“the wors”

I meant more to talk about how when you’re aro, there’s this whole side of relationships, those that are lauded as the « most powerful bonds » that you don’t have access to. You’re effectively barred from getting to close to people you know? How must it feel, to know yourself secondary in all relationships? If all you can have are friends, how do you cope with the expectation that all those friends could leave you to live with a partner?

And when you’re ace, especially when otherwise queer (like, being transfem), you have to reckon with the fact that no matter what, there’s a facet of socializing that you can’t access. This goes into relationships too, of course. What do you do with partners that expect some degree of sexual reciprocation? What do you do, when flirting, playing with desire, is so common in your community? Do you just accept you’ll be isolated from your peers in a tangible way? Is that even something you can accept?

I can’t claim these are the worst things the world does, nor to have solutions. But, when connecting with people, and doing so deeply and fully is predicated on relating with them, sexually or romantically, and you can’t do that. What do you do?

I get invited fewer places because all of my friends are couples. They do couples things now. I don't have a partner to share my burdens with, to help me manage all the labor that comes with just being alive, or keep me company.

All my friends and old classmates and acquaintances are all planning these big, shared lives, and I'm wondering how I'm ever going to make it. It doesn't matter how many friends and ace/aro person has, or how close they are with their family, or any of those other things. Sometimes, it's still Just Me.

Archive.org deliver a windfall of lost music.

“Our research reveals that relationship initiation studies published in popular journals (Study 1) and cited in popular textbooks (Study 2) overwhelmingly focus on romance that sparks between strangers and largely overlook romance that develops between friends. This limited focus might be justified if friends-first initiation was rare or undesirable, but our research reveals the opposite. In a meta-analysis of seven samples of university students and crowdsourced adults (Study 3; N = 1,897), two thirds reported friends-first initiation, and friends-first initiation was the preferred method of initiation among university students (Study 4). These studies affirm that friends-first initiation is a prevalent and preferred method of romantic relationship initiation that has been overlooked by relationship science. We discuss possible reasons for this oversight and consider the implications for dominant theories of relationship initiation.”

Like holy cow did you guys KNOW that relationship science was dominated by studies on dating? A thing that in which good grades are not possible to achieve?

And it’s kind of good for ME to hear as well! As a (weird queer) person, dating always seemed so artificial and undesirable to me, but so important to everyone else, that it was clearly just One Of Those Things that is programmed into the Normal Hetero Brain that folks like me simply miss out on, forever. But possibly not! Possibly “dating” is one of those heavily marketed products that nobody particularly wants. Like the Metaverse. And nobody, until these plucky social scientists, has been brave enough to call it out!!

Thanks guys.

So then a nurse comes over and goes "Okay, I've got some stickers I'll put on your things so we know they're yours" and I'm like "OK cool" so she puts a sticker on my coat and stickers on my bags of clothes and then she turns to Shamu and I'm like "oh I guess he gets a sticker too"

But no. She pulls out a hospital bracelet that's an exact copy of mine and slaps it on his tail, like so:

And i was delighted by this, so I took a picture to send to my friends, who were equally delighted, and were cracking me up with their reactions (like so:)

Anyway, they take me back and put me under, and when I awake groggily a few hours later it takes me a minute to get my bearings, so I don't notice Shamu at first. But then I realize he's tucked up next to me in the gurney, so I grab him, and my hand touches gauze.

And I'm like "huh?" so I look at him and I realize

and the results were:

it’s all fanfiction

which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic

idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick

One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. <3

I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.

and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?

we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?

One thing that we do know is that written English has gotten less formal over the past few centuries, and in particular that the word “the” has gotten much less frequent over time.

In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone! 

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

I made a grave error in my script.

A lot of people in the comments have, understandably, tried to correct me on my choice of words, most specifically on this panel:

“And yet a chimp can not learn language the way a human can.”

And I’m here to admit my mistake………….

I forgot to put a disclaimer reminding people that I do, in fact, know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Alright, I know that there’s a fun little factoid that gets passed around a lot - that gorillas/apes/chimps can learn sign language, and therefore CAN do language as well!

And the thing is - no, that’s not actually true. Not in the way you may have come to believe it.

If you want the TL;DR of it:

most, if not all, projects involving great apes and sign language were started and largely led by people with no actual native OR near-native understanding of sign language. Even if the apes DID learn signs, they did not learn ASL in any meaningful way.

the tapes used to prove that the apes were effectively communicating in ‘sign’ were heavily doctored and cut in order to make them seem more cohesive and convincing than they actually were

through a thorough review of the tapes, the apes (gorillas, chimps) involved were found to be effectively signing random things until the handler saw one that they thought was 'correct’

the handlers were often incredibly close to the apes and were often giving their charge signals - sometimes signing things for them to repeat, and the apes were often determined to be only copying signs their handler threw up, which was counted as 'correctly answering’

many, many apes often signed in an extremely limited manner - although they had the ability to sign many words, they rarely, if ever, asked questions - one of the main hallmarks of 'true’ language use

human language is thoroughly agreed upon by linguists to be a specific ability, and it has been determined that current apes do not have anything similar, though - importantly!! - they are still able to communicate in a multitude of incredibly complex and effective ways!

For further reading, I would suggest the following:

Here’s some reading about Nim Chimpsky, one of the more famous chimps, whose life was pretty horrible and frankly tragic by all accounts, even human ones

Here’s a wiki article with an overview of various ape language experiments and their surrounding issues

And HERE is a very succinct podcast episode that neatly summarizes the entire issue within an hour and twenty minutes: