Official Public Release Announcement - May 20, 2013

Introducing The Global Vampi(y)re, Donor, Therian, Otherkin+ Community Directory
http://merticus.com/vampirenews/2013/05/20/global-community-directory/

Thank you for participating!

In April, a documentary about otherkin (therianthropes, actually) aired on the Logo TV channel. It was also on some countries’ TLC channels, and the full episode was officially streamed on the Internet. It was an episode of the WHAT!? series, titled “I think I’m an animal,” produced by Zig Zag, and Shiro was in it.

I’d like to collect responses to the documentary from people who actually watched the show. Readers, would you please help me with this? Please send me links to blog posts about it that were written by as many viewers as possible. I want to hear lots of opinions and commentary on it, from inside and outside the otherkin and therianthrope communities.

- O. Scribner

Trigger warnings: Voluntary surgical body modification. Links to web-pages that include photos of the gross stages of the process.

Between the mid 1990s and 2007, body modification artists began making people’s ears pointed, like those of elves. At least eight people have now had this procedure, which involves cutting, folding, and sewing the ear cartilage to the desired shape.

I’m not sure when ear pointing started, or by whom. When I wrote the previous article on Otherkin News about ear pointing, the earliest I found was in 2007.¹ In an interview in 2012, Tye Olsen claimed he got his ears pointed in 2004, saying they were one of the first couple sets ever done. He doesn’t name the artist, apparently for legal reasons.² (Odd, I thought it was legally wise to always credit an artist for their work.) Tattoo artist Katzen the Tiger Lady³ is said to have gotten her ears pointed “in the mid 1990s” by body modification artist Steve Haworth.⁴ (Haworth is the Guinness World Records’ “most advanced body modification artist”⁵ who did much of the innovative surgery on the late Stalking Cat.) I haven’t seen any clear photos of Katzen’s ears, but another ear pointing is in Haworth’s gallery.⁶

The artists are still exploring new techniques for ear pointing. All methods result in smaller ears, because they only work with the cartilage that’s already there. The methods that had been used by body modification artists Russ Foxx, Steve Haworth, and Brian Decker, result in an ear with a flattened pocket inside the tip. Two new methods were recently created that result in different looking pointed ears than that. Brian Decker created a new method that makes an ear with a more natural looking helix running along the tip.⁷ Samppa Von Cyborg created an entirely different method of reshaping the entire ear, not only pointing the tip, but also removing the lobe.⁸

Please correct me if I have made any errors in the above, regarding crediting artists, or finding out who created a method.

I still haven’t heard of anybody in the otherkin or therianthrope communities who have gotten ear pointing surgery.

- O. Scribner


Sources

1. O. Scribner, “Ear-pointing surgery.” 2011-04-08. Otherkin News. http://otherkin-news.livejournal.com/7821.html

2. Shannon Larratt, “Video interview with Tye Olsen.” 2012-10-04. BME: Tattoo, Piercing and Body Modification News. http://news.bme.com/2012/10/04/video-interview-with-tye-olsen/ Or:
PangaeaPiercing, “Tye’s surgically modified pointed elf ears- THE MODIFIED WORLD.” 2012-09-28. http://youtu.be/1PNR7RJCYGk

3. Steve Gilbert, ed. “Enigma interview.” Based on interviews from 1996 and 1999. http://tattoos.com/enigma.html

4. Shannon Larratt, “Full ear reshaping by Samppa.” 2012-10-4. BME. http://news.bme.com/2012/10/04/full-ear-reshaping-by-samppa/

5. Steve Haworth. http://stevehaworth.com/main/

6. Steve Haworth's gallery. http://stevehaworth.com/main/?page_id=334

7. Shannon Larratt, “Refining the ear pointing procedure.” 2013-02-14. BME. http://news.bme.com/2013/02/14/refining-the-ear-pointing-procedure

8. Shannon Larratt, “Pointing versus shaping.” 2012-10-10. BME. http://news.bme.com/2012/10/10/pointing-versus-shaping/

Eamonn Keaveney, an anthropology MA student, wants to make an ethnography of otherkin and therians, focusing on the parts of that community that are active on Tumblr.com.


Source

Eamonn Keaveney (Kinthropologist), "Researching otherkin on Tumblr." 2013-02-17. http://kinthropologist.tumblr.com/post/43339329412/researching-otherkin-on-tumblr

Last month, Ketrino updated an informal collection of information about a subculture of mermaids that emerged around 2006. They’re real people-- mostly teenage girls-- who hope to physically become mermaids by doing magic spells. Some of them claim to already be real mermaids. Ketrino compares them to otherkin and therianthropes, noting that they’re isolated from those groups. These mermaids sound like a different group of people than the mermaids who were at MerCon.


