Pheonix System

Oh right, forgot one more book for giveaway: A Novel Love Story, by Ashley Poston. Woman’s car breaks down in her favorite romance series, but the author died suddenly and now the series is in stasis. For the romance-loving fictioneers among you!

Same rules as others: free in the States, you pay shipping if you’re internationally.

Rogan: We dropped into the sci-fi library briefly because there were a few books we wanted to add to the system... and found a big stack of comics on the cart labeled with our name. Turns out someone had donated the entire series of Transmetropolitan in trade paperback and we are the Person Who Knows Comics, so everyone decided to leave it for us. (Far as I know, there's one guy who knows manga and that's about it.)

We don't much care for Warren Ellis or his work (and this was not for lack of trying, back before we decided that our reading for fun is FOR FUN, plus Elli's reputation nose-dived), but Transmetropolitan is one of those series that are huge for a lot of people and critically acclaimed, so we are relieved to have the whole series just horked up in bulk in one go, sparing us the work. Thanks, mysterious donor!

We added it to the catalog, stickered and shelved it, and made a note on the mailing list so folks would know what we did.

The senior librarian responded with a bemused remark along the lines of, "I have no idea what Transmet is or why it matters, but yay, thanks for taking care of it!"

To which someone else responded, more or less, "yes, that is why we made it LB's problem."

Well, we've achieved our goal of becoming the head person for the comics section, I guess! (Seriously, though, we're glad about this. If we're the only person in that library who knows what Transmetropolitan is, we should be the one who handles comics.)

( comics library stuff )

What a organizational nightmare. We took a CD-ROM of:

• 2973 files
• 713 folders
• 25.6 MB

—and after deleting all duplicates, superfluous images (background textures, etc.), it is now:

• 473 files
• 36 folders
• 15.8 MB

—and is actually fucking organized. (Issue 10 was in a subfolder in Issue 9. No author names were in the file names. You people live like this? YOU PEOPLE LIVE LIKE THIS!)

All that remains is finishing the Table of Contents, listing what articles we want for later, and zip-and-ship on back.

Articles we want to go over for ourselves:

• the one where female multis are all just schizophrenics who really wanted to fuck their dads
• the one where PTSD is just paranoid schizophrenia
• the one that advises legal attack when accused of child abuse
• the one about how those guys who made child pornography didn’t make child pornography (spoilers: they made child pornography, it just wasn’t illegal til ‘77)
• the one that used as data on false allegations of abuse the accusations reported by the accused of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation... while admitting there was no testing of veracity whatsoever.
• the occult cop who quotes the Bible a lot
• the one about the pedophile journal interview

Gold star to Flash Renamer, that little program that made this WAY easier.

Crazy Boys Make Rules
Summary: D and Rogan aren’t sure what to call what they have together, but they make rules about it, plus Rogan dumps a douchebag.
Series: Crazy Boys
Word Count: 6000
Notes: Winner of this month’s fan poll! If you want to gain extra poll weight and support work like this, check out my LiberaPay and my Patreon! Also, though White Lake’s name is made up, everything else about it is completely true.

Click here for Content Warnings (contain spoilers!)

anti-black racism; concussion, urine, vomit, benign hallucinations, and other aftermath of injuries (no violence is shown).

Junior Year: Rogan

D is getting increasingly concerned about our not-relationship.

( This is the one place where we don't have to do what they expect us to do. )

Rogan: This post is brought to you by Phosphor of hungryghosts nerd-sniping me again. He knows my weaknesses and he asked, "someone in Otherconnect was wondering - when did the concept of system names become a thing?"

I plunged into my records and here's what I found! (With the gracious help of erinptah!)

The first time I've found what we might call a "system name"--that is, a name for the whole kit and kaboodle of body tenants that isn't just the body's legal name and/or individual names--is in 1905, in Morton Prince's Dissociation of a Personality. erinptah dug through their copy and quoted this bit:

With this hypothesis in mind, all three members of "the family," as Sally used to speak of them, were interrogated, in search of some accident or emotional shock which might have caused a split in consciousness. (213-214)

Sally was a personality of "Mrs. Beauchamp," not considered the "real one," and not treated well by Morton Prince, so I think it's important that he notes that it's specifically HER who used this name, "the family," for the group. And it was not a one-off! Over a decade later, German philosopher Schiller mentions not just "the Beauchamp family" (396) but also comments on the Doris Fischer case by calling them "the 'Doris' Family" (391). Clearly he found the idea useful!

After that, though, I have a big gap in my records. (System names probably exist; I just haven't been able to FIND any for easy reference.) Headmates are generally referred to by their individual names/psuedonyms or, for the whole of them, by their legal name or psuedonym--Billy Milligan, Sybil, Eve, etc. There is this sort of unwritten assumption that the legal name is the real person that encompasses everyone within. There isn't the group names we see so often now--the Flock, Zyfron System, Loony-Brain, etc. Where did these come from?

The first record I have (after Sally in 1905) is "Cafe D'Air" from the June 1986 issue of Speaking for Our Selves, #4. There are also people going by things like "S. Jeremy," "CW of Bonnie," "Bogie and Scarlet," the usual chaining together of names.

In 1987, the Troops for Truddi Chase broke ground in insisting on having their book, When Rabbit Howls attributed to them under that name, rather than just Truddi Chase. Thanks to S4OS (the first multi community record I have), it's clear that the Troops didn't originate this idea, but they certainly helped popularize it, and the idea of a group name became pretty common afterward--it's all over the place in the Many Voices newsletter, alt.support.dissociation, and books like The Flock, by Joan Frances Casey.

So as best we can tell, the idea of group names seems to be multi-originated, possibly to get away from the medical thing of just calling us by individual names or the "real person's" name, maybe around the '80s when multis actually started talking to each other and leaving records behind that I can actually find? I'll have to reread "B. C. A."'s "My Life as a Dissociated Personality" to see if any group name gets mentioned there.