Exist with Feeling

Holy fucking shit last night was weird. I’ve been kinda sore all week. I have hEDS and work in industrial maintenance. As you can imagine, I’m pretty much always in pain. My fucking back had more knots than the entirety of e621.

Anyways, I hit one of those DMT vapes and let this dragon creature give me a back massage. Holy shit that was the most intense thing I ever felt in my life. The whole room smelled like some kinda synthwave puppygirl dick and I’m over here just convulsing as my lame excuse for a skeleton gets exorcised of its religious trauma.

I’m spasming and trilling sprawled out on the bed. The creature asked me if I wanted to stop and I was like “naw fucking send it bro!” I think at one point I might have orgasmed, but it’s hard to tell. If someone told me to go fuck myself, I wouldn’t have been able to. I didn’t even know who/what I was. Was any of this real? I feel like this was the biblically accurate sensation of transforming into a werewolf.

Anyways, for a bit there it was nothing but a single blip. It was as if I was just a single light emitting diode in a vast screen of chemicals, radiation, and shit posting. It was kinda nice. I started coming back into the earthly realm. Someone was playing that one Skuru vtuber and he was talking about Bluey or something idk.

Your memories have gotten weird. It's easier to recall ideas and thoughts you've had. You can sometimes remember the exact words someone spoke to you, and know you're not misremembering or making them up, they're too high fidelity for that. ## Day 1467 You've gotten really good at mental arithmetic over the few years. You weren't doing any sort of training, but any time a mathematical or even logical problem comes up, it feels much easier to get to an answer. The dread you've had from math is pretty much gone. Actually, most of your anxieties have disappeared. The world seems so much more grounded than it was before, as if it used to be an unstable vision that didn't keep its shape when you looked away. Now its all there, all the time, and a lot of it in your head. You can recognize people by their footsteps, detect emotions from their voice with complete certainty, recognize *your own* emotions as easily as the language you speak in, be it English or any of the 3 others you picked up on. You can also tell one of your friends is taking the pills too. You can sense it. Less like telepathy and more like a magnet recognizes another through its fields. You're noticing her changes, they're the same as yours were at her stage of the process. ## Day 2834 As they wheel the bed you lay on into the surgical suite, you don't feel human anymore. You're not an unemotional monster or anything, you still feel happiness, sadness, anger, if anything you feel them more than you ever did before, with so much more fidelity than ever. You still have desires and fears. You just feel so different from the person you used to be, and some things that used to be a part of your quintessential experience now just feels like a burden. Eating became boring, sleep is mostly a chore. You used to enjoy swimming and running but its been years since you last went.

One last time you confirm your identity to the surgical team, and a nurse presses a button next to the large magnet next to your head, knocking you out instantly. The doctor makes a large cut circumnavigating your scalp, then with a chemical solution works her way around your skull, dissolving it carefully down. A nurse lifts your hear off, revealing the innards. Instead of a squishy, pink brain, they find, as expected, a solid titanium sphere, built from billions of nanobots, carefully scanning sensing and replacing your neuron network one cell at a time, replicating its function precisely. As they worked, they also automated and simplified many of your functions, increasing efficiency and memory capacity.

The doctor lifts the sphere covered by sticky connective tissues upwards, severing them with tension, and transfers it into a receptacle on the side table. Along with the rest of the surgical team she moves onto your abdomen to remove your organs and other tissues for organ recipients around the country. ## day 1 You wake up. You feel different. better. You look around the room, at your hands, then body, legs. They look very much like your own, but instead of skin they're built from titanium sheathing and electric servos. All your desired changes have been implemented too of course. You feel content with yourself, as if you came home after a long trip. You step out of your alcove, getting a little notification in the corner of your vision reading "94% charged", and go make your way into the viewing room, following one of the arrows on the floor. You watch the surgeons remove the last pieces of what used to be you, box them in bio-secure containers and carry them out of the room before turning off the life support.

Further update: Greg is trapping goblins in the Dollar General

But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.

And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.

It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."

And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.

That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.

I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.

One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.

I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.

It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.

Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.

I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)

She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.

I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.

In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.

I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.

It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.

It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.

When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.

But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.

Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.

I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.

But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.

I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.

My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.

I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.

After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?

And I was just like :| yep.

Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!

And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.

