Sunlight Is Said To Be The Best Of Disinfectants

But never picking explore options also gave me this specific line I don't think I've seen before, and it hit me hard.

Poor guy is so lonely and just wants the smallest amount of human connection. 😭

First, I’m relieved to be done with the story.  That may sound weird, since no one was forcing me to write it.  But this is the first time I’ve gotten a nontrivial amount of attention for a story while I was updating (the audience for Floornight before it was finished was around ~10 people).  This was a new kind of pressure I wasn’t used to, and while its existence wasn’t surprising, I wasn’t really prepared for it.  (This connects to some ways that I felt the story got out of my grasp, which I’ll describe under the cut.)

Also, it’s a spooky story, and it really kind of spooked me – there were a lot of times when I didn’t feel like writing it just because I wanted to write something more cheerful and less obsessed with inevitability and duty and stuff like that.  Next time I’ll write something more cheerful.

I am proud of the story, mostly on the level of prose, characterization, and setting.  I’m less proud of the plot as a whole, although I’m proud of certain parts of it.

More notes below, including some notes about how the story was conceived and written.  

My interpretation of The Northern Caves is that Salby and several of the other characters have Tourettic obsessive-compulsive disorder. I say this because I have Tourettic obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it feels like a definite wrongness in material arrangements of things.

TOCD is a weird condition kind of halfway between classic Tourettes and classic OCD. Tourettes is marked by tics, most famously shouting expletives but more commonly moving your body, touching things, or performing odd combinations of motions. These are not quite involuntary actions; patients can control them if they absolutely have to. Rather than the action being primitive, an overwhelmingly strong urge to perform the action that comes from nowhere seems to be primitive; the urge is so strong that the patient will almost always act upon it even though it makes no objective sense.

OCD is usually marked by obsessive thoughts that you have to perform rituals to banish.  TOCD is sort of in between these two. Patients perform complex compulsions and rituals not because they have obsessions per se, but because they have this feeling that something is wrong until they perform them. The IOCDF describes the condition as:

Unlike true OCD, in which cognitions (obsessions) lead to an emotional (affective) state and typically fear of the content of the obsession, TOCD sufferers report discomforting sensory experiences such as physical discomfort in body parts including hands, eyes, stomach, etc., or a diffuse psychological distress or tension for example “in my head” or “in my mind.” These localized or general discomforts in the TOCD sufferer tend to be relieved by varieties of motor responses, including “evening things up,” doing things to certain numbers, positioning items, touching and retouching things, doing things symmetrically, and so on, typically with the requirement that these actions are performed “just so” or “just right” in order to alleviate the somatic/psychological discomfort. Unlike reports of subjective experiences associated with classic forms of OCD, individuals describe a relative absence of fear or concerns about catastrophic consequences occurring should the required actions not be performed. Instead, there are likely to be concerns that the discomfort might be intolerable or unending if the actions were left undone or done poorly.

I’ve sometimes described this to people as “having an extra sense”. That is, we have a sense of cold that gives us a specific uncomfortable feeling if an ice cube is touching us, which is resolved by moving the ice cube away. We have a sense of pain that gives us specific uncomfortable feeling if we sit on a sharp object, which is relieved by standing up. I have a sense of TOCD that gives me a specific uncomfortable feeling in certain apparently unrelated situations, which is relieved by certain compulsions.

For example, if I’m in bed at night, and my foot touches the edge of the bed, I get the uncomfortable feeling until I extend my leg out as far as it can go over the bed, then bring it back in again without touching the edge. Or if I breathe on one hand, I get the uncomfortable feeling until I breathe equally hard on the other. If my fingernail touches paper, I get the uncomfortable feeling until I have scratched some kind of smooth or shiny object.

It’s hard to explain this uncomfortable sensation. It’s like but unlike pain, in the same way intense heat or crushing pressure is like but unlike pain. But Salby’s term “definite wrongness” is pretty spot-on.

My main difference from Salby is that, thank goodness, my feelings are almost always related to my body. There are a few exceptions: when I was younger, I used to have to have the shutters on the windows in my room at a certain angle (not necessarily the same for each shutter). Certain doors that always had to be closed. A garbage can that always had to be touching my door. If my parents got weirded out and wouldn’t let me maintain these things, well, I wish I’d had the phrase “definite wrongness in the arrangement of material objects” to describe it to them.

