#unfortunately I’ve been dwelling on discourse stuff

[arodabi]

I think a lot of alloros fundamentally misunderstand how being aro actually feels

I don’t go about my day as a hetro person who just happens to opt out of romance when it pops up

I’ve known i was different since before i even knew different was something i could be. Since i was like 12 or 13 I’ve known somehow what i was feeling was off compared to everyone around me. Growing up like that was fundamentally a queer experience for me, even if i wasn’t trans. In fact, i feel like my experiences being aro tie me closer to being queer than even my gender. While i can’t relate to everything in them, other queer coming of age stories do mirror my own aro coming of age. So to say that an aro person, regardless of their other identities, can’t be queer is just baffling to me.

[dreamingbrownie]

Tagging games #5

I’ve been tagged by @fandom-glazed and wanted to do this anyway, so here we go! Tagging anyone who wants to do this ^__^ 1. what’s your favorite way to dress? Black all the way. I’m a fancy goth on the inside and trying (but most likely failing) on the outside. 2. If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be? Not to be so voulnerable to the people that mean a lot to me would be nice. Not getting attached so fucking fast. 3. What movie/game/etc. helps you calm down? I tend to love movies reducing me to a sobbing mess, so that doesn’t count as calming me down, does it? As for a series, I’m all for Merlin BBC at the moment which I watch unfrequently with @fandom-glazed on Netflix and usually laugh my ass off at Arthur and Merlin’s antics. :D 4. What does your room smell like? Dust, nailpolish, some tea and the slightly burnt smell of my old heaters. 5. Do you like to organize? Hell fucking no. I’m an ADD person, nope, I don’t. 6. What kind of music would you listen to if you could only choose one? German rock / gothic rock. Unheilig, Staubkind, Blutengel, Lord of the Lost, Letzte Instanz, that kind of thing. Not that either of those bands would ring a bell with most of tumblr users, I assume. 7. What song is your aesthetic? Oh man, making me choose there is mean. Ghost Love Score by Nightwish, Stand my ground by Within Temptation, Morgana by Lord of the Lost. Hard and heavy. 8. What color do you think goes best with your personality? Crimson like my hair right now, probably. 9. Do you believe in auras? Nope. 10. What do you wish you hated, but actually like? Ballet. To wish for having been introduced to how to ruin your body in the most beautiful way as a child is kind of unhealthy. 11. Vague about your crush(es) Valentin Winter / van Porcelain. That man. Go to his tumblr @valentinvanporcelaine and dare ask me again why I’m addicted to his aesthetics. 12. Is there someone you have mixed feelings towards? Yep. Not talking about specific people in my personal life here tho.  13. Talk about an AU or story you came up with Oh boy, here we go. If you get me started on my vampire novels, we’ll be here all day and I won’t even be half way finished. I adore my own characters to a decree that might be weird, I ship some of them and the main gay pair Count Louis and his life long best friend and personal vassal Chris, later Knight of Alderton, to death and writing anything with those two idiots in love soothes me so much. The main trilogy (A shimmer of Red, Black and Silver respectively) is huge (as in 200k for the first, 140k for the second and 110k as of yet for the unfinished third) but not finished yet, I’m almost there and would have been a year ago if I’d just get my arse out of the Fantastic Beasts Fandom and saunter off to writing my own stuff again. Unfortunately, Albus and Gellert own my ass at the moment and I’m overflowing with plotbunnies that won’t go away on their own. I know my mind. I need to write them all down before I get any peace at all. Lol. 14. Do you like makeup? No, not really, I like sharp-winged-eyeliner though. 15. Do you prefer space or the ocean? Ocean all the way. Space is fascinating and I’m a massive nerd for SpaceX because their projects are so promising for the future of mankind, but standing at the shore, being able to breathe properly again (asthma kid here, hi) and cry from sheer relief of hearing the waves crash against the cliff or roll onto the beach again is my life blood. I’ll have that next week again. Fucking finally. The sea soothes me so, so much and I suffer from constant longing for distance. We have a very fitting word for the feeling in German. Fernweh. Roughly translated to “I want to get far away from here so much it hurts.” Yeah, that’s the German language right there for you. 16. If you could pick any planet besides earth, where would you live? Pandora, probably. You know, three meters tall blue humanoids, a captivating nature, trees large enough to be a bother for the planet’s rotation, probably? Yeah. I’d like that very much. 17. What form of government do you like the most? (capitalism, socialism, etc.) I’m quite content with the German system of Social economy. Pure capitalism, socialism and communism are shit, don’t work in the long run and should just be abolished altogether. 