# Rediscovering Plurality

By Alpha "sinza" Sparx of Pandaemonium

=> gopher://gopher.club/0/users/sinza/log/20241006-we-are-plural.gmi I recently remembered that I was, in fact, a member of a plural system after a meditation session during a group therapy.

The above link is somewhat out of date (headmates are reasonably accurate except for me somewhat, other words around plurality are not), but it works for now.

I felt like I had to hide my plurality due to stigma surrounding it. It seemed too weird. We couldn't be openly plural because that would mean people would hate us, and we've had bad experiences with people being transphobic in pretty much every way except for the MAGAt bullshit.

However, continuing to hide our plurality had dangerous side effects. It increased our self-doubt, and so headmate suppression, a horrible thing for us, happened yet again.

And yet, we can't suppress. We doubt we could integrate even if we really wanted to.

We're not stupid. We can't be 100% out and open about our plurality everywhere, especially not in real life. However, our mutuals on the fediverse seem to be okay with being plural. We feel safe enough being somewhat out in retrocomputing spaces.

Maybe we'll update our intros, but we are considering moving to a new instance just so that we can just better separate ourselves. We are fully fleshed out people, and while a decent amount of us have overlapping interests, we have our own interests and sometimes we want to post about *other things*. Also, my reputation as "that NetBSD nerd" precedes me in a way that my headmates may not appreciate.

It was a good sign for our plurality, and perhaps my reputation not fully preceeding the Pandaemonium collective at large, that Rachel's suggestion for the Old Computer Challenge, to build a computer we got parts for earlier this year and use that as a daily driver, won. She's wanted to build that PC for some time, and it can be our next major retro project!

An anonymous plural system we had befriended and discovered our plurality together with helped name the collective, since we wanted a BSDish name. Lucy, a Linux enjoyer, suggested "systemd" much to my mix of annoyance and amusement. However, rc doesn't exactly roll off the toungue. We considered "the Beastie Collective", but the host of the anonymous system suggested "Pandaemonium". We did a lot of research into plural history and Pandaemonium sounds like a name that wouldn't have been out of place on alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.

=> https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1120824.html Maybe not a forum we should should be getting inspired by, but hey. Our collective, our name.

## Preferred Terminology

When talking about Pandaemonium, we prefer plural pronouns wherever possible. We use "we/us/ours" in the first person and "they/them/theirs" is literally the only grammatically correct way to refer to us as a group.

In other languages, either use the neutral plural pronouns that your language has, or the feminine convention (as this is generally the non-normative gendered pronoun for a mixed group) or a constructed neutral equivalent of your choice.

Ask for our pronouns depending on who is out. Until we migrate to our new instance, we would rather you assume that I am fronting unless another fronter has very explicitly specified otherwise. I use e/em or they/them pronouns.

We call each other headmates for convenience's sake, but we prefer those outside Pandaemonium to refer to an individual member as a pluran, but "your headmate" isn't bad.

We don't like -genic terms. In our earlier post, we did use one, but we have since decided that they are not useful. We know that they were created with the best of intentions, but to us, "endo" (not endogenic, just the shortened form) is a slur.

It also doesn't matter much. We generally agree that our origins are based in all three of the major types of known origin[0]. Any attempts to further specify have been a real waste of energy and time on our behalf. Most discussions of system origin devolve into useless nonsense about who is more valid than the other.

## Plural Resources

=> https://healthymultiplicity.com/ We cannot recommend Healthy Multiplicity's list of resources enough. These have been collected by LB Lee, who is a very important group in the plural world. Also, one of our favorite webcomics about plurality, Gemini by Zyfron, used to be hosted here, but it appears some server upgrade borked that. :(

=> https://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/ Plures has wrote some very great articles on plurality. They've helped us come to terms with things we feared would make us invalid quite recently.

=> https://pluralpedia.org/w/Main_Page Pluralpedia is a dictionary wiki that has all kinds of plural community jargon. While we feel it suffers from Tumblr's excessive focus on origins, anyone trying to say it is a bad resource is probably an anti-plural. Even if they are themselves a system.

We actively recommend against most mainstream social media, including Tumblr. There is a large amount of people who like to have slap fights over system origin on mainstream social media. If you're interested in plurality, they probably are not the best place to get community we're afraid.

## Footnotes

=> https://pluralpedia.org/w/Emmengard%27s_Plural_Rings [0]: The Plural Rings are a symbol that overlaps the four major origin types: unknown, adaptive, created, and spontaneous. We identify with the latter three as our origins. Not unknown because... we really kinda do know? We're probably more specifically something like soulbonding or tulpamancy but it was without knowledge of such groups.