This essay, "the Empowered Multiple," was originally printed in Kinships Magazine, Vol. 1 Issue #3, from 2001, pg. 8-9 (numbers on paper, not the PDF). Pyatthemouse digitized the issue but it wasn't screenreadable, so I decided to copy it here for posterity so people could read it now, off the Wayback Machine!

Yes, this essay was also posted on www.darkpersonalities.com and in December 2000, on the authors' personal site. The authors, Teresa and JJ, ran a website, www.multiplicity.ca, where they talk about things like how a Dragon Riders of Pern MUSH (multi-user fandom story RP) connected them to headmates, and the murder and rebirth of a headmate, Shandra.

The Empowered Multiple
by Teresa and JJ Lemarath

I do not mean to judge Jean de Brebeuf... Everything he did, he did with the best of intentions. And yet this is exactly what disturbs me when I consider his life among the Hurons: that with complete purity of motive and satisfaction of conscience he was able to injure their deepest beliefs, their pride, their social structure, their very humanity, by treating them as crude and expendable vessels of the souls it was his business to save.

--Tobias Wolff, "Second Thoughts on Certainty: Saint Jean de Brebeuf among the Hurons"

We have our own view of what it is to be an empowered multiple.

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We are working on [SECRET PROJECT], which involves looking at a bunch of really, really old back-up files of [REDACTED]. Said files included 361 mysterious, unopenable .art files, an extension we'd never even heard of.

Turns out it was a proprietary AOL image format that hasn't been supported in twenty years. Even BSOD was too new to open them.

But Obsolete, our doughty little Windows 98 laptop, could! Its version of Internet Explorer added .art support in June 2000, so it could open the files! ...and convert them to bitmaps, which is how I learned that it can't save as .PNGs, only color-indexed bitmaps of one form or other (256 colors max!), .JPEG, or .GIF. I also discovered that Windows 98 had a WAY better file search than Windows XP, holy crap, it was child's play to get all those .art files, though I had to walk away and give it a while to crunch through all that.

So what WERE those 361 files?

Well, 354 of them were pocket lint: what must've been hundreds of duplicate identical background image textures, plus a few dozen duplicate identical logos. Glad we dug through them all, though, because turns out there were 7 buried in all those folders that mattered: one photograph, and six crummy flowcharts/infographics that'd make Tufte cry. Still important to the files they belong to, though!

I converted all those files into .BMP, zipped 'em (and got an angry message about how I was still using the trial version of Winzip after TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LIKE A CHEAPSKATE), transferred them to the sci-fi library computer using THEIR floppy drive, then transferred them to my USB key, where I will work at fixing and replacing all those cursed HTML files so we don't NEED hundreds of duplicate textures cluttering up the files.

Three cheers for Obsolete!

EDIT: of COURSE some intrepid old dog made a version of the Windows 98 file search to be used elsewhere. Bless you, old nerd. YOINK! BSOD getting an upgrade!

Sorry for getting behind guys, it's a bad mix of computer breakage, [SECRET PROJECT], and also preparing, because we are tabling at ReaderCon from Friday, July 10 through Sunday, July 12, at the Boston Marriott Burlington in Burlington, MA!

Hope to see y'all there!

Our oldest computer is a AST laptop from 2000 named Obsolete. It runs Windows 98 and had long since retired from duty, on account of it being so old that it was unable to do much besides run Office 97 and play MS-DOS games. It could read CDs, but not write to them, so data could only exit via floppy or zip disc.

However, it turns out Obsolete is PERFECT for inventorying periodicals at the sci-fi library.

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Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!

As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes.  (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here!  (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.

Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month?  YOU CHOOSE, readers!

Sneak: I did it! I am on a library computer to introduce MULTI MEDIA BINGO! :D (And many thanks to malymin who linked me this Rainbow Color Palettes site!)

( THE BINGO CARD! (in bandwidth-saving HTML which I'm not sure how mobile friendly it will be BUT WE SHALL FIND OUT!) )

( Here are the rules (which I am not taking very seriously!) )

LET THE BINGO BEGIN!

Sneak: I got a 1 AM idea, inspired by duckprintspress’s 40 Books Challenge: what if I made a Multi Media Bingo? @_@ (“Multi” being here our idiosyncratic and inadequate term for all sorts of singlet-norm-trespassing, because “multi media” is more fun to say. You get to choose what counts for you!)

I scrawled a bingo card for folks to fill out, either by AUDIENCING a piece of media, or CREATING it. (So the square for “singlet-busting song,” you could achieve by listening to one, singing one, or recording one!) There would be no time limit! (We took a decade to finish the Stuff100!)

People who achieve the bingo get a cute little icon for winning it, made by me! BLACKOUT winners would get a beefed up icon OR a offline sticker I make, because my roomy has a color printer and sticker paper and I am flush with power!

Would anyone be interested in doing this?

Rogan: hey guys, let’s talk about violence in Crazy Boys!

( it’s impossible for me to discuss without minor spoilers, so skip this if you want to be surprised! )

In summary: Crazy Boys is not about my attackers or what they did to me. It is about D and what he did WITH me, and thus I have chosen to write accordingly.

(based on a conversation I was having with my friend elsewhere)

Rogan: Okay, so as time has gone on, I've grown to really dislike how people talk about triggers and heartbreak.

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Ch. 2: Crazy Boys Surf Couches

Summary: Plans gets made, couches get surfed... and the family find out.
Series: Crazy Boys
Word Count: 6000
Notes: Winner of this month’s fan poll! The quotes from the CIA’s “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual” of July 1963 comes from Eberhardt Press’s 2016 zine verbatim reproduction, called Interrorgation: The CIA’s Secret Manual On Coercive Questioning. The original manual was declassified in January 1997 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Baltimore Sun, and is in the public domain.

Content warnings (contain SPOILERS!)

Grim after-effects of strangulation and sexual violence, but none shown on-screen, homophobia, hallucinations, walking corpse syndrome, and a heterosexual meltdown.

Junior Year: Rogan

It’s my first night at D’s beige box, he’s playing Halo, and I ask if I can use his shower.

“Sure. Use whatever’s there.” Then, chagrined, “I only have the one towel.”

( The secret apartment was never meant to have TWO people in it! )