vitaanteacta | Recent Entries

1) What is your hearthome? Is it a fictional world, a biome, a country, a town, a concept, or something else?

2) How did you come to realize you had a hearthome?

3) Is your hearthome tied to any other alterhuman identities you have? If so, did one identity lead to another?

4) Is your hearthome possible to physically visit? If so, have you been, or are you planning to go? If not, do you have any alternative methods of visiting?

5) Write at least one paragraph describing what it’s like to be at your hearthome.

6) Do you feel ties to other living things from your hearthome, such as plants and animals?

7) How do you cope with feeling homesick?

8) Say one thing you like about the place you live right now. (Nothing identifying, please be safe!)

Ranger Gatsby writes about being outside of conventional humanity while still human.

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Current Music: Night Light - the Mountain Goats

Not all these experiences are exclusive to fictionfolk, and even fewer are exclusive to fictionkin. This list is meant as a guide to what fictionfolk, especially fictionkin, might experience before realizing their identities. I hope it helps someone who is questioning.

For the purpose of this list, "unusual" and "abnormal" are defined in contrast to YOUR usual or YOUR normal. Keep your typical experiences when interacting with media in mind when questioning and toss out the expectations society gave you.

This list is a collaborative project worked on by members of the OtherConnect Discord server, and is a work in progress. If you would like to add to this list, contact us via the comment section of this post.

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Hi! I'm Cincinnati! This has nothing to do with alterhumanity but it is pasta. I would like to share it with you. Please read the recipie fully if you actually try to make this. I don't know how to write all the steps in the right order.

Abraxas' Favorite Pasta

Ingredients:

Rotini Pasta Box

1 and a half jars pasta sauce (Classico Fire Roasted Tomato and Garlic is best but if you only have the stuff in a can it'll be ok)

1/4th to 1/2 white or vidalia onion

2 bags spinach

1 small carton of the cheapest mushrooms at your store, unsliced

1 can of fire roasted diced tomatoes with garlic

Fresh garlic

Garlic paste

Onion powder

Italian seasoning

Red pepper flakes

Salt

Pepper

A lot of butter

1) Dice preferred amount of onion into large-ish pieces.

2) Wash mushrooms, pat mushrooms dry, slice as thin as possible and then cut the slices into thirds.

3) Chop some fresh garlic into as small of pieces as possible.

4) Chop the spinach up. This prevents them from being weird strings.

5) Put the largest pan you have on the stove, turn to low heat, add a big pat of butter.

6) Add onions and mushrooms to pan.
7) Add Italian seasoning to onions and mushrooms.

8) Cook until it smells AWESOME and everyone shrinks down. There should be brown liquid at the bottom of the pot at this stage.

9) Add your various forms of garlic. You'll need a lot more garlic than you think you will.

10) Add your chopped spinach. Do this slowly! It will all hopefully fit in your pan after it wilts but if you dump it all in at once your entire oven will be green.
11) Add your can of tomatoes. Stir everything together until all of your spinach is mostly wilted.

12) Add all your seasonings. I only use the ones I listed but there's probably other stuff you can put in here. You'll need more than you think you will, just like the garlic.
13) Oh, I forgot to mention that you needed to be cooking your pasta this whole time. Uh. You need to do that. Cook in very salty water until they are moderately underdone.

14) Add first jar of pasta sauce to pan, and wait for it to bubble a little bit.

15) Fish out your undercooked pasta and dump it in the pan.

16) Cover with a bit more sauce from another jar.

17) Throw a giant pat of butter on it and stir.

18) Sample pasta intermittently to see when it has achieved desired doneness.

19) Serve.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Location: The Kitchen
Current Music: None. Binging With Babish olive oil ranking video.

Ranger Cincinnati posts about driving our car.

Being a Desert Ranger sucks. It sucks kind of a lot! We feel a lot of pain and homesickness and grief over a lost way of life from this. It makes it hard to get out of our bed sometimes. But this isn’t just something that happens to us, this is also something we choose to be, and there’s a reason for that! When we CAN get out of bed, it makes beautiful things happen.

The rest of the system doesn’t like driving. They tell me it’s stressful and scary and boring. They talk about how they wish our city had a bus, or a train, or that they want to join a carpool. We only got our driver’s license when we were 20, despite not having any disability that would make driving impossible and having access to a car and lessons. We didn’t want to. It was scary.

( Gas fumes rising off the highway... )

Current Mood: jubilant
Current Music: 15-1 by the Mountain Goats

Ranger Dane and Ranger Tycho discuss our awakening as a Desert Ranger.

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Here's some thoughts about my hearthome, how I found it, and what I intend to do with that information.

I've had multiple hearthomes over the years, some of which have stuck around and some of which has faded. The one that's most important to me right now is an ill-defined area of modern day rural Nevada, which can be best described as "it's mostly northern Nye County".

Most of it is uninhabited, but my relationship to it is definitely within the context of being a human being from there, not any sort of nonhuman desert wildlife. (Humans are a species of desert wildlife, if you ask me!)

I knew my hearthome is in Nevada pretty much as soon as I knew the term existed, but I thought it was in Las Vegas or some other part of the Mojave Desert. As Arcade Gannon, that's where I lived my adult life, so I have a feeling of belonging to that place. Now I classify that as just being... from there, no qualifiers other than "it was in a past life".

