As many of you know, within the past three months, we've been dealing with a lot of crackdowns on our work online. Our blog is unviewable in Mississippi and our #1 bestseller, All in the Family, got kicked off itch.io. This has nothing to do with the works themselves (oh no, a minor might read our very adult essay about TAXES and BUSINESS EXPENSES!) but wealthy, powerful people trying to control others.

As annoyed as we are by this, we are not surprised. We've seen this coming for years, we have a plan, and we want to hear how YOU feel about it, fans and readers!
( We're gonna arty like it's 1999! )

Miranda: I was hoping to make a proper post about all this, but I am freshly vaccinated and rapidly losing my ability to think. So instead I will just post the notes because this interlibrary loan book must be returned to Utah and we need these notes somewhere for later.

Around the time of those touch workshops, Rogan took an interest in trying to study touch more. The two books we've read on the subject are Touch by Tiffany Fields, and now the Power of Touch, by Phyllis K. Davis.

If you only get to read one, choose Fields; her book is definitely stronger, dealing in study data on the therapeutic uses of touch for various ailments and situations. However, Davis does engage with something Fields doesn't: "vicarious touch" and "internal touch"... things that are extremely relevant to us multi-wise, as people who overwhelmingly meet our touch needs through noncorporeal means.

( Read more... )

We have uploaded a chapter of Madgic entitled "the Fall of Rawlin" after discovering to our horror that the first print run of the omnibus had a printer error (entirely our fault) which made a very important part of the comic completely unreadable. It's now up (and fully alt-texted) on healthymultiplicity.com!

We are so sorry about this. The ebook has been updated with corrections, and the second print run also has it corrected, but if you bought the first run of the omnibus and wondered what the hell was wrong with page 146 or so, here's your answer.

LB Economics
Series: Essay
Summary: How the sausage gets made. I hope y’all like color-coded numerical tables!
Word Count: 3634
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month. Also, since it’s not covered in the essay itself, if you’re a generous sort and wondering, “LB, what’s the best way to give you money?” the answer is: LiberaPay or a recurring check through the mail (yes, people do this), followed by Patreon, followed by buying an Ebook Megapack. Regarding buying individual books… paper books require more printing and shipping, but ebooks deal with more robo-bans and crackdowns, so we consider them about equal on our end.

Money is considered one of the forbidden public subjects, along with sex and religion. It’s one thing to say what you do, another to admit how much you make at it. However, we’re one of the only people doing what we do, and we want people to know the financial aspects of our job, so as to puncture some rosy illusions and defuse envy. So let’s talk about money.

“Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant ‘existing things’ does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like ‘woman,’ ‘butch,’ ‘lesbian,’ or ‘transsexual’ are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.” —Gayle Rubin, “Of catamites and kings: Reflections on butch, gender, and boundaries,” The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader, Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992, pg. 477-478

Rubin was talking about lesbian political fights about trans people and the overlap and boundaries between butch and transsexuality (and there’s LOTS of expressions of what we’d nowadays call trans and gender dysphoria in A Persistent Desire), but I think the same ideas apply to multi/plural/many-selved stuff too. Goodness knows I spent enough time chewing on my arm because I couldn’t figure out how to express a concept without it turning into a hopeless argument over the terms in use. This whole essay has a lot of great quotes (“sexual preference, gender roles, and political stance cannot be equated, and do not directly determine or reflect one another”) and is worth reading.

Also it’s just really nice to see an essay over thirty years old saying “cool your jets about trans people, it’s fine. Your politics will survive.”

Mori wants this book like burning. Too bad used paperbacks start at $100.

Rogan: Okay, so, in the "Summary of Legal Survey Data from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation" paper we talked about, we came across this contorted sentence:

"The most dramatic toll on families queried by the Legal Survey is loss of contact with children and grandchildren, loss of consort by non-accused husbands of wives who are developing images of parental child abuse, loss of privacy, injury to reputation, increased health problems and marital stress." (4)

Mori asked what the fuck "loss of consort by non-accused husbands of wives who are developing images of parental child abuse" meant. I replied that it sounded like "women dealing with memories of being abused don't want to fuck their husbands and that's so hard FOR THE HUSBANDS," but that sounded so over-the-top evil that even I couldn't believe the FMSF would say it.

Readers, I checked, and that's EXACTLY what it means. But why is this bad?

( aaaaAAAAAAaaaah )