Momo

Well, since this conversation seems to be ongoing... it's worth mentioning that most people seem to be misusing spectrum when what they mean (at least in their own head) is a gradient. Most people seem to be using spectrum to mean that there are two opposing things with some mixture in the middle, say aromantic <=> romantic with some various middle ground like greyro, etc.

That's not what a spectrum actually is.

A spectrum is a set of values from a range of possible values. I've seen this explained really well in autistic spaces and it may be worth taking some inspiration from. See for example this article: https://neuroclastic.com/2019/05/04/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/

In this sense, an aro spectrum (or romantic spectrum, depending on how you want to phrase it), an ace spectrum (or sexuality spectrum, again depending on phrasing), etc all make sense. Including either the wider or narrower definition of an a-spectrum.

14 minutes ago, time-is-ticking said:

i feel like gender identity is a bit different than being aro and/or ace spec, it's not about attraction which i'd argue the aromantic and asexual spectrums are about. however, i'm very open to the idea that i might be wrong in thinking this.

Being agender is at least as similar to being aro as being ace is. For me, at least, I experience my agenderness almost exactly the same as I experience my aroness - a confusion about the concept in general. As opposed to my aceness, which I understand fully but just am not into.

15 hours ago, nonmerci said:

but do agenders actually feel they belong in the aspec community?

Honestly? I don't feel like this is up to us (agender people). If the term was created as a grouping of ace and aro experiences then we shouldn't come in and barge into that. If it was created as a way of grouping people who feel like some part of their identity is defined by a "no thanks" then we're already included. Personally, from my experience, the former is the truth not the latter.

5 hours ago, sajastar said:

Also I'm ADHD and I love to chat about ADHDer life! (You may have heard of "triple A": agender, aromantic, asexual--I'm quadruple A ).

Yeeees, collect all the A's... together we shall rule the world! *ahem* Err, welcome to the forum from another quad-A.

1 hour ago, Lokiana said:

Just a question for y'all, and this is slightly off topic so pardon me: do you consider agender people to be on the a-spec? I've heard conflicting answers and am curious what y'all's thoughts are.

I am also curious about this. I hadn't heard of this as a thing before this thread.

2 hours ago, LauraG said:

Yeah, I kind of hate when people paraphrase? Because then it's hard to know yourself whether they're misinterpreting people or whether they have a point. For example, I know @Jot-Aro Kujo has gotten upset about how people bring up shared ace & aro history before, and my first instinct was that those complaints were talking about people making corrections when others make inaccurate claims about the history of certain terms (*cough* queerplatonic), until I encountered someone who just brought up that allo aros wouldn't have the words to talk about themselves without aces just at the mere mention of an allo aro person, and I was like "wait, wtf this happens this way? that's messed up" and realized that my interpretations of Alex's paraphrasing were probably inaccurate.

Echoing this. Paraphrasing is, at best, just adding an extra layer of bias on everything. At worst, it can completely rewrite and change the meaning of what was said.

Hi there!

Finding out later in life can definitely be hard. Personally, I'm 32 and only figured it out at around 29 - effectively ending a 7 year relationship on the spot. I'd definitely encourage you to join up to the forum fully and have a bit of a poke around. There's some good people here.

34 minutes ago, bananaslug said:

I'm finding that the Grammarly chrome extension is no longer working when I try to use it on the forum. Has anyone else been having issues with their extensions working sense the server transfer?

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Grammarly and CKEditor do not play well, and we received several bug reports about the same issue(s) related to how Grammarly modifies the DOM within an editor. In short = yes, there was an issue (or a couple of very related issues), and there was no way for us to resolve this outside of disabling Grammarly in the editor.

It may return when we reach a point where we can upgrade to CKEditor 5. It is my understanding that the CKEditor devs and the Grammarly devs are working together on maximum compatibility, but won't be backporting that to CKEditor 4.

