Apathetic Echidna

I hope your family already know the colours of the flags then! Just for a personal thing I painted a bookmark with the flag colours and different symbols yet no one, not a single person, has recognised it, though it would be cool if they did...in a future when I can read in a public space with other people present not having to social distance -_- I know some people subtly come out by doing a pronoun flip when asked about a relationship and it made me really want to use the phrase 'I'm in a non-romantic relationship with..*fill in blank space*' as a sort of no-romo call out

I wrote something! though it seems to have turned into a rambling wall of text: https://mesotablar.dreamwidth.org/12317.html and with this post I break my hilarious post count of 666

This This This. I'm relaxed about fandoms because it is basically peoples' hobbies, or they use it as a way to improve their writing skills like essays you have to do in school. However when professionals get praised by the masses for 'representation' when it is clearly not ? ?(we have no poop emoji?) I find being really strict about what I watch/ read is the only way I can deal with it. Mostly I avoid fandoms if I love the canon.

Thank goodness someone else got a low purity score! The explanation for purity is confusing me too.....well I guess I am just not willing to bend with the crowd on stupid taboos? But I don't get why loyalty is so low in many of us...... Your scores: Care 81% Loyalty 28% Fairness 58% Authority 39% Purity 19% Liberty 47% Your strongest moral foundation is Care. Your morality is closest to that of a Left-Liberal.

Hello, Yes, sensual attraction can be a whole other entity from sexual and romantic, for me it is certainly present sometimes. It is all very complicated, and in your teen years your hormones do drive things a bit differently that they will do for the rest of your life. Just know you certainly aren't alone and that sensual attraction doesn't necessarily effect you being ace/aro, unless you are like me when it does. I'm not very helpful or reassuring am I? Sorry!

Welcome! Yeah, there can be a lot of pressure and expectation put on you regarding a potential romantic future, so coming to terms with being different from that can be hard. I hope you find some interesting things and support here while you are questioning

Generally when I say (though realistically I write it much more often) a-spectrum it is not in regards to a specific individual but rather the communities or the groups of labels, and really I think it covers any of the a- prefixes, aromantic/asexual/agender being the most common, and as a 'spectrum' term it also includes all the grey- and demi- prefixes and their associated sub-labels. If someone is using it as their orientation label I will accept it at face value that the term is what they believe best describes their experience, which of course to be really understood has to be explained by the individual, which leads to more variety of meaning in this case. But all of this depends on the context of the conversation it is used in. As long as it is clear whether someone is talking about their orientation (individual level) or the community (population level) when they use the word a-spectrum I don't see a problem with it being both a very broad term and a specific individual term. (but I also try to be very open and accepting so I'm not all that bothered by much...I'm lexiconically lazy) Personally I think it is very handy having a very broad group name to refer to the people who's orientations are some sort of 'Nope' (excuse the crude generalisation) but the fact it is a homonym is not so great. EDIT 27/05/2020 If you are curious about this comment where I mention aro, ace and agender being a-spectrum that was a flow on thought from a vicious private conversation on the meaning of the A in LGBTQIAP+. I brought the idea of triple A people (aro/ace/agender) and the A-spectrum to that conversation and that is what was riding my thoughts when I wrote that. Then I never came back and explained anything because there were 2 death in my family and the Australian bushfires and I couldn't deal with heavy conversations then I forgot I ever wrote it. But no, I don't think agender is assumed to be a-spectrum. It may be linked for some people in how they experience things, and now arogender is bringing gender into the previously sexual/romantic a-spectrum anyway. Sorry for any problems I caused.

maybe having more boxes being more specific is not the way...maybe just replace 'sexuality' with 'orientation' or some other similar word. I do think 'Romanticism is useful being separate but then there are all the people who do not separate....maybe get rid of 'Romanticism' and 'Sexuality' altogether and just have one box for whatever people choose to use in whatever way they choose to label their orientation. @Coyote yeah, we talked about how I made my boxes into a pyramid shape ? but I realise now that if I pass 999 posts the shape will be messed up. And the system as it is now is structured to support those who separate their sexuality and romanticism, with no mixing or other shared augmentation types of things.

Can I ask what a flamel is? The only thing I know it as is Nicholas Flamel.... I have earrings (just the boring standard kind), but I can't wear hoops because I got them done with a gun when I was 12 or something and one of the holes is crooked....which makes hoops look weird. I really wanted a labret or a vertical labret but it just never seemed to come together (as I need permission from my doctor, or I was going overseas, or my work wouldn't allow facial piercings, or I freaked out when a friend's cheek piercing became infected, and then the piercing parlour I wanted to use closed down....) I will eventually get one....maybe

No more humans/people Ishtar!

