#perhaps not the best post in terms of articulation

[hunkydorkling]

Actually: yes, I will lament on main, only because it's my humanistic response to. I grieve over the visible decline in the TKKCK hype, clearly upset that there's very little to be done about the way it eventually staggered that I thought it'd make more sense if I churned out even the shittiest sketches I've ever done to somehow salvage the charm that came out pre-S3. And I can't ever be mad at those who came and went, as at those who stayed. Not at all, because they're saviors for keeping the feeling as alive as they keep the Tumblr side fandom afloat, really. This is the only comfortable fandom space I've been in since my countless of hours spent on forums for YEARS and I'm just really, really in full grieving mode, months after Season 5 aired.

[obsessioncollector]

Hi friends! Inspired by @librarycards I wanted to make a post celebrating Women in Translation Month! Anglophone readers generally pay embarrassingly little attention to works in other languages, and that's even more true when it comes to literature by women, so I will jump at any chance to promote my faves 🥰 Here are some recs from 9 different languages! Also, I wrote this on my phone, so apologies for any typos or errors!

1. Trieste by Daša Drndić, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (Croatian): An all-time favorite. Much of Drndić's work interrogates the legacy of atrocities in Europe, particularly eastern Europe. Trieste is a haunting contemplative novel centered on an elderly Italian Jewish woman whose family converted to Catholicism during the Mussolini era and were complicit in the fascist violence surrounding them in order to protect themselves.

2. Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, trans. Anton Hur (Korean): A collection of short stories that are difficult to classify by genre–speculative fiction in the broadest sense. The first story is about a monster in a woman's toilet, which sounds impossible to pull off in a serious, thought-provoking manner, but Chung does so easily—these are the kind of stories that are hard to explain the brilliance of secondhand.

3. Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, trans. Tim Parks (Italian; Jaeggy is Swiss): Another all time favorite! The cold, sterile homoerotic girls' boarding school novella of your dreams.

4. Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono, trans. Lucy North (Japanese): I think I read this in one sitting. Incredibly unsettling—these stories will stay with you. They often focus on the unspoken psychosexual fantasies underscoring mundane daily life.

5. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, trans. Katrina Dodson (Brazilian Portuguese): I think Lispector is the best known writer here, so she might not need much of an introduction. But what a legend! And this collection is so diverse—it's fascinating to see the evolution of Lispector's work.

6. Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, trans. Melanie L. Mauthner (French; Mukasonga is Rwandan): Give her the Nobel! Mukasonga's books, at least the ones available in English, are generally quite short but so impactful. Our Lady of the Nile is a collection of interrelated short stories set at a Catholic girls' boarding school in Rwanda in the years before the Rwandan genocide. These stories are fascinating on many levels, but perhaps the most haunting element is seeing how ethnic hatred intensifies over time—none of these girls would consider themselves particularly hateful or prejudiced, but they easily justify atrocities in the end.

7. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 by Alejandra Pizarnik, trans. Yvette Siegert (Spanish; Pizarnik was Argentinian): Does anyone remember when my url was @/pizarnikpdf... probably not but worth mentioning to emphasize how much I love her <3 Reading Pizarnik is so revelatory for me; she articulates things I didn't even realize I felt until I read her words.

8. Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems by Nelly Sachs, trans. Joshua Weiner (German): Sachs actually won the Nobel in the 1960s, so it's surprising that she's not better known in the Anglosphere. Her poems are cryptic and surreal, yet deeply evocative. Worth mentioning that this volume is bilingual, so you can read the original German too if you're interested.

9. Frontier by Can Xue, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Chinese): Can Xue is another difficult-to-classify writer in terms of genre. Her short stories are often very abstract and can be puzzling at first. I think Frontier is a great place to start with her because these stories are interconnected, which makes them a bit more accessible.

[ipso-faculty]

Proposing some intersex gender modality & transition terms

So there are a whole bunch of different ways that intersex people can be/identify as trans. I've been thinking about what names would be useful for articulating these differences and in this post I'll list what I've got so far. 🧑‍🔬

I'm hoping to get feedback on these, so if you have feedback let me know! 💛 I expect to edit this post, to incorporate feedback and further ideas.

CW: mention of IGM and forced HRT

Types of transitions

Distransition: a medical transition forced upon an intersex person, such as through IGM or forced HRT. Dis- to indicate the negative aspect of the transition being coercive, as well as to connote disability since this process is so frequently traumatic and/or disability-causing. In disability studies language it's a form of debility (disability caused through systemic violence).

Mistransition: a distransition (forced transition) that is not in alignment with a person's gender identity. Mis- to indicate the incorrectness of the alignment as well as to maintain a negative connotation because this is a coercive transition.

Entransition: a consensual transition done by an intersex person. Contrast to distransition. En- acts as an opposite to dis- and also to me indicates a level of intent (e.g. envision, enact, enliven). It also serves to indicate that transition is different for intersex bodies than for perisex bodies.

Retransition: an entransition done by an intersex person who previously had been distransitioned. I.e. when an intersex person does a second transition to undo, alter, or improve a forced transition. Re- to indicate a second transition, but also that it's a revision of the first one. EDIT #1: This term is not intersex exclusive, and may also be used by perisex trans people who have transitioned multiple times. EDIT #2: For an intersex-exclusive version, I suggest "re-entransition", combining re- and en-.

Retrotransition: a retransition that is done to undo the effects of forced transition. So an intersex person who, after being forced into a binary gender, then transitions their body towards a best approximation of what their body's natural state would have been without forced transition. Retro- for backwards to indicate undoing that is worth differentiating from detransitioning.

Laterotransition: a retransition done by an intersex person to a gender that is neither the gender externally imposed by a distransition nor what their body's "natural state" would be. For example, an AFAB AIS person who was coercively transitioned female, who then later transitioned male. Latero- as contrast to retro- (latero- is to the side, antero- is forward) as well as to indicate the turn away from the path set forth externally by parents/doctors.

Anterotransition: a retransition done by an intersex person that continues the direction set forth by previous forced transition. So additional transitioning done by somebody whose gender is in alignment with what was externally imposed. While this will probably be somebody's AGAB, it doesn't have to be - some times intersex people are forcibly transitioned to a different gender than their AGAB.

All of these transitions would have an analogous gender modality. So an entransgender person is somebody who has/is undergoing/intends to entransition. And a retrotransgender person likewise has/is undergoing/intends to retrotransition.

I see distransition and mistransition as potentially useful for intersex people talking about trauma and structural intersexism. I think entransition might be useful for talking about how being intersex and transitioning is frequently different than for perisex people, especially if it is a retransition. And perhaps distransition and anterotransition may be of use to exparium folks.

Personally: I was distransitioned as an adolescent and have recently started a process of medically retrotransitioning.

Feedback welcome! A list of revisions will go at the bottom of this post. Will make flags for terms once I feel satisfied with them.

Edits

2024-01-16: I've been informed by @chipbutbetter that retrans is already used by some perisex folks with complicated transition patterns, so I have edited to say this term should not be intersex exclusive. Thanks! 🏳️‍⚧️

2024-01-16: thought about an intersex-specific version of retransition and landed on "re-entransition". A little awkward but combines both retransition and entransition! Flexible on whether to include a hyphen (reentransition).

[thiswasneverthat]

him as your bestfriend (who's secretly in love with you.)

happy belated birthday, sweetest christopher.

First and foremost, the term 'secretly in love with you' didn't quite apply to Chris.

It was not because he ever vocalized his affection; but rather, the poor guy's emotions weren't the type that could easily be concealed. There were times when the heat would slowly creep up his cheeks at the moment you unconsciously grabbed his arm during movie night; or when you simply sit a little bit too close to him.

From the very moment you crossed paths in college, your lives became intertwined. Fast forward a few years, and even in the professional world when the two of you worked at the same company, nothing had altered. You and Chris remained inseparable, like two puzzle pieces that had found their perfect fit.

All along, you were acutely aware of his feelings for you. It wasn't like he was the master of subtlety, despite his best intentions. He convinced himself that his emotions were a well-kept secret, solely because he never uttered a word about them.

But, oh, the truth was far from his perception.

Your mutual friends, the ones who witnessed the sparks fly whenever you two were together, were not as oblivious as he thought. They quietly shared knowing glances behind your backs, exchanging unspoken truths that floated in the air, forming an invisible thread of connection between you and this affectionate but seemingly covert admirer.

Knowing Chris for years had granted you an unparalleled understanding, almost as though you possessed a special ability to read him like an open book. It was in the subtle nuances, the unspoken gestures, and the way his eyes lingered on you just a moment longer than anyone else. The way he uttered your name held a unique cadence, a tenderness that set it apart from the rest of the world.

His actions also spoke volumes, a silent declaration of his affection. From those daily post-work rides that ended at your doorstep to the steaming cup of coffee that appeared magically in your hands each morning, even though he was no coffee aficionado himself. As if it was the most natural thing, he wove his affection into your everyday life.

And then there were the moments of solace where he held you close when tears welled in your eyes, offering hushed comfort when words fell short. On holidays, Chris became your reliable chauffeur, ensuring you reached your parents' house with ease.

But perhaps the defining moment was when he stepped inㅡ a knight in modern armor, to protect you from the advances of an unruly drunkard during a night out with friends. It was in these moments, when his affection for you transcended mere words and blossomed into the unspoken verse of actions.

Well.. How endearingly oblivious he was.

He carried this fallacy that by keeping his feelings unspoken, they would remain a well-guarded secret. 

More often than not, you also found yourself yearning for a different script, one where Chris would step out of his best friend persona and take the role of someone more than that.

You really couldn't help but wish he would just muster up the courage to articulate those elusive words, breaking free from the confines of the 'best friend' charade that he maintained with such dedication for years. 

The frustration, like a relentless drumbeat, echoed within you because you had lost count of the times you teetered on the edge of confessing your own feelings.

However, in the grand scheme of things, you were very much aware of the added layers of complexity. The cliché was undeniable: you wanted him just as fervently, if not more so. Yet, your hesitation served as a sentinel against reckless decisions.

You understood the profound risk involved. The weight of the question lingered in your mind like a persistent echo: was it worth jeopardizing the treasured friendship you shared for the possibility of something more like.. love?

Because the fear loomed largeㅡ that one day, if the tides turned unfavorably, your beautifully woven friendship with him might fray and unravel.

And more than you would like to admit, the mere thought of losing him shattered you into a gazillion pieces.

So, until the time you would be ready, or until that one point where you just really couldn't take it anymore, you convinced yourself to put on a smile and pretend to be blissfully oblivious as he was. 

[ghost-bxrd]

GIRL CODED JASON !!!!! HI HELLO OMG TUMBLR USER AND AMAZING AO3 WRITER GHOST BIRD YOUR POSTS AND STORIES JUST ACTIVATE BRAINWORMS IN MY HEAD 😭😭😭😭 holy fuck hi I'm too shy to come off anon but I love the discussions you've been having, so just chipping in !!!

I love the many many looks on how people interpret him being girl-coded, exploring his feelings towards domestic violence, towards victims, women etc, extremely good points that you brought up ! And I'd like to bring up that on a more meta level, the way his character is treated by DC and by people in canon as a whole is also so... girl-coded ? Going to try my best to articulate since eng is my 3rd language 😔😔 Sorry if it's not consise 😭😭 I have FEELINGS AAAAAAAAAAAA

I think the core of this "girl-codedness" stems from a few things, two things I can point to currently are how he's treated as a victim and fridging. Fridging is the easier one to see imo, it's something that's usually associated with female characters but fits Jason a lot. It's not about him and his trauma/pain being feminine inherently (nothing can be categorised in that way honestly) but how it's dealt with by people and the narrative.

