And you’re thinking, “WTF, we just had Ace Week!” But International Asexuality Day is where ace groups in underrepresented countries do the work to not only raise awareness, but also, in some cases building the language.
stop talking about the USA. I have heard enough about that wretched place
So, if you’ve ever heard of Charing Cross Station, it’s named after a place that was home to a free-standing monument called an Elanor cross. They were a series of monuments marking the nightly stops of a funeral procession for Elanor of Castille, commissioned by her husband King Edward I.
The original Elanor cross named after the hamlet of Charing (which was absorbed as the big enormous thing we now call London gradually formed) stood from 1294 to 1647 when Oliver Cromwell had it torn down.
History tore down Cromwell, and then the cross he tore down was replaced by a statue of the King whom Cromwell had replaced.
Then one day someone was like, “Hey let’s also rebuild the Elanor cross that was at Charing, even though Charing is gone and there’s a statue of a king where the Elanor cross from Charing once stood.” And someone else was like, “Okay.”
So, in 1864, they built a new Elanor cross somewhere 200 meters away from the old site, and called it the Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross. Then they named the train station right behind it Charing Cross Station so that everyone would assume the Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross was the Charing Cross.
Oh, and the place that was Charing Cross became Trafalgar Square, and now you can see Trafalgar Square from a big traffic circle just south of it, which goes around the king’s statue, that replaced the Charing cross.
Oh, and Elanor’s husband was that King Edward. The one depicted in Braveheart.
But honestly, wasn’t that more interesting than more bullshit about the USA?
I know that’s kind of the go-to thing to show that a vampire character is “one of the good ones” or whatever but it actually seems a little bit more fucked up for a vampire to steal blood from a blood bank than for a vampire to attack people for blood, at least as long as it’s not the kind of vampire where a bite is instantly lethal like it never stops bleeding.
People can recover from losing some blood but blood bank blood is constantly in short supply and is reserved for people who imminently need blood transfusion of a specific blood type or else they die.
I also hate the “I can just substitute human blood with animal blood” like the whole idea of vampirism sort of hinges on the fact the only thing you can feed off of are humans.
YOU get it
Once you start having vampires subsist on animals, well, like, so do humans. In fact the average human probably eats more animals per year than most of the animal-blood-drinking vampires I’ve seen depicted.
That’s not a vampire, all you’ve written is an immortal superhuman who subsists on…food, even if it’s a bit undercooked. That’s a fucking elf.
Some of y’all’s ideas of other options for “ethical” vampires is insane.
“Ethical vampires should feed on criminals.” So it is ethical for a person to get death penalty without trial and/or to be literally consumed by other citizens as punishment for a crime? That’s the prison-industrial complex.
If you’re thinking about adding a comment on this post that outlines some way that vampires could actually be totally ethical, don’t:
1. I heard it before, twice.
2. You’re wrong. Don’t take this as a challenge, you’ve already failed and you’re wrong because
3. Even if you come up with something ethical, which you probably still didn’t, you’re missing the point of vampires!
I think the DESPERATION yet utter failure to find an ethical means of vampirism when confronted with this post is part of like, a wider trend in the culture of this website or fandom in general or something of complete black&white thinking on morality and also probably Puritanism.
I think somebody should write an essay on this instead of the next comment they’re about to make about how vampires should just feed on cops or politicians or billionaires or criminals or consenting victims (all of which present some pretty serious ethical problems that nobody has apparently considered!)
In your desperate need to find a means for vampires to exist totally without harm to anyone else, in these scenarios you posit, y’all have created so many more ethical problems, all while patting yourself on the back.
“Don’t worry guys, there’s this type of person called a ‘bad person’, and if we just kill enough of them everything will be alright!”
>Prison-industrial complex, already addressed this, already happening IRL.
>Would lead to more “tough on crime” bills like the war on drugs to put more and more people in prison so vampires never run out of food.
>Particularly hard targets.
>Always armed.
>Always in radio contact with other cops.
>Deaths more likely to be seriously investigated.
>City just hires more cops.
>Resulting moral panic from random attacks on cops easily spun towards more police funding, more heavily armed police, curfews, blame shifted onto minorities.
