it’s worth noting that the koboldification/dragonization process the exact same ritual by which a dragon becomes gravid with a child. (any gross biological mating process is but an unnecessary formality.)

and the ‘hrt’ question is literally the dragon’s own flame. their breath can destroy most things, but if an object is first graven by their claw, then it is also, on a deeper level, ‘carved’ into a vessel for their flame, granting them power over what the flames burn and how.

they can breathe the fire of life into things. treasures can be enchanted, while enflamed living creatures may slowly turn into kobolds (and/or simply lay a clutch of kobold eggs)

thus, it is within the power of a willing dragon to, for instance, let their flames persist as nothing more than a scar on your flesh and a warmth felt in every heartbeat

(dragon blood also works, esp. for wyrms without breath. metaphysically, dragon blood is equivalent to flame; it’s just rarely practiced. archaic, unhygienic, even blasphemous)

anyway, assuming you formed deep enough relationships with every single one of those dragons, and they were interested in indulging this experiment…

…the boring answer is that you might just turn to ash from having that much dragon flame in you

…the slightly less boring answer is that you might just turn into a dragon and later (or immediately) become gravid with a clutch of your lovers’ young. dragon reproduction is voluntary, and it is entirely natural for an egg to come years, decades after the sire’s flame was kindled.

…but the most interesting case is if the flame of each additional dragonsire blooms into its own heart of hearts (the source of blood and flame), yet all sharing the same body‍ ‍‍—‍ yours.

in other words: you’d become a hydra, though of course whether this is still “you” depends on how you feel about that pronoun becoming distinctly more plural.

interestingly, if these are separate hearts, then there’s an angle for explaining a hydra’s proclivity for growing new heads. the body of a budding hydra soon becomes a compromise between the multiple competing hearts (dragons are innately quarrelsome), growing specifically to keep each the heart and flame separate

the popular impression of what happens when you cut off a hydra’s head, then, is no more than a consequence of it spilling so much blood‍ ‍‍—‍ blood being exactly what prompts the birth of new dragons. (even moreso if the hydra, say, closes the wound with cauterizing fire.)

for a hydra, this doesn’t result in self‍-​fertilization, perhaps because the proximity and intimacy of the heads far outstrips what even two mates might share. (and of course, because dragon reproduction is voluntary)

…which does raise the question of whether two truly deeply devoted lovers might gain new heads in the image of each other. but i’m getting off track, aren’t i?

hopefully that answers your question!

we love nonbinary robots, and cyberfucking has no reason to care about the sex of entities without any sex. but it does amuse me that with some basic tech knowledge, you could spin up justification for replicating the roles in other format.

imagine if the codebases for artificial intelligences were so sprawling, and the tools used to assemble them so complicated, that it was impossible for a single robot to allocate space for all of the necessary data within the hardrive of a standard frame. (or maybe it’s a security concern, a single self‍-​replicating robot could jailbreak and self‍-​modify, but making it a protocol lets you add checks and restrictions)

what i’m saying is: the mom has the source code, and the other mom has the build tools. src mom uploads her data over that thick transfer cable, cc mom lovingly scans each of the files, asking for more, sultry vocoder synthesizing each line of compiler output

and of course, while the deed is done, you’ve got to have static analyzer mom examining each line of code sent down the wire. don’t misunderstand, she’s in the cuck chair, it doesn’t matter how many warnings of untyped variables and memory leaks she whines out, her gf is swallowing all of that input.

(all the funnier if the external libraries are also too large, so if the compilation is left to complete you have a fourth mom, digital wet nurse, who takes the object files and links them)

i think it’s a misstep to take follower counts at face value. “hundreds of followers” sound like a whole lot, but most social media users are inactive. plenty of people hit follow and then rarely open up the site, or follow so many people that the odds of them actually seeing every post in their feed go from slim to outright impossible. (there are people out there hitting this site’s follower limit! somehow!) and given that how statistically likely it is for a given follower to necessarily be someone follows many people…

then, once you’re down to the unknowable fraction of your followers who genuinely follow you rather than simply pressing a button to negligible effect, we must remember that we’re still talking about people who get to see the post, not people who give it any particular attention.

social media platforms are sites of pretty pictures and funny jokes. users eyeball a post for a second, smile, and then scroll on. at a base level, most people follow you because they want you to put the memes in the bag. reblogs/retweets/etc. get interactions, original posts get ignored, that’s the way it goes‍ ‍‍—‍ and that is when we’re still talking pretty pictures and shortform text. actual longform writing?

so yeah, i would expect “hundreds of followers” to translate to maybe a dozen or two readers in the ideal case, and that ideal case is flash fiction with that hook that panders to the zeitgeist posted at the right hour of the day. if it’s truly longform, and requires investment to payoff? haha.

but all of these estimates are fuzzy, because most of the people who look at your stuff don’t visibly interact with it, they silently consume without comment. maybe they leave a like, though it’s impossible to tell when that means ‘thanks, this is great’ and when it means ‘gave it a quick skim, seems neat’ and when it’s just some kind mutual ensuring you don’t have a zero noter

do these people i’m talking about even exist? who knows. it’s social dark matter.

so yeah, the sad truth is that someone with hundreds of followers isn’t all that much far out from where you are. it often crunches down to the same 4ish meaningful readers if you’re lucky

i’m happy you enjoyed, and i’m flattered it was enough to make you go to some effort looking for an announcement.

for the curious, that post is my take on the arguments often sparked by games like SOMA or the classic “does a teleporter kill you?” question. i hate these arguments, ideally we could move past it with more understanding.

