prehistoric housechicken go brrrrrrr

Another dino I didn't want to miss, it's velociraptor day!

The colors/pattern is inspired by the velociraptor in the game Paleo Pines

As someone who doesn't get phantom limbs by default, but can choose to conjure them up - think of phantom shifts like your mind's best guess of where your body parts are.

Your tail isn't physically attached to your spine, not in the way that your legs are attached to your hips, so your brain doesn't have the same amount of practice with knowing where it is. It's had many years of knowing exactly where your legs are in space from seeing, touching and moving with them - it's had far less time to figure out where your tail is, and knowing exactly where it is gets harder when you can't directly see, touch, or move with it!

If you want to make it feel more present, that is a skill you can improve! In my experience, it's a lot like a body scan meditation - you're bringing your attention to a part of your body and increasing your awareness of it.

I've had a few folks ask me to do a Rainbow Raven sticker based on the therian flag/symbol, but decided to make it an entirely new design since the theta-delta didn't fit the raven template too well. This design was a little bit of a challenge, but I think the results are awesome!!

I've got stickers of this design too, if you want 'em!!

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on February 22nd, 2026.

(This used to be part of a reblog thread, but it's long-winded enough that I wanted to give it room to breathe. Check out Sora's blog though, he's got good thoughts!)

I recently read a post by my friend Sora (@through-lines) about the way alterhumanity is often mistaken for a synonym of nonhumanity - and ve made an excellent point!

A lot of alterhuman identities seem to be viewed through the lens of species identity and apparent proximity to nonhuman identity.

People understand that being nonhuman makes you alterhuman, because otherkin and therians are the most recognizable part of the community - it's the most obvious way someone can be different from normal humanity, by not being the same species.

Unfortunately, this means nonhumanity is seen as the standard for other alterhuman identities to measure up to - the closer to nonhumanity someone is, the more accepted they are as an alterhuman. Put another way: the closer to humanity someone is, the less accepted they are as an alterhuman.

This is a problem, because most alterhuman identities are not nonhuman - they don't involve being a different species! But they're all judged against nonhumanity as a benchmark. It's something we've griped about before.

It got me thinking: if I'm not using species identity as a standard, how would I define an alterhuman identity? What do we have in common as a community?

It's not an easy thing to write up a concise definition, especially with a term that has a very complex history.

Alterhumanity being equated to nonhumanity (and maybe nonhuman-adjacence) is a multifaceted issue, and I suspect the biggest issue comes down to the nature of social media, but if there's one thing I can add WRT to defining alterhuman:

People dislike ambiguity. They like drawing connections and forming boundaries.

There are definitely commonalities to be found between "by default" alterhuman groups, but…most of those commonalities can also be shared by groups that are considered orthohuman by default. The hard part is justifying why X groups are alterhuman (by default) while Y groups aren't (by default). People will fish for that justification themselves, and when the face of alterhumanity is nonhumanity and species, that becomes the easiest place to draw the line.

I think alterhuman is a wonderful umbrella term that unites groups with shared history and overlapping demographics. I'm also tempted to say that shared history and demographic is probably the strongest, least ambiguous commonality for all the groups under alterhumanity. That kinda necessarily centers the otherkin community, though, and I think most folks want to avoid having any one community centered in the definition. Still, I feel like you could spin that in a way that doesn't assume nonhuman/nonhuman-adjacent experiences for every other identity...

It's soooo so hard to come up with a Simple, Snappy Definition for... I'd argue almost any identity-based group? Because people really are complicated! People don't fit into neat little boxes! There honestly isn't a clean, solid line that Separates alterhumanity and orthohumanity ("normal" humanity, opposite of alterhumanity, for anyone who doesn't know the word!) buuuut people don't like ambiguity!

It's a really frustrating puzzle? Coming up with a dictionary definition and judging individuals by whether they pass the Dictionary Test is always going to exclude someone who falls into both boxes, or neither box, but they'd benefit from having community and support from people who understand them!

like personally, I'd rather take someone like that in good faith and give them space to be their complex, contradictory, complicated self instead of closing the gates and telling them to leave because, whoops, you're too ABC and not XYZ enough, come back when you can cut off part of yourself to fit in with our Weird People Club :P

I think you're right about the community history aspect! The well-established Alterhuman Subcommunities definitely have shared history and overlapping demographics - like, I'm a therian, I'm fictionhearted, I share a system with people, and that all intersects! Systems have a lot of nonhuman and fictional headmates! Otherheartedness was coined to describe a distinct experience in a community with nonhumans! And archetropy and hearthomes are relatively newer terms, but they were made by alterhumans to describe their experiences, so they're also considered alterhuman.

