Bloodlines International

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22298832591:
Does anyone have current info on Bloodlines International?  They were at one time a vampire/otherkin/etc organization with chapters all over the world.  There are still 37 yahoo mailing lists for individual chapters.  But the main websites for the group, at http://www.bloodlinesint.com and http://illuminarti.com and http://illuminarti.co.uk seem to be gone, as does the main mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bloodlines_Charter-Members/  There might be a new website for the organization at http://bloodlines-international.spruz.com/Default.asp and a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bloodlines-International/201193743264539 but neither makes any mention of the individual chapters or their mailing lists.  Does anyone know what’s going on with them currently?  I was going to see about joining one of the old mailing lists to ask, but there doesn’t seem to be one for my area.

While I understand the trans* community quite well, I

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22300247474:
While I understand the trans* community quite well, I can’t help but find that this ‘Otherkin’ movement is pretty far fetched. Like, the people who complain that they can’t wear full shirts because their wings hurt? Come on.

 Anonymous

Saw this on lonelywizard’s post and I felt compelled to respond, since I have a very different take on this.  I’m an otherkin, I’ve been involved in the community for 13 years now, and I find the people who complain they can’t wear full shirts because their wings hurt absolutely ridiculous.  I experience phantom limb sensations myself.  And you know what?  They’re not physical, by definition.  They are, depending on your interpretation, either psychological or astral.  In either case, they do not interact with physical objects like clothing, chairs, etc.  Passing through such objects is not likely to cause pain.  If it was, then anyone with a kinside larger than a normal doorway or a normal room (I’m looking at some of the dragons here) would be completely fucked.  

Frankly, I highly recommend getting to know the kin community that exists outside of tumblr, because a lot of stuff is just accepted unquestioningly here that doesn’t fly in the rest of the community.  I’m not saying you won’t still find us far fetched, you very well might, but there’s just not the atmosphere of “any claim is fine no matter what” that you find here.

i-got-feathers: I am going to politely disagree with some of this to an extent. With some otherkins.

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22302355704:
i-got-feathers:

I am going to politely disagree with some of this to an extent. With some otherkins things such as chairs and clothing can be uncomfortable due to the psychological impact of phantom limbs. Mind over matter? probably, but kins still can experience sensitivity in their ‘limbs’ when coming in contact with physical objects.

Is it when they come into contact with the objects (sitting in a chair, wearing clothing, laying in bed, driving, etc), or when they consciously dwell on their phantom limbs coming into contact with the objects?  If the latter, then the issue isn’t any sort of sensitivity of the phantom limbs themselves, but a form of nocebo effect caused by them dwelling on something they presume “should” be unpleasant.  And if people here are reinforcing that belief, it’s only going to get stronger.

Jarandhel's Tumblr: i-got-feathers: I am going to politely disagree with some of this to...

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22302563356:Jarandhel's Tumblr: i-got-feathers: I am going to politely disagree with some of this to...:

i-got-feathers:

I am going to politely disagree with some of this to an extent. With some otherkins things such as chairs and clothing can be uncomfortable due to the psychological impact of phantom limbs. Mind over matter? probably, but kins still can experience sensitivity in their ‘limbs’…

Also, if this is really an issue for folks with phantom wings, why don’t we hear about people with phantom tails who have to go without underwear or pants for the same reason?  Apparently they all learn to manage with the issue.

chasingcaribou: A dragon’s human body

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22303987973:
chasingcaribou:

A dragon’s human body wouldn’t be pressed against the walls of their room, so the same sensory overload wouldn’t occur, even if the phantom body is larger then the room. But a shirt is interacting with your human body, and if you have extra sensation already I think it’s more of an overload? 

How do others who feel about that?

Honestly, to me it sounds like you’re bending over backwards to try to justify the reaction.  Phantom wings aren’t going to be “pressed against the body” the way clothing are pressed against the human body to create the kind of doubled sensation you’re talking about — they’d be pressed against the phantom body.  In the case of dragon otherkin, they’d be folded against the draconic body not folded down around a humanoid body.  Avian therianthropes?  Around a birdlike body.  
The closest you might get to the scenario you’ve described are with fae, angelkin, and some winged elves since they have wings on an otherwise humanoid phantom body.  And if that doubled sensation was particularly troubling for any of them, it would be rather easy to extend the wings rather than holding them against the body in the first place.  It certainly shouldn’t cause discomfort, much less pain.
Again, the folks with phantom tails seem to learn to deal with this just fine without being unable to wear pants or underwear.  How do we know that?  Because they don’t talk about not being able to wear such things the way that some winged otherkin talk about not being able to wear full shirts.

I experience phantom limb sensations, including phantom wings, and I have never once had any sense of them interacting with my clothing or physical environment in any way.  Nor have I had any sort of troubling doubled sensation from them and my clothing.  And I really don’t think reinforcing the idea that this is common/normal/to be expected is at all healthy.