Let's take a look at its counterpart which is 'Dead Men Defrosting' trope coined by John Barton. Here's the source for that: https://www.lby3.com/wir/r-jbartol2.html, and a quote from the Women in Refridgerators website I feel is really encapsulates this whole situation.

"...women heroes are altered again and never allowed, as male heroes usually are, the chance to return to their original heroic states. And that's where we begin to see the difference."

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Additionally, the grief that his death bought is made to be even more objectifying than it should have been. It's made to be Bruce's and everyone else's more than it is Jason's. The image of the dead character is, by necessity, distorted and is served as fuel towards a different character. He's reduced to his death and the pain associated with it is milked for like... 16 yearsish??? A perverted memorial, a perverted memory, an altered legacy. He was just 15. A boy. (Still, I wouldn't say Jason was fridged per say, as the term is created in reference to female characters and they have little to no agency in their stories there, but that 'feel' is there. So I understand where the girl-codedness comes from!)

It’s that the way a lot of characters treat him and a lot of the tropes used on him are things that are typically associated with feminine characters. It's also about how he's treated since he's not a perfect victim. Every attempt Jason has made to express his pain and his anger just gets him labelled as emotional, unreasonable and hysterical (which are again, unfortunately terms associated with women.)

There's many different points people have brought up about Jason, such as his bleeding compassion as Robin, the tears at the end of UTRH, and so on. Nonetheless, I think there's a lot of nuance that comes with gender discussions, since these things are deeply personal to people, and there's disagreements to be had. And that's cool !! There's many points loads of other people also being to the table that I love !! Contradictions too !!

Anyhow, so many cool PPL and analysis these days,,, ILY ANON WHO BROUGHT UP TITANS TOWER (anonanonanon pls chip in again and my life will be URS) Also ILY TUMBLR USER MAGIC-CRAZY-AS-THIS FOR PUTTING THE WEDDING DRESS IMAGERY IN MY HEAD, ALSO ILY GHOSTBIRD FOR THAT AMAZING REPLY AND ANALYSIS,, I LOVE THIS LITTLE POCKET OF COMMUNITY U HAVE CREATED this is so beloved 🥺🥺🥺💞💞💞💞

All very good points!

I don’t have much to add here except perhaps the argument with the memorial case. You’re absolutely right. I never realized how similar it is to the classic hero trope of protagonist mourning their dead love interest/family and dedicating their entire life to a memory of them, citing the actions they take to be in honor of the dead person.

On one hand, I tend to enjoy that trope. On the other hand with Jason, it all became horribly twisted so very quickly and lead to a hard downward spiral of Bruce having a real assholish phase.

But yeah that’s a whole other can of worms better left unopened for now ksksks.

I’m very happy you’re enjoying this blog 💚 it’s honestly super rewarding to hear people say that when it was one of the main goals to have this be a safe and harmonious space for everyone 💚💚✨

[writingdotcoffee]

Challenge: What Motivates You to Write?

I was working on a long post about motivation for writers over the past few weeks (it should be coming out in the next few days). It's a fascinating topic.

I keep returning to the parallels between writing and running. You don't need any fancy or expensive equipment to write or run. All that matters is your resolve to take the next step despite the discomfort. That's how you run a mile and a marathon. That's how you write a short story and a novel.

Writing—like running—is a struggle against yourself.

Why?

The answer to this question is fundamental to your ability to persevere over the long term. Out of the countless ways you can spend your time, you chose writing to be the thing. Why?

Do you want to spread the word about something? Do you dream of finding your own book in your local bookstore? Do you like playing with words? Perhaps you want to document your life or comment on the world as you have experienced it. Maybe writing is the best way to express yourself and have your voice heard.

Most writers have a very good reason for why they chose to write. However, many of us rarely think about it or may have never articulated it.

That's a shame because thinking about why you started writing is one of the best ways to boost your motivation.

When you put your struggle to write in context with your goals and why do you do it, many excuses and other typical expressions of resistance fade away. Can you really not find any time at all—not even 10 minutes per day—to work towards your dream? Will you let other people's opinion stand in the way of sharing your story?

The Challenge

Here's the challenge: spend at least 30 minutes this week reflecting on what motivates you to write. Why are you on this journey?

Once you write that down, save it somewhere safe so that you can read it whenever you don't feel like writing.

I set up a challenge for this in Writing Analytics if you'd like to join us and write along:

https://app.writinganalytics.co/challenge/64db507251a90c2209884c75

[kindred-spirit-93]

*succinct & eloquent opening line. maybe a clever joke or quote* :D

do you ever sit there and contemplate your life choices after like a certain experience or a talk with a loved one?

do you ever come across a quote or a piece that seems like it was written for you in this particular moment in time? an anecdote that mirrors your current situation perhaps?

well im currently going through it & after a double whammy of mama lore TM during some resurfacing anxious & assorted crises, i dont even know what im going through anymore. but we shared a really sweet heart to heart and reminisced over good and less good times aw!

i am reminded that there is still much to life, light to be sought and found, good times yet to be had. its bittersweet. its mature. its scary? its like coming to terms with your mortality but on a smaller scale. or bigger whos to say...

i wont be venting anything, i think for now at least im content to vague post lmao. also my dad bought me some stress eating treats so i might need to go wallow in my feels for a bit

after i jinxed myself by saying im going on hiatus but failing to stay off the website lol (i had moot withdrawl symptoms sue me), i wont be repeating the same mistake, but with context clues i trust u can see where im going with this

it might sound presumptious to state so confidently that this next month of my life will be the hardest in my career, especially since im not even half way there yet, but the truth of the matter is that it is.

ive been struggling for well over a year now (mostly academically) and im both succeeding in places i didnt before (alhamdulillah!) but failing in the exact same places elsewhere. guys i may have anxiety lol

self fulfilling prophecies, nocebo effect, whatever it is & regardless of what you want to call it, its rough. its hard. im tired. theres still so much left and im tired. i shouldnt be this tired. or this empty. or careless. what have i let myself become? why am i punishing myself still?

this coming month will dictate the rest of my future and ill have no one to blame but myself if i let the opportunity slip through my fingers. but if all goes well inshallah i can put this all behind me and start anew so theres that silver lining :D

i kinda lost direction of this post about half an hour ago lol. my point is im going to try harder at balancing several life aspects bc i really cant put it off any more. i need to establish balance because ive been out of the loop for too long now. *shudders in python*

anyways there are plenty of things i have to work on, both in my studies and life, so i have that going for me *party kazoo noises*

id love to grace you all with some wise words or a life lesson or something but i dont have a neat one liner to sum up anything. despite that im writing this because sometimes letting thoughts float in my head isnt enough, i need to articulate and write it out because to let them roam in the vast expanses of my mind under the pretense that i achieved something is frankly silly as it is counterproductive.

a n y w a y , to anyone and everyone reading take care of yourselves and your loved ones. i wish everyone the best in life and in their endeavours. i will probably pop back in every now and again to catch up on messages and make sure everyone is alive and nothing burned down. i will however attempt to exert self control. (key word: attempt)

aight imma head out before i get too emotional or combust with the need to say something stupid like i love you be more unserious XD

[theacecouple]

You all asked for more Dead Bedrooms, so Happy Holidays! You get more Dead Bedrooms.

You can also listen on Apple, Spotify, Our Website, or pretty much any podcast platform! Transcript below :)

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And today we’ve got a little expedited treat for you all because, whoo boy, last week’s episode was– Uh, I wouldn’t say it was fun, but I assume at least some percentage of you got some amount of, perhaps, catharsis out of it. Perhaps we accidentally had a little bit of catharsis ourselves. But I don’t ever want to be that angry on microphone again, at least not directed at a specific person. I prefer to reserve my anger for systemic issues, for broad injustices, but I don’t ever want to be angry at one dude on microphone to that extent, ever again I’m not promising I never will be, because some dudes deserve it.

Courtney: But what that does mean for us today is that we are delving back into r/DeadBedrooms. So on this channel, once about every six months, we have been doing an r/AmItheAsshole: Asexuality Edition, and you all really, really love those. We know it, we hear it, we get your comments and your praises. But just– just a few weeks ago, we– we decided to jump into Dead Bedrooms for the very first time and you all absolutely loved it, and begged us for more. So here we are. It has not quite been six months, but I think we are gonna start putting Dead Bedrooms in our rotation and you’re getting one a little early. A little– a little holiday treat from us to you. Just don’t expect Reddit episodes to usually come this often. [sighs] So, what– What did we learn from the first time we dove into Dead Bedrooms? What was the takeaway? What was the point?

Royce: The point? I think the first part of that episode was laying out the pattern of a lot of the posts that we were seeing, [Courtney hums] which included–

Courtney: The lingo. [laughs]

Royce: Yes, the terms used, the fact that things like low libido and high libido were mentioned right in, along with gender identity and sexual orientation. And, of course, that the entire subreddit is dealing with relationship issues that revolve around a lack of sex or sexual fulfillment in a relationship.

Courtney: [hums in agreement] And a general pattern we saw was that not very favorable toward asexuality. Some posts were a little better than others, but the– the general vibe is not– not very accommodating of aces. And truly just a lot of ignorance about what asexuality actually is. I recall in our first episode actually prefacing things with, like, we in our community, we at our podcast, we as aces, know that things like asexuality and libido do not always go hand in hand, but it’s clear, by the way some of the folks here are talking about it, that when they say asexual they also mean low libido, they also mean probably sex averse in some way. So we’re going to, again, try to not nitpick language too much, because we have been down that road time and time again. If you’re a regular listener of ours, you know where we stand on that. So we’re gonna try to listen to what they mean as opposed to what they say, [breathy laugh] to the best of our ability.

Courtney: But before we get into some of our posts that we have that actually mention asexuality, there is one abbreviation that has just been bothering me ever since we did that first episode, and that is LL4u, or ‘low libido for you’. And this is something that folks use in this subreddit to say, “Oh, you know, my partner who is no longer having sex with me – and this is a major issue – isn’t low libido, just low libido for me.” I don’t even know how to articulate it, but there’s something about that just being a concept, that this is a shorthand that is known in this subreddit, in this community, that is used so often that just– it feels so wrong! There’s something fundamentally about it that my brain does not want to accept is a thing in the way that they are using it.

Royce: Well, at the very least, libido seems like the wrong word to use to describe what they’re trying to describe.

Courtney: It really does! Like perhaps there’s an amount of attraction here, like maybe– And this could be a thing where they are just across the board, consistently conflating libido with attraction. But if someone is low libido for you it’s like– I don’t think physiologically speaking…? And I don’t know, any– any high libido aces out there feel free to correct me, I am not that. I don’t have one, never have, never want one. I don’t think physiologically that your level of libido actually changes based on prospective sexual partners. At least that’s not the way I understand libido as a concept. Like you might not be attracted to individual people or you might have more attraction for one person versus another, or one gender versus another, like all the things that someone may or may not be attracted to, like there are factors at play here. But, like, chemically speaking, can your libido just plummet upon seeing a specific person? Does that happen that way? Please advise. [laughs]

Royce: That’s not how I define or use the term. Libido can change, it’s particularly one thing that’s cited as changing alongside hormonal changes.

