cocked that up. they're way too small

Of fucking course Terfamort also started attacking asexual people, and on international asexuality day no less. What a vile human being.

*celebrates Ace Day harder*

*covers myself with an ace flag so maybe I turn invisible*

Like I'm not going to lie, this scares me. I still remember 2016 Tumblr, okay? And I know how much influence this lady has.

Yeah, it's... not great. I'm not even active on Twitter anymore, I just keep the app on my phone so I don't have to deal with links opening the browser version, but seeing that first thing genuinely was giving me flashbacks to some of the shit that happened on this site a decade ago.

The sudden wave of terror was the strongest emotion I've felt in a while.

Honestly, the lady just really hates her readers. Hates all the people who bought her books. Hates them all so, so much. Not sure why, maybe she read too many Dramione fanfics, or saw too many people suggesting better endings than she could write.

Anyways, I'm not too worried about her bothering aces, myself. Unlike with the trans kids she targets, there's probably not much she can do to us.

You weren't in the ace community circa 2015-2016, were you?

Hm. I was not active in the ace community around then. But I have identified as ace since 2003 or so, when I first heard the term on go-gaia.

Like, there's more than one reason why I dislike the BBC Sherlock series (and ugh that House episode, why is it that the Sherlock Holmeses of media acknowledge and disparage us at the same time), but I'm certainly not worried about Gatiss causing me injury the way that I'm worried about JKR stopping trans people from being treated as humans.

if you didn't watch how viciously the ace community was driven underground on this site, I kind of don't think you've got any room to be making this kind of what aboutism argument

yeah trans kids are in active danger. if JKR decides that she wants to target the ace kids next, they'll be in active danger too. Don't know why you're trying to gotcha about it.

I *was* here for the "discourse" but let's call it what it was.

A hate campaign. Intended to drive a wedge between groups in the LGBT+ community, which asexuality is explicitly and inherently a part of, no question, no arguments, no debates. It scared a lot of us, hurt a lot of us. Aces were threatened with and sexually assaulted. Over time, it seems a decent chunk of the community pulled their heads out of their asses once the primary bad actors realized they had a better, easier target (trans people). Don't whatabout to the threats on trans people as if they won't come for us, too. They ALREADY tried to, and *will* try again. I was literally threatened both offline and online for just visibly ID'ing as ace. Bigots will attack and do real injury to anyone and *everyone* they consider different. The trans hate just sells better on mainstream media. For now.

You see the way asshole bigots are trying to get the cis members of the LGBT+ community to turn on our trans siblings? That whole "LGB" movement? They tried that with the ace community, too, and now JK is preparing to lead the effort on it again, *because she's a Neo-Nazi now.* She hates trans people so much that she aligned herself with Neo-Nazis that want to take away all of our rights, including those of all women, cis, trans, straight, gay, white, PoC, all of us.

Don't let her win. The point of the LGBT+ community is to accept people that are different from the heteronormative, cisnormative, amatonormative, and allonormative expectations of how our society is structured. The best way to beat her and bigots like her? Don't let her or anyone else drive us apart.

I think another issue so many ace people have issues with is that no one ever really reckoned with the widespread hate campaign. And it was widespread. I have at least one friend who was threatened with being shot if they showed up to pride as an ace person.

And yet, when it finally died down, no one like. Acknowledged what had happened. They just all turned on the next target (trans people, so it's super fun to be both) and people just sort of forgot about the vitriol and hate they sent to so many people. People just went "wow that was a wild time" if they even remember it.

The ace community is not like it once was. It has never recovered. It used to be a lot sillier and more joyful, and a lot of the ace people I know now are a lot more jaded and angry. And we have a right to be.

The aphobia always been there seething under the surface because no one ever even recognized it. It was never fixed. It just quieted down for a while, and JKR is poking at a bubble of poison again.

Look, I'm ace. I'm also not cis. And this acknowledgement by this woman of ace people has my blood running cold.

Gosh yeah that's also a great point. There was this massive hate campaign that they had the audacity to call "discourse" ("I'm just asking questions") and then everyone else just... collectively memory holed it. No apologies, not even an acknowledgement that it happened other than the ace community pointing it out any time someone wonders what happened. I'm pretty sure half of my blocklist is aphobes (the other half is mostly transphobes and bots) because I developed such a kneejerk block reaction to anyone I saw being aphobic.

I'm honestly somewhat jaded to ace hate at this point; a sad statement, but it's true. I follow Yasmin Benoit on socials and her comments are always full of dipshits showing their ignorance (which has a lot of Venn diagram overlap with misogynoir but that's a TED talk for another day). So I saw her quote tweet JKR, and at first I didn't think anything of it - she's good at tanking the trolls while still getting her message across.

Then I saw who she quote tweeted, and my stomach absolutely dropped to my shoes.

#aces are already targeted (legislated against) by large well funded conservative groups it just flys under the radar#A recent in the UK showed that asexuals experience second highest rate of conversion therapy after trans people#Conservative American politicians have been trying to ban asexual marriage (aka requiring sex for a marriage to be considered valid)#Asexual marriage is considered a bogeyman that they fearmongered that gay marriage would lead to#Many of the aphobes leading the hate campaign on Tumblr went on to become TERFs and cite ace exclusionism as the gateway#Conservatives are also doing a moral panic about declining birthrates.

Shoutout to Vic Michealis for being the first person to ever score negative points on Game Changer. The only person to truly understand that the game is the players vs Sam and stick to that no matter the cost. The real winner, if you ask me.

#dressed as Rachel but bringing Marco energy

i don't know how to make this into a story, but one of my worst attributes is that i make so much sense to myself that i can totally forget that what im doing looks strange to other people. and i just remembered this incident in sixth grade where i learned that churning milk yields butter and i was fascianted by that because i had always wondered from whence butter. so i took my cafeteria milk box and i shook it vigorously all lunch and all recess (where it was over 100, because of course it was) and i was even shaking it in class, when my teacher, who was a saint for many reasons, came over and said:

hey.

babs.

what are you doing.

and i looked at this poor, patient, wonderful man like he was the dumbest motherfucker that id ever met. and i said

shaking milk

because that is what i was doing, and the butter thing was implied because why else would anyone shake milk.

he took this in his stride. instead of doubling down, or repeating himself, he said ah, as if i had actually explained myself to him, and then he walked away because he was willing to tolerate disrespect so long as it was amusing.

people like that are why i survived to adulthood.

anyway, he really did get the last laugh because after shaking that milk for four hours, i finally opened the tiny carton when i got home, and instead of there being delicious butter there was insanely rotten froth and it smelled and looked so bad i threw up a little. so. you got me there mr. c. you got me there.

That is the wettest sounding bat I've ever heard. :')

In fairness Australia does actually have "bat rabies" so you should still be careful handling bats, but it's a lot more controllable than normal rabies (which we do not have). This person clearly knows what they're doing though.

#how do you just. not have rabies#how does that work#genuine question

Well when you are entirely surrounded by water, you have somewhat of an advantage in keeping out anything a migratory bird can’t carry across the ocean. We don’t have rabies because we don’t let it in. Eventually some fucking arsehole who thinks he’s more important than our entire country will dodge quarantine for an infected pet or something but so far we’ve kept it out. We were varroa mite free for a really long time too until somebody fucked that up.

That is the wettest sounding bat I've ever heard. :')

In fairness Australia does actually have "bat rabies" so you should still be careful handling bats, but it's a lot more controllable than normal rabies (which we do not have). This person clearly knows what they're doing though.

Actually Derin, if I'm remembering rightly from my several years of animal studies education, Lyssa is still 100% fatal like rabies and all bats are considered a vector for it.

If you handle a bat at all, you need to be vaccinated for rabies. Full stop, no question. This was pounded into me a lot.

Especially because any bites or scratches can contain active viral cells and be so tiny that you don't even notice them. I was taught not to even pick up a dead bat out of the road and to just call a government hotline for this very reason.

average wally west to do list

ooh i have a nice fun fact!

Static was WILDLY popular in Brazil (a country where the population is over 50% black) and we had re-runs for YEARS on open television. Everyone who was a kid in the 2000s knew and loved him. As a result, every single Brazilian Con has a LOT of static cosplayers!

So, a couple of years ago, Comic Con Experience (the biggest con in Brazil, which is actually also the biggest con in the world!) invited Static’s creator Denys Cowan as one of the guests of honor.

Now. Thousands of people attend his panel. And cosplayers went NUTS because they could show their Static cosplay to the creator himself! What none of us expected was Debts Cowan’s reaction:

He cried on stage.

He had never seen Static cosplayers - especially not so many of them! And he had no idea the show was popular here! No one ever told him his character was so beloved! Years and years of reruns and he had no idea! He obviously created the character with his experiences and his community (Black North Americans) in mind. Still, he accidentally touched a whole other community of black people who could see themselves on the screen as a superhero!

Anyway he is a lovely person and one of the best, most memorable guests we had. And I think this is a nice reminder that your art might touch people you can’t even imagine would when creating it.

Aboriginal Australian mother and child, Australia, by Trent White

It truly sucks that a bad diet and bad sleep schedule makes you feel like shit. What if I want to be nocturnal and subsist on potato chips and coffee. I should be allowed to do that without my body throwing a hissy fit.

I wonder if you slowly shift your sleep schedule over to being nocturnal and add enough nutrition to the bad diet will it be possible to go nocturnal?

The nocturnal is more that my natural schedule slips forward a couple of hours each night, but it turns out that a few days with no sunlight and little exercise (can’t go outside and it’s cold as fuck) and eating garbage make you feel like shit. My favourite time is when I wake up a few hours before the sun (giving me time to fuck around on the internet and wake up a bit with a natural stopping point of Sun Is Up Now Go Do Chores) and go to bed mid-afternoon but that’s really hard to maintain except for the few days that my natural cycle slips into it.