I really need to check back here more often.... Okay, maybe it is because I am spending time in A-spec centred spaces but MOGAI as it has been used semi-recently seemed to exclude ace and aro. So I have been hearing it as 'anything that isn't L, G, B, T or A'. MOGAI covering queer, spectrum terms, and microlabels. But yes, I should have been clearer when I wrote my comment before.

I think quite a few of the labels in the glossaries were created as linguistic exercises (so the people who might use them are hypothetical to the label creator) or the simple need for questioning people to get their most specific idea across, which has led to many terms that are variations on a theme. Questioning people can sometimes be laser focused. I know that I had to find something super specific before I was willing to relax more into greysexual. I know I said it somewhere before but Cupioromantic is used by a few people for a while before they get a better understanding of Aromantic possibilities (like not all aromantics are romance repulsed relationship haters*). I do agree with what @Lokiana says. I think people should feel free to adopt labels and let them go, but should not be told to do so by other people (those people who would declare things 'dated' or 'too small'). On another point I always thought 'MOGAI' was a warning in of itself. When something is 'micro' surely people realise that there probably aren't many people out there, let alone an active community. I think what needs more clarification is the diversity of the grey- umbrella and that MOGAI probably means there are labels out there that are same-same-but-different. Rather than letting labels 'die' in prompted obscurity it might be better to reform glossaries to a 'Major Labels' and a 'MOGAI Labels' section, with the MOGAI labels being a sort of ....use at your own risk of not finding a community specific to this thing. *yes, someone said to me not long ago: "Aromantic? that is where you hate everyone and want to be alone all your life."

Yeah, this would come under specificity. People are less happy with having a broad/vague label. Maybe the internet has changed the dynamic and subject but I don't think it is new to this era. An example of it happening in the past would be people defining themselves by their home-town or state rather than their country, like the wonderful old lady I met when I was a kid: Someone asked her if she was from America and she said 'No. I'm from Texas'. "Texan" was much more important than "American" to her. @Coyote I couldn't find the link to support my hobby comment as it was from Tumblr, but basically someone was dissecting Latin and French usages to create a label and they ended the post with something like '..and now it is here I hope someone out there finds it useful' Some links: Here is the book, which has always been posted in the Shitposting category, and the description was always that it is a satire (however the author has had to put more warnings of its fictional content because people kept stealing their work and treating it as serious/public property (<which is specifically against the rules of the site)) https://www.wattpad.com/341462536-complete-list-of-genders-the-complete-list-of-all This is (one of the many) places flags are being churned out. They do requests, so there is some need, but it seems those are on hold while they try to document new flags for new labels. As you can see in the comments section they have gotten a lot of hate recently for making a gender flag for Autigender which was taken straight from JotaroKissesDolphin's satiric book. https://www.deviantart.com/pride-flags/ and maybe just have a look at some of the other flags they have given to already existing labels (pride-flags only does flags, they don't make the labels) https://www.deviantart.com/pride-flags/art/Arogender-749624700 https://www.deviantart.com/pride-flags/art/Vixengender-749229354 https://www.deviantart.com/pride-flags/art/Nebulagender-748751971 (I think this one is legit pretty, but as art, not as a pride flag) https://www.deviantart.com/pride-flags/art/Sodagender-751775285 https://www.deviantart.com/pride-flags/art/Cake-Gender-Cakegender-751776538 https://www.deviantart.com/pride-flags/art/Icecream-Gender-Icecreamgender-751776754 and those flags are all mixed in with bigender and lesbian and aromantic flags. *sarcasm*and don't you just love a gender that melts given the same attention as the trans flags*sarcasm* >>EDIT: Well from what you have replied to this comment I guess I was too close to the Hannibal fandom when it went nuclear to actually take anything food related seriously any more. For me it is a whole toxic zone.

I'm one of the ones who doesn't have squishes. I'm friendly to people and if they are friendly back then we have a chance at friendship but I don't understand the 'want to be friends' draw people talk about. Friendships just happen with work, I don't have a particular target to aim at. And once you are friends with someone there is an investment, and so a drive to continue the friendship ~even when the friendship turns toxic it can be hard to break the bond.