I never went to Nye County. It's quite far out of the way from anything else, even in the post-apocalypse. I had never personally lived there when I was messing around on Google Earth and I realized "I've been here before."

It felt familiar to me in the same way your primary school building might feel familiar to you. You probably don't remember the exact layout of everything, and your memory of how it felt to be there is colored by your future experiences and what other people have told you about what you were like as a child.

Nobody can ever truly remember exactly how their past felt, just like I can never truly understand what it's like to live in Nye County or Las Vegas. You remember your past much more than I can remember those places because you have a direct, unbroken, physical connection. I don't.

But I do have those flashes of recognition. The layout of a town feeling right in a way I can't describe. A deep sadness when I look at a point on the map which used to be something and is now barely hanging on, like I was there to watch the old schoolhouse collapse. I knew sagebrush had a smell before anyone told me. When I play Geoguessr, I can sometimes distinguish stretches of highway that look almost identical to other stretches of highway because one of them feels like the way home.

I don't think a past life is what's causing this. My past life in Las Vegas feels different, I can't put my finger on how. I don't feel, right now, as if I am Las Vegan. It's a place I've been before and that I'd love to visit again, and I feel a connection to it, but it's not my home right now.

I'm in the middle of a very long-lasting fictionflicker of someone who *did* live in northern Nye County, but these feelings predate that, and they never lived in this world, 2024. That flicker doesn't explain the feeling of deja vu I get when I look at dashcam videos. They didn't know what a car was. I never drove a car there, but, clear as day, I know I should be driving a car there.

I have a general fascination with rural and remote areas of the United States. I spend a lot of my free time reading about a lot of places, and I'd like to visit them someday. I know this isn't just that interest on a more intense level because my interest is that of an observer. I am a person looking down from above at dots on a map, wishing I could drive in and sit at the bar and ask what stories they tell. Their stories, their bar, their dots, their place, their home.

With very few exceptions, I have not felt as if their story is mine. I've felt as if we are a metaphor for each other, as if their history can be used to lay out my life in a way that makes just a little more sense. I've been able to see similarities between my hometown and other towns, to fit them together in a greater story of what it means to be a Midwesterner or to be American or to be bypassed and forgotten as soon as you aren't useful.

But those are not my story. There's always separation. There is no separation here. The story of this place is my story, when I read it I fit in perfectly. I don't have to go sit at their bar, I am already at my favorite bar, metaphorically.

For now, I am Nevadan. I've never lived there, and I will probably never live there. That's okay. I'm a multifaceted person. Nye County is a place that calls out to me, but I have other places I need to attend to. It'd probably make me feel worse to spend a lot of time there and realize "I'm *not* from here, on some level, this is all something my brain made up." I already know that, but it's not something I need to internalize, and for that I am grateful.

I have a hometown I love dearly and feel an obligation to give back to, and I'm very excited to live there. I can hold it dear without ignoring the call of the desert. To let go of either would be the death of me, so I won't.

I like to think of my identity as being retroactive. If I had never played New Vegas, I probably wouldn't have ever put the pieces together. Every memory from my childhood that points in the direction of "you are Arcade" could have another explanation. All the noemata, memories, and feelings could be fabricated.

I also don't think that matters.

I feel happy. I feel as if I know who I am and what I'm supposed to do, where I'm supposed to be. I have an explanation for my alienation from society. My feelings of disconnect and longing and joy and heartbreak and devotion. If all that was really made up by my brain when I played a very good video game, I don't think it makes it any less real.

The reality of my identitiy is fully internal. You can't fact check this. It has no measurable affect on anything except through the conduit of my body.

If I am dreaming, it is a beautiful, meaningful, glorious dream. It's a dream of the best story I have ever been told and had the pleasure of telling. It's the life I choose to live.

Expressing your identity in day-to-day life doesn't have to be bombastic, it doesn't have to be with merch, it doesn't have to be identifiable as what it is by anyone but you.

I do buy merch, there's nothing wrong with doing so. Two of my most prized posessions are a Followers flag I got off Etsy and a Nuka-Cola ammo container that currently holds my mail.

The things that have made me feel more comfortable in my interactions with the outside world, however, haven't been stuff that's inherently Fallout-related. I love wearing baseball caps and trucker hats, so I got a Las Vegas baseball cap and a Nevada trucker hat. I wear athletic shoes and loose clothes with pockets so I feel like I wouldn't be out of place in the desert. I have something around my neck that's important to me but I don't want to show to other people... so I wear a bandana around my neck now and you couldn't look at me and be able to tell it's not there.

People in my life who don't know what fictionkinity and having a hearthome are accept those things as a part of who I am. People have told me that they were told how to find me by "look for the Nevada hat guy", or "he's the one in cargo shorts/pants". They're shocked when I show up not wearing these things. That means they see me as myself, even if only a little bit. I've found it did a lot more for me than things that are obvious.

I've been questioning if our fictomere falls neatly into either the category of spiritual or psychological. We had a defined past life a while ago, but it seems to have been absorbed by a specific headmate of ours. We're left with very vauge and murky memories of our past, along with a sense that this is just how our brain is wired. Whenever we try to remember specifics it feels like one person absorbs them. What's left might be both spiritual and psychological or neither. The binary might not be as important as the community says it is, anyway.