So last night the Magnetons made their first vlog. Just as I was about to begin bedtime prep, so I cut into the time usually set aside for daydreaming to watch it. This may or may not have been a good idea, because it got me thinking*: How different would an alt-universe version of me have to be in order to not know about healthy multiplicity?

The more I thought about it (i.e. 12:20), the more the answer resolved into: Pretty damn different, actually. Because the Internet is a major major part of my life, and to avoid each and every one of the two or three wiki-blog-walks just begging me to click on them, her Internetting would have to be done almost completely differently.

I could cut off most of it at the root by having Mom completely fail to tell her she’s autistic. (Nor can she learn any other way.) Once she starts researching that, it’s only a matter of time until she ends up at Ballastexistenz, where the Amorphas (at least back in mid-2007, when this was going on) often make intriguing comments.

Also, from there anti-vaccinationism led me to the science-and-skepticism blogosphere. They don’t have many kind things to say about plurality there**, but they do have kind things to say about Left Behind deconstructions. (That’s the new site. This is the old site, which is still running under new management and at which you can still find me (because page-ified Disqus is horribly annoying to use).)

This is another place she can’t have gotten to any other way. Partly because one of the Slacktivites is in a multiple system, but mostly because with the interesting links available, and the links from those links, it was pretty much inevitable I would end up here (blog NSFW).

(Which means Brin would probably not exist at all. I first took on this name to become a Slacktivite.)

Really I have no idea quite what she would be like. So many of the things that have shaped me over the past four years were in places she can’t have been. (Guess what prompted the realisation I was ace? Getting into an argument at the Slacktiverse.) Maybe with some of them she could have gotten similar experiences other ways, I don’t know.

I suppose this is basically a long, convoluted way of saying thank you. Thanks Amorpha, thanks Loony-Brain, thanks of a slightly different sort to Magneton***, for being so wonderfully unavoidable.

~~~

*At midnight. While I was trying to fucking sleep. (On the other hand, if I hadn’t watched it I’d have just been wondering what was in it. So I was pretty much doomed from the moment I saw it was there.)

**The arguments against never made as much sense as the arguments for. (Hard to argue with “I think, therefore I am.” If you do argue with it, depending on how consistently you apply the argument you end up with either bigotry or solipsism (because you can’t argue with your own “I think, therefore I am”; that’s kind of the point). Neither of these sounds very appealing.)

***Who weren’t unavoidable, or at least without Loony-Brain and the subsequent poking around healthymultiplicity.com would’ve had to find a different way to insist on being in my life. But seeing as how it was their video that inspired this ridiculously long post in the first place, and they’re the ones I actually talk to on a regular basis rather than just listen, they deserve a thanks too.

Tags:

#oh look an original post   #ramblings   #the wondrous variety of sapient life   #multiplicity   #plurality   #hypotheticals