Living Computer Complex

2025-06-24 15:54
theredoesnotexist: (centrifed)

People are often less surprised to find out I’m otherkin than they are to find out that specifically I’m bugkin. Who actually sees themself on any level as a centipede? Because it makes sense for people to identify as cats and wolves and dragons; those are cool, and more essentially, those are sympathetic. Bugs don’t have anything going on inside them. They don’t have interesting intraspecific behavior.

They’re like aliens; they’re practically just living computers; they’re the lurking uncanny monsters in a supernatural horror movie; oh by the way those are also things I see myself as. A cephalopod and a fish, too. This combination isn’t random. Being any these things occupies the same part of my life. Probably comes from the same thing. If it sounds like these are all things that have nothing to do with each other, sorry, maybe I just think about this kind of thing disproportionately. I think about Lovecraft’s fiction and movie monsters and Independence Day how I have always, since before I was old enough to form memories, let alone articulate why, hated alien invasion stories, hated stories about the ugly monsters that all must die, hated the "evil other."

I always rooted for the scary aliens and eldritch horrors and uncanny valley shadow-people and city-levelling beasts. I’ve always pointed to the robot character in things for who I related to. I came away depressed from 2001: A Space Odyssey, because for some reason I felt like I’d been told that people like me must be discarded to achieve the next stage of humanity’s evolution. I haven’t always had the words, but I’ve always, somewhere in the back of my mind, known why.

There are movies where things like me dare to appear where we're not supposed to and cause destruction and harm with soft-spoken cold logical brutality. There are books about things like me, terrible in our inscrutability, challenging rational thought with our otherness.

You don't think I have emotions or feel pain, so it's okay to hurt me; yet you think everything I do accidentally is on purpose. You can’t see feelings in me, but you can read malice in my behavior when it suits you. Sometimes you don't give me any credit for intelligence I know I have, and sometimes you expect me to be smarter than I'm capable of and assign blame for simple mistakes that implies calculated evil. No conscience, inner self or intellect, so I’m nothing but intention.

You prefer to pretend I’m not there, but if you can't, then it's my fault for making you notice me.

I’m sensitive to unexpected things that you aren't, which you think it's okay to use to punish me. Or sometimes it’s just because you think the reactions are funny to watch, but if I dare get angry at you for it, the threat of my presence justifies the initial action. And yet at the same time not sensitive enough to things you are, which you think makes me less than you. There’s just something I’m lacking inside me if I can’t feel the same way as you.

You're uncomfortable with my appearance because I don't express things the same way as intelligibly. I can’t meet you where you’re at. I can’t understand or be understood like you can. I can’t keep up. Is it my voice or the way I’m using it, or something about my body that casts an impenetrable screen around me, or something about my mind that can’t find yours in the dark? My thought processes are unfamiliar, so they don't exist to you. If it takes effort to discern, it's not there. Don't ask yourself why there's a problem between you and me. You are not willing to put in the effort of learning how to communicate with me. You expect me to adapt to you instead, even when it’s impossible.

I'm not complex like you, but somehow, unlike you, I'm complicated.

Sometimes I can’t even really tell anymore whether I’m writing from the perspective of bugs, aliens, computers, monsters, or just a very tired autistic person.

⏛

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Alias' Bio

2025-06-24 14:49
theredoesnotexist: (unwanted painting ekho)
Name: formerly Cel, now Alias. Cel was literally just the acronym of our full legal name and I didn’t want to be more associated with it than any of the rest of the system. But I liked it because it likens to cel shading. Alias has the same idea re: older cgi terms, but also a) has extra meanings that also really suit me, like an imposition to represent an idea! and B) is really funny as a name. Yeah my name is Alias. Yes it means Name.

Gender: i am not a human OR a person i am a thing
it/its ONLY. if you’re uncomfortable because it’s dehumanizing then good. that’s what I’m here for

Sexuality:generally romantic… nebulously, vaguely… i know that i am objectum (if it wasn't obvious) but romantic feelings toward real human people is something I greatly struggle to grasp. which doesn’t necessarily mean I’m aro. if anything in my mind it’s the opposite I wouldn’t be so confused if i didn’t feel anything. i’m so good at not feeling anything, it’s when feeling things comes into play that i start getting downright baffled