Therianthropy Lonliness and Depression

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22304617380:
leeliolasercollie:

I’m having a serious problem at the moment, one I haven’t really had until now. I’ve just suddenly developed this overwhelming feeling of lonliness. Not just in general, though. Specifically related to therianthropy.

Have you tried IRC?  It might give you more of the real-time interaction you’re looking for, and there are a variety of channels for therians and otherkins.  I keep a list of all the ones I know of here: http://dreamhart.org/2012/01/a-revised-otherkin-faq/#irc-channels

metaldragon27: Think of your human body like a shell that coats your otherwise inhuman soul from...

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22305334226:
metaldragon27:

Think of your human body like a shell that coats your otherwise inhuman soul from end to end. Now the parts that don’t fit push against this shell constantly and never cease. Eventually the pressure of such would cause things to break but to prevent this your body regulates the pressure by using the ‘phantom limbs’ condition as a way to bleed it.

Errm, if you’re going with the astral form model of phantom limbs, I think you’re over-complicating things.  The human astral body extends beyond the human physical form, creating the aura.  A nonhuman astral body would simply do the same in a different shape.  No pushing against the shell, no pressure, no need to bleed anything.

chasingcaribou: However, what I did mean to say is that I think it is possible for a person to feel.

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22306266895:
chasingcaribou:

However, what I did mean to say is that I think it is possible for a person to feel phantom wings and have their clothing, particularly a shirt, become uncomfortable because of feeling two separate sensations on their back (even if one sensation is only a product of the brain and there are no wing nerves) that one or the other could be uncomfortable for that person, because the mixed sensations would be too much to process properly at once, and one (the phantom wings) might already be garbled up noise because it is in all likelihood caused by an anomaly in the brain.

I realize this is what you were saying, but it still comes across as far-fetched to me for all the reasons listed in my last post.  Phantom wings really don’t cause a doubled sensation that’s difficult to process when coupled with clothing.  They probably cause less of a “doubled” sensation than wearing a physical bra does. 
And, again, if this hypothetical sensory input problem were a problem with winged otherkin why isn’t it a problem for tailed otherkin?  Heck, why isn’t it a problem in the older otherkin and therian communities off of tumblr?  I’m the mod of angelkin, it’s been around since 2001 with over 7,500 messages to date.  There’s been plenty of discussion of phantom wing pain or discomfort, but not a bit of it has been attributed to clothing.  Much less to the point of not being able to wear full shirts.

I don’t see why that is bending over backwards, or supporting an unhealthy way of thinking.

You don’t see what’s bending over backwards or supporitn gan unhealthy way of thinking about producing an entirely new hypothesis in order to justify an idea that exists only among tumblr kin that their phantom limbs may hurt due to the clothing their wearing, and that they may have to avoid wearing certain clothing because of it?  

All I meant to say is that it is possible that a small amount of people who say they experience discomfort from phantom limbs when wearing clothing might be because the feeling of clothing on their skin is too much when coupled with the feelings of feathers, or the joints and weight of wings, or whatever other phantom feeling it is for that person. 

I get that’s what you’re saying, and I really think it’s incredibly far fetched.  If the feeling of clothing on their skin were too much, how is the feeling of air on their skin any better?  The physical back will always have sensations that will be coupled with the phantom sensations from the wings, from the movement of air along it to the temperature of the room to the patterns of muscle tension in it.  Taking off your clothing doesn’t get rid of the sensation of having a human back as well.

multipleproblems: They amplify. I can feel everything. I

via http://jarandhel.tumblr.com/post/22307011553:
multipleproblems:

They amplify. I can feel everything. I can’t always handle it. But I have to. Our world is dying around us and we are blind. We kill our mother on a daily basis. You can’t hear her in the cities. You sometimes can hardly hear her away from it all. Away from the smog and cars and pollutants. I hear the tiniest whisper. I touch the trees and the plants. I hear them. I see them. They call out. They call out to us all but we are deaf. We have become dumb, stupidity brought on by our arrogance, from our so called intelligence. But animals, they are smarter than we are. They know more. They hear. And they answer.

Hate to break it to you, but no.  Our world is not dying around us.  We are not “killing our mother”.  Humanity actually has very little power to affect the Earth in the grand scheme of things.  Sure, we can increase the greenhouse effect and create global warming.  We can nuke the planet.  We can make human and most larger plant and animal life as it currently exists on the surface of the Earth completely impossible.  But that’s pretty much our limit.  Even if we detonated every nuclear device on the planet, we can’t really make much of a dent in the Earth itself.  
And the Earth has geologic time to work with.  Billions of years.  Humanity’s only been around for about 2 million.  If tomorrow we set off all the nukes, unleashed every chemical, biological, or incendiary weapon we have, and just plain made a mess of things in every conceivable way, the Earth would recover in a million years or a billion.  It’s not going anywhere.  Resistant plants and animals would evolve to take the place of the ones we know, and a new cycle of life would begin.  As it has time and again on this planet.  A mass extinction event, manmade or otherwise, is not the end of the world nor even of life on Earth.