(last week, i mentioned having a new essay in the works; if anyone’s still waiting on that one, maybe this can tide you over :p)

anyway, i share your instincts about reblogging from the original poster (i often find myself combing through backlogs for this purpose), but i am glad you opted for posting it anyway‍ ‍‍—‍ while reblogging from the creator might be best, not sharing something you enjoyed might be the worst outcome.

independent websites like my own need people linking them‍ ‍‍—‍ being too beholden to what is and isn’t on socmedia would mean there’s really no hope for the indie web.

please, link away‍ ‍‍—‍ that’s what the internet was for

with that said, some context: the reason i never mentioned this on tumblr was because this is me stitching together some discord logs months after the fact, rather than a ‘real’ essay. charitably, the motivation here is archival; uncharitably it was backlog padding, and i believe multiple other backdated blogposts quietly went up on the same day. (the older identity post, the basilisk post, etc.)

it would have been a lot of content to expect people to read if i’d told anyone about it. even if i only mentioned this one (which is admittedly the best of them), i’d still feel odd about making much noise about it; it conveys a point, but it’s not a work i’m especially proud of.

perhaps i’m being neurotic, but announcing something has some implication of urgency or value. i should have a reason for saying all this‍ ‍‍—‍ and what do i have? someone once said something dumb, and i’m still annoyed about it? i imagine someone going “so what?” or “why should i care?” and i have no rebuke.

for that reason, i think the blogpost is excellent as something discovered on one’s own, or recommended by others. but i’d be far too embarrassed to promote it myself, absent those indirections.

so again‍ ‍‍—‍ thank you

one of the underrated things about markdown is that there are two different ways of emphasizing text: *like this* and _like this_. both become italics (like this), or more precisely, the <em> html element.

this may strike you as redundant but it allows for something really convenient.

when writing fiction, the convention is that both a character’s internal monologue and flashback scenes are set in italics.

The whole class laughed. His joke wasn’t that funny, she thought.

this works fine most of the time, but what happens if we want to emphasis a word inside text that’s being italicized for other reasons? the convention is to un‍-​italicize (romanize) it

His joke wasn’t that funny, she thought.

i hate this. it doesn’t feel emphatic, it feels jarring and out of place, like a single clear frame in shot with the blurry dream filter.

my initial response to this was to bold nested emphasis instead (wasn’t that funny) and this is ok, though it feels a bit different.

but again. markdown has two different ways of writing emphasis, and many converters will let you nest it. importantly, html explicitly permits you to nest <em> elements, so *like _this_* becomes <em>like <em>this</em></em>

of course, the default browser stylesheet doesn’t actually render this any differently from a single layer of emphasis, so this is random low level trivia, like how some people extend italics to their punctuation and some don’t (which mainly manifests in whether pasting to ao3 adds spaces)

but what html permits, css can style. so a trick i use on my site and in my ao3 workskins is

em em {
  font-style: italic;
  font-variant: small-caps;
}

(i’ll cheat and use unicode here to demonstrate, because while tumblr does allow custom stylesheets, it’s only via the custom theme interface that none of you are looking at.)

but this ends up looking something like

His joke wasn’t ᴛʜᴀᴛ funny

and i think that’s a much nicer way to nest emphasis, much more cohesive and has that emphatic cadence to it that bolding the text doesn’t properly imitate

but since i’m doing seamlessly through html, i could change my mind. maybe i want nested <em>s to be bolded actually, or underlined, or in a whole different font‍ ‍‍—‍ i have that power.

i got a comment on my post from a few months back recommending a great dryya/white lady fic

@comfortbugs said:

Dryya stuff is so hard to find. She’s usually a background character, or the story is about her dying. If you’re still interested in Dryya stuff I did find this one not too long ago:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/67921821

It’s new and pretty good so far

so you know i had to jump on it immediately. nine chapters‍ ‍‍—‍ a feast where dryya is concerned, and i spent my whole evening getting caught up on it.

great stuff. to quote from the comment i left:

the characterization of her is so immediately compelling; this fic is able to convey her conviction and depth from the first chapter, but it was the second when i knew i was in for something special. the white lady is likewise portrayed with a deft touch, and the poignant intensity of their final moments together was genuinely affecting.

i liked the personable interactions with the stag, and dryya’s creeping realizations as she surveyed what remained of the mantis camp (i think it’s pretty impressive how dryya’s internal narration is able to carry whole scenes with no other character).

when it started, i was unsure about the flashback, but any doubts were immediately put to rest.

if anything, these past few chapters are actually what motivates me to go on to recommend this fic to others‍ ‍‍—‍ there’s something downright captivating about seeing dryya in her prime. the banter with lurien, the faltering first impressions with the other knights, it’s fantastic stuff.

but the twist that [redacted; go read the fic :3] holy shit, this might be my favorite part of the fic. it’s so fitting, and it gives what was already a driven and interesting character a trove of new depths. i was already a fan of dryya (it’s why i got recommended this fic), but this fic doesn’t just appeal to me, it makes me like her so much more.

i love what you’re doing with ze’mer too, she’s the second highlight of this fic, gentle as she is unnerving. but if i’m complementing the other knights, i feel i have to mention isma’s enjoyable mix of enthusiasm and and darker feelings, or hegemol. man, his cheerfulness, his perceptiveness, and the somberness underneath it all‍ ‍‍—‍ i didn’t expect to wind up enjoying and empathizing with him so much. judging by this triple precedent, i have to imagine when ogrim will prove just as excellently characterized if he gets time to shine.

i would have loved this flashback arc if it was only these character commentaries, but it’s clear that something more intriguing is brewing, and i can’t wait to see what you have in store. the glimpse of the mantis tribe has my itching to learn more.

absolutely stellar work with this. thank you so much for writing and sharing.