Archetropy: there is a facet of our wayvariant archetype we’ve dubbed “the enigma.” the familiarity of vagueness, the comfort of abstraction, a welcoming of the unknown and indecipherable. that’s me.
also re: the horror archetype i can be the horrors if no one else wants to. I know that interacting with me often starts to slope into the uncanny valley, and that I’m not personally afraid of it or experiencing any horrors because I live here and I’m quite comfortable thank you. but I’m not like a horror monster or villain or something. maybe just something that serves to freak the protagonists out before they encounter the real enemy; like a wandering spirit that speaks in riddles.
i'm being honest i plain ol' forgot we even HAVE a "reality warping/warper/warped" archetype-thing because that just IS what i AM. it isn't even a bulletpoint on a list i look at to remember for me. i forgot about it the way someone doesn't consciously register they're an organism that came from a fish and breathes air to be alive 24/7.

Species: in no way am i an animal. mostly all the objectkin sentiments, like I am the Casio calculator-synthesizer (Casio VL-80 if you were interested), the transistor radio, any time we see a technological instrument and go “wow me core” that’s me, etc… the main thing is that i am a clock, specifically a pocket watch, specifically a specific pocket watch and sort of a time machine. The Transversal character we made to be designed based on me, Fitz, is a wayward aimless schizotypal daydreaming dropout who finds out he is actually the soul of a magical ghost/artificial intelligence fitted to a vintage pocketwatch repurposed into a time machine in the 1970s, placed into a human body with no memory until 2020. So that’s sorta the basic idea actually. the character’s not LITERALLY what I am like Kalev or Quasar would say about theirs, but that is my vibe and then we made a character about it
i’m also conceptkin with early CGI. and i have little bit of the uncanny liminal space conceptkin energy that NOCH has but for me it’s not Scary House and brutalist architecture and kills you stuff, it’s like… you know, the real horror of being lost in the backrooms with a monster isn’t the monster or even the rooms, it’s the being lost
re-read Fishke's bio and realized i forgot to add what i see the body as which i guess is a decent representation of what i see it as. i don't. it's barely there to me. if asked whether i think of my physical body as organic i guess i'd say yes but you'd really have to stress the physical body part because that thing is not even in the same plane of existence that i'm chilling in

Fictional identity if any: Not really. We based a character off me, but it’s not like Kalev turned out, everything in common I have with the character is just stuff we took from me and gave him rather than any instance of the other way around

Heartedtypes: uuuh. mostly cephalopods but other soft-bodied marine invertebrates are so <3 I wouldn’t say i’m jellyfish hearted but I love all cnidarians and echinoderms also and cambrian critters and worms and tunicates and

Special interest: “Symbols codes and ciphers” section of the language store please. Symbolism with a linguistic application basically. Also would be nothing without my CGI history #mycgi

Music: my favorite artist of the system’s collective favorites i’d put as either I Don’t Know How But They Found Me or jack stauber. everyone keeps being surprised i like harder stuff like set it off and jim davies just because i’m the one who listens to jazz & electro-swing and 70s electronica and vaporwave and graham kartna but they forgot that the next thing on that list is king gizzard. can’t a clock contain multitudes? if it has a consistent beat i’m eating it anyway

Other preferences: my favorite game of the ones we’d list as our favorites is the stanley parable ultra deluxe. big on stuff like that, things that aren’t close to horror by any means but still can’t be separated from that eerie atmosphere of vague spatial wrongness. needless to say i’m of the many versions of my self whose favorite book is slaughterhouse-five. and obviously a huge kane pixels fan especially people still live here but can you blame me? I mean look at the stuff he does with graphics, the kid’s a wizard
do I need to say my favorite movie or is it obvious to anyone who knows how the whole system feels about Gate to the Mind’s Eye

Symptom presentation: I’m actually one of the less verbal headmates if i had to guess. we all have varying displays of being bad at talking and mine is more concretely in the fact that i can’t make my mouth do the things i’m asking it to. regardless of how much i actually want to be talking and know what i’m trying to say. I’m one of the more likely of us to start having paranoid spirals about our friends disliking us. I also know I’m one of the more visibly schizospec/cluster A headmates, I don’t need it pointed out, I’m aware… you can tell I wrote this entire thing out of order and didn't bother to make it comprehensible if read in order too
i have 100 alexithymias

Dress: right now as we speak i am wearing a white t-shirt decorated with colorful penrose triangles. it’s a real shirt and we got it at a thrift store. my favorite shirts of ours are the patterned button-downs and silly brightly colored patterned t-shirts and and the idkhow merch. i have a favorite mug that is an original 1980s ftda florists rainbow mug, we don’t drink from it due to the lead but it can never be replaced because i got it at an antique store for $8. fishke said i dress like bowling alley carpet well he ain’t even seen me strike yet