Courtney: Sure.

Royce: But yeah, I see that as a much more chemical or biological thing than attraction. And oftentimes when libido comes up in the ace community, it is mentioned completely as an aside to the concept of attraction.

Courtney: Oh yeah, I know plenty of aces who are like, “I do have a libido, and honestly it’s frustrating because I’m not attracted to anyone. So what do I need this for?” [laughs] Or they’ll say you know, “I have a libido but I just don’t have a desire to sate that libido by involving another person. Like, masturbation is totally an acceptable option to me, 100% of the time.” Like there are aces like that out there, no doubt. But before we get into these posts, I had to google it assuming that I would– the first response would be from the subreddit and it was. But I genuinely just googled, “What is LL4u?” And I did. I found a post from about a year ago from a deleted user called “What is LL4u really?” And I was like, “Maybe this will give me insight.”

Courtney: But here’s what’s so interesting: they use a food metaphor – right? – in the post. The post is: [reading] “Is it really a case of getting sick of eating the same thing everyday. I mean I love Spaghetti Bolognese but if I had to have it every evening meal, it would probably lose some of its luster. Would it help some LL4u people if they had the occasional take out? Just a thought.” And here’s what’s so fascinating to me. We in the ace community, like we are the kings and the queens and the non-binary nobilities of food metaphors. We have taken “Cake is better than sex” and we ran with it. Cake is our biggest community symbol. Out there, the folks that don’t have as much of a sweet tooth have more recently adopted garlic bread. Like we use food so often, and we even use food as metaphors to explain things like sex neutrality. Like, “I don’t crave cake, I don’t want cake, but if someone put it in front of me I probably would even enjoy the cake. I’m just not gonna seek it out because I don’t have that desire, I don’t have that craving.” So we have so many ways that we have used food metaphors in our community. And so I see the food metaphor and I understand where it comes from in that sense.

Courtney: But the fascinating thing is, here, like, I don’t know if this is a cheating situation or if this is an agreed upon open relationship kind of a situation. Obviously one is more ethical than the other. But in my first several posts seeing this LL4u, it usually wasn’t about people who were cheaters or people who were thought to be or known to be cheaters. For the most part, it was just: you want to have sex with your partner and your partner no longer wants to have sex with you, and you’re trying to figure out what’s wrong, like have they lost their libido? Do they have a hormone issue? Are they asexual? And then a bunch of people in the comments would just be, “No, they’re probably just LL4u.” And it’s like, I kept seeing that as the justification for these reasons why a bedroom was now dead. And that LL4u is just grinding on me, because the implication was also that this bedroom hasn’t always been dead.

Courtney: At one point activities were happening. And if there’s some sort of drastic change, I don’t think your libido has only changed for that one person. So I’m struggling with the food metaphor here. But since it was posted, I wanted to see what some of the responses were and if people agreed with it, because I am clearly not a member of the Dead Bedrooms community, so I am trying to learn from those who are, and the first comment says: “That’s not logical thinking at all. I’m low libido because something about this partner relationship is killing my sex drive. So if I go sample a different partner, I’m going to learn that sex doesn’t have to be awful, boring, painful, entitled, and then I’m going back to the bad sex partner? That makes no sense.” So in this case, I still don’t think it’s low libido. I think you’re just not getting what you want, what you need, from this arrangement. But I don’t think that’s changing your libido.

Royce: The awful, boring, painful, entitled part is a whole bunch of red flags that there’s something else going on here.

Courtney: Well, especially the painful, entitled. Like, is this an abusive situation here? And you just haven’t found that word or connected that dot yet? Because from my understanding, sex should be neither of those things. Boring’s one I hear a lot. I don’t know what just awful sex is. I’m sure there are allos out there who could explain to me exactly what awful sex is. But if it’s not painful or entitled or boring like, what generally might make it awful? How’s that a different modifier than the others?

Courtney: Another comment says: “I think most people who are LL4u are in that phase because of other factors within the relationship, e.g. bad sex, loss of respect, poor emotional dynamic, loss of attraction etc.” Which still doesn’t sound like low libido to me, but does make more sense to me. One commenter said: “It’s often said that sex with the same person gets boring after a while and becomes routine. So the recommendation is to spice things up. However, if you have a partner who thinks anything other than plain vanilla is not acceptable, then things can only go downhill. Yes, I speak from experience.” That’s it– That’s another thing that just gets me so much about this subreddit was– Some of the previous posts that we saw and some of the previous comments that we saw there are just so many deeply hurt people here. [tentative laugh] And I don’t want to laugh at their actual hurt, I really do not. But at least some of the juicier, more heated posts definitely seem like just a lot of very sexually frustrated people expressing their frustration at each other.

Royce: Yeah, I definitely see a different vibe going back and forth between different threads. Some are just overtly hurt and angry, others are trying to have a more nuanced discussion. I was about to say I’m surprised at how many people who comment self identify as asexual, but here we are reading this as well, so.

Courtney: Yeah, I mean we had a poster in the last episode who is asexual and was posting for their own concerns. But here’s one that gets so much wilder when we consider what common ace theory is, or a common ace worldview. Because this poster says: “If you ask me, it means that your significant other is actually not romantically in love with you anymore. Plain and simple.” And someone challenged him a little bit, not in a mean way, but in, like, an asking a lot of questions kind of way, saying like, “Is sexual desire and romantic love one to one, synonymous to you?” Because that was my question too.

Courtney: Because we talk very often in the A-spec community about how romantic and sexual attraction are not always the same. They don’t always line up. And I so rarely see allosexual people acknowledge that, or believe that that is a possibility. In fact, there are a lot of allosexual, alloromantic people who have direct animosity at the very notion that they could be different. Especially in instances of, like, aromantic people who are allosexual. Like the stereotype for them is that, oh, they are just players, they are a fuckboy, they don’t respect the people they’re having sex with. And just horrible, awful stereotypes which, as long as everyone’s clear about what the nature of this relationship is and expectations have been set and there’s communication, there’s nothing wrong with that. But just the very possibility that you might have sex with someone you aren’t romantically attracted to is met with so much animosity. And this could be its own three hour episode, so I won’t get into it. We’ll save that for our split attraction model series that I’ve been saying for so long that we need to do, but we need to do it right.

Courtney: But the original commenter here specifies: “To be more specific, I believe someone can be LL – low libido – due to whatever reason, like asexuality, trauma, hormones etc.” I super don’t love that. Those three were the things that were all just, like, put together like that. [resumes reading] “But they can be low libido for any of those reasons and romantically in love with their significant other. But being low libido for you means that someone is sexually interested in general but not in their partner. And yes, to me that clearly proves that they are not romantically in love.” And it ends that thought with: “Because for someone who isn’t low libido in general, romantic love contains being sexually attracted to someone. It’s not synonymous, but one is the subset of the other.” So that’s kind of like saying for the most part, only asexual people have split attraction, or only people who are otherwise, you know, messed up. If you have a medical issue or trauma or you’re ace, then maybe your attraction can be split, but otherwise nah.

Royce: Yeah, the human condition is just more fluid than that. I think that in a lot of relationships, even ones that don’t get to the dead bedroom state, that romance and sexual activity or attraction will often fluctuate just as you go through life changes to some degree. How much content is there on allo relationships who are going through a slump for some period of time?

Courtney: I mean that’s basically the running joke in like every sitcom from the 90s or earlier, right? So yeah, I mean, I don’t know that one was just bothering me so much that I had to try to understand that one more. So I still reject the idea that this is literally about libido. But I at least think I have a little bit of a clear idea of “this is someone who has a libido but does not want to have sex with their partner, and maybe it’s their partner’s fault,” probably on a case to case basis there.

Royce: Okay, so this post is titled: “My fiance just realized he was asexual today.”

Courtney: Just today? Spontaneously?

Royce: I don’t know how spontaneously, but apparently the first thing to do after hearing of that is to make a post to dead bedrooms.

Courtney: Yikes. Yeah, if it was literally just today and you’ve now gone off to make a post here, I feel like…

Royce: We’ll see. I haven’t– I haven’t read this one, so I don’t know how much animosity is going to be in this post, but it is tagged ‘seeking advice’.

Courtney: Okay, I don’t know if this is the best place to get advice. I would strongly advise anybody who has a significant other who comes out as asexual to first have extensive conversations and do what you can to try to support them through that. But then maybe, maybe seek counsel from aces and not a community that is often hostile to them. But we’ll see. I will reserve judgment until we see what the post and responses are.

Royce: [reading] “Hi, I’m new, and I’m sorry if this isn’t coherent- my mind is a spinny blur, and I just feel small, helpless, and isolated. I (37f demisexual, high libido) had a conversation with my fiancé (42m very low libido)–”

Courtney: So this is a demi also. So at least knows some amount of the A-spectrum. Fascinating.

Royce: Most likely yes. [resumes reading] “– today about how sex has just not been working for me lately- and how I’d like to try to work through it together. We’ve been together for nine years, and aside from sexually, we are very happy and committed to each other.” That is a running theme on a lot of these posts: we are happy except for the sex part.

Courtney: And the sex part is emphasized so heavily that I fundamentally cannot understand it.

Royce: [keeps reading] “Own a house together, have shared friends and interests- the sticking point is sex.

Royce: Through the course of things he said “well, I just never have any interest in sex. So I don’t know what to do.” – That part was in quotes – “And I don’t know, the inflection of the way he said it just made me like, have an epiphany? So I asked if he meant never, as in literally never in his life, like an asexual person, or never as in, he’s been stressed and/or not confident in his body? And he gave me a blank face and said he didn’t know. He doesn’t know anything about asexual people. But he’s been waiting for sex to “click” and make sense this whole time.” Which– that is interesting, if they are just having this question and epiphany now, nine years into the relationship.

Courtney: And if she’s demisexual, and he’s saying he doesn’t know anything about asexuality, does he know she’s demi??

Royce: Let’s keep going. Op continues with: [resumes reading] “You guys. I’m communicative as anything. If he’s asexual, that is what it is, and we’ll try to figure out what that means. But like. How did he never make that– How did he never make clear that his low libido was absolute sexual disinterest? He loves cuddling and kissing- but nothing else really- and he’s known this the entire fucking time. I had no idea. Honestly I thought his low libido was caused by the medication he’s on. He’s acted quite convincingly that he enjoyed things. And I feel defrauded, and lied to.”

Royce: [still reading] “Here I was thinking that my life was pretty great- we just needed to get on the same page with our sexual preferences/kinks/desires- and agree on the level of frequency- and we’d be the happiest people we know. We’re going to keep talking about it, so hopefully it’s not actually a relationship ending thing, but my head hurts from crying. I feel rejected and robbed of the life I was led to believe I’d have. I’m confused and can’t talk to any friends about it yet because I don’t want to out him. I’m scared that I’m never going to get to enjoy my body with someone else without imploding my stable, secure, otherwise happy life. We’re supposed to be getting married in six months. Just, any help, please. Therapists or counselors online or in” – the area of the country that they’re in – “articles, other corners of Reddit where this would get guidance, tea and sympathy, anything. Thank you so much.”

Courtney: I gotta say I cringed at the defrauded word.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: Oh I– Ugh. We did our episode on marriage consummation laws, and fraud as a justifiable reason to annul a marriage and the precedence that asexuality could play into that... I don’t love that word. I really, really do not. I also feel like I need more information, because part of that, “I feel defrauded and cheated and lied to,” was like he seemed to be enjoying some of the things and it’s like, maybe he was?

