sennkestra

1 hour ago, eatingcroutons said:

The post in question has been deleted by the OP. 

Sorry, are we looking at different posts? The post I was mentioning is very much still up (at least on my end), although it's possible it may not be showing for blocked users or something. Just want to make sure we're not actually cross-talking about different things.

I"m putting together some history notes for a post, and I was hoping to see if I could find anyone who might have ever used the NCAV (National Coalition for Aromantic Visibility) forums or chatrooms way back in the day (like, 2010 - 2015ish). I'm curious about whether the chat rooms and forum were actually very active, and for how long, since that information isn't really preserved in the wayback machine archives.

I'm also interested in chatting with anyone who may have used the site in other ways at the time (even if just to learn a little more about aromanticism).

If this sounds like you, please let me know!

On 12/15/2019 at 4:32 AM, eatingcroutons said:

 

 

Mate I can't help you with that one, they blocked me ages ago for enjoying Impure Fiction. But if you take issue with their posts on Tumblr, have you considered contacting them directly, rather than posting essays on different platforms entirely? You ask, "What are we to make of that?" but nobody on these forums can read their mind any more than you can. 

Several of us have actually already reached out on tumblr. It remains to be seen if that will influence their behavior at all in the future (they haven't made any changes to the current post in question).

But I've also seen similar sentiments over and over from more than one source, so I think it's still worth talking about on a community level so that other future users can make note of this and know what bad habits to avoid in their own writing, because spreading harmful mistruths out of ignorance can still cause harm. Which is why posts like this aim to get out ahead of that ignorance.

(Also, fun fact - there were actually some distinct aro communities forming elsewhere around the same time! That's just not where these terms came from. Someday I'll get around to making a more detailed post about that, because that's something even a lot of more history minded people may not have realized)

This might be a bit late for your project, but the term "amatonormativity" itself was coined by the academic Elizabeth Brake, so any of her writing would be a good place to start!

The new Carnival of Aros call for submissions is up!
 

Quote

 

As November rolls around and eventually leads into December, we in the US have now entered the official Holiday Season, with giant sales and advertisements everywhere promising the perfect gifts for your loved ones, and kids everywhere writing out their wishlists for Santa Claus. On a less commercial level, it’s a time when many people start looking for ways to give back to their families, friends, and communities, through gift-giving and philanthropy and more. 

In the spirit of the season, I wanted to start building a wishlist of our own for aro communities: what kind of community spaces and resources do you want to see more of, as an aro-spec person?

That’s why for this November Carnival of Aros, I’m proposing a theme of “Aro Community Wishlists” – tell us more about what’s on your own wishlist for the aro community!

 

Click here to view the full call for submissions >>

Hey all - 

Some of the local aro aces in my local ace group have been talking about trying to put something together for AroSpec Awareness Week in February, but ideally we'd like to partner with some aro activists who aren't so tied up in the ace community, in order to prevent it from being all aro aces and no other aro perspectives. Is anyone here aro, in the SF Bay Area, and interested in dipping their toes into activism or planning of any kind? Or do you know anyone who might be?

While we're at it we'd also be interested in just putting together something casual like facebook group or discord chat or mailing list or something for aros in the SF bay area if it seems like there'd be any interest.

The new call for submissions for the June edition of the carnival of aros is up, on the theme of "Imagine"! You can view the full call for submissions here.

From the host:

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The theme I chose for this month is “Imagine”. I went with this because we all know how frustrating the present is, and we spend a lot of timing criticizing and venting about it, so I thought we could use some time to imagine a better, happier world. A world without amatonormativity, where we aros can feel comfortable.

So some prompts I have for this are:
–If you want to be personal, what do you imagine your ideal life looking like? Who are you living with, if anyone? What do your friendships look like? How are you involved in your community(ies)?
–If you want to speak broadly, what’s something that doesn’t currently exist but that you need/want, and/or that you think would help other people?
–What assumptions and norms would disappear? How would that affect people’s interactions with each other?
–Instead of the pressure to enter monogamous marriages, how would society make other possibilities viable?
–How would the laws be different?
–How would entertainment media (and fandoms) be different?
–How would schools be different?
–How would growing up be different?
–How would lgbtq+ solidarity be different?
–Talk about any other aspect of life that could change without amatonormativity

You can build on an idea that’s already been discussed, or this could be your chance to put out a new idea you haven’t talked about before. Whatever the thought is, big or small, simple or complicated, concrete or general, personal or wide-reaching, (even realistic or speculative!), if it’s a vision of how life or the world could be, share it! I think we could all use some time to indulge in picturing a less stressful environment.

For more information, and instructions on how to post, see the original post.

.

It's a bit late, but since aromantic ruminations was unable to complete the month-end masterpost, we've gone ahead and compiled all the posts we could find. Read them all here!