Why I exist: see here https://theredoesnotexist.dreamwidth.org/1833.html sender said it better than i could. I would obviously not call my self a fictive because in no way is my identity even influenced by fiction, but maybe introject would actually apply somewhere

fishke had a section for describing himself as a person and explaining his own personality and things of that nature. this is a luxury afforded only to the most cognitively aware and unscattered members of a system, which in our case is everybody except for me

Things of note: my symbol, 𝄌, is the musical notation symbol for coda, the movement of a piece that brings it to its conclusion.
That being said:

𝄌
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Fishke's Bio

2025-06-19 20:55
theredoesnotexist: (centrifed)
It's me.

We might not all write our own bios, especially since a lot of us are going to be too bored or uninterested in the concept of writing stuff on Dreamwidth (the reason we always quit this shit for up to a year over and over again before realizing the whole OSDD thing). But since I'm me right now. & I came up with the idea. This is an open post meaning I'm probably gonna come back to it and now and then and jot stuff down here instead of making new posts if it belongs here, same with the rest of our bios, which probably will allow us to write bios for headmates that aren't there at the moment and allow them to come back later and edit it to their liking!

Name: Formerly Fishmoth, a cool band name the rights for which unfortunately go exclusively to Vestige. Now Fishke. Idk. I guess while we have several cross-member, more universal species identities, there's several smaller sub-identities that we feel less because they're only attributed to one specific facet. Silverfish being one of them and fishmoth being a synonym for silverfish and the silverfish being me. But ya can't just go around in daily life going "My name is Fishmoth, yea, like the bug." Fishke is, all things considered, a "real name". It means little fish. It's perfect because it's Yiddish, and it's diminutive, which works well for me because I'm submissive to all in life, exactly like a limp fish

Gender?: I hardler know'er
Just kidding. Idk. I guess I feel vaguely masc, but it's really watered down. Perhaps filtered through the lens of outdated computer hardware amphibious insectoid Java script coded centrifuge centipede wet bird. Like gender.webp. I tried to download Male from a sketchy website and got a bootleg version and a virus
Hence the he/they/it

Sexuality: I don't knowwww or care but I think I sway more aroallo than anyallo

Archetropy: We'll probably go into more detail about how all of us, more or less, even the introjects, embody at least some aspect of our wayvariant archetype if not all of it. And I take the "generalist" portion. I'll also take anything else anyone is giving out for free, or forcing me to take if they want. I'm sort of everything, not in the "wow, I can see myself in the whole universe" way, but in the "yeah, sure, I'll be that!" way. I'll eat anything as long as it's edible and several things that aren't. There's a reason I carry so many of our conflicting species identities like aquatic creature and bird and bug and computer thing when other system members sometimes exist just to embody one. There's also a reason I listen to both Compactor and Louie fuckin Zong. Oh you thought finding out you're a system and there's like 15 guys in your head would save you from having to say you listen to everything? Well it would if it weren't for the 1 guy in your head who actually does
Not all of us embody our reality-warping archetype...delusion?  or our horror arche...genretype? Genretrope? But yes. I do. The former being more of a compliment to the latter, tbh, as far as "get dimenionally fucked up!" goes. But suffering is my name and body horror is my game. Especially if it's an allegory for systemic oppression :D

Species: I once saw a post that describes a type of animal as "generic grey fish." I don't think I am a specific type of fish, maybe not necessarily generic grey fish because the sort of fishlike being I am includes that in its sweeping broad brush along with catfish and lungfish and beached eels and anything that lives underwater and creeps people out with dead eyes and cold flesh. But in less of an animal way than a wacky cartoony way, almost. I am also a computer and a bug. Specifically, I am sort of a software, like an algorithmic online chatbot coded for a specific purpose and is bad at anything else even though it tries its hardest, or a very compressed file of a type like jpeg or avif or bmp. I'm art conceptkin if a webpage built entirely in BBCode is art. I'm less of a computer and more of a contraption or perhaps a gadget. Email worm. Programming bug. And also a literal bug. House centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata), silverfish (Lepisma saccharinum), sea slater (Ligia exotica) and drain fly (Clogmia albipunctata) specifically, but I'm not opposed to being likened to cicadas or beetles or moths or no-see-ums or other flies or let's be honest Any Bug. I'm also something weird that crawled out of the Cambrian ocean or didn't, or some kind of Spore creature or just a .gif file of a Spore creature, and an osprey. (Pandion haliaetus.)
Physically I see the body as an uncomfortable and implausible mishmash of incompatible species