Courtney: I don’t know, maybe he hasn’t been and that was explicitly stated, but maybe it was just because this was posted in such a haze of emotion and maybe it was just done very quickly and sloppily, but there are elements of this here where I’m like, yes, you are a demisexual person, but are you in community with a lot of other aces and demis?

Courtney: Because you, as the poster, seem to be either missing details or missing nuances of the orientation itself. And I don’t know, is it– Is it unfair to be like, how could he not know this? Why did it take him so long to realize this? Like– So, I personally have met people who did not come out as asexual until they were over 70 years old. Because they did not have the language for it. They met me, they saw me talk about asexuality, we developed a friendship, and then they confided in me that they are, in fact, asexual. And the things I was sharing were things they felt their entire life. But they– it was indistinguishable from, you know, heterosexual or homosexual, because they just didn’t know there was a word or an option for something other than those two.

Courtney: And so, like, is it really unfair, to be like, “I’ve been with this person for nine years. How did they not know?!” Because everyone’s on their own timeline, you know?

Royce: And a lot of times you have to get to a point where you see a very direct contradiction or comparison to something that you feel very personally and intimately, and it’s not that difficult to go a long time not – you know – encountering that information or having those conversations. The thing that stood out, in comparison to that, most to me was the OP mentioning how communicative they are. Because, yeah, they may talk a lot, but apparently they haven’t had this conversation, at least in extreme detail, until this point in their relationship, which can happen.

Courtney: It can. It’s– Was there anything in there? Did I just miss it? Was there anything that actually said that he does not want to have sex anymore? Because I feel like I didn’t get that. Did he actually say or imply that at any point? Because the way it’s posted, the way she’s talking, is like, “We were supposed to get married, but now my whole future, I’m grieving for it because it’s not going to be what I thought.” But they seem to, at least on occasion, be having sex now. So is he actually saying he wants to stop doing that? Or is this a situation where OP might actually be grieving the feeling of being desired as opposed to the actual act of sex? Because those are two different things in my experience.

Royce: I think that’s a reasonable impression. One quote from him was, “Well, I just never have any interest in sex, so I don’t know what to do,” which I think it’s reasonable to say that the implication of that is that he is not initiating anything. And she mentions that there have been times when he’s said or at least acted like he’s enjoyed things, and that they just aren’t on the same page about their preferences, kinks and desires, so. And the level of frequency is another one that’s brought up. She self-identifies as having a high libido, compared to his at the very least, which she says is very low, so it could be that the relationship that she wants isn’t one where she is having to initiate things. That’s possible, it’s not explicitly stated.

Courtney: Because that’s something that I know I have had in past relationships and other aces have had in past relationships. Where even if there’s a situation where an asexual person is in a mixed orientation relationship with an allo person, and the allosexual person does want sexual activities, and even if the ace is okay with that, to varying degrees – whether they’re sex favorable, sex neutral, whatever that is – there are some instances where that is still not enough for the allo person. Because I have seen allos react with outright hostility to aces, not because they won’t have sex with them, but because they don’t want sex with them or they don’t want it enough, or they don’t feel attracted, or they don’t feel– they don’t feel attractive, they don’t feel desired. And I really struggle to view that in any way other than some form of potentially insecurity. Potentially we can chalk it up to something else. But I genuinely do not think that if that is a tension in the relationship where sex can be negotiated, it can be enjoyed, but the allo person is upset that the ace isn’t actually attracted to them, the ace is not going to change. That is not something that can be changed.

Courtney: So if that is going to be an issue for the allo person, that is something that they need to work on. And they need to figure out why this is such an issue and why they feel this way, and if this is coming from insecurity, if it’s coming from any of these other things.

Courtney: I was a little caught off guard when OP here was like, “Oh, is it because of your body? Are you insecure?” It’s like– I don’t want to imply that in the situation I’m describing that all allos are, like, insecure in their own bodies, but I know from personal past relationships– I have had previous partners who are like, “Why aren’t you more attracted to me?” And it’s like, “I am literally as attracted to you as I could be to any other human that exists.” And they’re like, “But I want to be uniquely attractive to you!” And it’s like, you are! You’re the one I’m in a relationship with right now. I don’t know what more you want from me.

Royce: Yeah, I read that passage as OP just sort of grasping at straws to come up with a reason for their partner’s – what they describe as – low libido.

Courtney: Which is fascinating, because if OP did not self-identify as demisexual, if a like fully allo person was saying this, I would probably say that’s a little acephobic, like why are you trying to find the reason for this? Some people just are this way.

Royce: And I think that was coming– I think at that point, when she was going through this, she was operating under the assumption that her partner was allo, and this is where it clicked of “Wait, you mean like ever?” Like, this isn’t a temporal thing.

Courtney: Right, right. So yeah, I don’t know, this is interesting. This is why I have said before that I try not to be the advice giving type, especially like unsolicited advice. And clearly OP here is asking for advice. But I never feel comfortable giving advice unless it’s someone I know very well or I know their situation very, very well. And probably if there can be a conversation about it, because look at how many questions I am asking OP that I’m never going to get an answer to. Like, I would need to have a full on conversation with someone if they were seeking my counsel, because I need more information in order to give more information.

Royce: Well, look at how many conversations have come up for the two of them just now that I’ve prompted this post. It sounds like the two of them need to have a much more in depth conversation, but I was holding onto something. Let me go back to one of the last points that you made.

Royce: You were talking about an issue that comes up oftentimes in ace-allo relationships within the– The problem that arises from a need to feel desired or something of that nature. And I don’t think it is off-base in saying that that can often manifest in very significant feelings of insecurity. But I do think that there is also some amount of– If I use the word sexual orientation, I’m kind of stretching that term a little bit. I’m having trouble finding the right word, but the way that a person’s sexuality manifests – which would include their kinks and things like that – if someone is, you know, I guess, more submissively aligned and a big part of what they get out of sex is that feeling of being wanted or desired, that could be a big part of what sex is for them and it could represent an incompatibility of some kind. It’s something that could potentially be talked through, worked around, you could potentially find an angle for. But I could also see some people saying that like this is– this is something I actually need to feel satisfied in that area of my life.

Courtney: But what I want to know is how does one reconcile it with all of these posts? Because we’ve seen the pattern of like, “We are the happiest people in the world except for sex.” And it’s like–

Royce: I mean, I mean my knee jerk reaction is that that is an overstatement.

Courtney: [Thoughtful sound] So you’re just going to say that, huh? You’re just going to say what we’re all thinking, just– just like that. [laughs]

Royce: One of the things we’ve mentioned before is – that we see a lot in relationships – a lot of things get piled on to sex as the one thing that is going to make or break a relationship. And sometimes that is done in a way that I don’t think appropriately, like, summarizes the relationship as a whole. [Courtney agrees] Like, if you have so many things going on in your life that you don’t have time to spend with each other doing, like, meaningful activities, then sex becomes that activity. If you aren’t getting affection in other ways, then sex becomes the way that you’re getting affection. And it’s– A lot gets piled onto it, and that’s how you end up with, you know, entire industries of sex counseling as a form of relationship counseling, [Courtney agrees and laughs] when there might be other avenues to figuring out what’s going on.

Courtney: Yeah, I do think, just because what you were saying with sex sort of being the all-encompassing thing, that could also be a need that could theoretically be met another way. You mentioned affection, like well, if sex is the way you’re receiving that affection – and I know not every couple’s like this, this is definitely just a personal anecdote of mine – but like, I am incredibly romantic for someone who is actually identifying as demiromantic, on the on the aro spectrum. My gestures and gifts– I have always been a very, very romantic person. And I would put a lot of time and thought into– into these acts of romance. And I always wanted to make sure that my partner felt desired. And in fact you’ve made that very difficult for me, Royce, because you don’t like things. [laughs] I was like, “Let me get you gifts!” And you’re like, “No, absolutely not, I refuse.”

Courtney: But like in past relationships, like that was a thing I would do and then to, then, have a partner be like, “But I feel like you just don’t, you don’t desire me enough.” and it’s like– [sighs] I’m sorry it is not in– in the way that you want it, and I am sorry that this is all coming from an incredibly low self-esteem and a poor body image that you have of yourself, but I genuinely– I cannot develop sexual attraction for you. That is not how I am wired. It is not going to happen. So I fully understand that I’m reading this under my own lens there. But yeah, interesting post.

Courtney: But what are some of the comments? I guess also to your point of it being perhaps overstated that sex is our only issue. We’ve absolutely had friends in the past that would claim to have a really good relationship, really healthy, their relationship is almost perfect, but then we’d also get together to hang out and they’d talk about how they had a screaming match earlier in the day. And we were like, “Oh, that’s a thing you do?” [laughs]

Royce: Yeah, they just casually throw out something toxic, as if everyone does it.

Courtney: Yes! This is why we aren’t friends with straight people anymore. [laughs] I don’t think we have a single straight friend anymore. At least not a straight couple. We might have one or two individual straight people that are cool.

Royce: If, instead of saying straight, you say like heteronormative or non-queer.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: Like there might be people with gender identities that don’t fit into the binary who might still describe themselves as hetero, just out of habit or because they don’t have a better word.

Courtney: Right. We don’t have any non-queer couple friends anymore. [laughs] Because they do really just be out here throwing out very toxic things and being like, “We have a great marriage, we have a wonderful relationship.” And we’re like, “Mm?”

Royce: So the comments here. This post doesn’t have a ton of them. There are a few back and forth. Some are like: postpone the marriage, figure this out first. There’s one that was like: “Blessing in disguise. Don’t marry into a dead bedroom, go elsewhere.”

Courtney: No! Are you kidding me?!

Royce: There are a couple of posts being like, “You’re looking for other places. Go check out asexuality subreddits and see what you can learn there.”

Courtney: Yeah. Yes, I’m actually glad that that was a bit of advice that was pointed out. I’m pleasantly surprised. Less so with the blessing in disguise. Give me a break! That is what I have come to expect from this subreddit, though.

Royce: And from what I can tell, OP seems to be going through and responding to a lot of posts and just trying to take it all in. She does say at one point, “Someone mentions that it sounds like he genuinely didn’t know and could be just in the questioning phase of understanding himself.”

Courtney: That’s what I was wondering, like, was it mean to be like, “How did he not know?”

Royce: And she does say, “I agree that’s the best outlook to take right now. And yes, he’s been doing a lot of introspection in the last year or so. He’s just not terribly fluent or practiced in doing so yet.”

Courtney: Yeah, like I said before, we’re all on our own timelines. I hope they’re doing okay. We need a– We need a “Where are they now?” for Reddit posts.

Royce: This post was three months ago, by the way.

Courtney: Oh man, so we’re one month to the wedding, unless it got postponed?

Royce: Halfway there, it was six months out.

Courtney: Six months. Okay, I don’t know why I had four in my head.

Courtney: So this one. We gave up on r/AreTheStraightsOkay, because there were so many just like very visual memes that were just not good for a podcast format. But I did find one post on Dead Bedrooms. That was just a meme, but some of the comments just absolutely have me face-palming.