18. What animal would you keep as a pet, if you could? Give me a black cat, please 19. What do you think our purpose is in the universe? To find our place between the stars, become a multi planetary species and to develop a way that’s not as destructive to the planet we inhabit. There’s a beautiful sentence that sums it all up in Interstellar from Cooper: “We might have been born on earth, but we don’t have to die here.” 20. Do you believe in god(s)? Nope. Atheist all the way. Before anyone misunderstands me, though: believe whatever you want to, I don’t judge people for their religion, it’s just so not my tea. 21. Is there a song you can’t handle listening to, even though you like it? Yep. Chasing cars by Snow Patrol. 22. What ex do you miss the most, if you have one? Mean question. I only have an ex-girlfriend and sometimes I miss her gentleness and how instantly she saw right through me, but she replaced me, we’ve been done for a bit more than five years now and I’m over her. :) 23. Do you like soft, fluffy blankets or rough/smooth blankets? Soft, fluffy blankets all the way. 24. What is your favorite thing to learn about? History. What do you think I’d study that for? :D 25. What country’s history do you find the most interesting? Man, that’s a mean one again. I’m pretty solid on English history, but I don’t know the first thing about Asian history altogether because german schools don’t teach that and we’ve got a different subject for Asian culture in university so it’s not included in my must-do-schedule too, but I’d like to learn more about it soon. 26. What do you think about genderbent ____ (insert someone here) Nope, noping right out, nopedinopenope, not my tea. At all. 27. What breakup was the hardest, if you had one? The one I had was... bad. Not talking about that here any further tho. 28. Do you have someone where you can’t decide if you like them romantically or just as a friend? A couple of weeks ago, my answer would have been yes, but I’ve got that all sorted out now. Not dwelling on it, though. It doesn’t matter. 29. What do you think about tumblr discourse? Ughhh. Exhausting most of the time. I loved the metas in the Sherlock fandom before it all fell apart and I like Fantastic Beasts metas, but people get so emotional so fast that normal discussions are all but impossible here. 30. What instrument do you wish you could master? Piano. Still salty that I’ve been forced to stop that as a child. 31. How easy is it for you to be honest? Very. I’m a very honest person and I’m shite at lying. 32. Do you have any strange interests? Fandoms, probably? xD I find fossils infinetely fascinating, anything conserning dragons (that sounds strange in context, I’m well aware that they don’t exist) and the way stars are born in large nebulas is something poetic to me. 33. Do you have any strange fears? Strange? I dunno, I’ve just about ran out of the kitched screaming at the top of my lungs when a fucking spider dropped ON MY HEAD yesterday evening, you tell me if that’s strange. Drowning would suck a lot, I guess. Anything that makes you suffocate. Nope. 34. What food do you binge on when you’re lazy? Toast with something on it. I did that in exam week last week, not because I’m lazy but because I just did not have the time or the nerves for cooking. 35. When you get angry, how do you show it? I go all quiet and drill my posture to absolute perfection until it hurts. You’ll notice when I’m mad. Seldom happens, though, I’m hard to offend. 36. Do you have any impulsive movements? (twitches, ticks, flapping, etc.) Picking fingers. Bad habit that I’m trying to get rid of. 37. What do you listen to music on? YouTube and Spotify on the PC, used my phone a massive lot for that during the summer too but now with all the layers of jackets and coats and such it’s a bit hard to stuff my large phone anywhere. 38. Are you left brained or right brained? Uhhhh what? I’m right handed, but I don’t think I have any tendencies otherwise. 39. Earbuds or headphones? Earbuds. 40. Do you like light blankets or heavy blankets? Light blankets for around the flat, heavy in bed. I’d like to be able to breathe.