In case it isn't obvious (it wasn't to me my first playthrough lol) Rekka's boss arena is made to imitate a wrestling ring. The thing that had me curious to look around at everything was that I noticed this time around that her name is embedded on floor of the arena

Throughout the whole fight, this message remains above her office door. Grandstand (verb) - to pander to an audience. Fun detail because the cutscene before her boss fight ABSOLUTELY has her grandstanding... which takes place in her office. But the cutscene before the QA-1MIL fight also involves pyrotechnics with her introduction so I'm VERY curious about her definition of grandstand. Also curious how bad Zanzo is about it that REKKA of all people calls him out on it lol

The was just a fun little pic cuz I managed to pause right at the appearance of the onomatopoeia that I never noticed before (the detail in this game is so chef's kiss). But after I took it, I realized that when Rekka takes these pipes from the wall, the game will remove that bottom pipe visually. There are only two open pipe areas in her arena, both directly across from one another. HOWEVER anyone who's goofed off enough in her boss fight knows that she is capable of using these pipes to attack more than twice, which left me curious how these pipes respawn for her to do that. Turns out it's a very simple "respawn them when the player's camera isn't looking at them" trick lol

Another thing I somehow never noticed: you can see Rekka's little office throughout the whole boss fight! The day images are during her first phase. The blue night image is during her second and third. The red night is during her fourth/final phase.

Okay so clearly I didn't notice A LOT since I never knew her arena had a Jumbotron with a message that changed for every phase. This is from her first phase, the full message reading out to be "REKKAMANIA!!!!"

The Jumbotron during her second phase. The full message reads "SPARKS'RE GONNA FLY!"

The Jumbotron during her third phase. The full message reads "WE WILL REKKA YOU!!!"

The Jumbotron during her final phase. The full message reads "THE LAST ROUND!!!!"

(oh should also go without saying, yes the messages on the Jumbotron are all slowly spinning and made getting pics hard on me lol)

Somewhat related but when Chai defeats Rekka, he says "You're down for the count, Big Boss." but the only time we ever hear Rekka call herself that during the events of the game is when you get a game over during her boss fight. I just like the implication of Chai having clear favorites at Vandelay (knows who Rekka and Kale are but doesn't know anyone else. likely knows Mimosa but not a fan given he never brings her up lol)

And uh just one more thing... with the clear day-to-night happening in Rekka's office, we can get some kind of a timeline within the game. The only time when night happens is during Rekka's boss fight and Mimosa's fight as well. An argument could be made about the dark sky in Kale's fight just being a thunderstorm so if we take that in to consideration, that means that the game, for sure, takes place over the course of at least two days and at most three. Or I guess at most more if you include sleep time but ain't no way given Chai's energy drink consumption lol

a lil doodle of meeee

"I wrote a eulogy for my best friend last week. Then I read it to him. At the pub. On a Tuesday."

He was alive, holding a pint, looking at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I have.

I'm Mick. I'm 70. The man across the table was Barry. Seventy-two. Best mate for 46 years. Met on a building site in 1979. He dropped a plank on my foot. I called him something unrepeatable. He bought me a pint after the shift. Haven't gone a week without talking since.

Three months ago we went to a funeral. Bloke we'd worked with. Cancer. The eulogies were beautiful - people saying what he meant to them, things they'd clearly never said to his face. And all I could think was, he can't hear any of this.

Every beautiful sentence. Every "he changed my life." Said to a room of crying people and a box of wood.

I turned to Barry. Whispered, "What a waste."

Drove home. Couldn't sleep. Because I realised, if Barry died tomorrow, I'd stand up and say extraordinary things about this man. Things I've never said in 46 years. And he'd be in the box, missing all of it.

So I wrote them down. Took a week. Harder than expected - not finding the words, but admitting I had them.

Rang him. "Tuesday. The Crown. Need to read you something."

"Have you joined a book club?"

"Just come."

Same corner table. Pint of bitter. Crisps. I pulled out the paper. He saw my hands shake.

"Mick. What's this?"

"Your eulogy. I'm reading it now because I'm not wasting it on a day you can't hear it."

"Have you gone mad?"

"Probably. Shut up and listen."

I read it. In a pub. To a man very much alive and very much uncomfortable.

I told him about the plank and how it was the best injury of my life. About the night he drove forty minutes in rain to help change a tyre. About how he rang every day for three months after my divorce and never once asked "Are you alright?" - just talked about football and weather, because he knew I didn't need a question. I needed a voice.

I told him he was the funniest man I'd ever known and his jokes were terrible and both things were true. That he'd been a better father than he thinks. That his wife's a saint and he knows it. That I'd have been a worse man without him.