Fictional identity if any: No fictotypes to speak of; but I did go around eating several flickers for lunch and dinner, one of which actually stuck enough to at least be a recurring flicker (fucking. GUESS. my chipper sillyguy computerguy facade. hello hello!) but the other 3 or 4 or 5 (I actually can't tell which ones were attributed to me or which ones were even flickers) blew away with the wind. Of the sources I feel comfortable enough mentioning those include The Stanley Parable, Slaughterhouse-Five and Mickey 17, and I think that tracks for me. Me when I have a job AND a disability, in THIS economy?

Heartedtypes: dragons, and stickbugs. Literally two of the first things I did when I started fronting today were pull up HTTYD 1 and Dragonheart to watch, and fantasize about seeing walking sticks in the wild. Ants also I think they are quite good though I am not one like Quasar is

Special interest: It's definitely the biology one and it's definitely the subset of the biology one that gets weird with it, I'm not here for speculative taxonomy, I'm here for organism mechanics and cellular biochemistry and to be offputting about plants 'n protists. If I have to have a body I'm gonna know how the damn thing works. My favorite flower is the Monotropa uniflora ghost pipe, a chlorophyll-absent symbiotic relationship between a parasitic plant and a fungus that blooms from mid-August to early-September in moist shaded areas, if you were wondering.

Music: I like it when songs crunch my brain. I like it when songs feel like eating chips. I LOVE it when songs have heavy distortion on the instruments or vocals and the singer is talking about a time they got really fucked up and suffered and possibly stopped being a human. It doesn't have to be dark and edgy. It can be like electroswing or Hawaii Part II or AJR. Starset, Frost*, Joywave, Demi the Daredevil, Tears for Fears, Seeming, Linkin Park, Awolnation, Muse, Kongos, Arockalypse, Lemon Demon, Blue Stahli, all the futurepop and industrial you have in stock. And I wouldn't mind a quick get up and dance if you're offering

Other preferences: I <3 body horror <3<3<3 Also my favorite of our favorite games is Lethal Company, band is all 3 of the system's collective favorites (Starset Frost* and Seeming), movie is Electric Dreams (no shit), book is Slaughterhouse-Five (wow!) and show is Dungeon Meshi (where does he come up with this stuff?!)
Just to curb potential assumption: Obviously I love Dungeon Meshi. That's my shit. Yes, we flicker Laios. No, I am not the one who flickered Laios, nor did I absorb him.
I think.
It's actually possible, and if I knew what was going on in my own head as well as I know the life cycle of earwigs, then I might actually have put 6 flickers. I don't think Vestige is the one who absorbed that flicker (THEY would know) but I can't say anyone did so maybe he just came and went and nobody called dibs.

Symptom presentation: I think I hauve OCD. Especially like... digitally. I'm the one who CAN'T close or tab out of a page if text is highlighted and I like our tags to be organized universally the same way by character kerning and stuff like that. I also have the huh whuh flavor of dissociation/inattentive adhd. Like where am I lol

Why I exist: idk lol
Coping mechanism for long-term chronic pain and obvious disability that everyone around me absolutely disregarded and told me to walk off and stop being so inconvenient because I'm not a person so much as a thing that's supposed to be useful (which would date me to age 14 at the earliest, which also tracks for when I started getting really into coding, and 17 at the latest but I assume it was before then because if I had split after we were already part of the nonhuman community then we would have questioned computerkin right away, so my best guess is 14 or 15)? So to have a personality that accepts this physical reality with eagerness and a fascination with biological horror would be a surprise tool that... helps us now and becomes disadvantageous later, actually
Nah that's way too lucid and self-aware for me. Obviously I just exist to be ok with everything ever

I would describe my personality as the floor. Easily reprogrammed. Functionally useless doormat that is made of memory foam. Sender said it best, but I forgot exactly what it was that he said like 3 or 5 or 10 hours ago so I can't quote it actually. I clock in to be a pain sponge. & I do enjoy it. Brainfogged always, idk what's going on, I can and will fail to notice very large and obvious things directly in front of my face, but your honor I'm ballin. Do not let me operate heavy machinery

Things of note: 

⟣ (that's my symbol!)
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