Satsuma's Journal

It's that time of year again!

If you haven't gotten a chance already, consider filling out the Ace Community Survey:

The Ace Community Survey is run by the Ace Community Survey Team–a community-based volunteer organization–in collaboration with Northwestern University. It collects valuable information on the demographics and experiences of members in the ace community, including asexual, demisexual, gray-asexual, and related identities. Participants also have the option to make data available to external researchers, or only to our team.

The survey is open to anyone: ace, non-ace, or still questioning. As long as you are 15 years of age or older, we want to hear from you! We want to get a wide variety of responses from as many parts of the community as possible, so we encourage you to share this link with any other potentially interested individuals you know or any ace communities you participate in.

You can find more information & take the survey here

What did I do this week? Sources are unclear

Signal boosing:

brush_and_lantern is looking to connect authors with sensitivity betas
This sounds like an excellent idea, so I'm hoping it takes off!

Ace stuff:

The Ace Journal Club reviews the paper "Ace and Aro: Understanding Differences in Romantic Attractions Among Persons Identifying as Asexual"

Book Review: Asexual Erotics by Ela Przybylo

Carnival of Aces prompt call for August: What are you hoping to get out of the ace community?

Global language lists:

Unicode's Day Periods by language
eg. when is the cultural boundary between morning, afternoon, evening, & night?

ISO 639's 2 & 3 letter language codes
Honestly I'm mostly including this one bc I found it amusing that the reason it was in my currently open tabs had nothing to do with the Day Periods list (which uses full language names anyway)

The other day I wrote a post about fandom historians where I noted that:

Obviously on the internet things rarely last even ten years, let alone a lifetime, so the rate at which we loose documents that could be considered of historical significance is much higher, leading to an urge to try and save things that aren’t really historic yet but will be in the future, because if you don’t, then it probably won’t exist to BE significant. This is completely understandable at least in theory, but it often falls flat in execution because from the authors perspective, you’re pushing things that they consider to be private, or private-ish, into the realm of public.

What I failed to mention is that there’s also a second issue when it comes to preserving historical stuff which is that you can’t just save a bunch of original sources on wayback and call it a day, you have to make it so that people can actually find the stuff you’ve saved and then you have to make it accessible, so that people can actually understand. I’m bringing this up now because of this post, or specifically Sennkestra commenting that:

To be fair, finding all this history if you didn’t live through it is hard, and there aren’t really any resources around to make it easier - like, even among the ace community, which is like a hundred times more established and organized, there’s barely a handful of people who I’ve ever seen putting in serious effort to find and compile properly researched and cited historical information in a more accessible way, and no one has ever produced anything complete. 

So, if ace history is obscure and inaccessible, what do we do? There are a lot of individual blogs making small posts about ace history, and there’s some historical articles on the AVEN wiki, but none of that is going to magically cohere into a legible history unless we make it cohere. And I’m not sure how, exactly, we should go about doing that, but I figure talking about it is the first step.

So this is me talking and hopefully some of you talking too, because I certainly can’t do this alone

The Ace Community Survey, run by the Ace Community Survey Team, collects valuable information on the demographics and experiences of members in the ace community, including asexual, demisexual, gray-asexual, and related identities. It is the largest survey of ace communities and creates a valuable pool of data for future ace community activists and researchers.

The survey is open to anyone: ace, non-ace, or still questioning; as long as you are 13 years of age or older we want to hear from you! We want to get a wide variety of responses from as many parts of the community as possible, so we encourage you to share this link with any other potentially interested individuals you know or any ace communities you participate in.

Click here to take the 2018 Ace Community Survey: https://goo.gl/forms/0iOOOCbD5OX0pT3S2

You will be able to view any published results from the survey at asexualcensus.wordpress.com. The 2016 report will be coming out on Saturday October 27th. If you would like to automatic email update when new results or announcements are posted, you can subscribe here.

For answers to common questions about the survey, please see the FAQ here.

We are in the peak of birthday season here. With several in the extended family having ones last week or next, and three immediate family members with birthdays this week. My sisters is two days from now and I still don't have a tangible present for her (I usually get her something smallish, in addition to the next years subscription to Ms Marvel). Oops?

