Stalk River

(yes, these are actually my own screenshots, I am in tears laughing)

DO YOUR ANIMAL EXPERTS HAVE TO UNTANGLE THE JELLYFISH

You're talking with a cishet man, and the conversation has turned a little bit serious, you're talking about your feelings or maybe your family, and in a moment of really letting your guard down, you tell him something personal. In my experience, this often happens when I come out as gay, which often takes me a few weeks or months after meeting a new person, but I've seen it happen when someone opens up about drug addiction, or their wife cheating on them, or basically anything where you might want the other person to keep it a secret.

In response to this revelation, the strait man immediately gives you verifiable kompromat on himself, as a way of reassuring you that hey, you gave him a big secret he could socially wreck you with, now he will give you one of his, so you're both safe. You were out on a limb, telling him you have a husband, so now he's telling you about the time he committed treason. Now we're even, I can't betray you by gossiping, because you could get me locked up for 20-to-life. Mutually assured destruction.

OP is a Mauritanian student based in Beijing, and she joined the first Across Latitudes cultural exchange festival at China University of Geosciences. Cnetizens say she rocked both her traditional Mauritanian attire and Chinese hanfu. (cr 艾米 Amy)

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.

twelve episodes, twelve contestants - a mix of annoying middle aged sci fi authors, fan fic authors and random people off the street

a variety of against the clock writing tasks, big finish scripts, ability to interact with actors without shouting at them and challenges where you have no budget or doctor for an episode

judged by solely by christopher eccleston

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls. 

Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.

I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.