The Atlas System

We've been considering a few changes recently, one of which is changing our system name. We changed it a while back to our current name, The Atlas System, but we just haven't been vibing with it as much as we thought we would. One struggle with having minimal internal communication is that when one of us suggests a new name, it's hard to get others' opinion without waiting for them to front at some point. We've been using "Cosmic Cervid" as a username for a while, which works well because it combines our two collective 'types (our collective space kintype and collective deer hearttype). As such, we're thinking of changing our system name to the "Cosmic Cervid System", which will hopefully remain a permanent name (though if there's anything we know about our system, it's that we can't agree on anything LOL).

Another change we've been considering is returning to Tumblr under a new account. Although we've noticed some benefits from being off most social media, we do miss the Tumblr community and especially the alterhuman and fandom communities on there. One of our main issues with social media has been being inundated with things like politics and discourse, but I think if we're even more strict with our tag blocking and who we follow, we might be able to mitigate most of those issues. Dreamwidth does seem like a lovely little space though, so we're going to keep posting here regardless.

The last change is about how we describe and organize our system, for lack of a better word. In our last post on being mixedflux we talked about how confusing it can be to have members constantly fuse/blur and un-fuse/un-blur, and that identity confusion is probably one of the most significant negative aspects of systemhood for us. We want to explore ways of reducing that confusion, possibly by "forcing" ourselves to differentiate our members. None of us enjoy being blurry, so we expect that being able to increase that differentiation would help up reduce dissociation and work towards our goal of functional multiplicity.

There have also been a lot of changes in our personal life recently (mostly positive, fortunately), so I guess right now is just a period of change for us. Being autistic, we are NOT a fan of change, but we're working through it!

We recently deleted most of our social media apps and took a hiatus from Tumblr, which had been our main source of involvement with the alterhuman community. We aren't sure we want to return to mainstream social media for a variety of reasons, including our mental health and a dislike of the direction the internet has been going. That being said, we've been struggling with trying to figure out how to stay involved in our communities of interest without apps like Tumblr or Instagram.

Recently we've mostly been active on Discord, but as you can see we're trying to be active here on Dreamwidth too. We'll also continue working on and updating our website (cosmiccervid.neocities.org), and we're going to look into joining some forums. Sometimes we have the feeling that we're missing out, but that's one of the pernicious effects of social media, isn't it?

All that being said, we're still figuring out what's next. We intend to post more here about our alterhumanity and maybe some other things we're interested in. It seems like a lot of folks have been reconsidering their use of social media recently; maybe we can figure out what's next together.