Soulbonding Community

Mori: Rawlin pencil doodle behind the cut!

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Mori: we are still plugging away at Thunder Shaman: Making History With Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo. It’s super interesting and opening our mind in all sorts of cool new ways, but it’s really dense and about a people we had never known about prior, who have a vastly different cultural context, so we have to take constant breaks to just think about it. (Also this book really could’ve used a glossary; we’ve had to handwrite our own in the blank pages and have filled two already.)

The chapter we are on now talks about Mapuche ideas of text and books as ritual objects, and written law and documentation as sorcery to be countered and appropriated. And at first I went “what?” But then I thought about how the legal disability system controls the romantic relationships, job potential, and finances of those it identifies, how it fucks with the heads of those under it, and I went, “hey, you know... where’s the lie?” There’s a lot of talk about subverting the colonial legal system as acts of countersorcery, how the Mapuche make their own counterhistories not recognized by the state, and it got me thinking about how we’ve used story ourself.

Even as it was happening to us as kids, large swathes (the most IMPORTANT swathes) of our life was deemed “not real.” The concept of reality, objective fact, was used as a tool to control and harm us: crazy child can’t be trusted! And if it ever became our word against our attacker’s, we insta-lost because of who we were, no matter the circumstance. Sorcery indeed!

We couldn’t say directly what happened or was happening to us, because then we’d get caught and it’d get erased. But we could make our own twist on being unbelievable narrators: we could write fiction! And we could imbue it with all the shadow narrative of our truth that we could, interspersed with loads of nonsense, distraction, and noise, so nobody would suspect. We were, to the best of our ability, keeping our own history safe for our future selves. Though lots of sifting and salt is required, we still rely on those shadow histories today for records work! We have found ways not only to hang onto our “fake” history, but to spread it around so other people can use it and hang onto it too! So many of our comics and zines are just us trying to keep our life from getting derealized out from under us again!

And much like how the Mapuche aren’t above trying to use the legal system and its documents to their own purpose, we too use “real” records: dated photos, medical records, school calendars and report cards, etc.

We never considered this a battle of sorceries, but it’s a fascinating new lens with which to look at this stuff. Because if our digging around in archives has taught us anything, it’s that derealization, that erasure and erosion of history and reality, is constant. What gets buried, or retracted, or forever prefaced with “alleged” “identified as” or “perceived as,” what gets endlessly converted into symbolic metaphor instead of flat statement... it’s here all the time, and it affects us. I do believe that an objective reality exists, though I dunno that any one human can perceive it, but what becomes “history” and what becomes irrelevant footnotes is about way more than that objective truth. It’s so much harder than that (or the reverse of believing whatever damn fool thing your brain tells you no matter what).

We’ll probably post more about this book; I think Rogan was like, “I’ll do one big post when I’m done,” but there are so many angles and things to pursue in this book, that ain’t gonna happen. I didn’t even TOUCH the Mapuche concept of multitemporality and how it’s affected our ideas on memory work yet!

Okay, I know there are folks who do Font Stuff and I am at my wits end so I throw myself on y'all's mercy. I have a couple fonts. One, Hershey Noailles Old French 2.5, is a bold version of the other, Hershey Noailles Old French.

And I CANNOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME get my computer to see that. At first, it insisted they were two completely different, unrelated fonts, so I popped them into FontForge, renamed them to have the same family and named one Hershey Noailles Old French with weight Regular and the other Hershey Noailles Old French Bold with weight Bold. That at least got my computer to go, "Ah, I see, these are indeed the same family, one is bold and one is regular!" which is great... but now my computer insists that the two fonts are identical. I do not know why, they very clearly are not when I open them individually in Font Forge... but they show up as identical in Font Viewer too! And any time I try to use it, I get the bold face, and I cannot get the regular one.

I am giving up for now but ARGH. (And all of this could've been avoided if the font distributor had just NAMED THEM RIGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE!)

Crazy Boys Get Money (D Stories)
Summary: Two teens in Texas hook and heist their way out of danger. True story.
Series: LB autobio (D Stories)
Word Count: 8100
Notes: Winner by a long shot of the February fan poll. Depending on how this story is received, I’ll be pulling out more regarding this period of my life, a series called “the D Stories.” Normally I would break it into 3 installments, but due to the nature of the content, I have chosen to upload it all at once. I feel professionally obligated to disclaim that this story is not appropriate for anyone under 18… but this was my life when I was younger than that, and it's both insulting and degrading to say that my youth is unspeakable to the very age demographic it happens to.
Content warnings for anti-black racism; coerced, underaged, bad sex work, and (separate) consensual, okay teenage sex, along with the circumstances surrounding both. More information is in the comments.