Madison Rye Progress

Venmo $10 @ Flynn-Nicholls with the name of a fictional character and I’ll do a 10 minute drawing for you

sabriel, catbus, dirty pair, down on their luck slime

Real talk, I used to go by Ranna ahahah. Man, I loved these books...

honestly the idea that a 22-year-old would say to another human person that they are an "elder" speaks volumes about the insecurity of what it is like being 22, exactly the reason 22 year olds shouldn't be filling that role of elder.

i wonder if the thing they meant was that they are a mentor to trans teens? like perhaps they werent even thinking about us trans ppl over 30 bc all the trans ppl they know are between 16 and 20?

I am not a trans elder I am trans middle-aged. The 22-year-old who has been out for ten years is like the equivalent of a 28 year old cis person. People live for like 70 years there’s a lot of ages you can be

I'm gonna be exactly 31 forever personally idk about uyo

This makes me wonder if elder/baby, if the distinction is to remain, is not necessarily something you can label yourself as, but only be labeled by someone else as. Calling oneself an elder feels very presumptuous, where as calling someone else an elder feels like a term of respect, if not fact.

it’s cohost’s birthday! we first launched in private friends-and-family alpha one year ago today, February 3, 2022. before that, we’d been hinting at what we were working on (mostly via the codename “fourth website”), but had been cagey about details and only revealed the name to a few of our closest friends. we didn’t tell anyone in advance that this was our planned launch date, we surprise released on our locked twitter accounts and some friends-only discord servers.

we picked the february 3 date at our member meeting on january 4. we looked at the remaining work items, cut about half of it for the private release, and decided we could probably knock it out in a month. and we did! and we only had to work 12 hour days for two weeks leading up to it! and yes it was broken as hell but it didn’t matter because We Did It, our friends were using it, they seemed to like it, and we knew we could improve it.

on that note, here’s a short list of things that weren’t available until later in the private alpha:

• notifications of any kind
  • we had a like button though. you could click it, it would store that you liked the post, but OP would never know.
  • we accidentally weren’t saving timestamps for these at first, so when notifications shipped we set them all to epoch + like ID as seconds, making your existing notifications all show as January 1, 1970 ± 24 hours, depending on your time zone.
• a post editor that wasn’t largely broken
• a dashboard that took under 30 seconds to load
• pagination on the dashboard, user profiles, or tag pages
• eggbug
  • eggbug’s birthday is tomorrow, february 4
    • not gonna lie, i (aidan) kind of knocked this one out of the park. what a funny little guy. -aidan
• private pages that weren’t horribly bugged
• changing your password, email address, and username yourself
• custom icon shapes
  • the capsule icon shape, which is only available to alpha users, is a reference to a display bug that was present for the first few weeks
• access to drafts
  • you could save posts as drafts but you could never find them again. while the idea of a Post Hole was deeply funny, we decided you should probably be able to find your drafts.
    • in editing, i (jae) was informed that we never shipped pagination for drafts, so draft 21+ are still sent to the Post Hole. i do not intend to fix this, because it’s funny.
      • (editor’s (colin) note: we do actually intend to fix it. it’s just saying that we’re not going to is funnier.)
        • jae note: buzzkill
• image lightboxes
• tag autocompletion when Posting
• a way to actually earn money (this one is pretty important)
  • (editor’s (kara) note: you too can activate .beat timestamps)
• and much much more!

when we say the first release came in hot, we mean it. it’s wild now to read through the early patch notes and see just how much was missing and/or broken.

we didn’t expect at all to be where we are now within just the first year. we got 10k users on public launch day. we thought that was a ton and, given some of our performance issues at the time, we were right! and then four months later, twitter suddenly and unexpectedly imploded and we got 75k new users in under a week. still weird!

we love that you’re all here, we love that you like our website, we love that you love eggbug. we hope you’ll stick with us through the next year as we make cohost even better.

thanks for using cohost!

~ jae, colin, aidan, & kara

My sense of time is still so fucked that I thought I had been here well over a year and a half.

I would like to thank ADHD, the Academy, long COVID, a concussion, and my family.

Edit: yeah, yeah, I fucked up, but consider: my point is proven in the other direction, now.

We did it! Marsh is funded! Not just that, but so was all of this:

• ✨$750✨ funded! — Special hardcover edition of Marsh
• ✨$1,000✨ funded! — Short stories by other authors surrounding the events of Marsh will be included either as interludes or in a separate volume, turning the book into an anthology of sorts
• ✨$1,250✨ funded! — A Post-Self TTRPG module surrounding the events of the book, released alongside it
• ✨$1,500✨ funded! — Ask., a collection of stories in the form of responses from the Ode clade to questions asked by those who have not uploaded, inspired by (and using many of) the audience questions asked on cohost
• ✨$2,000✨ funded! — Post-Self themed stickers and bookplates
• ✨$2,500✨ funded! — Illustrations to accompany the book
• ✨$3,000✨ funded! — A full audiobook version of Marsh
• ✨$3,500✨ funded! — Motes Played, a new Post-Self novella (already written!) about the Ode clade to be published as a paperback

All money raised above $3,500 ($255 as of close) is set to be distributed among the authors writing for the anthology.