Also I'm tired AF and it's recently come to my attention that I have 50% more schoolwork to finish before I can graduate than I thought I did to (my advisor missed an entire class! Or something. She wasn't clear on WHY I suddenly needed to complete an elective credit, or what my options for completing that credit were. Just handed me a psychology class and when I responded like '????' told me I needed an elective to graduate and, did I have any specific problem with psychology? Ugh)

On a brighter note, I turned up an old Harry Potter fanfic archive that I'd read a handful of fics from back when I was brand new to fandom! It's called Red Hen Publications, and the few fics I've reread since discovering it have held up decently (Five Moments of Doubt, Midnight by the Weasley Watch, and Minerva McGonagall: Spinster Detective. People who are not fond of Snape: note that he does feature rather noticeably in the plot of all three of these)

Do you ever think to yourself, "Man, spaces and tabs just aren't enough, I need more flexibility in my whitespace than that." No? Just me you say? Well the Unicode Consortium didn't necessarily agree per se, but they did give a fairly long list of spaces official codepoints for the purposes of cross compatibility and preserving legacy text. Aresluna has put together an attractively minimalistic page displaying thirteen of the more common spaces organized by width, while Wikipedia's list is more complete

In addition to discoursing with straight people about what asexuality is and why they should stop harassing us for it, ace people spend a lot of time arguing with 'aphobes' and 'ace-excusionists' about if shameless reapplication of terf trans-exclusionary tactics are 'protecting the queer community' or 'unnecessary and unjustified harassment of aces who are just trying to live their lives in peace.' We ALSO spend a lot of time talking about the fact that we've spent so much time arguing with people who genuinely hate our existence instead of like, literally any useful kind of activist work, and speculating on what kind of effect that's had on the community. If that sounds interesting to you instead of terribly depressing, here's some good pieces on the subject: [one] [two] [source]

From the Atlantic's archive: A Grief Like No Other (cw: murder) [source]

"What if the Doctors had Listened to our Sister Becky?" is an article on how women's pain is often discounted, minimized, and ignored by doctors, from the personal perspective of someone who lost their sister to that negligence [source]

"Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?" Pretty much what it says on the tin (man I do post a lot of social media meta on this blog)

Had a fitness consultation today! I'm trying to improve my exercise routine because while there's no cure for my chronic illnesses, being fit is good for injury prevention and being able to do more with the energy I've got (and also reduce my chances of developing additional secondary conditions like osteoporosis. Don't get sick y'all, it fuckin sucks.) It went about as well as I was expecting it to; the studio was a nice space, was clean, and their equipment looked well maintained, so that was all good. The woman I talked to, Brittney, was nice and didn't raise any red flags, though she's not going to be my trainer so I was able to get a full read on what I should expect there. The prices are on the high end, but as my dad pointed out 'still cheaper than physical therapy' (which our insurance is only willing to cover after injuries, not the long term preventative care kind necessary for anyone with a joint condition) so if I can use strength training to avoid developing joint problems, it really would be worth the money. All in all, I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic, and I've drawn up a plan of next steps to take before putting down the big bucks of one of their training packages

Am also very tired now. Adulting and exercise in the same hour-long appointment is exhausting

In ace news, the Asexual Agenda has put out a two part series on Asexuality in Early Radical Feminism (part one, part two)

This is nice article on the dearth of good pockets in women's clothing, this time backed up with data from measuring the pockets of 80 different pairs of jeans (40 women's jeans, and 40 men's for comparison) (source)

ABC has posted some lovely amateur photos of an ocean full bioluminescent algae (source)

Will Wheaton joined mastodon, immediately became the locus of all the discourse, and then left in a semi-justified huff. It was the kind of incident where really no one involved looked great, and I was glad that no one I followed participated, which meant I was mostly able to ignore it up until it hit the crest of the suckiness wave (though I'm still not sure if ignoring it was the right decision. Lack of protest can be awful similar to being complicit, when it comes to culture,) but it did spark a lot of discussion and sharing of articles about internet culture, especially focusing on the harm caused by mob tactics & dogpiling. Heres a few of them: one, two, three, four, five.

On a different note, some rec threads! bethskw@wandering.shop is looking for stories with self aware robots/computers that aren't power struggles here, and ScreenTestOfTime@mastodon.art is looking for "your favorite movie that you feel like no one you know has seen?" here. Both threads have a lot of good stuff in them already, if you're looking for something to read/watch!

Folded Map Twins is a cool project working to reduce segregation in Chicago by matching people between the two halves of the city (source)

"A pangram is a sentence that contains all letters of the alphabet"

The book I'm reading mentioned Frances Wright, so I looked her up and she seems super cool! Always good to find more interesting historic women

Archivists Against History Repeating Itself is a site that's pretty much what it says on the tin. Have only minimally explored it, but it looks like a solid project so far (source)

This months carnival was hosted by trisockatops with the theme “Then and Now.” You can find the roundup post with links to all of this months submissions here

August's theme is "The Stages of Coming out" and is being hosted by DemiAndProud, you can find their introductory post here

This post is for the July 2018 Carnival of Aces, which has the theme “Then and Now.” trisockatops is hosting this months carnival, and should be putting up a master post of submissions at the end of the month.