>Surrounded by security 24/7. Fucking untouchable if they’re anybody who’s anybody.
>Money&power just goes to the next guy in line.
>Start reading again from the top.
>Start reading again from the top.
>Start reading again from the top.
>Vampires live forever and always gotta be drinking blood. Who do they eat when they run out of bad people?
>How many provably irredeemable Nazis are there really?
>How long before they start justifying anyone with a dubious tweet from 6 years ago?
>Society’s most desperate and poor people forced to sell part of their body to ‘earn a living’.
>Vampires essentially sex workers then.
>What if your every meal had to be filmed and the uploaded as a mukbang fetish video on pornhub
>What if your every meal relied on the next horny John coming around to get his neck bitten
>Ugly vampires starve.
>Relationship is literally draining.
>“You can’t break up with me, I’ll starve.”
>“You can’t break up with me, you’ll starve.”
>Ugly vampires starve.
>Already addressed this.
>Fuck
>off
>Actually, pretty good.
>Unfortnately, we can’t even supply enough donated blood for the existing IRL mortals who need it.
>What does a vampire do when their gofundme is $20 short?
All of these, as well as whatever other attempt at “solving” vampirism anyone else is going to inevitably comment in response, fail to provide a feasible way for a vampire to ethically drink human blood. However, they’re almost there, just barely brushing past the point, which is that vampires are unethical. Instead of a problem to be solved in worldbuidling, this is the ideal springboard for a story that says something about fucking society! Good stories aren’t about utopian societies or perfect people–unless those utopian societies and perfection are a lie–they’re about societies and people with problems and who cause problems! Vampires are a curse, they exists to cause problems, you take that from them in your story and they’re nothing. If you instead embrace how characters–even as protagonists–cause problems, you might actually stumble onto a theme or two.
These are genuinely excellent and thought out points! I’m going to come back to this post whenever I’m writing or thinking about vampires & vampirethics.
Now I’ll chime in completely unhelpfully with, if the rule is that the vampire can only gain sustenance from humans but the fluid doesn’t matter, they should eat via blowjob.
I really should’ve read that last one before I reblogged.
Photo: Me, wondering what I just saw happen here, moments before searching for, “melting point of the hardest element in a phone”.
Do, at some point, make real queer friends. One, two, a dozen. Friends you can actually meet for a walk or whatever.
Online communities vanish. Platforms collapse, or turn awful, or get politically messy they can vanish out of your life overnight. Have someone to fall back on.
It’s hard. But what would be harder is if I lost Instagram (last month), Reddit (last year) , and Tumblr (if/when Trump goes nuts) without also having real live humans I could talk about it with, over lunch or whatever.
I live in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trumpers, and I don't have a driver's license. Hopefully we'll move to a walkable city soon.
I'm not saying any of this is easy. The first "word" in the original post is literally a parachute. Parachutes aren't easy. They're hard to learn how to use, terrifying to use the first few times, and they need constant care and attention or they will wreck you. Just like people.
What I'm saying is that we live in a world where the President of the United States launched a trade war against penguins, and where Tumblr could pack up tomorrow because Automattic Inc. has to decide whether to fund and staff it, or fund and staff Wordpress, as they face a global recession. We’re in the, “yes that impossible thing can happen,” stage.
When I went on my first skydive it felt like time slowed down, and I could feel every single sensory input in hyper-detail. I remember the lopsided weight of the helmet, the way the goggles fit badly, I remember the remarkable rigidity of the canopy that seconds earlier was all in a bag, I remember the texture of the plastic toggles and how the right one had a sharper parting line, I remember the colour of the fields and the weight of the chute as I gathered it after landing. It was terrifying and it was awesome (and it was 32 years ago).
When I went to my first real live meet-up with people who've since become my real-life queer friends, time definitely slowed down. I remember the room temperature, and the texture of the table over which Amber slid me an asexual pride pin, I remember every nervous stupid thing I said, and how tense I was. I remember good-crying after. It was terrifying and it was awesome.
It took me 30 seconds to start my first skydive (because after a minute they pass on you and the next person goes).
