Godless asexual

@geoduckdude sorry idk how to reply pics, his Twitter is deleted now, I think something to do with fka twigs disclosing her abuse recently but I'm not sure what he said about that

“I’m not aromantic. I've never explicitly said anywhere that I was. What I did was release a complex record about lovelessness that is pretty romantic, lyrically and sonically. And followed it up with a long album about how my identity is too complex for catch-all terms. Lol

I have never identified, publicly or privately, as queer.  But I don’t correct people when they say that. I try not to correct people too much these days, because the desire to do so stems from ego. And I realised at some point that proclamations of identification are largely for other people, not for the self.

(source at link)

As I argued, a major theme in Grae is the dangers of expressing yourself, because people think what you’re expressing is your whole self.  Sing about aromanticism, and people assume it’s your whole identity, or that you “hate love” (his words).  Personal experiences are often more complicated, with different parts in dialectic.

This is very resonant with gray experience.  Moses Sumney has never identified with gray-romanticism, but our interpretation neither assumes nor relies on his identity.

oof dude I forgot what you were talking abt and had to go back and look and that was 2 yrs ago,, no I did not ever publish anything bc the survey was shared among a lot of alloro aces who answered the first question “do you experience both repulsions” (bc the survey was abt both) with yes, which massively skewed the results. someone in a server I was in was kind enough to correct the results accounting for that, but I still was too uncomfortable with the whole thing at that point to post it. but it also it was just recording the signs/symptoms of repulsions, not anything abt why, so it’s probably not what you’re looking for.

however, about a year ago, I did make this edgy vent post which had a lot of thoughtful, insightful responses I highly recommend reading, and this post abt my experiences with romance repulsion as a kid.

but as for knowing why you have repulsion... it’s possible none of us will ever know, and I’m not sure smth like that could be captured in survey form bc the “reason” will vary so much from person to person and a lot of ppl w repulsion may not have any idea themselves. it’s tricky! and does it even matter? does identifying a source have any potential of lessening or preventing repulsion? is that even the end goal?

Because it seems like whenever I ask for help on things, I get some interest and absolutely zero follow-through.  It takes a lot of energy out of me to ask for help.  It takes a lot of energy out of me to try to explain what needs to be done.  It takes a lot of energy out of me to simply deal with the thought of managing collaboration.

And I do I with the hope that it will make things easier overall, because there will be more hands carrying the weight and I won’t be doing it all alone.

But then.  Nothing.  No one actually joins in to help out.

So I’m left with no energy, trying to carry the whole weight of the thing, wondering what the point of bothering even is, if no one else cares.  This is the second project in just a few months where this has happened.  At least in the last one, I got a few lookee-loos.  This one didn’t even get that.

Cuz I've held you in place Of a wife, in the space A spouse would hold Only with you I'm safe

And the most significant thing that any person can do but especially black women and men is to think about who gave them their definitions and rewrite those definitions for themselves

(She had that) masculine thing down Shoulders and back straight Never slumping, never round 

I, I really do insist that others recognize my inherent multiplicity What I no longer do is take pains to explain it or defend it

I was looking at the proposal for the inclusion of the trans flag in the emoji standard and the thing that jumped out at me was that they had to include a monochrome, pure black and white substitute for the flag.  They proposed a flag with the transgender symbol on it.  Makes sense.

But… How can you do that for other flags?

Ace Flag, sure: ♠️ Lesbian Flag, probably: ⚢ Aro Flag, maybe: 🏹?

Wait,  how  did the germany  and  france  and  austria  and  armenia  and  belgium  and  bulgaria  etc.  do  their  flag  emojis?

Trickery and magic, mostly.

And by that, I mean I think their monochrome representation is just something like “DE” and “FR”, etc.

Or rather, “🇩🇪” or “🇫🇷” to be a bit more specific.

Unicode has a huge space for characters and symbols and emoji, but instead of actually using that all for each individual pictogram, many emoji are actually composites of two or more characters.  This provides a natural fallback:  If software hasn’t been updated to show a new emoji, it will often show these other characters.

In the case of country flags, there are a special set of characters known as “Regional Indicator Symbols”.  These look like the capital letters A-Z, but because they’re these “Regional Indicator Symbols”, if two of them are combined into an ISO country code, it can be turned into that country’s flag.  But if your display doesn’t support emoji, it will just display “🇫🇷“ or whatever the country code is.  I would imagine that’s what the fallback for monochrome displays would be, too.

For other emoji, they may be composites of two other emoji, plus a few special glue characters in the middle.  For instance, the “Mx. Claus” emoji I mentioned earlier today is actually a combination of “Gender Neutral Adult” and “Christmas Tree”:  🧑🎄  The Trans Flag is “Blank Flag”, “Transgender Symbol”:  🏳⚧  This allows for some kinda complicated combinations, which is how they build the different skin tone, gender, hair color, and age combinations for people emoji.

But, for something like “Elderly Black Woman Playing Water Polo”, even though it’s made up of “Person Playing Water Polo” + “Venus Symbol” + “Age Modifier 4″ + “Skin Tone 3″ or whatever, you can make a B&W drawing that depicts it.  So those components don’t have to be the fallback.

🏳🍳

🏳💻🚫

I suspect using actual letters is probably breaking the rules, but if not…..

I run a prominent group blog, The Asexual Agenda, and one of our goals is to promote insightful commentary.  Although we are an ace blog, we regularly promote and discuss content from the aro community as well–including allo aro stuff.  If you have some commentary, and would like people to see it and talk about it, I’m here for you, so let me know.

This is an especially great opportunity if for some reason you want the attention of people in the ace community.  For example, we recently hosted a collection of aro complaints about ace communities.

If this offer interests you, then I have another post with further details and caveats.  The most important detail is that I can promote you in two ways: link to your content, or host it.  Message me and we can discuss our approach.