get more furry

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

Aka talking about hallucinations using my own personal examples because I had an actual fucking THERAPIST tell me I was the ONLY person in the world who experienced hallucinations that were not solely visual or auditory. Warning for…hallucinations obviously.

Visual hallucinations - These are hallucinations you see. I usually experience these by way of inanimate objects moving (like dolls or mannequins moving on their own, before you ask yes I do hate clothing stores). Sometimes these can be scary and sometimes they’re mundane! I’ve hallucinated monsters and I’ve hallucinated pretty birds. Hallucinations don’t always have to be scary.

Auditory hallucinations - These are hallucinations you hear. I commonly hear crying, talking, music, and video game noises. If I play a video game for too long and it has a repetitive sound in it, I WILL be hearing that sound for minimum three hours. You think the sound that plays in LoZ when you’re low on hearts is annoying? Try having to listen to it on loop when you’re not even playing the game. Like with visual hallucinations, they’re not always scary! Contrary to popular belief, they can be totally mundane. Hearing voices is not always scary either. Sometimes they just say random stuff, sometimes they give me little pep talks, most of the time they just all talk over each other at once and I’m like GUYS ONE AT A TIME PLEASE jeezy cheez-it’s.

Tactile hallucinations - These are hallucinations you feel. I hear common tactile hallucinations are feelings of bugs on you and fur but I don’t usually have these, I mostly have tactile hallucinations of being choked which is…not fun.

Olfactory hallucinations - These are hallucinations you smell. Yeah I thought of farts first too. So far I haven’t heard of that being a common hallucination though. I hear a common olfactory hallucination is burning? But I just smell wet metal. I…don’t know why.

Gustatory hallucinations - These are hallucinations you taste. I don’t know how to pronounce gustatory either. I often taste blood or metal. I hear those are pretty common gustatory hallucinations.

None of these hallucinations are inherently scary! As a child, I thought hallucinations were a super power. After living with them for over ten years, they just don’t phase me that much. Remember: you don’t have to be schizophrenic to experience hallucinations! There are many things that cause hallucinations including and not limited to trauma, PTSD, psychotic depression, etc. (sometimes even stress!)

But please please please be kind to people who hallucinate. I’ve lived with it for over ten years and (rarely) it can still be terrifying to me sometimes. People say “But there’s nothing there and you know that-“ yes I know that! But it’s still very very real to me and very terrifying! Minimizing what people experience with their hallucinations is not helpful and will only make them feel worse.

[image description: a comic starring a dragon furry who has somewhat transparent skin and a large eye.

dragon, talking to someone offscreen: How long have I lived here? For forever, I was born here. Well, I say "born," but I was more, like... duplicated? cloned?

dragon: You know how some lizards can shed their tails? In some cases the tail goes and grows a body.

An example of this is shown, with the formed body having transparent skin, showing veins or nerves that stem from the shed tail.

Yes indeed. People repurchasing their childhoods – or wannabe childhoods – on the internet is basically the only thing keeping our economy going. If you can't afford a house, then at least you can try to hold a Sega Channel cartridge in your hands before the grave claims you.

Even if you did get all that stuff as a kid, you can get stuff that was never available before. Let's buy a spoiled Korean child's cool-ass toys. They didn't even bring the cartoons for this one over here. The magic of globalization makes it possible. We can all partake in the great act of scooping up culture and doodads from a distant land and depositing them indirectly in your storage unit.

Doing all of this, it is easy to distract yourself from your obligation to make new cool shit. What are the kids nowadays going to buy in twenty to thirty years, besides clean water and hand-reloaded ammunition? If we spend all of our time putting in low effort at work so we can hand that cash over to Normy's eBay-O-Rama Collectibles Store, then that work will never produce a cultural artifact worth becoming a weird piece of shit that their kids throw away after the funeral.