[demaesthetic]

Regarding the discourse around Dark Academia

Apologies, but this is gunna be long, and I am what tumblr qualifies as an old person.

I am new to DA and I gotta say, this has been a WHIRLWIND of a ride the last week or so. Coming across it and thinking "oh, pretty! This describes so many things I enjoy, like tweed and dusty old books and gothic architecture and underexposed photos lolol what a fuckin’ nerd I am" and then scratching the surface and finding a whole buncha racism (among other things) was...well, not shocking, but disappointing. I, too, want to think of a different way to describe what I’m doing here, because it apparently...isn’t DA. 

I’ll start by saying, I lived a version of that life that is apparently being represented. I’m showing my age here, but I studied classics and philosophy and the “western canon,”, many moons ago. My degree is sometimes called a classics degree, although that is not a great description and I do not consider myself an academic (in fact, I work in the arts now...which, contrary to what many artists would like folks to believe, makes me a craftsperson). Translating ancient languages was magical, and wandering the stacks in cold, dark libraries made me feel very smart and mysterious, and being buried beneath readings and homework was validating, so the studyblrs on here make me nostalgic for that experience...even though it was simultaneously the most insufferable thing I’ve ever done, and represented such a narrow window on human history and thinking. 

I’m sharing all this because I want to show the perspective of someone who did live that lifestyle, and is now able to look back at it with a lot more experience.

When I started, I really believed that I was on this special, secret road to the truths of the universe. By the time I graduated I had rejected that idea, and was dying to read literature and philosophy and science by women and people of color. I thought if I had to read another dead white dude talking about literally anything ever again I would choke on it. (I hear this is changing, and I hope it is.) So for a long while, I avoided them. I read stuff by people who were writing in the west at the time of the “western canon” but weren’t represented in my classes (spoiler: there is A Lot, from ancient stuff all the way up to now). Then I read more modern stuff. Then I took a break from trying to be an “intellectual” and read a shit ton of genre fiction and YA. Then I took a break from reading altogether. And now, years later, I feel like I can read the “classics” again, and male authors again, appreciatively but not uncritically. 

I found the selection of texts for the western canon was more or less...arbitrary.

A lot of it is good. I still love Tolstoy. I still love Homer. Most of the philosophers I find exhausting now, but a few hold up pretty well. But the thing that was so liberating to discover, is that wisdom and truth and beauty and the love of those things a) do not live only in some distant mythological past, and b) do not live just in the West. And they certainly did not and do not dwell solely in the hearts of white people. 

Or even in Academia.

In fact, Academia can never own these things, because unfortunately that world is still plagued by hierarchy of every sort. And that makes it unable to decide what wisdom means with any objectivity.

This is not to say that all the baby academics on here, just starting or just finishing their BA’s and hoping to go on to PhD programs and lock themselves forever in the ivory tower are wasting their time or doing a bad thing. That tower is very appealing. If you can make that life work, it can be a great life (I’ve got some wonderful friends who took that road all the way into dusty unkempt professor land and they are lovely, and doing important work). But by definition it is narrow, and often insulated from the stuff that is going on outside. It is meta. And importantly, it is not the only way to be an intellectual, or the only way to study. In fact, I strongly encourage everyone to study and practice things that will confer them no honors or official acknowledgment of expertise! Read things and take notes just because you like them! Get some friends together and unpack it and there you have a classroom. Attend lectures if you want to. Become an expert just because you love that thing. 

Your contributions don’t have to be published and tucked behind a firewall to be valuable. 

Oh, and you definitely don’t have to be a 20 year old thin white girl at Cambridge to look adorable in tweed. Wear that shit if you like it!