Ah, in hindsight that makes sense. Should I delete this, or keep it here for people to point and laugh at?

Depends on whether or not you can figure out the CEO's home phone number.

I helped to organize a couple protests back when I was in college, but I haven't done fundraising or nonprofit organisation. I volunteered to hand out food donations to impoverished families locally but I didn't organize in that case.

That really sucks, I'm sorry. I wasn't aware of how bad it was.

Writing a letter is convoluted?

Also yes it does suck how hard it is to get GAC in many places, I sympathize

I have actually seen one on YouTube, but I think it was a reupload of her video from TikTok and I don't remember her name.

You are absolutely correct, this is genius

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.

Awesome!!!! I was already working on writing a few video essays with heavy animation elements.

I have a side channel prepped for it and everything, I just need to get the ball rolling. I want to prepare sufficiently and actually have a few months worth of daily shorts ready before uploading the first video essay, though.

To save time on animation, I was going to build the background environments in Minecraft and then port them into Blender, where I'd use grease pencil to draw in the characters and import external sources (such as data, quotes, and charts) to back my claims.

So for example, when I start a section related to education, the animation would take place in a public school or university.

I was hoping to come to hexbear for peer review and critique from other LGBTQ+ people during the writing process for my video essay, "A Calm Explanation of Transgender People." I want to make sure that what I write accurately represents our community, and is educational without being inflammatory to the target audience for that video--people who genuinely don't understand the trans community but are willing to learn if the person explaining is patient enough to answer questions.

Basically, the kind of video that would have done me a lot of good back when I was an egg who didn't know I was autistic.

If that does well, then ideally, I'll have enough traction to get a nonprofit legal group going, to protect Americans relying on the Health Insurance industry for healthcare.