It took me eight months from figuring out I was aroace (October 2022), to officially coming out to a local queer community (late June 2023) and going to one of their events.
I'm not saying any of this is easy.
But I can say that the emotional center of my aroace life is safely offline. If every online community broke tomorrow, I wouldn't be broken or isolated. It was hard to move that emotional center, but it's been so so so worth it.
And I can say that all of you deserve to find that part of you that refuses to stay isolated even while you may have to stay hidden.
Photo: The view from the first Pride parade I attended with friends. Someone had to stage the first Pride March, here in Calgary, and they did it back when they were in one of their worst places to do it, at one of the worst times to try it.
Do, at some point, make real queer friends. One, two, a dozen. Friends you can actually meet for a walk or whatever.
Online communities vanish. Platforms collapse, or turn awful, or get politically messy they can vanish out of your life overnight. Have someone to fall back on.
It’s hard. But what would be harder is if I lost Instagram (last month), Reddit (last year) , and Tumblr (if/when Trump goes nuts) without also having real live humans I could talk about it with, over lunch or whatever.
Not it isn’t, @staff . You will never ever do anything to stop the flow of porn that’s tagged by porn spammers who, either by a misunderstanding of English, or by complete disregard for us, tag their porn with the asexual hashtag.
You will never do anything about it, @staff because spam is revenue. Spam pays your salaries. Without spam you’re going to miss OKRs.
We flag it, and talk about the spam that never goes away, and we make jokes about it, so that eventually someone might see a competitive opportunity, and do something about it on their platform and come up with a way to port what we love about Tumblr over to something that innovates and does something about tag abuse, and makes luring us all over to the Better Thing their OKR tied to their salary.
So yeah. Don’t worry, @staff . You’ve always only been Denethor in this story. We expected nothing and you’ve met that expectation brilliantly.
We’re not expecting you to do anything about hashtag spamming. We’re just inviting someone more ambitious to do something about it and invite us all over.
Apparently staff woke up from hibernation.
They’ll be back later today, as lindacparis452453, or lindadparis452452, or lindaclondon452452, and kathyuwilliamson or kathytwilliamsson, with the exact same photos which were probably stolen from someone who has no idea their how their content is being used.
We will be here. And wait for them.
This is the way.
Not it isn’t, @staff . You will never ever do anything to stop the flow of porn that’s tagged by porn spammers who, either by a misunderstanding of English, or by complete disregard for us, tag their porn with the asexual hashtag.
You will never do anything about it, @staff because spam is revenue. Spam pays your salaries. Without spam you’re going to miss OKRs.
We flag it, and talk about the spam that never goes away, and we make jokes about it, so that eventually someone might see a competitive opportunity, and do something about it on their platform and come up with a way to port what we love about Tumblr over to something that innovates and does something about tag abuse, and makes luring us all over to the Better Thing their OKR tied to their salary.
So yeah. Don’t worry, @staff . You’ve always only been Denethor in this story. We expected nothing and you’ve met that expectation brilliantly.
We’re not expecting you to do anything about hashtag spamming. We’re just inviting someone more ambitious to do something about it and invite us all over.
Apparently staff woke up from hibernation.
They’ll be back later today, as lindacparis452453, or lindadparis452452, or lindaclondon452452, and kathyuwilliamson or kathytwilliamsson, with the exact same photos which were probably stolen from someone who has no idea their how their content is being used.
Not it isn’t, @staff . You will never ever do anything to stop the flow of porn that’s tagged by porn spammers who, either by a misunderstanding of English, or by complete disregard for us, tag their porn with the asexual hashtag.
You will never do anything about it, @staff because spam is revenue. Spam pays your salaries. Without spam you’re going to miss OKRs.
We flag it, and talk about the spam that never goes away, and we make jokes about it, so that eventually someone might see a competitive opportunity, and do something about it on their platform and come up with a way to port what we love about Tumblr over to something that innovates and does something about tag abuse, and makes luring us all over to the Better Thing their OKR tied to their salary.
So yeah. Don’t worry, @staff . You’ve always only been Denethor in this story. We expected nothing and you’ve met that expectation brilliantly.
We’re not expecting you to do anything about hashtag spamming. We’re just inviting someone more ambitious to do something about it and invite us all over.