On 4/27/2019 at 1:21 AM, Magni said:

Hmm I would've wanted to add more options for things...on one hand, stuff like non-SAM aro and also like....aplatonic-spectrum or nonamorous or partnering or oriented/angled aroace, etc.  But yeah, polls are good! Would be nice to find out more regarding demographics and stuff.  It would be nice to do a "census" at some point, but that requires....time, energy, and organization.

I have a discord server for aro survey stuff.....which isn't particularly active, but it does generally have people who have interest in doing aro surveys and stuff.  I don't want to post link publicly per ce, but if you're interested in joining you can PM me and I can invite you. (this is general/plural "you" btw).

Yeah, I think the options need to be more thought out for future polls (I just winged this one based on responses from the ace census), but there is no foundational research to work from so...hopefully this thread can help whoever makes the next, not so half-assed, survey!

Also, I would be interested in joining the discord server! - I'll probably send you a PM later today. I don't know if I'll be able to contribute to actually getting anything going (I just recently stepped down from the ace survey team because I have way too many projects and I am really really not supposed to be picking up more right now...even if I want to...) but I'm happy to give advice or just chatter and do some casual brainstorming.

On 4/27/2019 at 12:50 PM, Coyote said:

For anyone else who's thought about it -- I also would recommend contacting the Ace Census team for guidance in getting the ball rolling. As their guide to the data [pdf] indicates, they've had a lot little of hiccups over the years in survey design that I think an aro census team could learn from.

I'm mostly a former member of the team now, but I'm happy to share advice from the sections I worked on :). In addition, on a more practical matter, the ace census has at least a little data on aro labels and how frequently they are used (at least in our target userbase) which could be useful as background info when building any aro specific surveys. 

If you want name suggestions, "sex and sexuality" is something that could be used to indicate that it's more about the sexual behavior/feelings aspect than the identity aspect (as opposed to say, sexuality and gender or orientations and gender or sexual and gender identities etc. As names for the current forum).

For example http://www.scarleteen.com/bb/ (although I don't think it makes sense to go quite so granular here as it is already a smaller forum)

On another note, this doesn't solve most of the wider issue at all but could address one specific slice - when I was back on AVEN, there was at one point a stickied "TMI Thread" that was an open thread for any and all explicit topics that one might want to discuss (often sexual or genital related, but sometimes other things like explicit descriptions of weird medical issues or whatever.) It was a great place for having frank discussions about things like, say, vaginal secretions or masturbation techniques or frustration about vaginismus or other things that other users may not have wanted to see un-warned-for in other general threads.

Super excited for this! 

I didn't see any other polls like this (at least in the last couple months I looked at), so I'm curious - how does everyone here on arocalypse identify? 

It's nearly impossible to find formal research on the demographics of various aro communities, or even informal community forum polls like this, so I'm curious to see how common various labels are here. (I'd also be curious how it compares to the demographics of other aro spaces at some point, but that's another project for another time).

Also, I'm sure I forgot some labels, so if there's something not listed in the poll feel free to comment below! This is a very informal half-assed poll but it's a question that definitely deserves more thorough research in the future, and commentary now could help lead design in the future.

[Edit: also, I apparently can't edit the poll, so let's just pretend I spelled quoiromantic correctly]

On 4/22/2019 at 9:53 AM, Mark said:

I would be rather more comfortable with this project had a majority aro allo leadership.

On 4/22/2019 at 12:55 PM, bydontost said:

Understandable, however at the moment we don't have a majority of aro allo leadership and identity was a secondary criterion when picking members.

Can I ask why you think that an umbrella aromantic organization should necessarily seek majority "aro allo" leadership (as opposed to say, parity or just letting things fall based on who volunteers?) I'm familiar with all the arguments and reasons why it's important to have both ace and non-ace aro representation (as well as representation from those in the grey-areas in between!  Let's not forget that seeing "allo vs. ace" as a binary in itself can cause harm), and I don't think there's anything bad with a hypothetical majority-aro-allo group in and of itself, but I also don't think that necessarily translates to "more allos than aces is obviously better" and I think it's important to talk about why that's being suggested instead of taking it as a given,

Aromantic Ruminations is hosting this month’s Carnival, on the topic of “Coming Out and/ or Being Out as Aromantic Spectrum”.

View the official call for submissions here >>

Re: AAN as a proposal - how do you feel about acronyms that sneak in a few extra letters, like AroAN for Aromantic Advocacy Network, for example.

That gives you more acronym options without having to add in more words that can start to feel a little redundant, especially since I feel like advocacy already covers a lot of recognition and education efforts.

Alternatively, if you leave the S for Spectrum in, while ASAN is taken, other options like ASAC (arospec advocacy coalition, center) are more available.

(On a side note, ACURE is my current shampoo brand, so that one might be a little confusing lol)

The acronym sounds nice as an acronym, but it feels a little wordy in the full expanded form. Might need to think a bit to find an acronym that isn't taken yet though so I don't know if I can necessarily do any better though.

