sometimes your robot gf craves a simpler existence for a little while

@musings-from-mars

mech pilot trainee who just flunked out of the program. she wasn’t supposed to be anything but a weapon and she couldn’t even do that right.

she doesn’t have anything. no house, no job, no car, no free will, no legal protections. her entire life down to the level of her brain has been organized around piloting a mech for years and now she doesn’t get to do that. she doesn’t know who she is and she doesn’t even know how to turn back on the higher level brain function that would let her try to answer that question.

she’s basically an empty shell that had a human being in it once. she eats and sleeps and uses the bathroom like a person, but her eyes are completely dead. now she just sits places, silently and unmoving, for hours at a time, waiting for orders she’ll never receive…

rehabilitating a pilot is hard work

Goddess of luck and celebration for my friend @bosco-reforged 's homebrew dnd world.

Her name is Fumielle and she's a french/japanese catgirl. Because the catfolk in this world have french and japanese notes. because reasons. I spent too long looking at old-timey french fashion for inspo.

I want old aros so badly. I want a history. I want a future. I want tales of lives that I understand. I want to see myself in a future where I’m happy and comfortable.

But I don’t have that, so I’ll have to build it.

I’ve got a story!

When I told my grandmother’s friend group about aromanticism most of them didn’t understand, they were polite and asked a lot of questions, some didn’t really believe it bc well, people in their 70s are rarely that open minded; but there was this one lady that looked pensive and when the others quieted down she asked me if the name for it had existed long, and when I said no she told me about her best friend:

A 74 year old woman who had married young, back when my country was in a fascist dictatorship and women couldn’t have/make their own money, so their only hope was marriage. They lived together years, and I’m not sure if they had children, but as soon as it was legal for her to divorce she did, and, living in a small town, she faced her neighbours’ questions and judgement: Was he a bad husband? Did he cheat or treat her badly? Was it the other way around? He wasn’t “man enough”? And many less nice things.

Her answer to all of them was that her now ex husband was a wonderful man, and that they’d remain friends as they’d always been, because on her side that’s all there could be, because she didn’t find it in herself to love, not him nor any man or woman, but still cared deeply for him as she did for all her friends.

She now lives happily in retirement, traveling around the country with her friends, ex husband included, and also has a cat.

When the lady told me this she sounded doubtful at first, afraid she was appropiating but when I told her that the experience sounded like those on our community she looked so happy, and kindly asked me to write down the terms and what they mean on a paper so she could show her friend when she went back home, tell her that she wasn’t alone that there were more people who had united and have a name and are fighting to be recognised.

That day I realised something: That there are more of us than we know about, that in this age of information many of the older generation were still estranged from the net and among them there are aromantic people too. And that for those people who have probably felt other and wrong most of their lives, the knowledge of the label and community, the confirmed existence of others like them that feel it’s important enough to recognise that feeling or lack thereof, can be just as healing, reassuring and important as it was for us, the newer generation who stumbled upon the term on the internet when we were teens.

The internet is great, of course, but if we want to find the older aros de have to look for them, because they most surely haven’t found themselves in that label yet either. And to do so we must share our terms and experiences and shout to the world that we exist outside the screens, that we are real. I know it can be risky or even dangerous but if we wish to find them, and hopefully make them a bit happier, it’s all we can do.

TL,DR: There are old aros out there, we just have to find them by spreading our visibility, not only for us, but for them too.

this makes me so happy to hear! thank you for sharing

Just wanted to tack on another sort of series of personal stories from work (a Canadian engineering company, employee age typically running 35-60 with more people on the older end). I co-run our company’s queer employee resource group (ERG). We run all sorts of workshops and events annually and ofc one of my favourites is in-person in-office Pride celebrations 🌈🌈🌈 I’ve been out for 20+ years and this place is no exception, plus I bedeck the heck out of our cafeteria with rainbows and pride swag, so there is little way to mistake what our ERG is there to bring visible joy and celebration to.

I always set up two frames at the table our group hosts over lunch in the cafeteria. Each frame has 8 of the most commonly used queer identity pride flags with labels beneath them (16 total). What ends up happening is this: some people shy away, some shyly approach, and others enthusiastically come over as allies and the handful of out fellow queer peers. Everyone who makes it to the table generally has their eyes drawn to the framed pride flags first because they’re so colourful, they’re standing up, and they recognize some of the “main” flag’s variations.

I have a lot of info in various formats to ask about, but what are my most common questions, every single year?