Courtney: It’s entitled, “Sex really isn’t that important in a relationship,” and it’s a picture of a couple – I don’t know what this is from – appears to be a man and a woman. The woman is saying, “Sex really isn’t that important in a relationship, to be honest.” And then a close-up of the man’s face, and the commentary is: “I’ve never seen a bigger cry for help in a man’s eyes.” And we’ll have a link to this in the show notes if you want to actually see what the picture is. But oh, my word. Some of the comments: [exaggerated voice] “But suddenly becomes the most important thing in life the moment that guy sleeps with anyone else!” And the same person said, “Sex is like money. Money is not everything, not having money is. Same with sex. Sex is not everything, not having it is.” As someone who is a no libido, borderline sex-repulsed asexual who has been in severe poverty for large swaths of my life, and no longer is: absolutely fuck that analogy.

Courtney: Then we had a really unfortunate sort of just conversation back and forth in the comments where someone says, “But it’s true… if you are asexual, I guess.” And someone comes in and tries to do the Ace 101 kind of a thing. Saying like, “This is actually a common misconception. There are asexual people who have sexual desires. There are also sexual people without sexual desires. Asexual people find no one hot. If you’re wondering why a person would have sex with someone they don’t find hot, most people who have sex with their hand don’t find their hand hot.” And some– some– some jerk was pulling quotes like, “There are asexual people who have sexual desires,” saying, “By definition not asexual.” Which isn’t true, we know that. But someone comes in and tries to say, “Asexuality is considered to be a sexuality wherein one doesn’t experience sexual attraction. Asexual people can get horny and enjoy sex, but they won’t be sexually attracted to their partners or be turned on by their bodies, pleasing them etc.” And then people just argue about language, because then that poster who came in with the ace spiel says, “I try not to use sexual attraction because so many people think sexual attraction equals want to have sex with.” And a few people are like, “Well, that– that’s less good language, that that is more confusing.” And the final say is that poster saying, “Asexual people do not find people hot. Sexual people do find people hot. It’s not about whether or not they want to have sex.”

Courtney: And I have been getting increasingly more frustrated with that definition and delineation. Just because – for as much as like we’re giving grace even in this episode, saying, you know, for some people, like, this is a manifestation of their sexuality, this is something that is important for those people, I understand that not all aces have the same experience I do, and I give space for that – but not having a libido, not wanting to engage in sexual activity, that actually is a fundamental component of the way my asexuality manifests. And I’m not going to say that people in different areas of the a-spectrum are less ace than me. I’m not going to say they’re not asexual because I don’t believe those things. But there is such a hard line push – especially as of the last, like, six years I think I’ve really, really seen it ramp up – where it’s all about attraction, not action. It’s just attraction, not action. And that’s something I hear and see all the time. Every single day. And a lot of sex favorable aces will say, “Well, we have to use this language because otherwise you’re invalidating my asexuality.” And it’s like you’re kind of now invalidating my asexuality because this is a fundamental way that mine manifests. And if I’m giving space for your area of the spectrum, can you please also give space for my area?

Royce: I think people are just going to have to accept that there isn’t going to be one simple, like, singular sentence definition of asexuality–

Courtney: No.

Royce: That just encompasses the entire A-ace spectrum. Because I’ve been thinking about this and I am not aware of any other orientation that has, for example, the depth of micro labels that asexuality has, and– or, you know, broader a-spec I should say. I use those two terms interchangeably a lot. I know not everyone does that.

Courtney: Well, we’ll talk about this in a future episode. But the fact that ace no longer means ace and aro people is fascinating to me. Because a lot of people, when we originally started using the shorthand for ace, it was like the full ace community, because we didn’t want to just be saying asexual the whole time. So it was like A is being shortened to ace for both ace and aro. And now a lot of people have completely forgotten that that is how a lot of people used to use it. And now people are saying a-spec for the a-spectrum, for ace and aro spectrums, and to me that is so much clunkier than saying ace.

Royce: It is- That’s–

Courtney: So sometimes I’ll still say ace, just because that’s the language that I came up into this community in, to mean both. And now people say, like, “If you’re saying ace but you mean a-spec, that’s erasing aros.” And it’s like my language originally did accommodate aros and we just forgot about that!

Royce: Yeah, in personal life, off the microphone, I never say a-spec. Pretty much I say ace to mean ace-spec. Because ace-spec is a clumsy, two syllable word that’s harder for me to say.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: But what I was getting to was when I look at all sexual orientations – straight, gay, bi, pan – they’re all very well-defined and have a lot of community and a lot of history. And of course, ace people have been here forever but it’s been so hard to connect, because you have to have a lot of very open, vulnerable, personal conversations. So I feel like the ace community is fairly young because it kind of relied on something like the internet to bring enough people together to have these conversations. But what happened is you found all of these different, varied experiences that aren’t gay, straight, bi, pan, and sometimes they are vastly different experiences.

Courtney: [Agrees]. Yeah, we– You know, in addition to our split attraction model series that we’ve been planning, we want a series of just episodes on language, [laughs] because we’ve got a lot of thoughts on language. Because, at the end of the day, really what I care about the most is that the people I’m communicating with can understand me, and so, to a certain extent, if you’re speaking to an individual person, your language is going to change and there are complicated nuances with that. Sometimes it’s something like code switching. Sometimes in a neurodivergent lens, that’s something like masking. But sometimes it’s genuinely just: we come from two very different places, what is the lowest common denominator for the language that we can use and still understand at least the most important elements of what we’re trying to convey to one another?

Courtney: And so, like, honestly, yeah, with a-spec, the thing is, I have started occasionally using that – either on microphone or sometimes in tweets and things – and that is just because that seems to be the direction that our individual community is saying. But I will only say that word if I’m addressing the community. If I’m trying to address a larger audience, or allo people, or non-a-spec people, I won’t use the phrase a-spec. Because they don’t know it. They do not.

Royce: Okay, I think this will be the last one for today. This one is simply titled “Broke Up With my Asexual Girlfriend.”

Courtney: Oh boy.

Royce: And it reads: “I loved her a lot. I really did. I felt like she was perfect for me in every way.” Going back to that…

Courtney: Except… sex!

Royce: [resumes reading] “Except one. [Courtney laughs] She was asexual. We dated for a little over four months. In that time I fell for her, hard. But two months into the relationship she admitted that she thinks she might be asexual as she finds the idea of sex and kissing to be repulsive. I tried to make it work for the remaining two months but I was slowly starting to resent her more and more, and I knew it would never stop. I really wanted it to work. But I’m a man with needs [Courtney hums disapprovingly] that she wasn’t capable of fulfilling, and I didn’t want to guilt or force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.

Royce: I broke up with her earlier today. I’m pretty sad about the whole thing but I know it was the right thing for both of us. Reading some of the posts here acted as the final nail in the metaphorical coffin for me. I didn’t want to end up like the unfortunate souls on this subreddit.”

Courtney: Oh no!

Royce: [keeps reading] “I thought I could do without sex, but I never really realized how damn important it was to be sexually desired in a relationship until recently.”

Courtney: Mmh… There’s that word again.

Royce: Yep. [continues reading] “It’s so goddamn important. I stopped working out in part because – quote – “what’s the point if the one person that’s allowed to see it doesn’t care?“.”

Courtney: Oh boy.

Royce: [keeps reading] “I did my first day back today and it felt good.” – I assumed that is at the gym – “II’m ready to clean myself back up and jump back into the dating game and put myself out there and find somebody new. I just want to say I don’t resent her for any of this. She was a really kind-hearted person and I wish her the best, we were just fundamentally incompatible at the end of the day and it never would have worked. I wish her the best and hope she finds happiness.”

Royce: So that was a collection of a few things we’ve talked about. One thing I wanted to mention that I’ve just always been aware of, and never really understood, is the “I’m going to exercise or diet purely to date.”

Courtney: Yeah!

Royce: Not for myself.

Courtney: Not for health.

Royce: I’m just going to do that to try to find someone during that dating phase.

Courtney: Yeah. I also– because he’s also saying like, “Man, my first day back at the gym and it felt good.”

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: Like if you like exercising, why did you stop? Liking exercise is a gift. Exercise sucks! [laughs] No, I’m with you on that. I don’t understand that. Just the loaded language in that post, though. Like, “I didn’t want to end up like the unfortunate souls here.” It sounds so melodramatic.

Royce: Yeah. As a post that was just, “Hey, here’s what happened,” and not asking for advice or anything, it’s also interesting that this person made a decision because apparently they were lurking on Dead Bedrooms.

Courtney: I don’t think I like that either. Because, like, it wasn’t that long of a relationship, so it’s not like, you know, there was a level of commitment that’s like years into this relationship, or a marriage, or a betrothment. So like, it was still technically early stages, that’s fine. But I genuinely– Like, you made a decision to break up with someone that you yourself are saying you really care about, because of what you are reading strangers say on the internet? And not out of conversations with that partner? I don’t know, that’s– Just the very concept of that is something I don’t understand.

Royce: Yeah, I don’t know what conversations they had in the relationship. Reading through some comments and seeing OP comment on a couple of things, they didn’t give their ages but they did imply that they were pretty young, and it had only been together for four months. So if they had a conversation and kind of outlined what they want or are looking for in a relationship, it seems perfectly reasonable for them both to be like, “Okay, this isn’t it,” and go on. Kind of a thing.

Courtney: Right. But, man… “The final nail in the coffin was reading about all you poor souls on this subreddit.” [laughs]

Royce: There is a comment that just says, “I’m glad that this graveyard of dead relationships saved one more soul.”

Courtney: No! That’s terrible! [emphatically] Graveyard of dead relationships.

Royce: Yeah, that was an old post. That one was actually– That one was five years ago. But it was very dense in a lot of the language that we’ve been talking about or seeing throughout.

Courtney: Well, I wish the best for his asexual ex-girlfriend. May he remember her fondly as the one who got away. [laughs] She’s probably too good for him. [laughs] I am just headcanoning this asexual girlfriend as, you know, the most gorgeous, beautiful person inside and out. That’s nonsense and I know it.

Courtney: You know, last time we did a Dead Bedrooms episode, we were talking to our friend Satan and they had a brilliant idea about what would be a better Dead Bedrooms concept than people in relationships who don’t have enough sex anymore. The concept they put forth was untouched photographs of the bedroom of people who died, like just how they died. This is what their bedroom looked like when they died. And I think that’s fascinating. I think it is a subversion of amatonormativity. I think it’s provocative, it’s enriching, it’s conceptually brilliant. I want someone to take this on as a project. I want this to be a coffee table book that we can put on our coffee table that is just pages of literal dead bedrooms. And then you can just pour over them for hours, fantasizing and wondering about the lives of these poor deceased souls. [emphatically] Who were they? What kind of life did they live? What will my bedroom look like when I inevitably die?

Royce: How many of them died before getting the chance to clean up their bedrooms before the photos were taken?

Courtney: Exactly! That’s the fascinating part! You can learn so much about a person. Was their bedroom spotless? Was it messy, as if they weren’t expecting visitors? Was it covered in medical supplies because they were aware that the death was imminent? There are so many possibilities. How old were they? How did they decorate? Did they die away from the home? Was their bed made? Did they die in the bed? The possibilities, they are endless. I am so much more intrigued by this concept of a dead bedroom than I am people griping about not having enough sex.

Courtney: So if any brilliant ace photographers out there– I myself am an artist, I am a professional, award-winning artist, if we’re being technical here, but I’m not a photographer. Taking photographs tends to irritate me. At least if it’s for social media. I gave up on Instagram a long time ago because – ugh – “I made a thing, now I have to take a picture of it to put on Instagram.” I hated it! Absolutely hated it. So if there are any already renowned ace photographers out there who are interested in making this dream come to fruition, do reach out. Let’s make it happen. But until then, thank you all so very much for being here. And we will talk to you all next time. Goodbye.

