Othercon 2025

August 12, 2025

Tags: Journal

It's week two of Blaugust 2025! I'm not going with any particular theme, just taking this chance to build back the habit of writing blog posts on a semi-regular basis.

This weekend (Friday to Sunday) was also Othercon 2025. For those who don't know, Othercon is an otherkin-focused convention held on Discord. It happens once a year, usually in early August, and is focused mainly around the panels. I didn't partake in chat too much, as it often went too fast for me to keep up with and it's hard to join ongoing conversations. But I did attend several panels, and it was a BLAST! So I wanted to take a moment to talk about it.

Firstly, the panels I went to that focused on otherkin topics were a lot of fun and I did get a lot from them. The panel on community building in particular was incredibly useful — once the video recording of it comes out, I'll link it here, as I can highly recommend it to anyone regardless of your community. The two 18+ panels were the most interesting and helpful though; both acted as a mini-series on using kink as a source of species euphoria.

Species Euphoria - feeling of joy, happiness, or comfort experienced when feeling affirmed in your species identity.

It was super educational in terms of kink topics and a lot of the ideas I got from it are perfectly useable in non-sexual contexts. Once I get the time, I really want to do more research into species euphoria in general and the various potential sources for it.

There was also a panel that was indirectly related to the otherkin community. A lot of people in the community will make personal websites, so one of the panels was done on web accessibility. There was a lot I already knew, as it was supposed to be a introductory discussion, but there was also a fair bit I didn't. I learned a much better way to make alt text and I also discovered that Unicode and screen readers do not get along. Yeah, turns out that every time a screen reader finds a Unicode icon, it reads out "mathematical equation" followed by a string of numbers. This means that words or sentences written out with those cute Unicode letters become a NIGHTMARE if you have to have a screen reader read it out for you.

Right now, I use a little Unicode icon after every link that takes you off site. It's meant to be more visually accessible by making it clear which links will keep you on my website and which links will take you out to the wilds beyond. I initially chose Unicode mostly because of The Link Hoard, as I was worried using something like a SVG file would make it load poorly. But given that I'm going to be doing a MASSIVE pruning of The Hoard anyways, I think it'll be fine if I update it. So that's going in the website checklist, probably to be done after or alongside overhauling The Hoard.

And for those curious: when I asked, the panelist said they didn't know of any way to make Unicode screen reader friendly. Every day I lament the lack of an HTML tag that would let me just give alt text to anything I desire. Emoji are also screen reader friendly, despite Unicode not being friendly, so they can be used in place of Unicode so long as visual consistency is not an issue. Because that's the main downside of emoji - you can't change their colors and they look different across different devices.

Oh! Speaking of emoji, I kind of want to add some to my site. For my own use. Mostly to pepper into blog post like questionable seasoning, but I might toss them in elsewhere. One of the panels used Mutand Standard Emoji, as did the entire Othercon server, and I love how they look. I don't need (or even want) the entire set on my site, so I'll probably just download the SVG files for the specific emoji I want. The license also allows for editing, so edit I shall! specifically to make the black borders white. I have this messy scrap-book theme going on, and these emoji look very clean.. I think a white border would make them look more like stickers, especially if I thicken it up just a tad. I also want to use some of these Alterhuman Emoji made by Mord. They'll just a similar sticker treatment.

End of Post Website Checklist

• Still gotta finish the Pikmin shrine. Got no work done last week, thanks to job hunting taking up my time. Hopefully this week.
• Switch to Linux. This is relevant to the site only because 11ty has been a little glitchy on my end, and I'm hoping that in the process of switching these glitches will go away (namely, collections do not update live in 11ty, so I don't properly see my blog posts on my local machine until long after they have been posted). Then again, I'm switching to Linux, so who knows! /lh Will also add an otherkin tag to the blog once the bug is squashed.
• Link hoard overhaul! Delete unwanted links! Make it easier to use! Yay!
• Replace the Unicode after every link with an SVG so I can have alt text! Uh. I think I can put alt text in the CSS...
• I should probably clean up my code. Make the HTML better, the CSS better, the 11ty stuff better. I could add 11ty Transforms in the process of doing this. And switching out my fonts.
• Gallery for artwork! May come before code clean up if I feel like it.
• Long term shenanigans in adding emoji and switchable themes. Alt theme would be purple and with a clean/modern look, in case the scrap-book vibe makes reading difficult.