Sources

1. Ketrino T. Ghoe, “A study of mermaids and mermaid wannabes on the internet.” Created 2012-05. Updated 2013-04. Ketrino’s otherkin essays, rants, and other writings. http://ketrino.angelfire.com/merstudy.html

2. O. Scribner, “Mermaid convention.” 2012-08-12. Otherkin News. http://otherkin-news.livejournal.com/23389.html

Trigger warning: weird, trippy glitches in how brains and bodies work.

In a recent study in Sweden, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, an experiment induced supernumerary phantom limb sensations. They investigated it in more detail by conducting 11 experiments on 234 participants. The tactile illusion works like this:

"the participants sat at a table with their right arm behind a screen so that it was not visible to them. The right hand of the volunteers was then touched by the researchers with a small paintbrush, while they imitated the same movement with a different paintbrush up in the air so that it was visible to the subjects. [...] 'most participants, within less than a minute, transfer the sensation of touch to the region of empty space where they see the paintbrush move, and experience an invisible hand in that position. Previous research has shown that non-bodily objects, such as a block of wood, cannot be experienced as one's own hand, so we were extremely surprised to find that the brain can accept an invisible hand as part of the body.'"¹

Brain scans demonstrated that the participants could really feel the invisible hand. "'Taken together, our results show that the sight of a physical hand is remarkably unimportant to the brain for creating the experience of one's physical self,'" Arvid Guterstam [lead author of the research] explained."²

I include this news here because supernumerary phantom limbs are a common experience among therianthropes and otherkin.

- O. Scribner


Source

1. Sarah Glynn, "Non-Amputees Experience Phantom Limb Sensation." 2013-04-11. Medical News Today. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/259003.php

2. Ibid.

The study in question:

Arvid Guterstam, Giovanni Gentile, and H. Henrik Ehrsson, "The Invisible Hand Illusion: Multisensory Integration Leads to the Embodiment of a Discrete Volume of Empty Space." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2013-04-11 doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00393

An article in the Huffington Post Blog talked about real people “who think they’re vampires, or werewolves, or witches […] a merman.” The humorist Donna Highfill interprets these as fantasies for coping with the boring or tragic parts of life.

Highfill wrote, “I must admit that I'd prefer to believe that I'm becoming a werewolf rather than accept the fact that, in my menopausal years, I now have to shave my face. How much cooler would it be to know that as the facial hair comes in, it brings with it tremendous power? […] So, maybe we forgive ourselves the need to be fantastical creatures. But, let's also keep our feet on the ground. Being human isn't that bad.”

Thanks to Merticus for pointing out this article in a post to the WereList Media Center.

- O. Scribner


Source

Donna Highfill, “Am I menopausal or a powerful werewolf?” 2013-04-23. Huffington Post: The Blog. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donna-highfill/am-i-menopausal-or-a-powe_b_3132315.html

Caters News, which is “one of the UK’s biggest press agencies,” has sent messages to otherkin. Their e-mail, re-posted here, says only that Caters News wants to “help spread awareness of the subject,” without specifying what form of media it will use. (News articles? A TV show? Who knows?)

Thanks to Of Salfarro, an otherkin, for collecting and publicly re-posting that message.

- O. Scribner


Source

Of Salfarro, “Here we go again…” 2013-04-03. Otherkin. http://otherkin.livejournal.com/578268.html

Discovery Studios, an entity of the Discovery Channel, has sent messages to some otherkin. The studio says that it would be interested in including some otherkin in a new TV series. Here's a public transcript of an e-mail conversation between them and Arethinn, an otherkin.

- O. Scribner


Source

Arethinn, "Whee, more media crap." 2013-04-11. Otherkin. http://otherkin.livejournal.com/579072.html

Therians & Otherkin: Please take a moment to cast your vote in the following three (3) polls regarding the Logo TV Documentary, ‘What!? I Think I’m An Animal’.

http://merticus.com/vampirenews/2013/04/26/examining-a-documentary-for-the-therian-otherkin-communities/

VCN is acting as a neutral party in this discussion by hosting these polls so that the Therian and Otherkin communities may better understand and evaluate their position and/or opinions on media depictions of their subculture(s).  We will leave this documentary poll active and the results visible on a permanent basis via VCN so that your communities may reference it in the future.