[polutrope]

Not a character ask, but I hope it's ok? Anyways, wanted to drop by and thank you for articulating why recently it has been itching me whenever fics/posts/etc put Maedhros as the best and better parent of the E&E twins! And on a related note, do you have any thoughts whether (going with the narrative idea of cascading events starting with sparing the twins) searching for Elured & Elurin shouldn't have been also connected to those, and technically therefore should've been attributed to Maglor in the published Silm (or rather, connected to aforementioned chain events), as well?

(In reference to this.)

Totally okay, and thank you! I am happy to see from the reception of that post that I am not alone.

I love this insight! It certainly fits with the themes of pity and repentance in the series of events I talked about (i.e., pitying and raising Elros and Elrond, being glad at the appearance of the Silmaril in the sky, "Less evil shall we do in the breaking", and finally casting the Silmaril away and wandering in pain and regret).

I like your term "cascade" for these events. I talk at the end of the this bio about pathos and why I think these four events are a large part of why readers finish the Silm especially sympathetic to Maglor.* In that vein, let's dub this the "Pathos Cascade" 😁.

*Not all readers, of course. Without judgment of either pathway, I'd be curious to see how reception (of Maglor, but also more broadly) changes depending on whether someone came to the Silm via fandom or not.

I had thought in my original post that the only mention of Maedhros searching for Dior's sons came from a marginal note on the Tale of Years -- the briefly sketched annals that Tolkien revised in the 1950s, published in War of the Jewels -- in which it is Maidros/Maedhros who fosters Elros and Elrond. Which would support the hypothesis that it's part of the "Pathos Cascade"!

But Christopher in a footnote reminded me that the "failed search" element actually first entered the story in The Later Annals of Beleriand (written sometime between 1930-37, published in The Lost Road):

"The young sons of Dior, Elboron and Elbereth, were taken captive by the evil men of Maidros' following, and they were left to starve in the woods; but Maidros lamented the cruel deed, and sought unavailingly for them." (Annal 306[506])

(Yes, Elured and Elurin's names changed a lot. The servants became Celegorm's in The Tale of Years.)

In the Later Annals, Maglor is still the one fostering Elrond ("Elrond was taken to nurture by Maglor," Annal 329[529]; Elros conceptually existed by 1937, but Tolkien never added him to this particular text). So that's a point against the hypothesis.

However, we're talking about evolving and unfinished drafts, so it doesn't mean Tolkien might not have reassigned the search to whichever brother he eventually decided should get the "Pathos Cascade". Or not.

(Sidenote: It's not like either Maedhros or Maglor is unrepentant in any version -- they are both the "sympathetic Feanorians" -- but still, in every draft only one of them is firmly connected to the sort of pity and "letting go" we see in the "Pathos Cascade".)

Regardless of Tolkien's intentions, it fits well, and I like it as a way to support my take that all four surviving brothers search for the sons of Dior (for complicated reasons that I won't get into). Perhaps it's hypocritical of me to simultaneously insist that only Maglor should be a parental figure to Elros and Elrond, but it helps me make sense of events. As the discussion around this has shown, there are other ways to do so, but this one works for me.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about the Silm's textual history. I know dissecting this stuff is not everyone's cup of tea, but I love it.

[boyfridged]

i tried looking but i couldn't really find a post similar to this so sorry if its already been asked! what do you think about the outlaws as a concept and in general Jason working in a team?? personally i don't necessarily like (or at least haven't so far) anything that takes Jason fully out of Gotham and more so out of being a street level hero in terms of setting

i share the same sentiment. i once talked about it on my old blog and i got so much hate in my inbox because i said that jason shouldn't have any permanent teams and most critically should never be a leader in them.

i also recently talked to some people in dms about how the most ironic and saddest thing is how dick & jason got the opposite of what they probably want and what is the most natural for them... i don't think dick appreciates being tied to one place, and yet for decades (of publishing history) now he can't get out of bludhaven, which is just a step from gotham... and then there's jay, whose dedication to gotham (and his bond with it!) is perhaps one of the most notable traits of his, and yet he operates within that weird status of being banished from gotham by the narrative...

and the thing is, while i definitely would prefer for these dynamics to be reversed, and for jason to finally settle down in gotham, dc could at least articulate the misfortune of it all? of jason being so isolated from what is dearest to his heart. but they don't even recognise it. they make it seem like jay becoming a globetrotter is just who he is predisposed to be.

then there's what i already mentioned; imo jay shouldn't be a leader. especially not after his authoritarian stunt in the utrh. if he's to develop in any direction, he needs to take a step down from his position of power. and honestly, i don't see any reason for which other vigilantes would want to entrust him with such a role? it's a frankly ridiculous notion. he doesn't really have the right skill set for it. come on, he might have learned how to command people as the red hood, but he's not great at inspiring trust, he has attachment issues, he takes everything personally, and he usually works without a safety net.

he also usually does not feel comfortable working under someone. what would work best is for him to partner up with others, but that's it. for anything else, we would have to see tons of actually well-executed and visible in the narrative progress. or at least show us how he's failing on a team (like in countdown.)

[funkymbtifiction]

hi! i had a few questions about the judging functions:

1. similar to your perceiving function descriptions in the previous ask, would the judging ones go something like this:

fi>te: i make decisions based on what’s important to me and the facts, but what’s important to me matters more than the facts

te>fi: pretty much the opposite of above, the facts are more important

fe>ti: i make decisions based on what’s best for everyone and what makes sense to me but what’s best for everyone matters more

ti>fe: the reverse, what makes sense to me matters more

is that sort of along the right lines?

2. someone who thinks hurting people is morally wrong in general, but hurting CERTAIN people is morally fine - is this more an example of fi (being inconsistent with values due to what does/doesn’t bother them) or fe (values shifting based on circumstance)? for instance - hurting or even killing someone who has harmed you or someone you love, who goes around being horrible to others, or who is a threat to society in some way is morally alright, but targeting a random, possibly innocent person is wrong?

3. what’s your personal opinion on the above type of moral question and what was your thought process in coming to your conclusion, especially in terms of your functions? if you don’t mind answering (if it’s too personal just disregard this question lol)

tysm!!

I think those are more or less correct, with perhaps a few “explanations” added on…

To a FiTe user, how I feel, how this makes me feel, how this impacts me, outweighs the facts or external opinions. For example, an FP may get disturbed by knowing there are bodies left on Mount Everest that have become “sign-posts” for other climbers. Aka, once you reach the “blue parka guy” you are halfway there. Let’s say it bothers them because their Fi values human life and to reduce a human body to a sign post devalues the sanctity of their life. Their logic accepts the facts that these bodies stay there because they can’t be brought down; it would risk other people’s lives to recover them, but that doesn’t change how they feel about it. The facts can’t alter their inner sense of “no, this is wrong/bad.” A TJ, by contrast, might be disturbed by that or not, depending on how their Fi interprets it, but the facts are undeniable – the bodies are there because it’s not safe to recover them, and it reminds others of how dangerous this decision is; it can’t be helped, short of not allowing anyone to climb the mountain, and that would be ignoring personal freedoms, etc. Their feelings come secondary or as a “supplement” to the facts of the situation, which are the baseline for their thinking and decision-making, a default stance.

FeTi is pretty much as you articulate it – I am responsible for everyone else and their well-being and their feelings, and so I will suppress my own needs or wants to accommodate everyone else, because their happiness makes me happy. TiFe does not feel this way, because they are dialed out of people’s emotions, but many of them do have a sense of “my life impacts other lives and I don’t want to do damage,” even though they may not know what that “looks like” in the way a FJ might have views on that (they will reduce it to something like “people shouldn’t litter, for the greater good” and/or “it would be better for everyone if we all did XYZ”).

Your second question involves moral thinking, and all humans have gray zones where their morals are contingent – it’s wrong to kill innocent people but not people who are trying to kill you; it’s okay to hurt an abuser; if I catch someone beating a dog, I am going to kick their ass and feel no guilt; it’s inborn in humans to want a sense of “justice” and to desire “revenge.” Laws exist for this reason – killing someone in self defense as they attack you is very different from planning to murder them four years later, and so the system kicks in to determine what is/what isn’t permissible, from a high Te stance of “if everyone did this, would society crumble? If yes, we have to prevent everyone from doing this by establishing rules.”

Targeting a random person is seen as bad because it’s happening to an innocent bystander, and IMO, people should not live in fear of never knowing whether they will be safe walking down the street. It’s easy for us to wrap our minds around revenge or a “reason” for violence, but hard for a nonviolent person to understand “senseless” violence and/or attacks. Society also categorizes things in terms of people – it’s worse in our eyes for some random person to walk up to a pregnant lady and punch her in the stomach than to punch a guy in the face, because of the collateral damage. Humans are catered to think in terms of “degrees of evil” – but whether this is instinctual in us, or the product of social conditioning, I don’t know. I do know that some things are engrained in our psyche – no society ever celebrates a traitor, for example, and even hardened criminals all hate and abuse pedophiles in prison.

What’s my opinion on that kind of moral question? That it’s interesting to discuss, in an attempt to figure out what motivates people, whether our morals are entrenched or a product of our environment; since no one is raised in total social isolation and is free of all outside influences, it would be hard to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg – the moral stance, or the adopted moral stance. I do know that humans are the same throughout history, that we think and feel and react in similar ways to our ancient ancestors, even though our thinking has progressed into more modern values.

My thought process was just as I wrote it – I come up with answers as I type them; thoughts separate from them don’t exist, and I parse things through the implications, the psychology behind it, and then collateral damage. I treat most things with detachment and want to explore them without my feelings weighing in (possibly because of my impartial 3 fix, I don’t know). In a more personal sense, I think any kind of vengeance is wrong, that hurting others is wrong, and that it’s wrong to kill people unless there is an extreme circumstance driving it (self-defense, protecting someone you love, etc). But I’m also aware that in my angriest moments, I’ve had extremely violent thoughts and that I would be capable of evil by acting on them, so I can’t really condemn others who “snap” in extreme situations when they want to “stop something from happening.” Evil is inbred in human nature, and humans are capable of anything in the wrong circumstances. That’s one reason I’m not partial to judging people from the past by modern values, because I cannot say how I would act in their place, and it’s arrogant to assume I would be morally “superior” or “enlightened.”  