-- https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/452728-grammarly-will-it-come-back-to-ips/?tab=comments#comment-2791092

Looks like this is unavailable indefinitely due to incompatibilities. Sorry! But on the upside, it should only be Grammarly that's affected.

Ahem! I guess this is me now.

You can now add your own images to posts. As of right now, the current limits are as follows:

• 300KB per post
• 10MB per user

If you start running up against the per user limit, you can view where you have posted images previously and remove some of them from your previous posts by going to "My Attachments" in the drop down menu at the top right of the screen.

Embedding images has always been a bit funky but should still work as well as it used to:

In an effort to streamline the profile a little, reduce confusion and generally make things better for everyone the follow changes to profile fields have been made:

1. The Romanticism profile field has been renamed to simply Orientation.
2. The Sexuality field has been hidden from everyone but yourself so you can just copy and paste that information into the Orientation field if you wish. The Sexuality field will be removed completely in the coming weeks.
3. Feel free to include as much or as little information as you feel relevant in the new Orientation field.

This change has been made to make things easier. New people felt the need to include both when sometimes they weren't relevant and others didn't have the fields they needed to fully express themselves. I think this change puts everyone in a better position.

16 minutes ago, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

Yeah, sometimes people legitimately do say things that are homophobic or sex-shamey, and that needs to be addressed. So, how can this be addressed in a respectful way, and in a way that won't instantly make aces feel nervous due to past experiences with aphobes?

2 hours ago, Momo said:

Criticising the meme on it's own merits and saying "this shouldn't exist" is very different to saying "this isn't aro" because while it's mostly specific to aroaces, aroaces are part of the aro community too.

I think I can summarise my previous comment better and it may give you a better guideline: your arguments should be centered around bringing the community together and explaining why things are problematic or hurtful rather than trying to divide the community and push problematic things out of your sphere so you don't have to see them.

3 minutes ago, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

I guess, what really bothered me about it was that the OP tagged it as simply "#aro" "#aromantic" "#aromantic memes", implying that it was an experience that would be relatable to all aros.

I'm curious - are you of the opinion then that all things labelled as aro must apply to all aros? That feels... overbearing. I'd even go so far as to say impossible. Individual experience is too diverse for all things to be relatable to all people in a given group.

6 minutes ago, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

What would you say should be done regarding things such as the aforementioned "Attraction is cancelled" meme?

With regard to this meme in particular, "x is cancelled" is generally a hamfisted attempt to make any point and I'm not a fan. Frankly, I don't believe this meme should be anywhere and I say that as an aroace - the primary audience for it - even if I do sometimes identify with the sentiment personally. That's different to saying it shouldn't be in #aro though. Criticising the meme on it's own merits and saying "this shouldn't exist" is very different to saying "this isn't aro" because while it's mostly specific to aroaces, aroaces are part of the aro community too. Should things only be tagged with the most specific things you can ever think of?

I have enabled the option for people to hide their own posts. Note that moderators can still see your posts even when hidden to prevent abuse - this isn't a delete option.

I'm creating this thread as a notification thread that people can follow for information on changes made to the forum. This thread will remain locked so that people can follow this and not get chatter. If you have questions about any of the announcements here then please start a new thread in Site Comments.

The current staff can now always be found at the following link which is also under "Other links" in the menu: https://www.arocalypse.com/staff/

As for who it currently is, I'm the only permanent staff member. The current moderators are all currently considered interim moderators but that could change - that said, they still have my full support.

That sounds like a joke in pretty poor taste, yeah. I'm sure your friend meant well, but there's so many layers to unpack there.

1. The implication that because you're aromantic that means that other people's love is less somehow (giving love a bad name generally)

2. The implication that because you're aromantic that your love is less somehow (otherwise why would it be giving love a bad name?)

3. That love implies romance and the fact you're aromantic is even relevant.

Probably some other things I've missed. But if you're upset about it, there's definitely reason to be and it might be good to talk to your friend about it. But most likely it was just a bad drunk joke that they said without thinking.

