raavenb2619

Overall, yes. I find it helpful to think about sexual and romantic attraction as being things I don't experience. When I want to hug or cuddle with someone, I find it helpful to think about that as sensual attraction. However, aesthetic "feelings" don't really seem like attraction (at least as I experience them). My attraction usually leads me to pursue or want to pursue a specific course of action, but that's not the case with aesthetic. I might admire someone's appearance, but I won't go out of my way to look at them (or keep looking at them if they move out of my line of sight), just like how I might enjoy looking at a pretty picture but not act on any impulses or anything. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. When I'm friends with someone I have a squish on, there's definitely an attractive element, in that I'll consciously and unconsciously try to spend more time with them, text them more, etc. Sometimes this can coexist with sensual attraction but it doesn't have to, and when we're not interacting, I'll often times be wishing we were interacting more. When I have a squish on someone I'm not friends with, it's more of a feeling of wanting to be friends with them, but without any specific action. There's a sense of wanting to hang out, but it's different from a squish on a friend because, in this case, it's hanging out to have a friendship develop on its own, and if we don't end up hanging out by coincidence or if the friendship just doesn't develop, nothing really happens, I easily forget about the squish, and the feelings go away. Maybe the guarantee or lack of guarantee of a positive outcome if I follow though with certain actions, and the specificity of the actions in question? For a "feeling"/unfriended squish, I don't know for certain that I'll actually enjoy hanging out with the person in question, it's just a guess my brain decided to make. The action I'm interested in pursuing is similarly vague, just a nebulous desire to hang out with them somehow. For an "attraction"/friended squish, I do know that I'll enjoy their company, and I have specific things I want to do with them. (Or rather, there are lots of specific things that I know would make me happy, but as long as they involve interaction, I don't really care that much)

Amatonormativity comes up so often in English class, and I'm the only person who notices. I've never brought it up because I don't want to be the one to say "this passage that no one's talked about yet has some subtle but damaging rhetoric that shows up a lot in society", because I'd probably then have to talk about how it hurts me to a class of skeptical alloros, only to have my interpretation be dismissed. I tried bringing up a particular passage of blatantly arophobic rhetoric with a friend once, but he somehow got it in his head that the book was all about how love is bad and wouldn't listen as I explained that no, the book talked about how essential love is to humanity and emotional maturity. Eventually he apologized, but only after I made it clear how he had hurt me, and even then he didn't totally get it.

Is the beta okay to signal boost in other places like Tumblr?

Yeah, this is something I think about a lot (or rather, try to avoid because if I imagine it for myself in too much detail I have an existential crisis). Running a home is no easy task, and having to be entirely self-reliant for housing, food, money, medicine, etc is a scary prospect because when you get it wrong, there's no one you can 100% count on to help clean up your mess. I've thought about a QPR maybe being a solution, but like you said, it can trigger my romance repulsion if talked about in the wrong way. If that's the case, the only workable solution I can see is having a bunch of friends and a supportive community, but that solution is harder for me to imagine because it's lacking the ready-made template of a romantic relationship. It's entirely possible that the best thing we can do right now is talk about this, that this is a fear we'd like to see addressed in society. Maybe if we talk enough, people will listen.

In parts yes, and in parts no. If the narrative is so vague that we have a hard time seeing, we need to first understand who doesn't fit. (Fwiw, when I said "simply talking about a counter-narrative, 'Z people exist'", I should have really said "people who aren't X or Y" exist because the latter more readily identifies the narrative without automatically creating a new label). But it seems like, at least right now, we're focusing on the more concrete examples of people not fitting into narratives, and in that case, I agree that while making labels can help some people, it's also important to have the meta-discussion and interrogate the narratives in question. I'm glad that's the case (and to be clear, I didn't doubt that that was the case). I think the main sticking point for me, is that in your original post, you said "Where, specifically (specifically as in with links please)" and I think that people saying they've been harmed by some narrative, without links to where it's happened, should still get into this list and be given equal weight/consideration to harmful narratives that have links. That said, so far we've spent more time having a meta-meta conversation (that is, talking about how the meta-conversation should happen) than actually having the meta-conversation we want to happen, so I'd be interested to hear what other people think.

I understand the desire to have concrete examples of narratives that leave people out, and I think having those examples can be really useful at times, but I'm not convinced that they're absolutely necessary. One of the things that I gathered from the conversation is that it's not a case of the easily cited "if you're not X (or Y) then you're bad", but instead the more nebulous implication of "everyone is X (or Y)". I could be entirely wrong about that (and if so, ignore this entire paragraph), but in that case I think simply talking about a counter-narrative, "Z people exist" might be more productive than searching for specific examples of narratives. (I'm also wary because requiring evidence also feels a little like asking someone for "proof that they're oppressed" which aspec exclusionists on tumblr love to ask for) That said, I do think identifying the mainstream narratives and who's left out by them is still important, because then we can figure out why the narratives proliferate and hopefully raise awareness so that people stop repeating them.

A friend of mine asked me over text if I wanted to see Star Wars The Force Awakens on opening night. I was super excited until I realized that they might be asking me out, and then I got super uncomfortable and spent the next 45 minutes figuring out how to sneakily ask if there would be other friends there as well. But it still took me another 9-ish months to realize I was aro.

Hats off to the developers, while I’d still be interested in seeing a mobile app at some point, this is by far the best mobile web experience I’ve had in years, and it’s more usable than I thought was possible in a mobile web browser.

This might be out of scope for this thread, but are there plans for making a mobile app for arocalypse? Or is the mobile web experience good enough that we don't need a native app? (I'm new here, so I haven't had time to try this out on my phone)

Cats. Just because.

I'm raavenb2619, you might know me from my tumblr where I post queer memes. I'm aroace, non-binary, and trans (they/them pronouns). I've known I'm queer for a couple years now, but only recently (past few months) got involved in the queer community online.