OOH!! I just found “Crawling Chaos,” that’d work perfectly for the battle early in book 1 against a hive mind leech monster summoned by a blood cult.

After listening to a few different songs, I don’t think they’d fit the tone of the video essay, BUT they’d work very well for a fiction series I’ve been hyperfixated on that I’ve been wanting to animate. For example, “Hastur” would work really well for a certain really tragic scene from book 1 I have in mind (I won’t specify because it’s a spoiler if you ever intend to read the series yourself).

Fantastic!! Can I actually get a link to your music to listen to while writing? It’s unlikely to end up a central theme, but I do intend to have the fact that I used to be a genetics and genomics major back when I could afford college be a sort of “beat drop” at the relevant moment.

Before I deleted my Xitter account back in 2023, I ended up being blocked by a lot of transphobes after dropping my college transcript (doxxable info censored, of course) in response to being told that I “don’t understand basic biology.”

I’m hoping to get in contact with my professor from back when I was in college, Michael Turelli, to invite him to interview for the video, but he’s likely busy.

Plz just pet me. I need friendship

Thank you!!! ;u;

Thank you!!!

I have no idea. She used the topical spray.

I am new ;-;

Thanks. I’m awake again after a 26-hour mini-coma and have had some cookie dough and fruit juice. I’m gonna play Minecraft now.

sue their ass to pay your medical bills

Yeah, while the cervix isn’t 1:1 with a urethra, the idea of cramming objects into a tiny hole that was never meant to have objects inside it works well to compare them. I’ve had a catheter put in before prior to a surgery (they wanted to do a pregnancy test “just in case” even as my appendix was about to burst) and imo the IUD insertion was much worse.

Several years ago I had to have a catheter put in prior to an appendectomy (they decided that testing to see if I was pregnant first was more important than scanning to see what was going on with my appendix, but I was in too much pain to urinate on my own) and yeah the IUD insertion was worse

I realize I wasn’t clear with my wording here–a single “strain” of Nameless is an individual infecting one or more hosts, and can communicate similarly to a hive mind, but is isolated to its own strain. If a strain infects an actual hive mind, then the Nameless strain and the hivemind can actually communicate with each other via abstract processing.

That, and to clarify another comment, infected infants die, not the strain trying to infect them.

As I mentioned, in this fictional version of Earth, they’re fungal. Their form is a spongey mycelium-like structure that is nearly indistinguishable from human nervous systems. Most doctors would never consider them something wrong, as they see this in nearly everyone, and it’s listed as a “normal variation in anatomy” in all textbooks.

In the world I’m building, humans would not have existed without the Nameless, and are quite literally domestic livestock who don’t even know they’re being fed on. The reason (in this fiction) that animals are more closely related to fungi than plants is literally because they were engineered to be compatible by final-stage hosts of another planet, that were destroyed after use.

They can’t live without a host, as they feast on the information that the host learns. In later stages, the host will “autopilot” quite a bit, responding as if they heard what they were told without actually processing anything. This is because their nervous system was literally hijacked.

Hungrier Nameless will often consume information as soon as the host learns it, causing problematic memory loss.

Infection usually has to wait until the brain is somewhat close to done with development, as early infection may result in the brain not being suitable to learning enough to feed the Nameless strain they are hosting. Desperate nameless strains will sometimes try to infect infants, but they die when this happens.

That second point is meant to parallel “gifted kid syndrome,” where a student does very very well until their mid/late teens, then suddenly hits a metaphorical brick wall when they get to college.

Hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli, especially sensitivity to temperature and pressure changes.

Note that in this fictional world I’m building, they do also take intelligent young folk as hosts.

I… entirely skipped one of your quotes. I was referring to immune resistance.

It 100% starts from within. It only takes a single strain with a vendetta against its own species to steer its host to reveal their existence. It’s the reason affected planets are kept in a constant state of near-annihilation and disallowed from discovering intergalactic communication or travel–if even a single strain decides to reveal the existence of the species as a whole, the planet (and the strain born there) is annihilated, like amputating an infected wound.

The primary species on an affected planet will eventually discover weapons of mass destruction, and is usually the primary indication that The Nameless have taken hold.

However, total annihilation is a last resort, and is only taken if the individual strain’s host(s) can’t be located and destroyed.

While The Nameless can technically choose a hive-mind as a host, they explicitly avoid doing so, as it makes strain destruction less feasible and detection more likely. However, rebellious strains intentionally seek out hive-minds. This is why most affected planets don’t have any–they’re either exterminated before technology can develop, or never evolved to begin with. The Nameless choose host planets carefully.

Funny thing about dulling an entire species research of neurology and psychology, though, is that the species themselves can’t detect when they’ve branched into a hive-mind variant, and it’s very difficult for The Nameless to pick them out when the hive mind variants are so worried about prosecution that they, too, hide their existence.

I’ve always struggled with that. Whenever I allow my mind to idle, I start thinking about random stuff, and inevitably my childhood trauma comes up. Then I enter a downspiral that’s hard for me to escape.

I rely on my spouse for income and chores are something I unfortunately don’t have the dopamine for. Even “fun” things are difficult to make myself do.