OTTERLY ADORBS

WHAT JUST HAPPENED

Everything the screen does is also said in the strip under it, out loud, for anybody not watching the water. Nothing in this list is a score and none of it is kept.

WHAT OTTERLY ADORBS WILL NOT DO

• Floating will not fill anything up. No meter, no stamina, no bonus afterwards. The zine this is built on refuses rest so you can produce in as many words — the otter is not recharging in order to forage better tomorrow — so wiring a reward to rest would have put a sentence on this page that another of our pages spends a spread refusing.
• It will not rank the otters. The other three keep their own rhythms and none of them is the good one. Under pressure a real population does not converge on one best way to be an otter; it fans out into specialists, each better at its own thing (Tinker, Bentall & Estes, 2008). A leaderboard is the one thing this cabinet is built to refuse.
• It will not tell you how many blows a clam should take. Two observers on the California coast in 1964 watched otters take between 6 and 88 to open a mussel, averaging 35.5 (Hall & Schaller). Those are the numbers this uses. There is no correct number; there is your number.
• It will not make you carry a stone. Some otters never use one — they are on prey a stone would not help with, and the ones who do use a stone keep their teeth (Law et al., 2024). Both routes are here and neither is scored.
• It will not time you or make a noise, and it will not remember you. Feeding time arrives and leaves on its own; nothing is lost by ignoring all of it.

WHY OTTERS

Every Saturday the Stimpunks Solidarity Session leaves an otter cam running while the conversation drifts in and out — cameras on or off, some speaking, some in text, some just there. Nobody has to watch it. That is the part that makes it work.

Helen Edgar wrote down what the cam was doing for her in Stimpunks Solidarity and Otters (Autistic Realms, 2026): somewhere to put her attention on a day when listening and speaking were both off the table, and a way to exist in parallel with people she wanted to be near. Then she noticed the resemblance — the otters float, juggle a stone, somersault off alone, drift back for a minute of shared play, and peel away again. Parallel play, and a cave and a watering hole in one animal.

Helen’s reading is hers and is credited to her, not folded into our “we”. The findings behind the mechanics are in The Stone You Keep (Star Stuff No. 58), which sources every one of them. One thing that zine corrects and this cabinet follows: the widely repeated lifelong favourite rock, kept for years in a pouch under the arm, traces to popular retellings rather than to the primary literature. What the primary supports is a stone kept and reused across successive food items within a bout of feeding, and that is all this does.