“What’s asexuality?” and “What’s aromanticism?”

And almost every single time I can remember answering that question, I see either 1) rapid mental calculations now exploding in their mind 2) a long, pensive stare at the ace or aro pride flags as they ask sort of distantly “A term for that exists?” Or 3) curiosity-animorphing-into-deer-in-the-headlights

100% of those people have grabbed one of my “identify definitions and where to find more info and communities related to them” printouts then ran away (at various speeds lol, some are in their 30’s but others are indeed in their 50’s and 60’s!)

And each time I’m just like yeah that makes sense that these people I particularly admire for their passion for their job/cool life stories of adventuring with friends/amazing technical and/or artistic skills share a large overlapping Venn diagram with the “oh I was not expecting to be in this aro/ace picture” people at our pride table haha

(for the nuance, I am never going to diagnose someone else’s identities. I am simply open to the fact that there are many, many people of the older generations are queer in some way but have never heard of identities beyond gay, lesbian, and now bc of the media, trans people)

Sharing the wide variety of different identities is one of my favourite things to do with our ERG ✨

I was once talking to a massage therapist, a woman in her 50s or early 60s, and when I started telling her about how I’m demisexual, she just…. stopped in the middle of working on my shoulders. Her hands just went limp.

She was quiet for so long that I lifted up my head to see what was wrong, and she looked like she’d been struck by lightning. And finally she said, “That. I’M that. That’s what I am, that’s ME.” and I got really choked up and said, yeah. Yeah, that is you.

Once, I got an email from an 80 year old man who said he’d seen my book in the library. He said he was so embarrassed as he checked it out because he felt like there was a spotlight shining on him and the librarian might say something… But he was brave, and he took it home and read it and LOVED IT. And then he told me that he was gay, that he’d been closeted for his entire life and he’d never told ANYONE ELSE BEFORE because it had been so dangerous when he was young, and he’d been so afraid that someone would find out. He said he’d been so scared that he’d never even dared to kiss another man. And he said that my book gave him a little taste of what real love might feel like – he called it a ray of light in the dark. (Obviously I ugly-cried for an hour and wrote him back with a BUNCH MORE recs for gay romance novels and all the love and encouragement and emotion I had in me. I wanted so badly to talk to him more, to have a connection with him, but I think he was too afraid for more than just that little thread of a lifeline between us. I check the obituaries for his name once a year or so, just because I so badly want to know that he’s still alive.)

They’re out there–there are older queers of all stripes. But we have to remember that times were different in their day, and so many of them are still so, so scared. Of course they’re quiet. Of course you have to go looking for them. Of course they probably won’t tell you anything until you’ve earned their trust.

Be gentle with people when they ask awkward questions about queerness, because they might be someone who has been very scared for a very long time and who has just worked up quite a lot of bravery to ask a life-changing question to the only person they have ever encountered who might know the answer. If the solemn and sacred duty of being that angel for someone falls to you, HONOR IT. Be gentle, be warm. Welcome them when they peek out from the closet. Don’t punish them for getting it a little wrong. Please, please be gentle.

All this discourse over who does "painting with light"

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

And it's BEAUTIFUL

Original post was made unrebloggable so I'm reposting the link. Click through for the whole thread.

happy friday and nothing else !! 🥰🫶

just lil ol' me. my little pixel art icon is 9 years old now, which is crazy to me.

+cryptid mode

I can’t believe I never posted this. These are the parents of my character Yolotli Delacroix. Her catfolk dad, Félix Delacroix, and her orc mom, Sharn Delacroix. They used to run a tavern called the Bottle n’ Corc.

Her dad has markings of a siamese cat. Yolotli would look similar if she had more furr, which is why her weretiger form has this patterning.

A little doodle to celebrate me finally getting a shiny minior.

moon jellyfish girl

Ready for Halloween!

My DnD character, Yolotli. I thought it would be hilarious to put her in a tiger halloween costume. Because she’s a weretiger. She could literally just turn into a real tiger.

how many Super Mario games are there NOW?

even clouds cry sometimes

Updated art of my dnd character, Yolotli Delacroix. There's supposed to be studs on her arm-bands but I forgot them. Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ just imagine they're there.

Shiny Buneary! My first shiny pokemon was a shiny buneary in Diamond version✨️I didn't even know what shiny pokémon were, lol. Glad I caught it!

One of my favorite shinies!

you can get a sticker of this here :)