(It looks like ANREA isn't used for anything except obscure shipping policy, though, so that's a plus in it's favor)

On the other hand, for the domain name specifically, I'd recommend going for a full word or two rather than an acronym - it makes it more obvious what your site is and is also more advantageous for SEO and making it easy for people to remember you. (This is part of why AVEN, for example, is asexuality.org and not aven.org). You can still use the acronym elsewhere.

Aromantic.org (which used to be the National Coalition for Aromantic Visibility) looks like it's been snapped up and is likely too pricy to buy back, but maybe consider something like aromanticnetwork.org or another more descriptive url?

-aroadvocacy.org

-aromanticadvocacy.org

-aromanticnetwork.org

-aronetwork.org

(Aromantic is more clear but aro is more concise so that could go either way. I also haven't checked availability for any of these).

I also had some thoughts about that recently here: https://nextstepcake.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/the-chance-to-be-the-change-you-want-to-see/

On a side note, if you need or are open to monetary donations for supporting initial domain or hosting costs, please let me know! I've been wishing someone would set up something like this but didn't have the time do it myself, so I'd like to support in the ways that I can!

Is there any kind of twitter or other offsite location where communications can be posted when the site is down like it was a while ago? I'm not sure if there are some existing that I just don't know about.

I used to use AVEN back when it was having a lot of server problems, and having a designated offsite twitter and "backup site" that we could check really helped with peace of mind when knowing that site downtime was just temporary technical issues that would be resolved in a few days as opposed to the end of the site forever. (Especially considering the history of ace and aro forums that do just disappear into the void without notice)

This is a question for whoever currently manages the non-forum parts of arocalypse - 

When I was looking up aro resources pages a few weeks ago, I accidentally stumbled upon the Arocalypse 101 page section, which I had no idea even existed until now. However, I also noticed that these pages aren't accessible from the main arocalypse site (going to arocalypse.com redirects straight to the forums, which have no mention of the 101 pages that I can find) - so you have to kind of know they already exist to find them. 

Does anyone know whether these pages are still active, or are they more just a historical artifactand/or something still under contruction? 

Or, for my actual question, should I avoid including these arocalypse 101 pages in resource lists for now? I'm not sure if they were hidden for a reason or if it was just an accident of site remodeling over time

I tried using the contact form in that section but didn't get a response, which is part of what makes me wonder if they may just be archived pages that don't have up to date information or functionality. 

1 hour ago, bananaslug said:

I think including the coming out of aro celebrates like Moses Sumney might also be good

Oh, yes, thank you for the reminder! I got so distracted looking up fictional aros that I completely forgot to think about non-fictional aros....

Does anyone know if there are any existing projects that have created / are aiming to create any kind of aro history timelines? 

I'm interested in maybe, eventually creating some kind of timeline / reference page with some tidbits of aro history but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to, so I'm wondering if anyone knows of anything pre-existing, or if there's anyone already working on something like this that would be interested in some help.

Specifically, the kinds of things I'm thinking to include are:

• Timelines of various attempts at aro forums, including when they were founded and when they collapsed (including things like the [ace] aromantic forum-motion forum, aroplane, the first arocalypse, the second (current) arocalypse, the AVEN a/romantic orientation subforum and it's false starts, etc.) especially with notes on which were aro ace specific and which were general aro.
• The beginnings (and ends) of various aro activist efforts and resource pages (like ASAW, the now defunct Coalition for Aromantic Visibility,  the aromantic wiki, etc.)
• Outlines of the three main aro flag proposals and when they mostly saw use
• The evolution of various aro community and related vocabulary, like "aromantic", "grayromantic", "gray-aromantic", "qoiromantic", "squish", "queerplatonic", etc.
• When and where aro characters have appeared in mainstream media (jughead, that one dude from the cassandra clare books)
• [possibly] early media coverage of aromanticism, if it seems notable, and misc. things like aromantic getting added to the OED

I have access to most of the sources needed for a lot of this info already, the tricky part is just getting it all organized and figuring out how to work it into something for people to actually use and understand. Also, if it sounds like I've forgotten some category of events or spaces that you think would be interesting to include, please let me know!

Other things that I'm not as familiar with, however, that I'd be especially interested in learning about if anyone would be willing to share their notes:

• Any influential aromantic pages or groups on facebook, reddit, twitter, or other non-tumblr or wordpress social media (I know absolutely nothing about what is or isn't going on on facebook in particular)
• Any non-english language activity
• Explicit canon representation of aro characters besides bojack and rafael (I suspect there have been some webcomic and YA novel characters by now, but I don't follow either of those very closely. Also, does anyone know if Bojack has any aromantic characters? I know they named drop the word but not sure if they ever link it to any specific characters, and I don't really want to actually watch the whole show)

Also, if anyone has questions about aromantic history, or is intrigued by any of the mentions above and would like a link or to learn more, feel free to post a comment here and I'll try to see if I can answer them (though I might be slow) - any thing that gets me motivated to work on this more is good.