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks Pimp by Iceberg Slim. Borrowed this from @martinjballou since it had been on my reading list forever. He said I could finish it in a day or so, saying it read like a black Ernest Hemingway in regard to the terse straightforward writing... and Mart wasn't wrong. Really the godfather of the genre, you quickly realize just how much this has influenced. Authenticity aside, he is just a real complex human with an IQ 5 points lower than Elon Musk (Googled that). He sums the book up best in the preface, "The account of my cunning as a pimp will fill many of you with revulsion, however, if one intelligent, valuable young man or young elman can be saved from this slime; then the displeasure I have given will have been outweighed by that individual's use of his potential in a socially constructive manner...perhaps my remorse for my ghastly life will diminish to the degree that within this one book I have been allowed to purge myself. Perhaps one day I can win respect as a constructive human being." Also, what you see and especially reading about his childhood is just how emotionally damaged you have to be to pimp. There then has to be a subsequent hatred that combined with all the statistical factors provide really an easy Freudian reading into most pimps... and drug dealers really. However, what he gets into is the deep psychological game that a pimp and whore have to play for it all to work. His strength mirrors that of the great rappers who have in ways emulated him in that his authenticity comes from the remorse that those who engage in the same illegal activity understand... shits exhausting. In literary terms, Mart describes the style but in all those old films you never really understand the pimp. They were usually just convinents tropes for populating certain types of a films with background characters. The attention to detail in essentially spanning the history of jazz from hearing records in the background that would express the sentiment whether it is good times with Art Tatum's beautiful Harlem stride style or a prosititue after a beating lamenting to Billie Holiday or earlier in his career Bessie Smith. Charlie Parker captures the post war uptick in H and difficultly with the economy and accelerated pace of the next generation where he is elderly at 32 in the pimp game at the end of the war. But he just articulates it all. I was personally suprised in really growing up listening Jay-Z and BIG, how much they based their real life personas off of Iceberg Slim, especially Jay-Z. If you listen it was around Blueprint he finally shed the emotionlessness of the influence. It all encaptulates the toxic black male mantra of "just keeping it all inside" that my generation was the last to abide to that we are all finally discovering now. Started and finished Romeo and Juliet yesterday and Iceberg Slim today haha.

[whatisonthemoon]

Excerpt:

Capitalism’s attempt at preservation of gender roles, premised on preserving the family institution, led to strict enforcement of criminalization of homosexuality and this crisis reached its crescendo with militant confrontation between the police and visitors to the illegal gay bar, Stonewall Inn, after the police attacked some of the people they arrested at the bar. For the next few days, streets and nearby parks were cleared and overrun by queer persons while police were pushed back from the areas surrounding Stonewall Inn. This is pertinent to the phrasing of Stonewall as a “riot.” In the present, many attempt to assert Stonewall as a riot while trying to portray the militant nature of the incident but it is a conscious choice by us to use the word uprising. A riot is a disturbance to the norm, in the language utilized by the state. Stonewall on the otherhand, was a spontaneous militant uprising by oppressed masses against the forces of the state. It should be pertinent to note that the most militant sections during the Stonewall uprising were the proletariat and lumpenproletariat of New Afrikan and Chicano national background, most of them homeless and/or sex workers.

Post-Stonewall, organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) cropped up, many of them aligned with the anti-imperialist politics of the time, with GLF also engaging in joint action alongside the Black Panther Party. But with imperialism shifting on the offensive, internally with the FBI’s fascistic COINTELPRO tactics and ideologically with post-modernism, a shift in this trajectory of the queer movement can be seen. Perhaps this is best represented by the Boston group Combahee River Collective. Comprised particularly of black lesbian women, the collective asserted that they aim for a socialist revolution while at the same time, coming up with the term “identity politics” to argue that struggle against capitalism, that the struggle for socialism, is waged on lines of identitarian oppression. The statement goes further to argue that the members of the collective cannot differentiate between racial, class-based or gendered oppression and that the combinations of the same led to their oppression. 15 years after the release of this statement, Kimberle Crenshaw would propound her theory of intersectionality, a keystone in post-modernist obfuscation of reality. In practice, this meant two important changes in queer political assertion. First, queer politics would only articulate itself in the language of queer identity politics. Second, queer politics would aim to seek normalization and compromise within patriarchy, going so far as to even reinforcing existing patriarchal constructions of gender while claiming liberation.

The first change led to the diminishing of the principled anti-imperialist character of early queer political assertion. Many communist organizations in the United States faced isolation from queer political formations for highlighting the national contradiction within the US and the practices of white nation chauvinism over the New Afrikans, Chicano and indigenous queer persons both within queer political formations as well as in their political practice. Many such groups solely focused on the issues of queer persons and even within this homogenizing category, contradictions were clear between the dominant aspect comprised of those who asserted their identities as gay, lesbian etc. versus those who chose to transgress the construct of gender itself. The second change is the aim of seeking legal recognition of said identities for a normalization of queerness within capitalist society. The issue with this practice is that it assumes that resolution of oppression premised on capitalist relations of production will somehow be found within the realm of capitalism itself, without changing the basic premise of this oppression. Many activists from the early period of queer politics rejected the motley collection of identity labels that emerged during this period of political deterioration. This distinction between sex and gender as categories itself was cleverly crafted for the now ‘sexually-queer’ section to comply within gender norms, relegating the transgressing section (then, the transsexuals), to the margins (now, transgender). Instead, the sexually-queer section now became compliant within the bourgeois assertion of individuality. Being gay or lesbian simply became a matter of one’s private affairs, part of an individual’s experience. These two developments completely transformed any capacity of liberation from gender oppression for queer persons into a politics of compromise and opportunism. A pamphlet from 1992 summarizes this change, “many gay and lesbian pride rallies across the country are organized by white men and do not project an anti-patriarchy and anti-imperialist program. Instead, organizers call for yuppie job protection against gay discrimination…. And like pseudo-feminists, these gay men only fight against their own particular oppression, oblivious of their own privileges.”

Related

On Anti-Gay Legislative in Japan Supported by Moonies Socialism is the Answer to Patriarchy, Including Moon’s Patriarchy Interrogating the Unification Theology of the Family and Finding a Better Way Patriarchal nationalistic faith and the devoted daughter-in-law

Parapolitics and being an ex-Moonie on the Left

[hwy95eh]

[16-03-2023]

SCREENSHOT THOUGHT

I shared the Mayor's post about a McDonald's maybe coming to Marysville on the 95EH Facebook as a #TheDailyEh?! — with some additional "eh" context from me due to 'spice 🌶 potential' of topic — and since I also converted that text to fit into a 2200-character-limit Instagram post, I figured I’d also copy/pasta the main takeaway over here on the 95EH.CA Tumblr:

"Residents get to vote with their dollars – to support or not support a particular business."

I would just add that residents get to vote with their voices & actions too, in every aspect of society they participate in (not just in their role as a consumer of basic needs) — AND — it is always waaaay more productive to focus on the things you have control over yourself (which are only your own actions & reactions, which is still quite a lot to be in control of) and it is always best to not get so caught up in worrying about what everybody else is or isn't doing/thinking about it (be aware of what’s going on… but don’t become obsessed with the projections).

So, with that in mind… what are you doing/thinking about a McDonald’s maybe coming to Marysville? (and there's no rush to jump to your first conclusion or even tell anyone else besides yourself, but sound off in the comments or on the socials if you fancy trying to articulate some thoughts and/or feelings)

And that might sound like I am hedging my bets on having my own personal headline opinion myself, BUT, I mostly just think we all should take a breath and try to have a good think about what having a McDonald's coming to a small town would mean for a mountown where there's already a McDonalds 25 minutes away (and an A&W even closer) — AND — what are the interconnected conversations we should be having instead if you feel that this is not really a long term solution to any of our ongoing collective problems (for example… perhaps there are more locally driven initiatives that could be invested in & supported to deal with problems of "essential" jobs and affordable/accessible "food")?

But, again, there's a lot of layers to all of this stuff — and people have a tendency to get pretty defensive about some of the unspoken parts of how our society actually works, SO, I will just leave you with advice that I've found helpful with trying to navigate thru all this layered stuff:

Oftentimes, the things you find yourself getting immediately defensive/agitated about are the very things you need to take some self-reflection to unpack better yourself — so go for a walk outside with it 🙃

Because we need to talk more openly about ALL of the interconnected issues that involve multi-billionaire corporations setting the culture (especially for a local area that has attracted interest by trying to be a place that people want to setup a life, not drive thru).

**This Screenshot Thought was submitted by Jeremy / @HI54LOFI from Kimberley, BC (where he successfully runs an unsuccessful “music blog” called HI54.BLOG and attempts this 95EH.CA thing). If you’d also like to submit a ‘Screenshot Thought’… please check out the EH? section for more site info and/or just reach out to: hey@95eh.ca 👍

[education3244]

Conceptual Modeling

Over the past decade, within the modeling and simulation community there has been a growing interest in, and concern about “conceptual modeling.” Generally accepted as crucial for any modeling and simulation project addressing a large and complex problem, conceptual modeling is not well-defined, nor is there a consensus on best practices. “Important” and “not well understood” would seem to qualify conceptual modeling as a target for focused research. Some workshop participants defined conceptual models as “early stage” artifacts that integrate and provide requirements for a variety of more specialized models. In this view, conceptual models provide a foundation from which more formal and more detailed abstractions can be developed, and eventually elaborated into analysis models (e.g., for simulation). However, workshop discussion led us to recognize that “early” and “late” are relative terms that apply within each stage of development. 

For example, creating an analysis model might involve describing, (i.e., modeling) the analysis independently of software (“conceptually”) before implementation and execution. As a consequence, there might be multiple “early” models: conceptual models of reality and conceptual models of analysis; and there may be multiple versions of conceptual models as the understanding of the target system matures and the analysis design and implementation evolves. 

Conceptual Modeling Language/Formalism

An articulated conceptual model, whether describing the system of interest (the referent, in Robinson's terminology) or an analysis model of the system of interest, is expressed using some language, which may be formal or informal, graphical, textual, mathematical, or logical. Today, the situation is that most often, conceptual models are expressed using some combination of 26 sketches, flowcharts, data, and perhaps pseudo-code. Lack of general agreement on the implications of these techniques (i.e., ambiguity) limits the computational assistance that can be provided to engineers. Incorporating conceptual modeling into a modeling and simulation engineering discipline will require more explicit and formal conceptual modeling languages. 

However, conceptual modeling must be done in a manner accessible to domain engineers, who might not be trained in the necessary formalisms. This is addressed in the first subsection below. 

In addition, formal conceptual modeling applies as much to analysis as to the referent systems, raising questions about the variety of approaches to simulation, as covered in the second subsection. Formality in model integration is discussed in section 3.3

There are number of simulation softwares for the FEA - Finite Element Analysis are available in the market like, Abaqus developed by Dassault System. Ansys Software products including Ansys Workbench, Ansys Fluent, Ansys APDL, CATIA, SolidWorks and Hypermesh are more common used by the industry. All this software used for their unique capabilities for pre processing and post processing work. To get trained on this simulation software many of the companies are offering research and training services to get trained on this softwares also including PIGSO LEARNING LLP. They offered Abaqus Training.  

Domain-Specific Formalisms

In mathematical logic, formalism is the application of model and proof theory to languages, to increase confidence in inferring new statements from existing ones (Bock, et al 2006). In practice, however, most mathematicians are more informal in their definitions and proofs, with peer review confirming results, or not. We expect conceptual modeling formalisms to be rigorous approaches to studying referent and analysis models, at least in the sense of mathematical practice. Formal approaches have fewer, more abstract categories and terms than less formal ones, facilitating integration across engineering domains and construction of analysis tools. 

However, by using more abstract language, formal approaches are often too far from the common language of applications to be easily understood by domain experts and too cumbersome to use in engineering practice e.g., in air traffic control, battlespace management, health care systems, logistics, etc. More specific formalisms would be useful not only to domain experts, for describing their systems, but also to technical or modeling experts who must translate the system description into analysis models and maintain them, and to other stakeholders who may need to participate in validation

A Unified Theory for Simulation Formalisms

Conceptual modeling applies not only to the system of interest, but also to the analysis of that system. Our understanding of a system of interest evolves from our earliest concept of it as we gain deeper understanding through the development of system models. In the same way, our understanding of the analysis itself also may evolve as we better understand the system of interest and begin to elaborate our analysis model. 