He didn't look at me. Stared at his pint. Jaw tight. Doing that thing men do when the feelings arrive and they'd rather swallow glass than show it.

When I finished, long silence. Then he picked up his pint, took a sip, and said,

"You're paying for the next round. And the one after."

That was his answer. Perfect. Because Barry doesn't say "I love you too." He says "you're buying."

But in the car park, he hugged me. Not the quick back-pat. A real one. Thirty seconds. Neither let go first.

And he said quietly into my shoulder, "Don't read that again at the real one. I want new material."

Who would you write a eulogy for - while they're still here?

Don't wait. The flowers can't hear. The box doesn't laugh. Say it now. At the pub. Over a bad cup of tea. You'll feel ridiculous.

They'll look uncomfortable. It'll be the most important thing you've ever done.

Read them the speech while they can still hug you in the car park.”

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

- Nobody needs to apologise for venting in the notes or reblogs. We're scared and upset and deserve to be heard.

What to do:

- australians: don't give up! There's still people fighting this, it's not law yet. And even if it passes we can fight them on it. Most disabled peoples' organisations are fighting this, so organisations like People With Disability Australia and area specific groups. Membership to most of them is free if you're disabled. PWDA sends out a list of the news about us each week to keep us informed.

🔗Disabled People Against Cuts are leading a charge. There's always a way to make politicians pay attention even if we have to park our arses on their front step. Share support and resources where you can and keep an eye on the others in your community if you're able to. Talk to local support clinics about Coles and Woolworths vouchers for those facing a lot of uncertainty. And get your flu shot if you're able. Nobody needs the next protest to give everyone the flu.

- non-australians: keep watching. You might also benefit from seeing what DPAC are doing and if they ever call for international support. Supporting the disabled australians you know and refusing to be kept in the dark about what’s being done to marginalised people internationally is good preparation for lots of ways to help, it means you're ready to go if something you can help with appears and don't lose time educating yourself. Many of the situations with the NDIS have deliberately had short time frames to act, to try and stop us from having a voice.

context from the notes:

- When I said health insurance doesn't cover disability supports, I don't mean "it's very expensive so people can't access it". I mean the services often won't take on anyone who doesn't have an NDIS plan. Even then, it's common for services to prefer people who are "plan managed" or "agency managed", meaning someone else handles our invoices, because they feel "self managed" people might not pay them fast enough.

- People have been getting "check in" phone calls from the agency. It’s secretly plan reviews for them to reduce people's funding. If they call you and you don’t have your support people with you, they are lying when they say you don't need them. Tell them to organise a time to call later so you can have your support people. This kind of warning is the only reason I knew to contact my support coordinator when I got this phone call. Others I have seen didn't know and got their plan cut. And it takes years to try and change a plan or appeal it through the tribunal.

- Someone in the notes has identified herself as a support coordinator and offered to help with questions for people concerned about their plan via DMs (thank you @andromedusia). This is very kind of her and I also hope mentioning this here doesn't cause you any trouble, very sorry if it does.

- Also, not thrilled to find out they might be phasing out support coordinators. Lots of us are dependent on them - a support coordinator is someone who helps us understand out plan and connect with supports, and often helps with advocacy too. They’ll save money on us purely because we won't know where to go or what the plans mean. They use a lot of confusing terms in the plans. I'd be screwed without my support coordinator.

- Oh they also want to use a standardised assessment tool to tell how disabled we are, after a decade of having to pay out of pocket for specialists who know us to provide reports. This is actually worse because the tool doesn’t have to be done by a qualified professional and doesn’t work on people with a lot of different disabilities. The government is very good at somehow turning "bad" into "worse".

- Yeah. 760,000 australians is actually not that many. There's 27 million people living here. 85% of disabled australians aren't on the NDIS. Now, a lot of disabled people don't necessarily need the kind of support the NDIS provides, but you know who I don't trust to make that decision? The government who doesn't want to pay for it.

- None of this fixes the existing problems with access for First Nations people or people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. I'm pretty sure a standardised assessment tool will actually only make that way worse. No room for professionals to work with cultural sensitivity and humility to understand the impact of someone's disability, or the varying ways First Nations communities may construct and talk about disability that don't necessarily align with the settler government's convenient definition. Just checkboxes.

- This isn't even our "conservative" government party in power. This is the centre/centre-left party, Labor. The 'Liberal party' (note: not liberal) would likely do worse. But I don't think there's much to be grateful for when this will kill people. And probably won't stop later conservative cuts anyway. Because we cost too much.

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