Sure I've mentioned this before, but...

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I've told y'all about this book before, but I'm finally reading it, so I'm going to tell you what I think of it.

The book is "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. It's hard scifi.

Now... the blurb on Amazon may say that one of the characters has "surgically-induced Multiple Personality Disorder," but neither the book nor the book's jacket call it that. In fact, I haven't seen one mention of MPD in the book except for the letters "MPD" where the book said "they called it a disorder." It seems that the future society of the book abandoned the term Multiple Personality Disorder and now calls it Multiple Consciousness Complex, and one character in the book used surgery to *become* a multiple called the Gang of Four. It seems this gives her a lot of advantages in her field, including the ability to multitask on a large scale. Psychiatry and psychology seem to be dead sciences, as well, in an age of brain editing. In fact, they called the practitioners of those branches "hacks" and "barbarians." They referred to integration as a barbaric practice of picking one conciousness core and murdering the rest.

And it is not just all that which makes it an awesome read. We highly recommend it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, The Gang gets very upset when someone calls one of them an alter. They also go into this huge rant about it. At one point, the Gang of Four member named Melissa says, "You think when you're spending time with me you're really spending time with Mom?" (Not an exact quote.)

Second Edit: You're welcome, everyone!

(no subject)

[withfangs.livejournal.com]

I don't know if anyone has access to it, but Bitch Magazine this month ran a story on an artist named CarianaCarianne. They refer to themselves in the plural, they've even taken oaths to be legally recognised as 2 separate people, have received MFA degrees in their own names. Their work appears to be centered around identity concepts, but in the article, they mentioned that they always viewed themselves as 2 separate people, and were confused when they learned that other people were single.

Part of me is slightly skeptical b/c concept art is highly involved in identity concepts, and plurality/identity multiplicity are actually discussed topics in a few of my art theory courses. But, the article on its own was a good read, and mentioned the idea of co-consciousness and brought up the fact that CarianaCarianne was not disordered.

I'd love to post the text, but I don't have a scanner, and can't seem to find a net version of the article. Maybe it's there if you pay for a subscription, but I'm too broke to do it. :( But:

Bitch Magazine's Website: http://www.bitchmagazine.org
(The article is named: Double Vision—Can two artists share one body?)
CarianaCarianne's Website: http://www.carianacarianne.com/
Aaaand their bio: http://carianacarianne.com/biox.html

For anyone who's interested. The magazine itself was a semi-decent read for you feminists out there. ;)

Regarding multiplicity, its trolls (?), and everyone else who claims to 'suffer' from it.

[clsa.livejournal.com]

Some times I feel like there will be a moment where everyone will collectively crack a wide smile and bow, going "Tadaa! We're not really strange after all, but we sure had you fooled, yeah?" and I'll be the only one left, with that everlasting feeling as though I've somehow missed the bigger picture and brought this all upon myself.