But if I imagine the feelings I have about my own body suddenly extended to encompass the entire world without losing any intensity, I imagine ending up pretty much like Salby. I could absolutely imagine being William Chen and writing several pages on everything that was wrong with a glass of water.

(Actually, I could probably write several pages on everything that has been wrong with my body position in the past fifteen minutes as I’ve been writing this post, except that it’s gotten to the point where I adjust 99% subconsciously the same way other people would fidget and adjust to uncomfortable positions.)

The description of Salby and Chen disagreeing about the content of Mundum also sounds like TOCD - although there are a few common patterns, no two people have exactly the same tics or compulsions.

Sleeplessness and Adderall both exacerbate most anxiety disorders, presumably including TOCD. I’ve never had Adderall, but my OCD becomes much worse when I’m low on sleep. In the book, two of the main characters go thirty hours without sleep, take some Adderall, and develop a bad case of Salbianism. I think they had latent TOCD. Maybe something about the Chesscourt books attracted people with latent TOCD for some reason and the stress of the Caves reading has brought it out. Or possibly Caves is some sort of infohazard that installs TOCD into the brain of anyone who reads and understands it.

This is all pretty much spot-on as regards the story, and also is very interesting to me personally, because I’ve been diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, but my symptoms “shade into” OCD more than classic Tourette symptoms do, in pretty much exactly the way you describe.  I’ve usually “explained” this by talking about the fact that Tourette’s and OCD are comorbid, but if there’s a distinct thing called “TOCD,” that’s probably what I have.

Wayne's typical MO is to appear, say something ominous, then disappear. Very helpful, Wayne.

PWHL Hamilton today announced that forward Alina Müller has been signed to a three-year Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) Standard Player Agreement ahead of the team’s inaugural 2026-27 season. Müller, who was under contract with the Boston Fleet, joins PWHL Hamilton on a new deal through the 2028-29 campaign and becomes the third of five players to be added during Phase 2 of the PWHL’s Expansion Roster Distribution Process.

A taxa that does exhibit more than two sex morphs is, surprisingly enough, birds! Both the ruff and white throated sparrow have four sex morphs with distinct behavior and social niches! Unfortunately, this does lack the pheromone aspect as well as the hermaphroditism present in the omegaverse.

Hermaphroditism, biologically, is the ability to produce both male and female gametes. It’s not known to be present in birds or mammals, but does show up in aquatic species such as clownfish. All clownfish are initially male and the largest one of a group becomes the dominant female. Cuttlefish have so-called “sneaker males” that present a female color pattern to mate with a female in a larger male’s territory.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a perfect real world analog to omegaverse sex dynamics. To me, it strikes at a speculative biology angle for completely decoupling sex and gender into completely different axis, playing in the space of how biology and society intersect.

i feel like the way fanon tackles it, it doesn't actually acknowledge the horror of displacement and the grief of being ripped from your culture because it seems to assume people will just embrace that being a slave is their new identity and easily give up their places of origin. this is still assimilation, in a way. it ignores that those people have an individuality beyond the traumatic experience that other people have forced on them and they have their own cultural origins. and even then, slavery in geographically separate locations is an entirely different experience. assuming that for example slavery on tatooine is generational, with people living long enough and reproducing often enough that you can have a somewhat stable population without a constant influx of new displaced individuals with their own cultural background, then anakin's experience is going to be very different from idk. a twi'lek on zygerria where people get sold or die too quickly to form communities. they might relate to each other in terms of traumatic experiences but the cultural background is different because shockingly, same trauma doesn't mean same culture. it seems odd to me to equate the two.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to have been a gradual thing with that one author's works as a starting point? (I've been in the Star Wars fandom for almost 30 years, but for the latter half, I've mostly only been popping in for a little while to gobble up some fanfiction before wandering off.) I don't remember seeing it before then. Was it Fillariel? Something like that? Anyway, I don't think people immediately jumped to making it universal. It was just Tattooine. (Again, correct me if I'm wrong. This is off the top of my head.)

I do recall one author making it so it wasn't an entire galaxy-wide culture, but certain stories that slaves take to new places when they're sold and then spread among other slaves, who spread it further. There are multiple versions of the stories adapted to local cultures. More of a cultural diffusion situation than an entire culture being clumsily transplanted.

Maybe because I'm not around consistently, I actually haven't seen a whole lot of people making it universal? Or maybe people who are that clumsy with this particular fanon are clumsy with other things too, and I stopped reading before it came up. Both seem likely. But I am curious about, like, the process by which people concluded this was a reasonable route to take. When did it become common?