2 minutes ago, Coyote said:

 

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That said, that also isn't how I parse this list either. I parse this list as a shorthand for "alloace, aroallo, and aroace".

 

...Okay, in that case, I will say this: that entails interpreting "ace" by itself as implicitly meaning "alloromantic ace," and I want people to please... not... do that.

I agree, it's not a great way of looking at it, but I still feel like it'd go some way to explaining the thought process behind such a list of identities in lieu of actually having someone to ask what they meant.

1 hour ago, Coyote said:

In a bunch of cases, I've seen people rattling off a string of categories in the from of "aces, aros, and aro aces" -- this would be an example of treating "aces" and "aros" as if those categories don't already include aro aces, which is just baffling.

This might be a uniquely Tumblr thing, but this isn't how I would have read this. A similar list would be transgender, nonbinary and gender diverse. Just because someone fits into one of those categories doesn't imply they don't fit into the rest. That said, that also isn't how I parse this list either. I parse this list as a shorthand for "alloace, aroallo, and aroace".

2 hours ago, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

you saw people who made mistakes- Including people who likely did so by accident- And instead of attempting to resolve the situation by speaking to them directly, you took their words out of context and used them on a different platform as an example of People In The Aro Community Doing Bad Things™ without even notifying them that you were doing so, despite many of those people being actual users on this site. That's... Pretty uncool. It's one thing to say "Yeah, this person said this thing and I talked to them about it and they ignored me", it's another thing entirely to just go "This person said this thing" and leave it at that without trying to talk to them first.

I'm going to preface this with a disclaimer: I am very aware that I can also be guilty of this - I feel we all can be. That said, I would like to encourage everyone to take this to heart. Talk to people if something is upsetting you.

1 hour ago, LauraG said:

I didn't reach out to both of the people I quoted up there, mostly because best case scenario I didn't think they'd listen to me... worst case I'd get hate mail...

I can't address other platforms and most of the links shared so far have been to Tumblr, but I do want to say that if this happens within this forum then please reach out to one of the staff. We definitely don't want this sort of behaviour on the forums and there are things we can do to help.

6 minutes ago, running.tally said:

It's tough because I feel like if communal living was more acceptable in the society I live in, I'd be much happier as an aro.

I wish communal living was more widely accepted in general. As someone classified as disabled by a lot of people, living on my own just isn't really feasible. But whenever I mention that I live with a woman (I'm an AMAB enby) I get Looks. Those looks only intensify if I say we used to date (before I realised I was aro).

1 hour ago, Adriano said:

I can't see a difference between hug and cuddle in english(it's not my own language).

A hug is a once-off thing that only takes a few seconds and is typically done standing up, though not always. A cuddle is longer, minutes or hours and is often done on some piece of furniture like a bed or couch and isn't necessarily face to face, it can be side to side as well.

Welcome!

Well, I tried to include a picture of a manul but apparently the image embedding is still broken. But welcome anyway! Hope you enjoy your stay.

As soon as I go to the effort of doing a workaround, my host gets back to me! Emails should be at 100% now.

Emails are using a temporary workaround to get them working. There may be some issues in the short term but all emails that should have gone out are now being retried and I will be keeping an eye on things.

@Magni Looks like internal embeds are working now and external embeds are degrading to just regular links without breaking the server.

Oh, I was testing it with Imgur which isn't on the official list but apparently does embed inside the editor:

Links from the following sites are supported: College Humor, Coub, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, Funny Or Die, Gfycat, Google Maps, Hulu, Instagram, ReverbNation, Screencast.com, SmugMug, SoundCloud, Spotify, TED, Twitch, Twitter, Ustream, Vimeo, Vine, Wistia, YouTube, and internal links to content within the community.

Testing Gfycat:

https://gfycat.com/hollowdigitalcorydorascatfish-kittens-cats-cute

Well, so much for that. At the very least the server isn't falling over completely now.