The General Font of Madness

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

i’ve identified as bisexual for a really long time. like it was one of the first things i told jp (my husband) when we started dating long time. jp has never had a problem with my queerness. but when we started dating in january of 2018, i didn’t have all of the orientation pieces. and so despite my previous unexciting experiences, i had sex. and i had sex because i thought that’s what i was supposed to do. because that’s what you do in. relationship, right? sex is “supposed” to be a big part of a relationship. and i cannot stress enough how consensual all of the sex was. but it didn’t feel fantastic like i was told it would. i didn’t think about it as much as i was supposed to. there was no bliss. my toes didn’t curl and my eyes didn’t roll to the back of my head. i just didn’t enjoy it. it was boring. i was too aware of the mechanics of what was happening. so i never once thought “oooh this is nice,” my thoughts most of the time were “it’s kinda weird there’s something in me right now.” and “is it almost over i’m getting bored” and “am i faking well enough?”

and i thought not enjoying it meant there was something wrong with me. and since it was a me thing, and not anyone’s fault, i had sex. i just pretended that i liked it the way that society told me i should.

so me and my husband had sex when we started dating because it was something he wanted and i didn’t mind doing, even though it was boring.

but this past year i realized and came to terms with the fact my disinterest in sex wasn’t a nerve problem like my gynecologist said or trauma based like an old therapist said or any other explanation offered to me by anyone from friends to medical professionals. my disinterest in sex was because i don’t experience that kind of attraction.

and when i finally figured it out i was kinda devastated. because i was faced with either a) continuing to pretend to enjoy it, or b) coming out to jp. i knew he wouldn’t take it badly because i love and trust him, but i can know something is true and still not believe it. so i was scared but decided to come out even though the thought literally made me sick. i cried and apologized and told him how horrible i felt that i “lied” to him for years and how terrified i was that he was going to think i wasn’t attracted to him anymore or that i wasn’t ever attracted to him in the first place. i had to tell a man that i’d been having sex with for years that i didn’t really want to anymore. that for me it was boring and i didn’t enjoy it and i could never get out of my head long enough to experience the closeness and intimacy sex can bring. i hold to tell him that i’d never enjoyed it. and i’d realized that i didn’t know if i’d ever truly want to have sex, but i didn’t mind it. he would just have to let me know when it was something he wanted.

and do you all want to know what his response was?

he asked if he’d ever hurt me. and then he asked what my boundaries are. and then he thanked me for telling him. and then he said he married me because he loved me, not because i’d fuck him.

so me and my husband used to have sex. and now we don’t because six years into our relationship i realized i was aspec. and we haven’t had sex since i came out to him, and we hadn’t for months prior to me coming out. and he hasn’t even tried or asked for anything sexual, despite me telling him that i didn’t mind having sex, just that he would have to be the one to bring it up because i don’t ever think about it. but he hasn’t brought it up. not once. because he knows it’s about like going to the pharmacy for me.

so my husband doesn’t have sex with me because he loves me. because he cares about me. because he wants me to be happy. because when he asked me to go on that very first date it was because he thought i was smart and enthusiastic and funny and “lovely.” because he knew he was in it for the long haul when he watched me shotgun a red bull in a harbor freight parking lot at 7:30 pm on a thursday.

that’s kind of what marriage is about. the whole loving and wanting to take care of and cherishing your significant other thing. sex has never been a big part of the equation.

jp stayed with me the first six months of my sobriety. for the past seven years of my sobriety, actually. he stayed even though one time i had three tequila shots too many and yarffed all over him. and then again in his floorboards. he stayed when my grief made me shut down and shut out for over a year. he stayed with me when that grief made me so depressed i’d spend days at a time just staring at a wall. or hours and hours reading fanfic so the only thoughts i had in my head belonged to someone else. he stayed even though i don’t remember most of 2023. he’s stayed through every good thing and bad thing and in between thing and literally every single thing for the past nearly seven years.

There have been long (I'm talking years long) stretches of my marriage where sex is a rare if ever thing. I am probably allosexual? (Idk it's weird and for me it is a trauma thing) But I am also physically disabled and have severe mental illness

There have been long stretches where sex is just not an option for me because I am in too much pain or I it is too distressing for me to enjoy

Or my libido just dies!

My husband is understanding. He'd like sex but as long as we make time to have non sexual physical intimacy he is fine.

As he told me once when I was crying and feeling guilty about it "I have a hand"

We have been married over 20 years and are still going strong.

Do you think my husband should leave me because I am physically disabled and mentally ill?