It's always gonna be arbitrary to a certain extent. That's just the nature of the beast. But without the context of shared history and community overlap (or that people were shoving most of these identities under "otherkin"), a lot of the labels originally included under alterhumanity seem pretty disparate, and it kinda requires you to take for granted that we group these different identities and experiences together Just Because. Which goes back to people struggling with ambiguity and wanting to find patterns. It's extremely arbitrary and not super intuitive to newbies, and that makes it hard to accept as a full answer.

That does get me wondering if there's something we can do to help build tolerance towards that level of arbitrariness. Not that it really answers the question of "what is alterhumanity?", but I guess a recursive "you're alterhuman if you relate to alterhumans (and want to call yourself alterhuman)" gets the job done well enough lol. In that case, it's more a matter of raising awareness for less-visible alterhuman experiences.

I don't want alterhumanity to be an exclusive club, I want allyship and a mutual respect for our similarities and differences - I don't know what it's like to have a hearthome, and my friend with a hearthome doesn't know what it's like to have a raptor living in their brain, but we can be ourselves with each other! We can listen to each other's experiences and learn from each other and share space and resources! And I think that's valuable to have in a world where neither of us can safely mention that stuff at work.

I think building a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty is really important in a community where your identity as alterhuman is basically self-determined?

Like, I can tell you that I'm alterhuman right now, and you can't verify that based on the way I look or sound or act - the only thing you have to go off is my word. You just have to take me at my word, that I'm using this label because it tells you something about me, because I saw myself reflected in it, because I feel like I belong here.

I'm not entirely sure where to start with improving General Community Tolerance to Arbitrary Borders, but I can talk about where I'm coming from on that topic. I'm saying all this stuff now about accepting outliers and acknowledging different experiences, but I've fretted a lot about my identity. "Am I actually X?" or "Do I really deserve to call myself Y?"

And for me, what it came down to was the fear of being wrong. I was scared of confidently saying that I am something, only to realize sometime later that I made a mistake, or I changed, and losing that label would mean losing the community and support that came with it.

And that fear feels pretty justified on Tumblr! There's always someone being accused of "betraying" their community by dropping a label, or using a word "for attention," or not being a "real" member of the community for any number of reasons. It's reasonable to see All That and feel paralyzed with dread about Using The Wrong Word, and then start worrying about where exactly you're supposed to draw the line between Belonging Here or not.

Off of the top of my head, our parents (who are immigrants) always had a strongly pragmatic cast to how they approached the world. Extremely resourceful folks, saw objects for what they could do rather than what they were "supposed" to do and could jury-rig anything to their needs. They didn't believe in letting their feelings get in the way of doing what needed to be done (or so they liked to claim) and what needed to be done was defined by what concrete value it brought to the family, not some kind of abstract morality divorced from reality. (Or so they liked to claim.) They thought constantly in collective - what was good for the family, not just our nuclear unit but the extended group, the way people's actions reflected on said family, etc.

Make no mistake: our parents sucked in a lot of ways that left scars. But they did teach us a lot of things, some good, some that can't be neatly classified as good or bad. When I look, I can see traces of it running everywhere through our plurality. Our willingness to jury-rig and modify parts of our own functioning. Our focus on concrete advice on living plural. The relative ease with which we accept ideas like "people in systems can be both individuals and parts of a whole - singlets, too, are individuals who are parts of their communities." On a more fraught level: a tendency to stifle our feelings and efface ourselves for the good of the group. Being perhaps a little too comfortable with being unseen. Difficulty distinguishing looking okay from being okay. Generational trauma that manifests, among other ways, as a fear of scarcity and a complicated relationship with food. A need to Achieve Something and Be Successful. Things that kept us outwardly functional, even through incredibly trying circumstances, while also eroding our deeper well-being.

And also, for us, US-born to immigrant parents who were our main connection to our culture, who we are purposefully no longer in contact with - there is a perpetual sense of… not simply loss, but having been severed from a greater whole. When we cut away what was killing us, a lot of good went with it too. Something that was always with us, unnoticed in the background, until it was gone. Even those of us who don't quite see themselves as Asian can sense its absence. We look after each other, try to create our own little culture with its own little traditions within, but it can't ever be a replacement.