This is a post for the August 2020 Carnival of Aces. It is cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
What am I hoping to get out of the ace community?
In a word, accessibility. I mean that in a broad sense: accessibility in terms of consideration for physical disabilities, accessibility of information, and accessibility in terms of creating an environment that doesn’t feel hostile, where I feel safe and welcome to share the truth of my experience. Continue reading
This post is for the May 2018 Carnival of Aces on “Nuance & Complexity,” which I am hosting. Please check it out and consider submitting! Cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
Last time I talked about how there’s a lot of extra scrutiny about attraction for both bi and ace people, which makes inhabiting that intersection difficult, and the misconceptions that become barriers to talking about it. Now I’m going to talk about some specific aspects of my own attraction and how it’s different enough from the norm that it usually goes unrecognized. Continue reading
This post is for the April 2018 Carnival of Aces (“All the birds but us…”). Cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
Content Note: contains a brief mention of sexual assault, and discussion of the impact of trauma on relationships.
The question for this month is, “How did your (a)sexual and (a)romantic orientations impact your (expected or imagined) future?”
When I was a child, honestly, I didn’t really have an expected or imagined future. I didn’t know “what I wanted to be” when I grew up, and I found the question so obnoxious that I started to routinely protest it by giving an impossible answer. (“A cat!”—because nobody ever asks cats that kind of question.) Continue reading
I’ve been reflecting back on my hard-won personal progress of the past year and making notes about what’s working best for me now, so that I can come back to this post in the future and remind myself of these strategies when I need to. Continue reading
An old screenshot of a tumblr argument that visually represents why tumblr’s design is the worst. Who can follow this kind of conversation?
I hate Tumblr. I’m sure that many of you who have been reading my blog for a long time already know this. I think the site is designed in such a way that it creates confusion and friction rather than facilitating good discussions.
To the right, you can see an example of exactly why the site’s design is so awful. This is an old screenshot from 2015 that I found on my computer again recently. I made this image and shared it with a few people privately, but I didn’t post it anywhere because I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was picking on them or talking about whatever the actual content of the discussion underneath these usernames was, which I no longer remember at all. It isn’t important. But notice how it looks. It doesn’t look like a conversation, it looks like a labeled bar graph. In order to really follow this conversation, to know who exactly is saying what, you’d have to scroll up and down with your mouse on each of the lines to match up the username with the text. And trust me, it was a veeeery loooooong conversation, with each post being pretty substantive, so that was a lot of scrolling.
That isn’t the only problem, of course. With conversations decentralized, it’s difficult to even see other parts of the same conversation topic going on, so you have to click through a lot of notes—sometimes many thousands, most of which are just likes and reblogs—in order to actually see the full range of responses that a post spawned. I don’t have an answer for that problem, other than to wish that a better site would come along that could actually compete with tumblr, and spark a mass migration to the new platform instead. It will happen eventually, I’m sure. It’s happened many times before. (Hardly anybody still uses MySpace or LiveJournal, and AIM is about to be shut down for lack of use too.) It will take someone coming up with something better, and then lots of time and dissatisfied users. Until then, I’m going to be stuck reading a lot of things posted on tumblr, because such a huge portion of the asexual community resides there.
So for now, I’m just going to share a little trick that I eventually learned to help manage reading these blogs as someone who has vision problems.
Prismatic Entanglements 