Otherkin News

Summary: A digest of selected news tweeted on the @otherkinnews Twitter during February 2016.

The otherkin community itself

An interview with a furry mentions differences from therians.

Coined this month: animafidem, someone who believes they are nonhuman in spirit, not in psychology or by choice.

Coined this month: cerebrumalius, someone who believes their nonhuman ID comes from a brain quirk, not spirituality

Draconity.org is holding a contest with prizes to redesign their logo. The last was held in '08. See their main page for details.

Animal people in performance

"Naturalist Charles Foster wanted to reconnect with his inner beast – so he tried living as a badger, a deer and a fox"

Body schema

A study on the fluidity of the human body schema.

Spirituality

A 2013 academic article on reincarnation is now retracted: it'd been copied from Wikipedia. News articles at Vocativ and Indian Express

Transhumanism

A cyborg drummer is playing music with the help of a third robotic arm

A 3D bioprinter that can create human cartilage, muscle, and bone tissue

Scientists modified a cotton candy machine to help create artificial body tissue

Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan says in interviews, "We have Transhumanists who want to become fish," and "I have friends that are trying to grow tails."

Read about it at the Tips For Trans Folks blog: Call for papers for transgender studies on theme of tranimality.

Humanity Plus magazine article on defining humanity in context with transhumanity and posthumanity.

Content warnings: None.

October: Mistwolf wrote an article in Spanish called "La Mano Transhumana." Mistwolf also translated the article into English as "The Transhuman Hand." The article "is a proposal for cooperation among different communities involved in an identity search, the Otherkin, Therian, and the Real Vampire community." Mistwolf uses the word "transhuman" to include all of those peoples. The article offers guidelines for how the communities can cooperate in constructive ways.

Source

Mistwolf, "La Mano Transhumana (The Transhuman Hand)." Noctalium. 2013-10. https://noctalium.wordpress.com/textos-comunitarios/la-mano-transhumana-1-0/

Content warnings: Gross stuff. Medical. Anatomy. Implants. Injuries. Experiments on animals. Cancer. Some of the linked articles have photos of some artificial organs.

August: Tissue engineers are developing 3-D printing methods for creating body parts that can be implanted in living people. These body parts can be designed to be a perfect fit for the patient, so their body is less likely to reject the implant. The bio-engineers are already experimenting with making:

- Bones. Based on ceramic powder, bones that are custom-made to fit could replace bones that are too heavily damaged to repair.
- Blood vessels. Necessary for creating other organs. Nobody has made artificial organs with blood vessels in them yet, because it’s so complicated in there.
- Ears. Made of a cartilage gel, molded to match a 3D scan of the patient’s other ear. Cartilage is difficult with traditional tissue engineering, but with 3D printing, it’s easy, especially because cartilage doesn’t have blood vessels in it.
- Skin grafts. Creating skin from scratch, and printing it directly onto a wound. (Traditionally, you’d have to take a skin graft from somewhere else on the patient’s body, so fixing one wound means making another one.)
- Kidneys. Made of a cell culture from the patient, placed in a biodegradable scaffold. Engineers have successfully made a tiny, live kidney, but not yet a working kidney that could be implanted.

Although engineers are still working on the basics, someday lab-grown tissues could go beyond replacing a body part. Artificial body parts could be designed to do things that the original body parts couldn’t. Not only could we make a bionic ear from 3-D printed cartilage, engineers propose that they could also add to it a super-human hearing ability, or even a “sixth sense” to detect radio and electromagnetism. On the more practical side of survival, neurologists wouldn’t have to open up a brain cancer patient’s skull extra times if they replace a piece of the skull with a transparent window made of a material based on dental ceramic. Such a transparent skull implant has already been tested in animals. Through that window, neurologists could do laser treatments, and have an easier time scanning and monitoring the brain's healing process.


Sources

Steven Leckart, “Five body parts scientists can 3-D print.” 2013-08-16. Popular Science (online magazine). http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/5-body-parts-scientists-can-3-d-print

Susan Young, “Cyborg parts: Princeton researchers, using a 3-D printer, have built a bionic ear with integrated electronics.” 2013-08-12. MIT Technology Review (online news). http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/517991/cyborg-parts/ (Actually, the article sounds more like the lab team proposed that they could build such an ear, not that they have actually made one. I’m not sure.)

Honor Whiteman, “Transparent skull implant provides ‘window to the brain.’” 2013-09-04. Medical News Today (online news). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/265634.php

Content warnings: Some linked articles contain the kind of ableism common in reporting about amputees.

July: A group of students designed an amphibious prosthetic leg. Shown in the video above, it’s called the Murr-ma, and it makes it possible to swim very fast. This prosthetic has a bird-like foot for running on soft sand at a beach. It has fins on its calf area, instead of on its foot. Its fins are inspired by those of the sailfish. It has advantages over the usual kind of swim fins, which make it hard to walk on land.

Compare the prosthetic mermaid tail of Nadya Vessey. In 2009, Vessey, a swimmer who did not have legs, asked the special effects studio Weta Workshop to design it for her. Unlike costume mermaid tails, this one has the advantage of having only a supple spine down its length, so it moves more like a real dolphin tail. It’s a great example of how prosthetic limb design doesn’t have to resemble human limbs.

