention.)

Very interesting was to learn we’re apparently in a major minority in that we don’t really experience dormancy! (Except arguably Rawlin? But she was imprisoned in the deep bowels of headspace for years, so it’s not like she was GONE, just we lost track of her. She eventually went into hibernation because what else was there to do in solitary confinement for decades?) We lose access to people from elsewhere, but they aren’t dormant; our metaphorical rail just doesn’t go to their stop anymore and their lives just continue without us.

comments

My Worst DID Awareness Day Post Ever

2026-03-07T00:01:35Z

Rogan: Apparently DID Awareness Day was yesterday. I... frankly had more important things to be doing, but okay, let's... let's pull the old shit together and say something.

( This will surely end well for all my readers! )

comments

Less Nothing Right Now

2026-03-05T00:23:03Z

Rogan: A friend of mine is dead but I’m not ready to talk about that yet, so instead I’m distracting myself with Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.

( I’m failing and I miss my dead friend. )

comments

Mr. Skarsgard Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Pillion

2026-03-02T20:30:05Z

(Title comes from Pat Califia’s highly relevant essay, “The Limits of S/M Relationship, or Mr. Benson Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”)

Rogan: Mac has been wanting a date night since Boskone, and we chose the gay leather biker flick, Pillion! We saw it on a triple date with other kinky queer friends of ours, and it generated many conversations!

( My initial biggest question was, can Alexander Skarsgard convince me he’s a gay leather biker? SPOILERS )

comments

LB's favorite zines!

2026-03-01T01:39:03Z

Mori: witchpoetdreamer asked us about a list of our favorite zines. FOOLISH FOOL HAS ACTIVATED MY TRAP!

For this post, we are using "zine" here to mean "a floppy booklet (lacking a spine) that is either self- or small-published, and also NOT from an academic journal NOR just a comic." It can have comics IN it, or mash-up image and text in other, more experimental ways (such as the classic cut-and-paste style of zine), but it can't be primarily comics or we will be here for all eternity.

HERE WE GO! ALL ABOARD THE ZINE MACHINE, Y'ALL!

( ZIIIIINESSSS! )

comments