Post-mortem

As with the Mitzvot Kickstarter, I would like to write a small postmortem for the whole experience, because, as before, I am completely overwhelmed by the response to this campaign.

I began with the same goal of $500. While the Mitzvot Kickstarter proved to me that there was a demand for another book in the Post-Self cycle, I was not sure, with how definitively Mitzvot (and especially "Selected Letters") wrapped that up, how much demand there would be about a book not about the Odists and their travails. Yes, Dry Grass is a somewhat major character, and yes, themes of the eighth stanza's work do arise in the story, but it is not about them.

The Odists, with very few exceptions, are skunks, you see. Even the ones who are not shaped like skunks (especially the ones who are not shaped like skunks) are skunks. One of the joys of the setting is that, by virtue of its metafurry nature, those who are furries remain furries, even when they are shaped like humans.

The Marshans, however, are not. This is a story about identity, yes, but it is not a furry story. A large chunk of the audience for Post-Self — prior to the last quarter of 2023, I would say nearly all — is furry. They are here for the shitty foxes and wicked/tragic skunks and the weasels the have a not-so-subtle crush on. I worried that perhaps writing a non-furry story would limit the appeal to an audience that loves furries.

This was a conscious goal of mine, in a way. I was starting to feel limited by writing within furry, and I wanted to increase appeal to a wider audience. I was in my MFA program and felt a pressure to write MFA Stuff™. Very heady, lyric essay type stuff. Of course, when I got there, one of the other students was writing a novel about baseball and sex, and the other was writing a YA book about magical girls. Ah well. I am still proud of my thesis, for which I may also seek publication.

Towards the end of 2023, however, the tone started to shift. I will attribute much of this to two factors. The first is the engagement with Post-Self on cohost ratcheted up significantly. It turns out that queer people escaping toxic environments vibe with a story surrounding a bunch of queer people escaping toxic environments.

The second is that my partner, The Lament (@hamratza) system, rapidly latched onto the setting in general and the Odists in particular for informing eir various identities (ey has added A Finger Pointing, Warmth In Fire, No Longer Myself, and True Name as headmates since diving into the setting). Ey also finally nudged me over the cliff and into plurality, myself, something which has been coming since before ally.

Post-Self has always found appeal for plural and median systems, and many of those within the Discord server would describe themselves as such (many even adopting 'clade' in place of 'system' for themselves).

As such, Post-Self saw a boom in popularity and reach, and it was perhaps misguided of me to maintain that assumption that a less furry book would not find a place.

The Marsh Kickstarter once more found success within the first few minutes, and the first three stretch goals were met by the end of the first day, and I added stretch goals to $2,500 by January 2nd, and again in the last few days, with the two most exciting being an audiobook of Marsh and an additional novella, Motes Played.

I offered rewards for:

• The Marsh ebook, paperback, and hardcover
• The Post-Self cycle in ebook, paperback, and hardcover
• The Motes Played ebook and paperback
• A Post-Self TTRPG module based on the events of Marsh
• Stickers and bookplates
• One's name in the credits, with a personalized message at the higher tiers.

Motes Played

Over the last week of December and the first two weeks of January, I hammered out a novella called Motes Played surrounding And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights of the Ode clade, an exploration of childhood sys-side.

This was written on a whim after a conversation with The Lament during a long drive. We had been talking about what sorts of taboos might remain sys-side and why. In a queer-normative society, what remains transgressive? Is there a reason for it not being accepted? How does that play out amongst the cladists?

The obvious example is that of intraclade relationships, a taboo that only started loosening up after True Name's 98.14% successful assassination in 2350. This was mentioned briefly in Nevi'im and more in depth in "Selected Letters" as Serene winds up in a relationship with the Dear 'cule on Pollux. I wanted to explore it more directly, though, and so the relationship that existed in protocanon between Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps and Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself was elevated to canon, and the complication of a family dynamic within a clade was added on top of that.

It was super fun to write and a very worthwhile experience. It was also something that I was not planning on doing much with beyond posting the story as a bit of canon writing to Post-Self site in the stories section, maybe release as an ebook on the Itch.io store. It was already done, after all, and has even already been edited and read by several of those on the Discord.

This, however, was an opportunity to push that a bit further and get it pulled together into a full paperback, complete with a cover. I am really excited to have the chance to do that! Even though, as a novella, it will be much shorter than the other Post-Self books, and even though it follows along from Mitzvot in such a way as to require having read the cycle, I still hope that folks will enjoy it.