I've had several false starts trying to write a post for this month's theme, I didn't really have much to say when comparing my past experiences with asexuality to my present ones because really they haven't changed much. I use the same words (queer, ace, bi) to describe myself now as I did as a freshman in high school and I'm just as comfortable using them now as I was then too.

So I decided to write looking at the history of the ace community and ended up with a pretty solid first draft of a piece on who the ace community was before they were the ace community. But, in addition to being a bit off theme, that is an incredibly controversial topic, and I didn't have the time or energy to put the research in to get things from there to publishable. So instead I'm just posting this, which is more or less a just list of links to resources I stumbled across while writing my first two posts arranged into something resembling a post, along with some additional context and commentary.

A brief history of asexuality:
Researchers of human sexuality have documented the existence of asexual people a number of times through out history, most famously, we are Kinsey's "X," which he defined as people with "no socio-sexual contacts or reactions."

Asexuality, in the sense of the modern community, more or less started with a blog post by Zoe O'Reilly in 1997 titled "My life as an amoeba." After that, there were a number of small communities that termed themselves asexual that, to varying extents matched up with what is now considered the universal definition of asexuality: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction. Nat, who was an early organizer in the ace community, has a pretty great post spanning from the years after My life as an amoeba up through the first several years of AVEN that's titled "Asexuality BC (Before Cake)"

Asexuality began to leak into the mainstream consciousness by way of community outreach in the mid 2000's. For an idea of what that was like, here's an interview The View did with David Jay in 2006. The earliest example I could find of a full asexual contingent marching at pride was 2009 (you can watch that here.) Asexual Awareness Week was started in the fall of 2011 (intuited via wayback, i couldn't find an official date on the site anywhere) and involved a fairly large community census (3,430 respondents!). If you're interested in seeing some of asexuality's progression to being a relatively well known and accepted sexuality, the AVENWiki has pages on media coverage of asexuality pre-2000's, 2000-2010, and 2011-2016 (also, wiki's depend on user submissions, so if you know of stuff that's not on this page, please submit it!)

Internally, the ace community was also picking up a fair amount of steam during that time, it's when the carnival of aces was founded (May 2011, by Writing From Factor X) and The Asexual Agenda was started around there as well (their first post was in July 2012) as was The Asexuality Archive (sept 2011) Incidentally I would've been 14 in 2012, which was when I first came out, so this is the community that introduced me to asexuality right here. So I can say everyone was absolutely lovely, and did such a good job putting out so many resources during these years that I never even bothered making an AVEN account.

After that, the only large faction in the ace community yet to form was the tumblr ace community, who's defining characteristics early on was a proliferation of anonymous asexual advice blogs of varying quality and a couple meticulously crafted lists of the personal blogs of very possibly every single english speaking ace person who was on tumblr at the time.

There's been some changes within those groups, but more or less AVEN, Asexual Outreach groups, the asexual blogging network, and ace tumblr more or less cover the vast majority of the ace community. Hopefully someone somewhere has written some really lovely histories of those groups but I haven't found them yet, so I'll leave off here, at their foundings.

Ace Representation in the media, then and now:
When I joined the ace community around 2012, the fact that there was virtually no ace representation anywhere was a fact bemoaned by many. This post about asexual representation in femslash is one example, but a number of blogs around this time had made similar posts detailing the lack of representation in fiction, non fiction, online media such as fanfic and webcomics, movies, tv shows, you name it. Worse, a lot of the representation we did have was terrible (remember that terrible episode of House?) Hell, the FIRST time I ever read something with an explicitly ace character was when Fiona from Supernormal Step came out in 2014! (if you'd like a longer exploration of the flaws in asexual representation, i enjoyed this video on the subject) A LOT has changed since then though, asexual representation isn't everywhere by any means, but there's enough of it to fill out several lists.

For example, we've got Claudie Arseneault's Aromantic and Asexual Characters Database, which focuses mainly on speculative fiction. And then there's Penny Sterling's list of Free/Online Aromantic & Asexual Fiction, goodlesbianbooks.com's list of Asexual Lesbians/Asexual Women in Fiction, and Quietya's list of Books with Asexual Main Characters . I'm sure there's more compilations that I've never seen and representation that isn't on these lists, so if you know of either, please leave them in the comments!