#[ask game send fire emoji and topic for unpopular opinion]

[ghelgheli]

🔥 unpopular fruit/food opinions

people are, of course, free to have whatever affective responses they may to (concepts of) foods. it isn't blameworthy to feel disgust at a particular food. but i think it is a very common move to then endorse this disgust as containing a truth about the food, to move from the observation "i feel disgust at this food" to "this food is disgusting" (including when they attempt to express the former and come out with the latter). and i think this demonstrates a failure of imagination. in general, people tend to eat things because they think they are worth eating; in general, a food cannot be essentially disgusting and commonly eaten by a group at the same time. considering how much disgust is bound up with class, race, etc. a lot of people are way too quick to commit to their food-icks as something beyond the personal. you are free to feel disgust at something i eat but if you start declaring that disgust as though it is a fact about the world i will find you tedious.

[astrabear]

🔥

You didn't specify a topic, so I will default to TOG.

I don't like reactive headcanons. "Other fans write Character as X, so I will write him as even more Y!" I get the impulse behind it, especially when X feels very hostile to the nature of the character, but it still feels flat and shallow to me. Which means that there comes a point in the "Joe is a sweet sweet ball of sunshine" characterization where I nope out. Yusuf al Kaysani will slit a man's throat and wipe his sword off on the dying man's clothes. He has a temper. He has chosen a life of violence. He is also very warm and loving, and an artist, and a confused red panda when suddenly awakened, and an incurable romantic, and he makes corny jokes to defuse tension. I love him, and I love all of him, including the parts that aren't soft. I love that he's a complex character.

(None of this is meant to throw shade at the Soft Joe fans. Like I said, I get where that's coming from, and I prefer that approach to the one they're responding to. But it's not for me.)

[zoology]

I can't find the original post but let's do the ask game where you send the fire emoji 🔥 + a topic and i'll give you a potentially unpopular/controversial opinion on it

[pleaseburger]

fire emoji (im on browser) - architecture, hygiene

architecture: there are too many architects who design buildings and their interiors without considering how theyll be cleaned and/or maintained. architects should be mandated to clean their buildings for the first month after their construction

hygene: i dont understand people who enjoy taking hot showers. i always shower with the tap right in the middle between warm and cool. ive been taking hot showers recently to steam up my sore throat and its been hell for my skin

ask game: send me a 🔥 and a topic for an unpopular opinion!

[ghelgheli]

fire emoji metal music

i don't know if this is an unpopular opinion here but metal constantly seems to be in a process of re-entrenchment: whatever's new, especially whatever is a "fusion genre" at the edge of the vague concept of "metal", is always "dorky" or "over-the-top" or something to the true metal fans of the "classics"—the classics, of course, never having been any of these things, never having been at the frontier of the concept, and certainly never having been camp, except when these true metal fans watch stranger things and enjoy their martyr figure eddie munson. deathcore is good actually and there has always been something funny about metal.

[ghelgheli]

🔥 the 4th poonic war

it's a difficult conversation to have I know and we must be careful about the audience it reaches but like pretty much any material conflict there is a comprador class arming and supplying the opposition even as they mingle with us. tread carefully!

[ghelgheli]

🔥 kant

u kno academic philosophy is busted bc i could put "kant was a racist" here and it would count as an unpopular opinion in that context

[ghelgheli]

🔥 transness and mass class politics

i wonder what the unpopular opinion here would be. that organizing efforts will never overcome the gender problem until they engage in full-throated transfeminism? that there is a tendency to blame tma people for a "separatism" that is in fact a defensive reaction against the hostility of so much class politics to our presence? or maybe that there is a common failure among "trans people" (vaguely defined) to recognize the role of transness as one attribute among many within class society, and that this leads to a tendency to engage in a sort of trans-reductionism (more common among certain trans people than others—fill in the blanks) where "being trans" takes primacy over the role that transness plays in mediating labour. trans-idealism, you could call it.

[ghelgheli]

🔥 - sci fi

there are a lot of ways of doing robots/synths boring. don't need another synth story "raising questions" about the nature of identity and the self when we can eschew the concept of the self entirely and save everyone a monologue. why produce yet another racism-allegory at an unnecessary level of remove using "robots" (coined from the czech word for serfs/hard labour, by the way) when we can just... write about racism. please let's spare the world more stories about whether a synth can "love" or "feel empathy" or fit some other narrow psychologizing mould of "what it means to be human" as a way of recuperating the pathologized mind.

what synths are really really really good for is doing phenomenology. they offer a window into infinitely varied uncanny ways of what-it-is-like, an escape from the rationalist demand of being essentially human. they are not human nor should they need to be, just as we can be not-human and should not fear being so

[ghelgheli]

🔥 psychedelics/psychedelic music

never done any/only listened to a bit! my unpopular opinions form the null set here

[ghelgheli]

🔥MATH

i understand where intuitionists are coming from but i think we should just play along with infinite constructions because they arE FUN

[astrabear]

🔥👀

heh heh heh

The game is "send me a fire emoji ask and I'll share an unpopular opinion (bonus points if you give me a topic)." My curious anonymous friend here has not provided a topic, so I must come up with one on my own.

So here it is. My very, very unpopular opinion (or so I believe it to be. Maybe I'm wrong.)

I... dislike the whole concept of the ace spectrum.

Hear me out! Asexuality is real and valid. The hostility and othering that ace folks experience is real and horrible. The community is real and valid and necessary.

But I don't think there's an ace spectrum. I think that humans vary pretty much infinitely when it comes to how we experience sexuality (or don't). I think the proliferation of micro-identities and ever-more-specific labels has fundamentally skewed people's understanding of how it all works. It's like... calling some people "normal height" and everyone else is on the short spectrum. It just doesn't make sense.

Our culture has decided that there is a normal way to be sexual, but that is wrong. And as helpful as some of the micro-labels have been in terms of giving me vocabulary to talk about myself... it still feels like a) the definition for allosexual is far too narrow and constrained (and frankly stereotyped) and 2) the whole concept of separate categories is misguided. It's not a bunch of boxes, and it's not a box and a spectrum, and it's not even one spectrum (which implies a single linear path between one extreme and another.) It's just a big... blob, with multiple axes and space for everyone.

I have a whole Thing about the primacy of variation, because I read a lot of Stephen Jay Gould at an impressionable age, and if I could easily link to his essay "Of Wasps and WASPS" I would. So this is all part of a larger worldview. And it has nothing to do with how people choose to identify or describe themselves or form communities. It's just my unpopular opinion.