To support conceptual modeling of simulation analysis, it seems reasonable that we should first have the ontology, semantics and syntax to formally define a simulation. Unlike the case of other analyses, such as optimization, this requirement has not yet been satisfied for simulation. Several structures have been studied as simulation formalisms; however, there is little consensus on the best approach. In the same way that various models of computation provide a basis for theory within computer science, considering various simulation formalisms will further the development of a robust theory of simulation.

Conceptual Model Development Processes

Model development is a challenging and highly intricate process, with many questions needing to be answered, as discussed in this section. Currently, answering these questions in a systematic and informed manner is hampered by a lack of formalized knowledge in the modeling domains and in modeling and simulation in general. Providing these would constrain development decisions and the design of development processes themselves, reducing uncertainty in model lifecycle engineering. The first subsection below gives background on model development processes and analyzes questions about them. The next two subsections (effectiveness and maturity) describe complementary approaches to reducing model defects introduced during the modeling process. 

These help avoid difficult and high-cost amendments of the model after it is finished. It is impossible to reduce model defects to zero during development, leading to the need for validation after the model is built, the results of which are also useful during model development, as addressed in the last subsection. Taken together, progress in these areas can significantly enhance the credibility of models by improving the quality of processes that produce them

Motivation and Research Approach.

The purpose of modeling and simulation is to improve our understanding of the behavior of systems: an executable model M of a system S together with an experiment E allows the experiment E to be applied to the model M to answer questions about S (Cellier 1991). Simulation is fundamentally an experiment on a model. A conceptual model C is the articulated description of S, upon which both M and E are developed. In science we seek to understand the behavior of natural systems; in engineering we seek to design systems that exhibit desired behavior. Because modeling and simulation facilities are themselves complex systems, it is seldom possible to go in one step from problem to solution. 

The processes involved in modeling and simulation require different degrees of human interaction, different computer resources, are based on heterogeneous, partly uncertain knowledge defined more or less formally, and involve different types of expertize and users. Data, knowledge, processes, and orchestration vary depending on the system to be modeled, the questions to be answered, and the users. In these processes different versions of models and artifacts are generated, that need to be put into relation to each other.

Effectiveness Measures

In a model-based engineering (MBE) approach, the development team evolves a set of models throughout the system lifecycle to support design, analysis, and verification of the system under development. These models are intended to express aggregate knowledge about the system to enable communications and shared understanding among the development team and other program stakeholders. Program leadership must continue to determine what knowledge must be acquired at any given point in the lifecycle to maximize the likelihood of program success. The type of knowledge to be acquired can help identify the kind of design and analysis models that should be further developed and updated.

Maturity Models.

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software development has played a key role to guarantee the success of software projects (Paulk, et al 1993). CMM and CMM Integration (CMMI) originated in software engineering, but have been applied to many other areas over the years (CMMI 2016a). However, in M&S, there is no such standardized and systematic assessment methodology developed for M&S processes. Some related research and development results can be used as references to establish the maturity model of M&S:

Validation

As simulation models become more complex, validation of conceptual models and understanding their role in the broader process of validation will continue to be important research areas. Of course, understanding validation of conceptual models is dependent on a precise definition of the terms “conceptual model” and “validation.” This section argues that a better consensus is needed on the first term, while a careful review of the validation literature will reveal the same for the second.

Conceptual Model Architecture and Services 

Many modeling paradigms exist for most kinds of domain problems, applied to knowledge from many engineering disciplines. Understanding complex systems requires integrating these into a common composable reasoning scheme (NATO Research and Technology Organization 2014). The software and the system engineering communities have overcome similar challenges using architecture frameworks (e.g. OMG’s Unified Architecture Framework (OMG 2016)), but modeling and simulation does not have a similarly mature integration framework. The first subsection below concerns architectures for conceptual modeling, while the second outlines infrastructure services needed to support those architectures.

Model Architecture

At the foundation of a modeling architecture should be a fundamental theory of models, to enable reusability, composability, and extensibility. What theory of models could support the implementation of a model architecture? An epistemic study of existing modeling and integration paradigms is necessary to develop a theory of models. This should include a taxonomy of modeling paradigms, semantics, syntaxes and their decomposition into primitives that operate under common rules across paradigms, to integrate them as required by complex systems. 

Services

The success of large-scale integration of knowledge required by complex systems fundamentally depends on modeling and simulation infrastructure services aggregated into platforms. These enable affordable solutions based on reusing domain-specific models and simulators, as well as integrating them into a multi-model co-simulation. For example, understanding vulnerabilities and resilience of complex engineered systems such as vehicles, manufacturing plants, or electric distribution networks requires the modeling and simulation-based analysis of not only the abstracted dynamics, but also some of the implementation details of networked embedded control systems. Systems of such complexity are too expensive to model and analyze without reuse and synergies between projects.

[bottomlouisficfest]

Addressing Some Drama

We prefer not to address drama publicly because this is fic fest and people are here for writing tips and fics, but since people are making misleading posts about this fest, we decided to address it.

Last year, an individual signed up to be both a writer and a beta in the fic fest, but later dropped out as a writer. They said they were able to continue on as a beta, so we said that was fine and removed them from the fest.

Many months later, we heard from a writer whose fic this person had beta-ed that they had insulted BL writers and the fest and had made this writer feel uncomfortable. We received explicit proof of this, and so the beta was blocked from @blouisparadise​​, as that blog is intended to be a safe space for BL writers. When the person found out they were blocked, they had a friend ask why, and we explained the situation. They later reached out through another friend to apologize, which we thanked them for, but chose not to unblock them from the blog in order to keep it as an encouraging space for BL writers.

To our surprise, the person went on to sign up for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest soon afterwards. We treated them as we do every other writer and welcomed them into the fest despite their previous disparaging comments.

As many of you know, we require all writers to submit a draft of their fic about a month and a half before final fics are due. This draft has no minimum word requirement - it can just be a couple of paragraphs if a writer wants - but it’s a good way to ensure that writers are working on their fics.

This draft deadline is articulated to writers through email and on Tumblr at the beginning of the fest and it is also mentioned as a requirement in the rules for the fest. One week before this deadline occurs, the mods send emails to each participant in the fest to remind them to submit their draft via email. We also posted numerous reminders on Tumblr and on Twitter.

After the draft deadline passed, we didn’t receive drafts from several writers and reached out to them through email. This is the email we sent:

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In the email above, we provided an additional week for these writers to either submit their draft OR simply reach out to us about an extension if needed.

We also mentioned on Tumblr and Twitter that we were sending this email, just in case some may not check their email frequently. Immediately, several writers sent their drafts, and some others let us know that they would be sending their later that week. However, there were a few that we did not hear from. We posted reminders throughout the week for those writers to please submit their draft OR to contact us about an extension, just as we did in the above email. We repeatedly reiterated that if writers chose to ignore our requests instead of reaching out, they would be removed from the fest.

When the one week draft extension passed, we had heard from most participants, but there were a few that did not get back to us. We sent them an email letting them know that they had been removed from the fest and that they would not be able to participate in future fests due to lack of communication, which is our only dealbreaker in terms of participation in the fest.

The person who we mentioned above had failed to turn in their draft or reach out to us on any platform, so we sent them an email to let them know that they had been removed from the fest. They sent us the following in response:

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At this point, we had posted or emailed at least 6 different reminders about the draft deadline and requested that writers simply reach out to us if they needed more time. We heard nothing back, not even a single line email letting us know that they needed more time, which we would’ve happily accepted just as we did for others. They only reached out after we let them know that they had been removed from the fest. We replied with the following:

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We were willing to accept their draft later that day despite the fact that they had failed to reach out to us repeatedly and had now missed two deadlines. We expected that we would receive their outline and we would pretend the entire removal hadn’t happened, but instead, we received the following email:

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This email and the accusations made it in have mysteriously been excluded from this person’s post about our response, which made it sound like we had sent a two-paragraph, rude response simply because they had tried to drop out, which is untrue. For most drop outs of the fest, we simply let them know that they’ve been removed and thank them for letting us know. However, for most drop outs from a fest, we aren’t insulted by the writers.

After we received this email, we were extremely frustrated and upset at being told that we somehow lacked compassion after we had done everything possible to ensure that this person and all our writers were aware of the draft deadline and that they should reach out if they need additional time.

We have no issues being accommodating - we have allowed numerous writers over the course of three years of the BLFF turn in their drafts late and turn in their fics late because we fully understand that fic writing is not everybody’s first priority and challenges come up in life. That’s why our only request, which we reiterate constantly, is that people simply REACH OUT TO US when they are struggling or won’t be able to keep to a deadline. We are human beings, we are not all-knowing, and it is impossible to run a fest that had 100+ initial sign ups when writers will not communicate with us. We cannot know that you need help or more time when you choose to stay silent about it.

This writer had countless opportunities and chose to wait until after they had been removed, and even then, we still gave them the chance to submit their draft, only to be told that we had no compassion. As you can also see, they chose to drop out of the fest and express that they did not want to work with any fest like ours because we apparently did not care for their well-being and treated their life circumstances as a burden, also untrue.

This was our response:

Most of this email is addressing their accusations about the mods of the fest lacking compassion. We do everything in our power to help every single writer get through our fest successfully. We send emails, we post writing tips, we reach out to writers to send reminders, we post reminders to both Tumblr and Twitter, we answer questions, and we check our email daily. We have run the fest for long enough now to realize that there will always be issues for some that prevent them from staying in the fest or that ensure they require extra time, and that’s something that we accept and accommodate as much as possible. It’s why our biggest requirement for the fest is simply communication.

We’re not sure why this individual chose to selectively post private emails today in order to paint a picture of a situation that was not accurate, though we can probably guess. We’re also not sure why others in response to that post are spreading lies, but perhaps jumping on the bandwagon of hate is more fun than acknowledging the truth of any situation.

As mods of this fest, we always try to strike a balance between having rules and deadlines in order to ensure things run smoothly, and providing accommodations for people when things come up that make it difficult for them to adhere to a deadline or stay in the fest. We do our best, and we’re sure we don’t always get it right, but we think we did here. We don’t understand how anyone can suggest that providing six reminders about a deadline and an additional week to either submit a draft or to reach out to discuss options lacks compassion. We also don’t understand how anyone can send that email to strangers as though we are bad or cruel people for simply expecting all writers in a fic fest to follow a few very simple, clearly articulated rules.

Human beings participate in fic fests, but human beings run them too. We do not have the time or ability to jump through hoops to track down writers for a fic fest. We’re sympathetic to everyone who signs up for a fest and then has to deal with personal struggles that interfere with their ability to write their fic or stick with the deadlines. That’s why we do everything we can to help those people, but when our attempts to reach out and our reminders are ignored, and when we are then insulted for providing yet another chance, we are not going to respond positively to that. Even less so when it’s from an individual who has a history of insulting the fest and the types of fics this fest includes.

We apologize if we upset anybody with our response, but we also hope that people will read through the full emails to see the full story and realize that all we have ever done with this fest is do the best we can. Since we cannot individually keep up with 90 people and their personal situations as we run the fest, the one ask that we have is that people communicate with us when it comes to any issues they may be having so we can try to help. When someone chooses not to keep up that bare minimum requirement of communication and we respond accordingly, we don’t think we deserve to be insulted for that. Some may disagree, but that’s our personal take.

If you got through this, thanks for listening. And now, back to fics! 😊