(also feel free in the tags to clarify Why you made the choice you made!! :0c)
Four of these are part of the same sequence of events, so I voted for the first event in the sequence.
im really really tired of the idea coming back that asexual people are More and Uniquely sex negative than the rest of the population ngl
I don’t hate ballroom dancing. Ballroom dancing doesn’t bug me. I’m not ballroom dancing negative or ballroom dancing repulsed.
I just have no attraction to ballroom dancing, so it’s not a part of my world. I don’t even actively ignore it, it’s just something that doesn’t register. I put no emotional energy into liking or hating it.
I could walk past the two best ballroom dancers in the world while they’re doing the most celebrated ballroom dance ever, and it would register as, “Well, that’s two people who are doing a thing. I guess I respect the athleticism and stamina, but, yeah, anyway…”
Now, if all you think about is ballroom dancing, then as I walk past that performance you might see repulsion, rejection, and hostility, because you can’t imagine apathy towards your most cherished thing. “Who in their right mind wouldn’t be stopped in their tracks by these two dancers? Everyone loves this stuff! You either love it or you actively hate it for some reason.”
Wall Street Journal: “Who wants to use public transit?”
Me: “Oooh! Me! Where are we going?”
Some of my first memories as a were riding the BC ferry between Horseshoe Bay and Langdale.
The first thing I wanted to do when my family moved from the northern town of Fort McMurray to the “big city” of Edmonton was to ride their light rail transit, which was mostly surface rail, but had a few genuine subway stations!
My favourite part of any road trip to British Columbia is the ferry ride from Tsawwassen terminal to Swartz Bay.
I genuinely squealed (discreetly) with glee the first time I heard “mind the gap” announced in a TFL rail station in London (it was the Elizabeth Line and we were still above ground, so not officially the “tube”).
I considered emigrating to the UK from Canada after my first LNER trip from London to Durham. (Still haven’t ruled it out, but I’ll wait till my one last elder relative ages out.)
I used all my spare time at my first ever conference trip to ride the street cars in San Francisco.
The only time I’ve ever visited the USA as a tourist (i.e. not sent by my employer) was when visited Seattle for a one-night visit, specifically so I could travel somewhere by a hydrofoil ferry, and so I could ride the Seattle monorail.
I’m absolutely going to ride le Métro de Paris this summer. There’s always been someone asking where it was, since my first junior high French textbooks, then in the cassette based courses I tried in the 90s, and most recently all through Duolingo (which seems to be working), so I need closure. «Voici le métro, enfoiré!»
(Now, in fairness to the NYT, it sounds like transit in the USA is kinda bad, but maybe it’s just that everything down there is kinda bad, and every little bad thing just compounds the pain from the million other bad things. We have travel delays here, too, but they’re not digging into the exposed nerves of constant universal dread.)
“I’m sorry, but we have to consider the possibility that [hiring/keeping/insuring/serving] you will draw unnecessary hostility towards the brand, and create an unhealthy climate for our current team members. You understand, it’s not that we dislike you, it’s that our valued customers have… complex feelings about… people like you… feelings which we don’t share, but which we’re morally obligated to respond to, in a pluralistic and open society. And with the economy in the state that it’s in, we’re forced to focus on our responsibilities to the investors and our current workforce, to not create unnecessary… ‘headwinds’ if you will. We have families who depend on us—some of them are even people almost like you, and so we’re faced with this impossible dilemma.”
You won’t be discriminated against on the basis of disability, sex, gender presentation, sexual orientation, race, religion, country of origin, or anything like it. You’ll be deprioritized on the basis of the imagined operational and reputational risks that come with ‘showing bias against high-merit people’ by being seen as ‘over-considering’ disability, sex, gender presentation, sexual orientation, race, religion, country of origin, or anything like it.
This won’t be stopped by letters, protests, posts, or campaigns of trending hashtags or topics. But this is a commercial service, so obviously I’m not gonna talk about what will stop this, here. All I’ll suggest is that you start reading and learning and thinking about movements all around the world that did stop things like this once they chose to move past letters, protests, manifestos, zines, or catchy slogans.