A Retrospective on Stagnation and Renewal

This post is my submission to the July Carnival of Aces on the theme of “Renaissance.” Since there weren’t a lot of suggestions provided on how to approach the theme, I was initially unsure about where to go with it. After all, the word “renaissance” paints a much more grandiose image than a simpler word like “change.” It wouldn’t seem right for me to say that ace culture has undergone a renaissance, so I won’t try. What I can speak to is a kind of revival in my own ace blogging and which factors are the most responsible for that. So here I’m using this prompt for a kind of seven-year retrospective, with a specific emphasis on some turning points around 2015-17 and 2019.

The short version: tiresome old things got stale, and then discovering new people and new things to talk about renewed my motivation. Breathing new life into the community as a whole, though, would call for a lot more than that.

[ Preview image by Jeremiah John McBride, CC BY-ND 2.0. ]

PF Promo

I’ve talked some on here about Pillowfort.io and what I see in it, both in this short post and in this Carnival of Aces post, so I just thought I’d let y’all know that their Kickstarter is currently over 80% funded and has a little more than a week left to go.

While I understand having reservations, I’ve really enjoyed my time there so far, and there’s been a lot of discussion about how Pillowfort’s similar and different features encourage a different social dynamic from what a lot of us are used to (for instance: in this comment section and several other places, I’ve seen PF users mention that the site’s features have helped them participate in a lot more interaction and real conversations).

That interactivity, in addition to PF Staff’s responsiveness and PF’s anti-harassment tools, makes Pillowfort.io worth looking at if you are another beleaguered ace tired of the status quo. Aces have talked about the problems with AVEN at length and have talked about how Tumblr has become a hostile environment (in general, and for aces in particular) with the way a post of yours can easily spin out of control and get you flooded with harassment. Suffice to say, there are a lot of elements in play over on Pillowfort that I think can significantly alter those dynamics that by now feel so ingrained. For instance, how would you like it if, upon deciding one of your posts was a bad idea, clicking “delete” on one of your posts also deleted the reblog-copies off the blogs of anyone who had reblogged it? And deleting it literally deleted it from the whole site, not just from your own blog? You could actually make sure that no one ever saw it again. Or, one better, what if you wanted to put the post back up again but keep it away from unfriendly eyes? What if you could keep parts of your blog public while also setting an individual post to “viewable to mutuals only”? Can you imagine how that would change the game?

…And that’s only some of what I value about Pillowfort. I meant for this to just be a short two-sentence “hey check out the kickstarter” post but once I get going talking about this place, it feels like there’s so much to say. But please, check it out and see for yourself.

At the moment, PF is still in closed beta and will remain so even for a time after the Kickstarter, but beta invites can still be obtained via the Kickstarter for the next few days for just $5, and if you want you even can use the demo account right now for free. So you’re invited to take a look around!

Update: Pillowfort Beta

So you may have heard me mention the closed beta for Pillowfort.io, a new blogging platform in the works, and with the third wave of invites gone out, I was able to finally join it last week (here’s my personal blog there). Without an account you can’t see comments or go into tags, but right now you should be able to take a look at specific blogs if you have the url.

As mentioned, the site is still in beta and has a ways to go, bugs are common, some desirable features are missing, it’s still pretty quiet, etc. That said, here are some nice things going for it:

• COMMENT SECTIONS
  • seriously comment sections are so important y’all
  • you can have a back-and-forth public conversation without also spreading the same post around over and over and repeatedly exposing your followers to it
• A real, actual message/mail system with an inbox and threading, unlike tumblr’s wonky “ask” system
• when you make a post, you can set it to “viewable by everyone,” “viewable only by mutuals,” or “viewable only by me”
• when you make a post, you can turn off comments and reblogs — no more having to put “don’t reblog” in the tags of something you don’t want spread around; you can just outright disable the option
  • also you can mark it as NSFW as well
• so far it seems like there’s quite a few ace people on there, which helps set the tone for me — the ratio of “people saying they’re ace and/or affirming asexuality” to “people making fun of aces” is definitely weighted toward the former
  • (I actually don’t think I’ve seen any antiace antagonism there yet at all)

So! Stay tuned for further updates, I guess. After Imzy’s rise and collapse, it’s fair to be especially skeptical of this taking off, but I hope to enjoy this while it lasts.

a prospect

Half-formed post idea: you know when people say those things like “don’t feed the trolls” and “don’t burn yourself out arguing w/ people who don’t want to listen”? A decent sentiment, right, but to me that’s not very useful or instructive without getting into the nitty-gritty of Identifying the Features (of someone who is/isn’t engaging in good faith), so I was thinking about writing out some thoughts on strategies for that.

A note on being thanked

This past… few weeks, or maybe even month or so, I’d been thinking gradually more about taking down a certain post, out of rising shame at having published it (as an embarrassing oversharing thing that I’m worry Insults The Real Survivors w/ my stupid selfish overreacting nonsense, y’know).

And, uh.  Opened my email and saw that just two days ago I got a message through here specifically thanking me for exactly that post.  So.  I might be tearing up a little bit now, that’s fine.

 

@ the academics

Number 47 there is a footnote on the passage I quoted earlier from this book (Ann Burlein’s Lift High the Cross).  Would any of y’all with access to academic libraries/databases be able to investigate “Sex as God’s Work” and “Re-making Love” and see if there’s anything of interest in there?

well.

Finally decided to close the comment section on that WTDIYTYPMBA post.

@the folks who send me nice messages

Thank you, always.

🌀

Okay, that’s enough of this radio silence.  I don’t care how much you feel like isolating yourself, brain.  We need someplace to vent.  So go… post some drafts or something, and cut this out.

Update

Some stuff going on:

• Dealing with various health issues and trying to balance out my meds & diet has been feeling like a game of whack-a-mole
• Trying to accomplish a life thing, maybe, so I can maybe have a job that I like one day instead of continuing to be a dreary office gremlin
• Realized I might be cutting off contact with my entire family minus my sister just in time for the holidays, nbd nbd
• If you weren’t already aware: Imzy is out of closed beta now.  Sorry if you requested an invite from me and it got lost in transit (as happened with at least 1 person) — now you don’t need one!  Besides my critical kink comm Unravel, I recommend Sci’s Asexuality comm (specifying hers because there’s two of ’em).
• It’s occurred to me that I actually find it pretty strange that people who say “cishet aro/aces” aren’t the same people who say “monosexuals” (mostly, anyway)
• I’m going to a Big Thing and it’s exciting and something to look forward to but it’s also up north and I haven’t been up north since I was a toddler, please send help
• I get bored at work and recently compiled a list of my favorite fictional depictions of abuse and abuse victims, gonna write that up as a real post one day maybe
• Smaller big thing happening Monday, wish me mental clarity
• I keep thinking to myself “oh no, what am I going to do for Thanksgiving” but then I remember that I’ve never even liked Thanksgiving and it’s always literally the worst food of the year to me
• Recently joined a tabletop roleplaying group and started a new campaign like a true nerd… our party is a hot mess in the worst way but I can report with satisfaction that so far not one of us has attempted the “I roll to seduce them” tactic, so let’s end this post on that positive note