Because fuck you.

Things only exist if you can see them in indie Sci-Fi puzzle adventure, Object Impermanence. So does this post only exist if you see it too?

The Steam page may also only exist if you see it:

The Radiation

some people don’t deserve fanfics, much less for free.

also even if authors didn’t tag any specific warnings but they used the “creator chose not to use archive warnings” tag, then that is your warning.

reblog if you believe anon is wrong and writers are writers, no matter what they write about. no matter how they portray these taboo topics.

reblog if you believe art can be about topics that are controversial, taboo or outright disturbing, and artists who create controversial, taboo or outright disturbing art are as valid as artists who create art of conservative values.

We’ve AI witch hunted ourselves into a spot where nobody is allowed to engage with some of the core tenants of fic writing anymore like writing clumsy metaphors or purple prose or using em dashes and I wish people would put half as much energy into uplifting writers and leaving comments and kudos as they do searching for alleged ai fics they can screenshot and call out on twitter for clout.

Like you want to talk about literacy crisis under an “obvious ai example” and then in explaining why the metaphor is bad the explanation is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what a metaphor is??? “It doesn’t make sense, what does a lie smell like?!” Hello???? I mean yeah there is a literary crisis and you’re also a prime example of it.

I fucking hate that AI is poisoning fan works but all you’re doing is encouraging it to grow. It’s like you go into fics with your AI detecting goggles on and I couldn’t imagine approaching reading a fic that way. If I start reading a fic and it’s bad I hit the back button, I approach every fic and with the assumption it’s gonna be good and in the event I get a few sentences in and am not feeling it, I leave.

So many of y’all don’t actually care about protecting fan culture, you just want your cookies and pat on the back for doing your “good” ethically pure deed. This behaviour is making people too scared to post anything, it’s giving people anxiety about their own ability- so many people are qrting or replying to these “obvious ai” examples saying things like “I write like this” or “ngl I’m never posting anything again” and the responses they are getting are people yelling at them and calling them stupid for not being able to see how it’s ai and that if they can’t tell it’s ai then they aren’t a good enough writer to be posting fic anyway. Huh???? What happened to “fuck AI, make the bad art”??? Can y’all hear yourselves???? How do you expect people to grow into great writers if they aren’t even allowed to even start? Even people expressing similar elements to myself here are being told they are "missing the point" and that "no you can always tell" babe idk how to tell you this but if you've got a lot of people telling you "actually I write like this and no I can't tell" then you're objectively wrong, getting off on your own perceived superiority and don't want to accept that you are also participating in behaviours that are driving as many people away from writing fanfic (that thing people traditionally do FOR FREE btw because THEY ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT IT) as the influx of AI is.

You’ll pry the clumsy metaphors, run on sentences & “bad writing” from my cold dead hands. Fuck AI but fuck a bunch of you for allowing it to further poison fandom, something that is supposed to be a community but has been turned into some kind of mean-girl morality engagement/content farm over the last few years.

And was like, uh, are you missing something there, buddy? Like all that red in northern Africa? Because that's a lot of red.

And I was going to give them the benefit of doubt, since I don't know much about the climate in Northern Africa, aside from Morroco and Egypt, which seem like really hot places, so you know, maybe it's normal there?

But nope, that's not the case:

Some selections from the article:

"The region has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

“Researchers say the human body can only handle so much heat before it can no longer cool itself, and that limit is below a wet-bulb temperature of 35C. Above this limit, even a young, healthy person resting in the shade with access to ample drinking water and skin fully coated in sweat would experience a continual rise in core temperature, leading to death from heatstroke within hours.

The paper grimly adds that nearly 380 million Indians are living in conditions that exceed the capabilities of human physiology.”

This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was taken by Voyager 1, a space probe meant to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. Far from dying, she's still out there doing her job and is the furthest human made object from Earth.

In the mid 80's, they knew Voyager 1 would soon pass beyond where her cameras would matter and she needed to save power, so the question became: what's the last thing she should take a picture of?

Carl Sagan and Carolyn Porco both independently had the same thought: take a picture of Earth. Us. Yes, it would be essentially just one pixel. It wouldn't be scientifically useful. It might even damage the camera because of how intense the sun is, even forty times as far from Earth as Earth is from the Sun. But they got it sorted because it's NASA.

3.7 million (not billion) miles away, that's Earth. Caught in bands of light, artifacts of the Sun's incredible power even 4 million miles away. We are an island in a sea of radiation and vacuum and it's all we have.

I can't say it better than Sagan did, so I'll let you alone with his words:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan