The average Tumblr user reaching for the most obvious joke to make on a post that the op has most likely seen already
A couple weeks ago I was practicing my owl calls on a night hike and I successfully called in a barred owl. My owl call is pretty good, but I've never called an owl to me from afar because I rarely do night hikes and so I don't get much chance to. I had expected to be really excited about this, especially since two of my coworkers are really skilled at owl calls and they don't usually get a response, much less a full conversation, but instead I felt so guilty. I eventually had to start ignoring this poor deceived owl that was following my call through the park. I felt like I catfished him.
ALTI was gonna say "who among us would follow an inhuman voice in the forest yelling HEY, HEY YOU WHAT'S UP?" but then I remembered this website has me pigeonholed as Most Likely To Be Taken By The Fae. So. Yeah fair enough to this owl, I would probably do the same.
ALT
One of the strangest dnd experiences I've ever had was a series of short campaigns with one dm, where the food in game always sucked. We would buy from food stands, inns, restaurants, markets, and no matter where we went the food sucked ass. Meat pies that made someone hallucinate. Moldy sweet rolls. Stew with a finger in it. Slightly squishy fruit. Literally the best thing the party ate, the dm made sure to mention it had a soggy bottom. (GBBO was a big deal back then.)
It's wasn't the worst thing I've had happen in a game, but it was a miserable monotony that colored the entire campaign. I remember very little about that game, almost a decade later. A couple high points, one extremely low point that ended the game, and the fact that we never ate anything good.
I learned a few months ago that not everyone has sensory imagination for taste. Like, hearing or imagining something doesn't create the ghost of it in their mouth. Thinking about a squishy, overripe peach was viscerally unpleasant for me. It made the game rough, to never have a beautiful thought in my mouth. I love good food. Even basic food that's made with love and skill, or that happened to turn out amazing this one time, is one of my life's greatest joys.
I don't have a good inner eye. Most of what I can imagine are simple, static pictures and rough outlines. When I run games I've started putting more effort into describing visual things, and talking about what's beautiful, not just the gruesome deaths that DnD gives me so many opportunities for.
Yeah, the enemy's head ruptured from a combination of necrotic and radiant damage. Yes, the knife got stuck in the joint of your armor and stayed there with the handle sticking out for the rest of the fight. But there were also clouds sweeping across the sky, and a lake like a mirror with the reflection of a god in it, and two little kids with mud up to their knees chasing each other with a fat millipede.
Dragongirl kidnaps a maid instead of a princess by mistake; comes back to her lair after a hunt to find the coins and gems in her hoard have been organized into neat piles sorted by type, value, and kingdom of origin.
Her princess is a little special but she'll keep her around.
WHUH??? THIS IS SO CUTE???
Love that everyone from the 90s is like “incidentally: Dealing With Dragons”
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.
