indeed

the thing about "just say you have a boyfriend to make that guy leave you alone" and "just say you are a couple so you can get that apartment" and "just marry your friend for tax benefits" is that they aren't actually solutions to any of the underlying problems, and I'm tired with the discussion always ending there. No please keep going and explain why being in a relationship would solve these issues and why you think that isn't actually a problem?

trying to explain why i love being aroace is like if love is the light spectrum romantic and sexual attraction are visible light and then every other possible kind of love is outside of the visible spectrum and it’s like. just wait till you guys find out about radio waves they’re actually really important in a lot of modern technology. same with x-rays and infrared. and if you guys knew where and how to look you’d actually see there’s way more light around you than you actually thought there was. you’ve trapped yourself in a fake box of what light is based on what you can see but if you try a little harder to look there’s so much more out there. visible light isn’t special just because it’s what you happen to be able to see, stars are made of all of it, every wavelength, visible light is just a fraction of their radiance. if you didn’t bother with visible light so much you’d be able to appreciate what light truly is so much better. just saying.

I love that Jules Verne asked the question "What kind of person could circumnavigate the world in 80 days?" and decided that the answer was not a groundbreaking explorer or genius inventor, but a guy who's really, really, really obsessed with train and boat schedules.

my final paper for my CS degree was literally "how can we algorithmically optimise for the fastest possible circumnavigation route on commercial flights?", which incidentally required me to adopt a very good working knowledge of what flight options are available at what times (and also led to me accidentally memorising several hundred airport codes)

incidentally the fastest possible route seems to be about 51 hours, if you're working from 2022 schedules like i was. if you use current schedules and are very optimistic about how quickly you can transfer between flights, you can maybe get it down to around 48 hours (also known as 25 millivernes).

The very best thing about tumblr is that you can make a post about a 154-year-old novel and get responses like this.

Someday I'm gonna.

I think more people should just be ok with being single

[Image ID: Tumblr reply from sorrelEater reading: one time i made a post like this and it blew up and this woman messaged me and told me it ended her 10 year marriage /End ID]

why is there an upgrade button on gmail. why does twitter want me to scan my palm to get into my account. why is google a chatbot. why does the transit app make a transit app wrapped for me. why does youtube keep shoving its infinitely scrollable shortform content down my throat. why do free trials want my credit card number. why are most scholarship websites just data brokers. how do i make capitalone stop sending me mail. why is my school making its own special chat gpt powered chatbot. why is every third video on instagram an undisclosed ad. why is nothing online real anymore. why is everything so FUCKING STUPID

I love vague labels that make people go "but that's confusing" or "but that could mean anything" Good. Keep guessing lol

"Queer doesn't actually tell me anything" who says I wanted to tell you anything. Who even are you.

we need to normalize a tradition where nonpartnering aros are like "hey, i'm officially never getting married, please come to this party and give me whatever kitchenware you would have bought me for a wedding"

dreaming of a world in which people know about aromanticism. And by "know" I don't mean "having a vague idea of it's existence", I mean know. I mean a world where an in depth article discussing people's choice to stay single will include an aromantic perspective. I mean a world where people have an understanding of why love, as an emotion, is detached from morality. A world where people will ask you "what kind of relationships do you want in your life?" instead of asking "do you have a boyfriend?". I dream of a world where aromantic people can exist without the constant underlying expectation of being dehumanized, erased and belittled by an unexpected, unassuming comment. I try to create a microcosm of this world around me. I hope it will be easier one day.

This pride month I need every aromantic to get more annoying about being aromantic

being anti-amatonormativity in a romance centered world is like watching half the people you know put all their eggs in one basket and then drop the basket and all their eggs break and they’re crying and swearing they’re never gonna do that again and then a month later they have all new eggs in a new basket and they tell you the problem was they didn’t have a strong enough basket or fresh enough eggs and then they drop the fucking basket again.

Im glad they made up romance for stories and music but can you imagine how scary it would be to deal with all that for real

@eroticismofthemachinedetector

beep

i do wish the response to the ai water usage concern debate (umm actually the water and mineral usage is roughly equivalent to all of our other constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction etc etc etc) was less of a "haha checkmate luddites" and more of a "hmm maybe we should reevaluate our usage of constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction" but idk