I could have sworn that I posted on Otherkin News about the mermaid tail of Nadya Vessey a few years ago. I remember researching the article, but it’s not in my blog archives, so I must have failed to post it. I thought that I also posted about the industrial design student Kaylene Kau’s prosthetic tentacle arm in 2010, but I can’t find that in the archives, either. (By the way, all three of these prostheses were unique prototypes that aren’t sold commercially. Years later, Vessey’s mermaid tail is still the only one of its kind.) Maybe I had doubts about these articles’ relevance to otherkin, trans-human, and trans-species topics. In the future, I think I'd rather err on the side of including such things.


Sources

Thomas Essl, “Murr-ma, the amphibious prosthetic.” http://youtu.be/Q-yFS9qrDd0 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-yFS9qrDd0

Victoria Woollaston, “The AMPHIBIOUS prosthetic limb inspired by the world's fastest fish that enables humans to swim at 'superhuman' speeds.” 2013-08-09. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2387961/The-AMPHIBIOUS-prosthetic-limb-inspired-worlds-fastest-fish-enables-humans-swim-superhuman-speeds.html

“Close up: A mermaid’s tail.” 2009-02-26. TVNewZealand. http://youtu.be/cDajDkWGW4c or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDajDkWGW4c

Kaylene Kau, “Prosthetic arm.” 2010-10-23. Coroflot. http://www.coroflot.com/kaylenek/PROSTHETIC-ARM?school_name=University+of+Washington,+College+of+Built+Environments&

Summary: News from 2012 regarding topics of interest to otherkin and therianthropes (therians), including: a new study on clinical lycanthropy, an anthology of non-supernatural otherkin and therian romantic fiction, a survey of therians and furries, a Tarot deck for people who were extraterrestrials in past lives, a therian-inspired art exhibit, advances in the technology of wearable animal ears, other transhuman innovations, and the death of Stalking Cat.

Trigger warnings: mental illness, death.

2012-01. A new academic article about clinical lycanthropy was published in The Journal of Psychiatric Practice, focusing on the case study of Ms. A., 47, who believed herself to be a snake.¹ The syndrome of lycanthropy recognized in psychiatry has some traits in common with spiritual therianthropy as discussed in the therianthrope community, in that the subject believes himself or herself to be or become an animal. The syndrome itself isn’t a mental illness, and doesn’t consistently correlate with any specific mental illnesses. Clinical lycanthropy is distinguished by delusions of physical transformation, and presence of other mental illnesses; all but one case of clinical lycanthropy have quickly responded to treatment. People in the therianthrope community, on the other hand, generally don’t believe they physically transform. The new article itself is behind a pay-wall. You can get the gist of the article through an irreverent informal commentary on it in the Neurotic Physiology blog.²

2012-09. Good Mourning Publishing is working on assembling an anthology of short romantic fiction titled Shifting Hearts, "in which at least one of the love interests is Otherkin/Therian. Any identification of otherkin or therian is accepted. No vampires, p-shifting, or paranormal themes; strictly real world depictions. […] The submission deadline is December 31, 2012."³ To my knowledge, this is the first book of its kind. Personally, I’ve heard rumors that a member of the therianthrope community is writing the preface for it; is there a public post by the person in question to confirm this rumor?

2012-09-05. A multidisciplinary team of scientists (sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists) called the Anthropomorphic Research Project (ARP) released results for its surveys of furries, bronies (fans of My Little Pony), and therianthropes.⁴

2012-09-05. An interview with Patricia Cori, co-author (with Alysa Bartha) of the Sirian Starseed Tarot. In the interview, Cori said she intended the oracle deck as a tool for “starseed awakening,” to assist the “the starseed [extraterrestrial] beings currently incarnated [in human bodies] on the planet, here to assist in the great transition that we all are beginning to recognize is well underway. […] In the generations of children since the 60’s, I believe, many very special souls are coming into the life experience highly conscious, with many gifts. They are starseeds from other planets and systems that are quite possibly more evolved than ours.”⁵ The starseed community has been active for several decades, but their community remains separate from the otherkin and therianthrope communities.

2012-09-11. Valerie Daval’s art exhibition of paintings inspired by therianthropes, featuring animal-themed reinterpretations of classic paintings. “Therians believe that while they have a human body, some important part of their mind, identity or spirit is that of an animal. […] Therians Dream is a series of portraits about metamorphosis between human and animal form.”⁶ Caution: the linked page includes artistic nudity.

2012-10. Following the release of Necomimi, the wearable cat-like biofeedback ears by Neurowear, an independent business emerged, called Emoki, offering diverse modifications built upon that hardware. Emoki offers the Necomimi headset, plus their own variety of interchangeable animal ears: bunny, bear, and fox, with more to come soon.⁷

2012-10. Transhuman week on Wired magazine, featuring the latest experiments and predictions about high-tech enhancement of the human body and mind. Trigger warnings: surgery, physical injuries particularly to eyes and extremities, vivid descriptions and photos thereof.

2012-11-05. Stalking Cat, 54, died. Famous for modifying his body to resemble a tiger, which he called his totem animal, Stalking Cat was active in the furry community,⁸ but I haven’t found evidence that he was active in the otherkin or therianthrope communities.


- O. Scribner

( Sources )