Getting to the root of the issue, could it just be that for some parts of the internet it has become normalised to make up words and flags. I know there are some 'pride' flags that are based off orientations created for a work of fiction that may or may not have anthropomorphic characters (I avoided reading it because if it isn't anthropomorphic then it is gonna be pseudo-bestiality, so I just wanted to avoid it). I know that in my own experience I rejected the asexual term because I couldn't connect with any experiences in the community back in 2007, and ultimately I think it is the experiences rather than the dry, simplified dictionary explanation which people use to find labels for themselves BUT when they can't find shared experiences they make something up. Maybe it all started because the communities started small and skewed towards people who felt most different/alienated. So the labels have sprouted like mushrooms as the communities move from being extreme-end to more mainstream as they embrace more varied people and experiences. Now people are just making up labels (and flags) because they find it an enjoyable hobby or something, and do it all on the expectation that someone out there 'might' need it because 3 or 5 or 10 years ago there was a need for different or broader terms. The best solution would be to pop the label and flag producing pimples on the internet and advocate the broader understandings of terms like grey- Seriously, I do think we already have all the labels we could possibly ever need, and even now many of them severely overlap. I say all of this, but even I use a microlabel sometimes. I have searched. Apparently only 2 people use it, me included. I have also seen 5 or 6 people questioning and thinking it might fit them only to be shut down (fairly brutally in some cases) but 'well-meaning' people trying to reduce the usage of microlabels. It is all a bit of a mess. If we could tuck it all under the carpet of grey- or aspec it would be much tidier, but people would have to search much harder to find shared experiences because there wouldn't be specific terms they could put in a search bar to pinpoint people who may be the same as them. (edit: I can give links later, if you want them)

Did a bit of searching after you gave the name and yes. And I'm pretty sure the squish reveal is in part 2 of the trilogy of vids

Is the concept of "attraction" useful to you? Yes, in both the sense of it's presence and it's absence. Most people have a basic vague understanding so it makes explaining aromanticism easier by just augmenting what they already think of attraction, so I find it useful descriptively too. What about the concept of "platonic attraction," in particular? Personally I don't find it useful to my own experience, and I don't think I understand what people mean by it as there seems to be lots of different usage and generalisations. So when others mention their platonic attraction I fill like all the sentences in my inner monologue of understanding all suddenly end in question marks. For you, what is the dividing line between a "feeling" and an "attraction"? (or whatever other word you want to contrast it against) So I am going to add in a third word because I think there are two ways of looking at this, but first: Feeling vs Attraction. I think feelings are centred within myself. Sure, feelings can be influenced by outside forces and change how I act but ultimately they are mine to deal with. I read a romance novel once and it had a sentence along the lines of 'I love you but that has nothing to do with you'. Attraction can cause feelings but ultimately the attraction is an external point of focus, and there is a lot more of a sense of losing yourself. The other word I want to use here is 'appreciation'. For me attraction can be strong, so I felt uncomfortable using a word that I felt was strong and had sexual connotations as I felt it misrepresented what I was trying to say. Then I stumbled upon a post on AVEN where someone was complaining of the overuse of the word 'attraction' and proposed 'appreciation'. I find this a particularly good word for trying to explain my experiences with aesthetic. You could say appreciation is just weak attraction, but I think it is the difference between walking down a hallway and liking the wallpaper compared to being entranced by a painting at the art gallery and spending 10 minutes staring at it.

I would say yes, but as far as I know there is only one easily found example. I forgot the link, or the name of the vlogger.....but on youtube the 'ABC of LGBT' Asexual/Aromantic 3 part info videos, the host, who doesn't identify as aromantic, found the word squish helpful in describing experiences.

a good comeback to that would be "yes and that is why you are the parent" Though I have friends and family in childcare/education and they deal with sometimes 70 kids at a time and seriously some of the poor things. Their parents should have just got a dog or a car rather than doing the stuff they do. Technically none of it is abuse (which at least is reportable), but the kids are going to have terrible teenage years because their parents have set them up for failure.

My new name is Weird because I have done that before. Only a few times and mostly on AVEN.

I basically never use that label for my sexuality unless it is deep discussion like this So far I have only found 1 other person who uses a variation of apres- Most other people mention it when questioning because it truly is a really broad concept behind that label, but I guess people move on to more common terms or more specific concepts. I know I mentioned it somewhere in the forums before, but it really all depends on your inner drive to be specific or not. Personally I thing grey- works really well for me most of the time. Most of the time though, not all of the time.

yeah, I know those feels. Then even when it is known you don't like young kids they expect you to act as if they are the best things. I end up saying things they find inappropriate as I try to find things to say that are not outright lies.

hahaha no. I'm Aro and I don't have crushes or squishes or basically any unexplained fixation on anyone when I am not around them.

I have no idea what purpose leaderboards have, but the points are connected to the content you make. So the more points the more content. So you can see who is more active by looking at points or something. I guess the next logical step after having points is that we have a leaderboard for them? The site has been having various glitches. I can't load it either and I am using Opera browser.